by Oblimo
Crammed into the trunk behind Ursula, CeeCee said, "They've been whispering to each other nonstop."
"Subvocalizing," Eurydice agreed. "All the time." She pantomimed a conversation with her hands, her voice tinny and warbling as if she were speaking into a tin can. "Yap - yap - giggle - yap - yap - ooh - m'wah - m'wah ." She mashed her puppeting hands together and made obscene smooching noises. "It's like preteen puppy love but with latex queens."
CeeCee nodded before hulloing to the front of the car. "I call shotgun for the next ride, honey, you hear?"
Yves, his curiosity getting the better of him, kept one eye on the road and the other on the rearview mirror. "Unless you developed a Sudoku fetish, I take it there's more to that book than just magic square puzzles."
"Nope." Ursula flipped to a page in the middle of the book and held it up for Yves to see. "Just magic squares."
Yves could only look at page for a few seconds, at the impossible looping scrawl of words and numbers and symbols in dozens of languages and ciphers and geometries that burst organically from the confines of simple square Sudoku grids to infect the empty spaces in between with illusory dimensions. It filled him with a lurching vertigo and he slapped the rearview mirror vertical. "Sweet Jesus. What was that?"
"Just magic square puzzle answers." The skittering noises of Ursula's fountain pen/claw started up again. She affected Tomoe's mixed-up Asiatic accent and added, "The way they used to answer them. In the old days. The very, very old days." The scratching reached a crescendo and Ursula finished her work with a final chop and flourish. When she spoke again, her voice was edged, echoing and strange. "Oh, God—the stars."
With the driver's side window open and the passenger side door laying in the grass on the side of the road somewhere, the wind whistled through the Jeep's cabin unhindered, whipping up receipts, leaves, and the aromas of lime and caramelizing sugar. Yves drove passed a sign for the highway onramp.
"We're superheroes," Dee said.
Yves pulled the Jeep through a tight curve in the road and the onramp appeared beside the overpass before them. Without knowing why, Yves found his center and entered the detached middle-distance of the martial trance. The next few seconds unspooled before Yves' senses in an orderly, slow-motion succession of events.
Yves consciously registered the bumper and hood of a yellow SUV hidden in the recess beneath the overpass. Yves lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal.
Ursula called out in that same strange voice, "She's here."
The Jeep reached the mouth of the overpass. Yves swung his leg over brake pedal and willed every ounce of his weight into his foot as he began to bring it down. He realized he would not be in time.
Black Cherry, blood-and-shadow batwings spread thrice as wide as she stood tall, leaped from the top of the overpass into the air above the Jeep. She plummeted with the lethal aerodynamic grace of a guided missile, arms thrust ahead of her. Her fists punched through the silver hood of the Jeep, snapped the vehicle's frame and cracked the engine block. Yves' foot felt no resistance when the brake pedal connected with the floor. The brakes failed and all four wheels lost contact with the road.
Black Cherry's feral scream reached Yves' ears.
"Master!"
I told you from the start
Just how this would end:
When I take what I want,
I never want it again.
—Hole, Violet
Act 5
Chapter One: The World Will Never See
Centered and combat-ready, Yves had observed Black Cherry's descent with a calm, analytical appreciation for fine form. Black Cherry executed her leap with cliff-diver perfection. Wings fanned out, sailing into the air. Her body curled downward the moment her jump achieved apex. Fists thrust forward. Wings snapped inward, slapping together at supersonic speed. Black Cherry rode the thunderclap down.
She hammered into the hood, a pile-driving pillar, a fallen angel sculpted from red clay and blackest basalt. The hood and engine block crumpled. The Jeep rebounded into the air, pivoting on the immobile fulcrum Black Cherry had become. Yves saw her sneer, her page boy hair cut flying wild, her abyssal gaze locked on Dee's face. Her voice was triumphant, primal. Demoniac.
"Master!"
Dee turned away from her, his expression stony and stolid even as the Jeep's rear wheels rose higher than the front. He reached behind and above his head, bracing himself against the Jeep's roll-bar. The trunk of the Jeep soared higher. Black Cherry's impact stapled the hood to the road. Dee kicked his left foot into the driver's side foot well. The vehicle's chassis squealed as it fought against the opposing forces trying to tear it in half.
