by Garrett Cook
The line moves slowly but it moves. I feel a catwalk beneath my feet taking me there. Glory, freedom, victory. The line pushes me in and my fingers twitch. None will die in vain if I start shooting now. Only glory if we shoot now. Freedom, victory…shoot now. Too soon, don’t exalt. Psyching yourself out. Look around and listen. Atmosphere. Blood red neon again. Expensive, gaudy, brilliant blood red neon. Expensive, gaudy, brilliant costumes. Things will be okay if you don’t make a mess. Their ignorance won’t hurt you anymore. Their ignorance might not hurt them. Show them who is strong and who is weak and they will shun the weak like the animals they are. Just remind yourself what happens if it all works out. The soulless automated chatter runs together. Flocks of winged breeders buzz around the little blondes who will further the line and bring forth hordes of screaming, monstrous…not on your own anymore. More than one part of the plan, God, think of the plan. Not their plans, yours. Yours…go in and be inconspicuous for awhile. When the guest of honor introduces himself you’ll…just forget the stink and concentrate.
I walk in and breathe a sigh of relief because I’m a step closer to doing something indubitably right. The sort of thing where denial and a labyrinth of moral ambiguity don’t get in the way. Everybody who kills kills the wrong people. Any of these girls, dressed up and dancing and absorbing the horrors brought down by their idols is vulnerable to attack by the Dark Ones, by any of those devils they worship, and if it came down to it, by me. Don’t zigzag, don’t miss the target. I’ve gotta strike true, Cass said it, Lud said it. Strike true, kill the monsters and the blasphemers and the ones that tore civilization apart and left everybody with this. I’m led to believe that all the vessels and all the empty skins don’t matter half as much as those who would cause the real damage. It’s no wonder so many of these girls regard themselves as prey. I have a shotgun, and if I just fire it, look at the target, let it loose, what was once a person becomes a mess.
I never think of the fragility, really. Usually just about how easy it is for these psyches to get supplanted. They all look so spindly as they dance, their bone so easily broken, their skin so penetrable. That’s why the word psychopomp replaces killer so much these days. With a knife or a gun or something blunt and hard, a man can be a messenger of death, a force of nature. The simple, tender bodies sweat under lights, tense up over just the exertion of dancing, grow unstable with just a few drinks. That’s why all the spooky masks, witch doctor tricks to scare away the spirits that will take them. I could take them. Click click buzz click buzz click buzz no meat no blood. That’s why they no longer strive to be human and accept the circuitry so easily. If they knew that wires cut as easy as veins, they might not think to be machines. They might stop and think about what would make them less fragile. Maybe if they bothered to say no to all the potential agencies of destruction instead of inviting them in and just accepting that they exist they could be something more. Perhaps even something good.
A bunch of the kids are watching the door, and are ready with applause at the entrance of Penny Dreadful and the Aberrations. Tonight she wears an elegant silk kimono slit down the side and a geisha wig. They go surprisingly well with her black bondage boots. Funny that the band never dresses up, no matter how far her outfit goes. She, like Ian Sterling is one of those people made to be the center of attention wherever she goes. I try to erase the fact that I am not from my mind. It doesn’t quite disappear. I feel like I should be and it’s scary and exhilarating all at once. It’s not a feeling I’ve ever known before. I’m grateful for the PA, because otherwise I’d feel sick.
Everybody’s too shy to go up to ask her and ask for autographs or compliment her latest album or attire. Instead, they move away. People are as scared of celebrities as they are intrigued by them. Something to remember, maybe. A line of roadies brings in the instruments and sets them up on a makeshift stage that rises via not-too-shocking technical wizardry from the center of the dancefloor. They’re surprised though, even the ones who’d seen it happen. A display of the godlike potency of fame, and a reminder of how far above them she actually is. Life is barely livable when you can see through it with such painful clarity. I wish that I were entertained and not just full of smirking revulsion. At least she seems to mean what she sings, a song about wishing the gore would spill out into the streets, that the blood would wash over everything and anoint it. Careful what you wish for.
