by Garrett Cook
Cass reaches into her handbag and takes out one of the .32’s, handing it to Joey. Joey looks incredibly confused.
“See this gun?” she asks him.
“Yes,” he answers, “I see this gun. After all, you did just hand me a fucking gun.”
“Very good,” Cass says, all business, “I want you to take that gun and shoot that Son of Sam in the booth over there in the head as he cleans his gun. Just glide down the aisle and shoot that Son of Sam in the head.”
Joey stares at the gun as if we’ve handed him some sort of rare snake. “How do you know I’ll do it? I could just take this gun and shoot you right now?”
“Because, you seem like a smart kid,” I tell him, “you seem like somebody smart enough to know who to point a gun they’ve just been given at. The rest of you Ripkids shut the fuck up, or you’re going to get capped. Understand?”
The Ripkids at the table nod agreement. Joey gets up, sneaks down the aisle and gets ready. Cass and I take this moment to jump on the table and unholster our weapons. I grab the shotgun from my coat and Cass gets Mr. Right’s magnum from the holster sewn into her pant leg. Joey shoots, and not surprisingly, he hits his mark. By the time any of the Sons of Sam can grab their weapons, Joey’s under the table, seeking fire cover, and Cass has fired on one of the other Sons, dropping him in one shot, making an almost lovely spray of red and pink.
“Attention Reapkids,” I shout, subtly handing Ian the second sawed-off shotgun sewn into my coat, “you are in the presence of Mr.400. Those of you who have not heard the message of Mr.400 should know this…”
Ian does something incredible, he gets up on the table, which starts to get wobbly under our collective weights and that of the handbag, and he improvises.
“Your culture of violence is dead. The soldiers of death, who you have praised so widely, have proven themselves fragile. The messengers of the so-called grim reapers have found themselves punished, forced to deal with the consequences of their years of corrupting misinforming and harming the populace…” Ian shouts. I can see his game now, and it’s a damn good one.
A nearby Manson jumps to his feet, and does the only thing Manson ever did and the only thing Mansons are ever good for. He screams. “Fuck you, you’re not Mr.400! Neither of you are Mr.400, fuck you, you fucking poseurs! Fuck you all! You don’t need to listen to this shit. You don’t need to listen to any of his fucking shit! Charlie knows the gospel, Charlie knows the score…”
The Sons fire, once on the Manson kid, once on Joey, who is trying to scale the booth and once on me. I take the .38 slug in the chest with dignity on account of the flesh-toned Kevlar I’m wearing under my shirt. Joey’s claim that he wasn’t Spiderman might well have been false, since he manages to avoid the shots, get on top of the booth and jump. He surprises me by not running out and instead dropping to the ground behind the second row of booths and seeking a vantage point. I feel like applauding when the Manson kid drops, but the Sons are trying to kill us. A booth of Gacys runs toward the door, unlike the Manson chick waitress who has simply dropped to the ground, knowing full well that nobody will dispatch cops to a shootout in a reapjoint a block outside the Safe Zone.
“Stop!” Cass shouts at the Gacys, “Nobody leaves!”
Three more Mansons at the booth with the slain one rise and pounce like wild animals, leaping onto the table and finally making it buckle under the weight of six people. We all tumble to the floor, Mansons, Ian, Cass and I and the combat has gotten close. The Sons don’t know what to do besides try and find where Joey’s taken cover. They get up and start to look behind the booths. I’ve lost track of Joey, and can’t really focus on finding the kid in the middle of this brawl. The Mansons are attacking with knives and teeth, joined by the ex-Ripkid leader who has pulled his swordcane and is getting ready to stab me in the stomach as soon as the Manson on me rolls off. The Gacys stop running and join the melee, leaping on top of the Manson covering Ian and I and lashing out with every part of their body that they can.