Yves struggled for focus amidst madness. Dee's not bracing his body against the Jeep's roll-cage. Yves' seat belt bit into his tender shoulder. Dee's trying to brace the roll-cage against his body. Yves closed his eyes.
The passenger compartment buckled but resisted caving inward and crushing Yves to death. Yves turned to stare at his friend. Holy shit. The cords in Dee's neck flexed. His arms strained as he battled torque, stress, and metal fatigue. It's really true. Yves found himself very surprised to be alive.
Dee's a fucking superhero.
Black Cherry was forced backward as the Jeep hurtled upright. The vehicle's shadow overtook her. Her triumphal sneer faltered. Two tons of American truck know-how bore down upon her. Yves heard Raspberry's battle cry over the ruckus of tortured metal, plastic, and glass. "Say 'Splat,' bitch!"
Black Cherry set her jaw and swung her legs down, puncturing the pavement with her Mary Jane clogs. Her wings shot forward, around, and then behind the Jeep. Crimson claws pierced the undercarriage. Yves heard Ursula yelp and stamp. Black Cherry's sneer returned with a lazy roll of her head. Tension gathered within her gel.
Dee spoke. His voice bypassed Yves' ears still half-stoppered with beeswax. His words came from outside time and transcended other sound, as if the world paused, eager to listen. They resounded through bone, sang in the blood, rang clear as a tower bell in the brain. "Raz, to Yves. Now."
Two lavender arms shot in through the open driver's window in uncoiling springs. Cool fingers entwined behind Yves' neck. The bendy-straw arms cinched up slack and Raspberry's angelic face zoomed into view until her button nose dimpled his cheek. Her eyes searched his as she muttered a lightning quick, "Awfuckit," and kissed him hard and square on the lips.
His mouth filled with the flavors of summer as more and more of Raspberry's jellied substance poured through the window and pressed its supple weight against him. Yves had never been kissed in bullet time before. His heightened awareness let the kiss linger even though it lasted no more than a second or two. He could not fully process the experience, as his inner ear reported he was now suspended upside down.
The Jeep slung high over Black Cherry's head. Her arms and wings took on the full weight of the Jeep and all its occupants. She crowed in triumph.
I'll have to try this again, Yves vowed to himself as Raspberry broke the awkward kiss. If only the person kissing me back had a dick, I'm sure I could get it right. Outside, Black Cherry followed through, accelerating her pitch. If only I could survive the next few sec—
Black Cherry hurled the Jeep with all her strength. The vehicle flipped end-over-end once, then twice, before colliding with a ferroconcrete pylon. The blacktop below fissured. Cement chips and dust showered from the highway above. The Jeep folded up, chevron-shaped, and tumbled to the ground.
"Splat," said she.
The Jeep hit the pavement passenger-side down. The safety glass windshield fractured milky-white on impact. Cracks and torn seams in the canvas top bubbled and wept golden champagne froth. The carriage bled oil, radiator and hydraulic fluid. Dust settled in the quiet.
The driver's side door bulged outward then burst away in lavender geyser. The crest of the eruption resolved into the upper body of Raspberry herself, a bust carved from the richest amethyst. More gel peeled away to reveal Yves, slack, motionless, and
cradled in Raspberry's willowy embrace. Yves groaned.
Raspberry startled at the sound. Yves rolled his head and winced. Raspberry's shoulders sagged and she hugged Yves close. "Shh. I gotcha, babe." Her limpid gaze fell upon Black Cherry. Raspberry purpled with rage. She hissed through gritted teeth. "I am gunna rip off your head and shit down your neck you jam-ragged, clit-clot cunt."
The dainty batwings poking out from behind Black Cherry's ears flared. "I'll kill you where you stand." The scarlet girl froze in mid-snarl, blinking her confusion. "As soon as I figure out what you just said."
The Jeep's windshield exploded. Nuggets of safety glass flew like birdshot, ricocheted off Black Cherry's creamy red, rubbery hide, and clattered against the yellow SUV in the shadows behind her. Dee withdrew his fists. "Raz," he said, "enough banter. Get Yves out of here."
Raspberry's bare hips and legs coalesced and she pivoted to jump from the Jeep. Black Cherry sidled and stretched a wing wide to block her path. "That's my playmate," she said, jerking a wing claw at Yves. "Master gave him to me and I only got to play with him once."