Pfenniger walks in and there’s an even bigger fanfare. He’s a hair short of five feet, bald and has a gaze that never meets anyone else’s. He seems to be doing math in his head and counting his fingers. Kind of a typical collector, except for the volume of his kills and the brutality. Power drill through the eyes and then taking their fingers, sometimes all five, sometimes just a couple. There was a sum he was trying to reach he said. Voices told him he needed six hundred sixty six fingers to keep out the host of hell. He didn’t really seem to get why everybody was praising him or what he was doing here, although it was said he had a speech prepared. I feel almost bad for needing to put an end to a pathetic little man like this, but he is a Bundy winner, he is at Le Couteau and this would have to scare sense into somebody.
First thing they do is lower down a “piñata” from the rafters. Their definition of “piñata” is a naked, stoned prostitute which a number of Geins and Gacys gather round to whack with a bat. Of course, the guest of honor gets the first strike. Smash it open. Blonde, not quite mechanical on the inside yet. Smash it open don’t let it get infected. Take your turn show them what’s what. Smash it and remove the workings. Monsters. Fucking barbarians. Hurting that girl there’s no reason to hurt her go to your fucking peaceful place don’t need you here don’t fuck it up for me I don’t need you to fuck it up for me you go you go you go! Calm down. Work to be done. I’m not going. Stay the course don’t listen to him. You and me, we’re heroes. Another voice drowns out the old one. Sounds like me. Sounds like better me. Sounds like lightning.
Penny stops playing and greets Pfenninger with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He sort of blushes and sort of pushes her out of the way to reach the podium. I beep the boys in the truck to start the PA soon and to tell them that Pfenninger has started speaking. I pull out the shotgun, shove a Manson in front of me out of the way, and I do my business. Parts of his face move to other parts of his face. Time freezes and I feel enormous as I look at the surrealist painting I’ve made out of the guest speaker. Surrealism gives way to the postmodern nightmare; identity deconstructed, deconstructed again, until gone. Utter loss of human context. Look away. Go someplace safe. All I need is a pair of hands. Fuck you! FUCK YOU! Fuck you back I have to see this. Pieces fly, people duck flying teeth and ribbons of flesh. Dyed black and purple hair get streaks of reddish brown and pink. Penny Dreadful screams. Her band screams. Everybody screams, but nobody moves to do anything. I reveal the Mr.400 shirt and then the boys stream in MY little speech.
“This is your urban legend,” my garbled and technologically manipulated voice begins, “an idle speculation of Mr. Sterling’s that must not exist because it’s so far beyond the scope of your microscopic, television choked imaginations. Expand your imagination. 380 corpses can’t be wrong. Sorry for taking the title a little early, but the last 20 will come and they will come from your number if you refuse to change…”
Wide applause. The bassist and the drummer of the Aberrations are beginning to keep time. Penny signals her guitarist and he starts up the song she was singing. She sings along to my message, making a kind of perverse medley out of it that the Reap kids can’t help but dance to. I holster the shotgun and watch as everyone begins to groove to it, bobbing their heads, undulating and twisting like charmed snakes. A quiet stampede of charmed snakes. My message plays through all of this and even the kids who aren’t dancing are kind of bopping in place to the grisly affair.
“This is Mr. 400; your culture of violence is dead…”
“Your culture of violence is dead,” the bassist sings along adding rhythm to the ch
ant.
“Your days as mechanistic hedonism machines are over. Mr. 400 will make sure of that…”
“Mr.400, yeah mr.400, yeah, mr.400,” the guitarist chimes in.
“The Bundy winners, the soldiers of Kali, of Samhain, of Hades of Thanatos…”
“Of Samhain, of Hades, of Thanatos,” the drummer contributes. They’ve found the phrases to repeat as Penny sings her song and my well prepared apocalyptic message plays on. My well prepared apocalyptic message that Reap kids dance feverishly and make out to, almost forgetting that I just walked in and killed one of their idols. It dawns on me that intimidating them will take more than this and require a more organized statement. It turns out I’m an even worse terrorist than I am a pharmacist. I wish I could see an out.