I have to wonder if this will finally be the end, torn apart by these animals. So quickly these people turn into the beasts they are. It reminds me of Orpheus. The love, the song that could tame the devils, brings on the end at the hands of those who crave the love. Those who want to be understood by their heroes, those who are most violent, most powerful feel dismissed and they set upon me and they tear me to shreds. The children of Dionyssus, disciples of the leopard, their teeth and claws could be the end. They could be, if it weren’t for Joey’s friends.
I hadn’t thought I could count on these kids. I had suspected I could only intimidate them, but these kids have some brains too. These kids knew that the sadist with the swordcane who was getting ready to gut me had gone too far leaving Joey to die, and now they see that these kids are going too far. They saw all the bloodshed, knew what I, what Mr.400 had done, and still they know these kids, the jealous ones, the hateful ones who won’t get the message, who can’t grab peace from the song of love have gone too far and now they must be stopped. The Ripkids pull at the Gacys and the Manson on top of Cass and Ian and I. They pull them off and they hand us the guns lost in the tussle. But I don’t take mine. This kid with the swordcane wants me dead, this hateful stupid kid thinks that he can do what Godless Jack and so many others failed to do.
So I let him, I let the little land shark come at me with the cane. He thinks he’s going to cut me, and he’s grown faster and more savage, so it’s likely he might. It’s even more likely he might because I’m distracted by a gunshot. I worry for Joey and look over at him. Joey’s fine, but the Son of Sam that he’s flanked and shot in the spine isn’t. The kid goes numb and hits the floor like the Manson he had just killed. Another Son looks at what’s happened, observes the shape of his friend, crumpled like tissue paper. Cass has become a regular Lone Ranger, though, quite capable of shooting the angry kid before he can blow Joey away. If only the kid had known what Cass had, that anger can make you weak, that anger can make you slow. There’s one son left to look on all of his dead brethren and that kid drops his gun.
But I shouldn’t have stopped to look. It lets the kid surprise me with a trip, something I don’t expect him to do with the swordcane. I hit the floor and he leaps on me like the animal he is, like all the other animals are. I expect to die right then, take off guard without a weapon by somebody who sees no better way to prove he’s worth something than to kill me. How pathetic. But he makes a mistake, the mistake Cass caught the Son of Sam on and the mistake Mr. Right might have caught Cass on were he not such a weakling and a coward. The Ripkid decides to be a sadist. Instead of just stabbing in the stomach and killing me, he punches me in the face. If it were a good punch, he’d have been able to stun me a second and let me suffer more, but it isn’t. It barely makes a noise. When he moves to punch me again, I raise my good arm and I grab his hand. I twist hard and he screams. Then I reach for his arm, and with a bit of leverage, I knock him off me. He falls and that’s all I need. I’m standing once more and he’s on the ground.
One of the Gacys gets free of the Ripkid that’s pinning him, more or less in the same way I just did. He’s a big kid, might have played some football for awhile. He charges, getting ready to bring me to the ground again for the sadistic fuckhead I just pulled off me to get back to beating me. It seems the asshole’s regained some status among the local Reapkids. The Gacy kid doesn’t expect Ian to smack at the base of neck with the sawed off shotgun. Were these kids more observant, they’d have expected the poor stupid clown to get shot, but they don’t expect that and they don’t expect him to fall to the ground like the big, heavy sack of stupid he is. This does give the leader some edge, though providing a moment of chaos and hesitation that he can use to stand up again.
I give him a good old-fashioned jab to the stomach, and then I headbutt him. Were I not more certain now that I can bring this kid down in spite of his support and in spite of his savagery, I wouldn’t have tried it, but I feel confident. Confiden
ce is key. His balance isn’t good enough for him to take the headbutt. It brings him down instantly. This kid seemed for a little bit, like he wasn’t a weakling or a quitter, but it’s clear that he is. He reaches one more time for the swordcane, but I don’t let him get it. Anything even remotely like hope is gone from him when I take the gaudy, cheap, histrionic weapon for myself. He squirms, the animal in his eyes gone. I wonder if I should let this bully and this sadist live, if seeing him on the ground humiliated would be enough to get these animals to understand that the stupid things they love might be worth rethinking and resisting, that violence for the sake of violence is nothing. I don’t give the kid mercy, and the act of violence against him is not to show them that I am tough or that I will kill them, but to show them what I am killing. Even though I see no Dark Ones near him, I know who their tools are and I know how to fight them. I raise the swordcane high, to let them see what I’m doing and the kid is too stunned too busy wetting his pants to move. I drive the swordcane into his heart, deep. In a truly Victorian fashion, I have staked this vampire. No longer are they to feed off blood.