Dee elbowed out of the Jeep and rose to his feet, uncut and unbruised. "Let her go, Cherry."
Black Cherry golf-clapped her hands. "Oh, Master: name me." She giggled and grabbed her knees. "Name me like you named your stupid green whore. Name me and I will become she who eats worlds for you."
Something heavy clonked and settled inside the Jeep. Black Cherry craned her neck to see but Dee hustled in between, his back to the vehicle. "Let them all go, Cherry, and I will stay." He swung one arm behind his back, hand opening and closing in a pantomime yap yap yap.
Black Cherry clucked and dismissed the notion with a pshaw flick of the wrist. "You don't mean that, Master. You're going to stay anyway. Besides, I don't think Raspberry wants to leave. I had her made for you, you know." Dee pointed to the left with the hand hidden behind his back. "Why haven't you fucked her yet? I would smell her on you if you had. She wants you to fuck her, Master." She tipped her head, leading with her nose, breathing deep and nibbling her bottom lip. "She wants you so badly I can taste it from here." Dee pointed left again, looped his index finger around to the right before bringing his hand down flat. "But she can't handle it like I can, Master. She's so horny she can't understand you want her to feint to the left so you can flank me on the right while I'm monologing."
"Oh," drawled Raspberry behind him. "Now I get it."
Dee heard a fizzy susurrus. Sunny slush frothed down the Jeep's sideways roof and heaped onto the pavement. Raspberry's speedy recovery matched her quick temper, but Dee knew CeeCee and Eurydice needed much more time to sort themselves out after such a rough jolt. He opted to stall, hoping to Hell that Ursula and Nyx were unhurt. "X-ray vision?"
Head-wings rolled into cute megaphones around Black Cherry's ears. "Sonar." She winked. "Echolocation off the metal behind you, of course, because you're so impenetrable, Master." Her head-wings unfurled only a fraction before Dee spoke in his newfound voice.
"Let them go, Cherry."
Black Cherry gaped. Head-wings twitched and wilted with melt. Sanguinary brandy brimmed her lips and slicked her sex as the pylons supporting the overhead arch of the highway amplified and took up her name. Cherry—Cherry—Cherry. She rocked with each echo, dropping to one knee, then the other, and then to all fours.
The echoes played out a long, low, bubbling roar, leonine and almost subsonic: Cherrrry. Black Cherry keened in reply, arms trembling, wings pearling with fat drops of ruby nectar. "Yes, Master, yes. Go." The underpass still purred with the final vestiges of Dee's echoed voice—rrr…rrry—and Black Cherry fell back on her haunches. Head bowed, she waved Raspberry away. "Go. Go!"
Raspberry dismounted from the Jeep, her elastic legs protracting down onto the road before returning to their usual sumptuous, classical perfection. Yves, face pinched in pain, rode the gentle descent in her arms. Raspberry eased by Black Cherry, twittering and pawing at the ground. "Go, go," the scarlet girl whimpered. Dee's echo died. Black Cherry's hands curled into fists. "No."
Dee charged, seized a bleeding wing. He planted his feet and started a vicious twist. Black Cherry reared back and tore the captured wing off her shoulder with her own hands. The wing dissolved in a russet flood. The momentum of his planned attack knocked Dee off his feet. "Run, Raz!"
Black Cherry howled, "I told you I could handle it, Master!" She bitch-slapped the fleeing Raspberry across the back with the flat of her remaining wing.
Raspberry exploded into purple haze. Yves sailed, ragged-doll limbed, through the air. The sound was consonant with the recording of smashing glass played backward and too fast and a thousand harp strings rubbed with steel nails. Raspberry snapped into solidity parallel and inches below Yves. She threw her arms and legs around him an instant before they both hit the pavement.
Dee kipped up but Black Cherry clipped him on the chin with an uppercut on her backswing and knocked him flat on his back. "I should have known my minions would never be enough for you. Not like I am." Behind her, Raspberry and Yves streaked over the blacktop, trailing a greased, lavender wake. "I'm glad I stopped with the latex gimp. Where is she, anyway? Hiding isn't her style at all. Ah, well, she'll show up just in the nick of time, I suppose."