“Are shallow reflections of death as a fact of life. They are not cancer, AIDS or car accidents. Mr. 400 is cancer. Mr.400 is the fact. Mr. 400 will strike like lightning from God and crumble your false idols into dust. Mr. 400 will bring the killers and the liars and the hives of silicon maggots that spawn rotten devils to justice…”
“Yeah! Mr. 400! Fuckin’ A!” some imbecile in the back shouts. The buzzing, the stench, the smell of oil in their veins is becoming nauseating. There must be a way out of this, there must be. I have to stay and hear the message out and keep it in their heads, if it’s getting there at all, but it’s becoming extremely difficult to do so. This place is too stimulating. It’s spinning; it’s insane, it’s wrong. I want to go, but I have to see this through and can’t lose this attack to their ignorance. They are here. They are moving in them. Filthy cunts, robots. Smell the bug shit inside them. Hive mothers robots filthy cunts breeders. Break the fucking machines stay the course stay the course strike true break the fucking machines break the fucking cunt machines break it now!
“Those who stand with the armies of Satan will find themselves treated as unmercifully as they might treat the innocents, the lambs of God. Mr. 400 is here and those who ignore him are not only dead, but damned as well. Mr.400 is lightning from God, the flame of purification. End transmission.”
I breathe a sigh of relief until I realize that the guys in the truck are playing this in a loop. They aren’t listening at all, they’ve fallen into an ecstatic religious trance, soaking up the blood and chaos and the chanting in an absurd pagan ritual. What do I do? The noise and the confusion are getting to be too much, and they have lost receptivity to the dance. The only way to do this is to stop the music, to cut off the noise and the ecstasy. I begin thinking over what I know to be a very bad idea. It seems like a very bad idea, until I can feel a hand on my shoulder and feel the stinking breath of a drunken college kid in my face.
“I fuckin’ love you man, you just fuckin’…”
I shove him over, and I take out the two pistols. I know that Cass would be shouting if I hadn’t told her not to say anything. I put a slug into the drummer, and the panic resumes. Nobody sees that coming. Blood spurts out of his head wound and a girl near the stage dives forward desperately. As the tiny hole in his head ejaculates his last bits of life, she lets it fall onto her face like the slut she is and the girlfriend she brought with her laps up the splatter of rockstar essence. The girls near the shotgun blast scoop Wayne Pfenninger bits out of their hair and feed them to one another. Fucking high art.
The bassist puts down his bass and in a fog of tears and rage, he screams “fuck!” I don’t know what comes over me. The drummer was enough. Should have been enough. Proves the point. No. Still not taking it seriously. That girl slathered the man on her, wears blood from the headshot proudly. They’re not gonna get it, but I still have to try. Two in the chest, falls over onto the drummer, their bodies slam down onto the drum kit. There’s a cymbal crash. Gory punch line. Noise wakes me up. Fuck! The attack has lasted all of five minutes and I’ve killed Pfenninger, the drummer and now the bassist. Still nobody gets it.
Before I have any time to react, the room fills with blinding radiance and I know damn well that it’s time to run for the door. Cass must have gotten the flashbang ready when I brought down the drummer. I can feel Cass bump into me as we both head for the exit, she stumbles a bit and I prop her back up. Jones definitely didn’t fuck me over, that’s for sure. The shotgun works great, the pistols fire, and the flashbangs are most certainly military issue. We have to hide in the dark of the parking lot to get our dazzled vision back and be prepared to drive.