When the battle of Murderland is done, I look around, at terrified ignorant Gacys, at the Ripkids who helped me win, at the Mansons who would never know better no matter what I told them, then at Ian and Joey, the lives I saved out of compassion instead of just disgust, at Cass, who is love, which is the only real reason to fight. The Gacys and the Mansons remain on the ground in shock, but not as much shock as I feel when the one surviving Son of Sam moves to leave with me. The Gacys and the Mansons find that violence is only so powerful because it has to be, and as many before me have thought; I find that those who cannot love, think, feel or be reasoned with, deserve nothing better than a canister of Sarin gas.
The God I once thought would let me be a martyr has given me much. He has given me friends, a lover and an army. The Dark Ones build their city behind the scenes, but I can tear it down with the hope in front of my face. After all I’ve been through, and all I’ve done, I see that I can only do the thing any man could and would in these circumstances: I can take the war outside of my head. I can walk the streets of America as it is, not America as it is doomed to be. I can only hope this is enough, because Murderland is everywhere and there are only so many bullets.
Reapchic.com, October 31 st, 2006
Tonight, once more we celebrate All Hallows Eve, the night when the dead return to earth; seeking offerings and reminding the living of the precious gift they’ve been given. The emails have come to me, asking me to do the same thing. You’ve all written for me to bring you some kind of light and sanity in a changing world, and to remind you why we have chosen life and shunned death, why we embrace death’s visage and venerate those who bring it. I regret to say that I have given all of the answers I could to these questions. I have been with you for five long years now, bringing this site from a little personal blog to one of the biggest forums and newsgroups about Reap on the net. I’m happy to have been able to give you this perspective and for all these years to tell you what I believed and what you should believe too. Like the epitaph, like the ghastly mask, I have reminded you of death in life and how we cannot deny it. I’m glad to have had the privilege.
But now, things are changing. Yes, things are always changing, but it seems like they’ve changed too much. Psychopomps used to be able to kill with impunity to show us that we lived in a dangerous world and to bring us a new dose of truly taboo excitement when there were no taboos left to entertain us. The fact that America changed enough to allow this was one of the biggest cultural shifts in history, one that will leave a mark on many a generation to come. Now, we are faced with a change just as large, and with as long lasting a consequence. Now, we are faced with Mr.400, a phenomenon I thought I had a handle on. A phenomenon most of us thought we had dealt with. Mr.400 was surely the newest evolution in Reap, or a bigger, riskier, extension of the things we believed. Now, I wish things were that simple. I wish I could say Mr.400 was just heralding a new age of Reap, but I can’t. I can’t tell you what Mr.400 is capable of, because I have not yet seen it, nor has anybody.
Godless Jack was more or less the founder of Reap. Even in death, he remains the founder of Reap. It was Jack that made us call into question, the ethics of killing to survive, that made us see that violence was a part of ourselves that could not be severed and that needed to be fed. Jack could not subsist without killing, and it is every man’s right to subsist. How could we have argued with that? We all imagined what it would be like if the government told us we could not fulfill our urges, if policemen carted us away for masturbating, listening to loud music or eating too much, we wondered how we could deny a man the things that made him a man. We all watched a Clockwork Orange and we took notes. We all examined our faiths and saw that death is transformation. We all made a series of excuses for Jack and we all decided that if he did not have the right to live, then we did not and that America had to be free.