Dee sat up, rattling his head, his jaw pins-and-needles numb.
Black Cherry sighed. "Where was I? Oh, monologing, yes." She splayed her hands, crimson fluid rushing up her legs and humping her back with a burgeoning wing. Her once-nectarous surface smoothed into a polished rind of creamy carmine. "So there I was, with boxes and boxes of Jell-O gelatin, just oodles of raw collagen powder." Dee staggered to his feet. "I had to do something with it, but I'm not really the baking type." Dee charged, arms out, palms flat. He struck her in the abdomen, arms working in a peculiar rhythm. Nothing happened.
Black Cherry cleared her throat. Dee stared down at his hands, one on her tummy, the other sandwiched between her breasts. The geek and the scarlet girl looked each other in the eye.
"So I ate it all," Black Cherry smirked, and punched Dee in the gut with the force of a wrecking ball.
The asphalt dimpled into two shallow potholes beneath Black Cherry's feet when her underhand swing caught Dee's stomach right below the ribs. The pin-and-needles sensation erupted across his body, over his skin and through meat and fiber. A seismograph slung down from his butt would have recorded a 6.7 Richter scale Dee-quake with its epicenter beneath the intruding crimson fist. Dee stood motionless, eyes watering, for a long and breathless moment.
The laws of physics caught up with his nanomek-enhanced physique and launched Dee into the air, doubled over, a superman in sweatpants flying in reverse. His trajectory described a grand ellipse until he crashed, still ass-backwards, into a high corner where a recessed pylon met the overhead highway above the yellow SUV. The entire structure shivered, cement blocks scraping together, louder than firecrackers. The steel rebar enforcing the integrity of the overpass fatigued but held.
Dee fell. He belly-flopped onto the roof of the yellow SUV. The vehicle's rear and side windows blew out as the impact bent the roof at jaunty angle. Three figures, already crouched and hidden between the SUV and the pylon, dropped to their knees and escaped the spray of glass. Numbness blossomed into dull headache and honest-to-goodness, throbbing pain. He rolled his head to the side.
The three figures stood swaddled in shadow. Heads and arms hung low, faces covered in bedraggled, damp and filthy hair, reminding Dee of undead wet girls from Japanese horror movies. Dee thought he heard a muffled buzzing noise. He managed to mumble, "Ow, quit it," before all the lights went out.
Raspberry and Yves slid to a slippery halt. Raspberry rolled over and laid Yves out on his back. She fought off weakness, tried to be tender. Raspberry, pale and wan, knelt over Yves' inert body. The long trail of purple jelly collected into oozy polliwogs and wiggled upstream toward her. She bent close to Yves and nestled her head against his chest, eyes squeezed shut in hope. She fel
t a strong heartbeat, a shuddery breath. Relief flooded through her and the polliwogs raced to feed her growing, rising, darkening, furious form.
Black Cherry contemplated her fist, mashed flatter than a ball of clay thrown against a brick wall, less than a dozen feet away from where Raspberry, radiant with rage, made her stand. The intense silence made the scarlet girl turn and look on with mild interest. Raspberry said, "Burn."
She spat acid. A sizzling jet of molten violet struck Black Cherry in the face. The scarlet girl screeched and reeled, clawing at her face with her good hand. Raspberry spat again but overshot as Black Cherry fell kicking to the ground. The ejecta struck a concrete pylon.
"Raz," Yves called to her over the Black Cherry's now burbling screams. "Raz."
Raspberry sat on her knees next to him, took his hand in hers. "Yeah?"
Yves watched the purple sputum eat a pizza-sized hole in the pylon's concrete, revealing ribs of blackened steel rebar. "What was that?" His voice was very faint.
"My acid tongue. CeeCee calls me a real spitfire. I think it's one of her stupid double tundra thingies." She glanced up. A wide shape, a massive curvy mound of peach-orange ice cream, drew itself together by the overturned Jeep. Raspberry smiled. "You can ask the fat ass yourself in a minute."
Yves shut his eyes. "I didn't know you could do that."
"There's a lot you don't know about me." She felt so tired.
Yves reopened his eyes and Raspberry did her best to smile again. "You wouldn't happen to be a goo guy in drag, would you?" Yves asked.
The burbling screams tapered off into wet hissing.
Raspberry shrugged. "Nah."