We leap into the dirt cheap car, and hope that it will start this time, too. And it does. What a stroke of luck. We gun it before anybody can get a plate and speed our way through a bunch of side streets. Our speeding is in fact quite moot since nobody’s in the parking lot and inside it’s total chaos, but we feel especially paranoid now that we overstepped our bounds just a little. Cass has nothing to say, but “fuck, fuck, fuck…” Which I guess summarizes the situation pretty well. But, on the other hand, we are getting away with it. I don’t really know what to say to Cass at this point, or if there is a good explanation. It’s one of those things about being crazy (which I’ve gotten better at admitting to being), not being able to provide explanations that anybody would understand. The moment makes so much sense, but the next day is just a mess. You can’t really apologize for the moment making sense, any more than anyone will apologize to you for how society doesn’t make any sense.
We abandon the car a quarter mile from home, stopping to pour gasoline over our costume pieces. Wonder of wonders, we get home okay. All I can say is, “well, that could have gone better.” I don’t feel like lightning from God, I don’t feel like cancer. Cancer can’t choose or make mistakes. I cannot judge whether my accident is the particular accident everyone needs. God’s wrath and my wrath look a little too similar sometimes and it’s disconcerting. It’s altogether not right. Lightning must strike true.
Lunch Date
I have never been on television before this morning, although I couldn’t see my face beneath the harlequin mask, and most of the focus was on Jeremy as he turned Wayne Pfenninger’ s head into pink, gooey bits. It made me feel grateful that I followed Reap and had seen a lot of crime scene recordings because otherwise I think I might have ended up feeling very, very, very sick. Amazing how the news is no longer squeamish about slo-mo replays of a guy getting blasted in the head with a shotgun. The speech Jeremy wrote for just those at the club now echoed over everybody’s TV set. I didn’t know if it was a success or a failure or what, but I had to smile as I mouthed the words along with it.
“This is your urban legend, an idle speculation of Mister Sterling’s that must not exist because it’s so far beyond the scope of your microscopic, television-choked imaginations. Expand your imagination. 380 corpses can’t be wrong. Sorry for taking the title a little early, but the last 20 will come and they will come from your number if you refuse to change. I am Mr. 400. Your culture of violence is dead. Your days as mechanistic hedonism machines are over. Mr. 400 will make sure of that. Your Bundy winners, the soldiers of Samhain, of Kali, of Thanatos are shallow reflections of death as a fact of life. They are not cancer, AIDS or car accidents. Mr. 400 is cancer. Mr.400 is the fact. Mr. 400 will strike like lightning from God and crumble your false idols into dust. Mr. 400 will bring the killers and the liars and the hives of silicon maggots that spawn rotten devils to justice. Those who stand with the armies of Satan will find themselves treated as unmercifully as they might treat the innocents, the lambs of God. Mr. 400 is here and those who ignore him are not only dead, but damned as well. Mr.400 is lightning from God, the flame of purification. End transmission.”
It sort of makes me want to laugh. Sort of. I don’t even bother to ask my very tired boyfriend what he thinks. I’m pretty scared, but I’m not the only one. It’s something of a moral victory for the people who are scared all the time. Nobody gets scared at the club, but everywhere else people get scared. Anybody who tries to walk home alone at night gets scared, everybody who turns on the news gets scared, but the people at the club never had b
efore. It feels fair now. But, I don’t know what to think about the drummer and the bassist. I don’t know if that part was fair, I understand, but I don’t know if it was fair. Makes glad that everyone’s shocked, because if they weren’t, it would be too much to bear, it would be a waste of two lives.
The news is interviewing some of the kids at Le Couteau, referring to them as “the witnesses to this bizarre tragedy”. Makes me feel sort of proud. Not only am I on television, but I’m closely affiliated with a “bizarre tragedy”. Some wording on their part. I was expecting “desperate act of terrorism” instead. By the definition of the word that’s what it is, but no, we’re a bizarre tragedy, like some little girl trapped in a drainage ditch or something. I should know by now that I can’t expect them to be quite that straightforward. We need to take what we can get anyway.
The interviews start with a fat Manson.
“You never expect crazy sh-t like this when you’re at the club just minding your own business and dancing and having a good time. You don’t think that it’s not you know, a safe place anymore. I can’t believe that the club’s not, ya know, safe now. It’s just really weird.”