So, we became something different thanks to Jack and America became something totally unexpected, it became freer. Our politicians saw that we were terrified of having some integral freedom taken away, and thought of how they would look for doing it. They thought about votes and human rights and they thought about the ends of their careers. They got scared like we did. They got scared of thinking that we were missing some integral freedom. So, in their eyes, Jack became a political threat, a Malcolm X or a Gandhi, a man who said it was okay for us to go nuts, okay for us to be ourselves, regardless of what that self was. America’s advertising would fail if Jack did not go free.
Now Jack is dead, and many of us wonder if we are no longer free. I have received many e-mails asking what Reap is to become in the absence of its founder and what I planned on writing about the death of Godless Jack, the death of American freedom. You are still free. Free to kill in the Safe Zone, free to sniff all the modeling glue you want, have sex with whoever you like and gorge your brain on real, live murder. Don’t worry about that, nobody can take that away from you, not even Mr.400. Mr.400 looks now to be a threat to a Reap-loving, free-loving, violent, exciting, living America, with his claims of our hypocrisy, of our absurd and his statement that our culture of violence is dead. Without Jack, you thought Mr.400 had already won and you had lost these freedoms you treasure so much. Don’t worry about your freedoms, worry about your lives.
Worry because the more we kill, the easier it gets, not just to kill but to ignore the things that have driven us to kill. Outside of the Reap community, there is a war with China that will cost more lives that any psychopomp who ever lived or ever could. Outside the Reap community is an America that’s just as confused as we are. Those Islamic terrorists are gone because they no longer entertain us, and it’s become unpopular to bother with them. Somali warlords are gone because the cameras are gone. Before the cameras turned on, Mr.400 killed a lot of people and nobody knew or gave a shit, just because he decided to be invisible. This is why you should worry, because you can only see what you choose to, and you have chosen to see the wrong things, things that are done for you to see them. Worry about that. This Halloween, try worrying about all the screaming souls that must surely have no place to rest now. This Halloween, worry about the dead, and worry about us, the living becoming dead inside or dead altogether. Embrace and fear it. Understand it. Respect it.
I have led you astray, Reapkids and the time has come for me to stop. I’m going to go out and do the right thing now. I say goodbye to Reap and goodbye to the cult of death. I hope you have the judgment to do the same. I suspect most of you won’t, but it doesn’t matter. I might as well try. The time has come for everyone to try. Mr.400 is hope, and I for one, have chosen to embrace hope, and help some souls rest in peace on this Halloween night. To these lost souls, may you find your way home, may your screams and pleas be heard.
This is Ian Sterling, signing off forever.
THE END.
Garrett Cook spends his time working both sides of the s
tory. He is both an author of his own work, as well as an in-demand editor. Garrett specializes in scribbling and shredding: Horror, Bizarro, Dark Fantasy and Neopulp fiction. His books include Archelon Ranch, Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective and the upcoming Time Pimp. His fiction has been reprinted in The Decade’s Best Bizarro Fiction and has appeared in anthologies alongside such authors as Michael Moorcock and Joe Lansdale. He is the editor of Imperial Youth Review and is available for freelance slicing and dicing editing services. And you are right. Garrett’s beard does fuckin’ rock!
WELCOME TO HARBORSIDE DISTRICT HOSPITAL ... where three of a kind have come to live, work and kill. Born whole from the rectum of a dying patient, Morbid silently stalks the hospital's hallways, heinously dispatching the most helpless of patients and in the most painfully repulsive of manners. In the meantime, in order to pay for his family and home that includes his ghost step-father Sammy and his pet aborted fetus Chip, Westphal has to ingest mounds of dangerous narcotics to get through his night shifts. Barely hanging on to his Care Tech gig by his fingernails, the last thing Westphal needs is to be accused of Morbid's evil deeds. You, on the other hand, simply want to find some solace. Terminally ill from a virulent infection, and dependent on Life Support, all You beg for a peaceful and dignified demise. Shirk has other plans for You. The ancient drug-snuffling demon makes You relive all of your deadly and venial sins as he tortures You. Night after night. Until eternal Damnation begins for YOU MORBID WESTPHAL, yet again.