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All In Your Head |
| “We are live from the scene of a massive firefight where earlier today, two gunmen fought off what seems to be the area’s newest supervillain....” Felicia Dumont ignored the ramblings of the various news channel reporters swarming outside as she made her way up an old staircase, careful to avoid the rotting steps. Various details flooded in her head, things she had made note of before she had entered the condemned building. The boy being comforted by his mother on the doorstep of what she assumed was their house - the boy’s mouth had been lined with something flaky, almost looked rust-colored from where she had stood. The various pockings on the asphalt where she had stepped, and the long bullet casings several yards away and outlined in chalk, looking like they belonged to a hunting rifle of some sort. The mangled body, covered with a sheet, lying far below a broken window. Several charred bird bodies gathered from around the location where the bullet casings had been found. And one window of the building in particular, one that looked like it had been glowing like there was a light inside. When she had stepped in to check, she picked up quips like ‘...we’ve got an OD here, woulda died anyway if her head was still there...’ and ‘...didn’t run away, were slaughtered’ and one person even asked where the bathroom was so they could puke. So she began to head upstairs past the hubbub of the investigation. Farther up she smelled smoke and heard a voice saying nothing recognizable. Somebody had lit the place on fire and was still there admiring their work. She reached for her gun, thinking it might be the perp, and listened. This door? No. This door? No. This door? Yes, this was the one. Not wasting any time, she kicked it open and aimed within, directly at the forehead of an old dark-skinned Indian man sitting behind a campfire. She lowered her gun - he looked too frail to be dangerous, something she would understand later as a mistake on her part. The man’s face was wide and crinkled and smiling. “You wish to know who did this?” His voice was deep and unbroken and beautiful, making her forget that he had spared the pleasantries but not that he had asked an odd question. “...Yes.” She didn’t know it, but already he had her in unwavering rapt attention. “Then take this to Galloway.” He took a stone out of his robe - it looked like it had been torn straight from a mountainside, save its deep sapphire blue glint. There was a hole in one of its protrusions, around which a rope was tied. It was meant to be a pendant, almost. “...Derek Galloway?” “Yes, Galloway. By the time you have given this to him, you will know who has done this.” He offered the stone to her over the fire. “Go quickly and give this to him. He will need it much later.” She stood, considering for a second, then reached reluctantly over the fire, not yet grasping the stone. “You will give that to him when you see him, yes?” She nodded, almost like it was against her will, and then reached for and grasped the stone. She gasped as her fingers touched it. She had wanted to rip her hand away the instant her skin brushed against it, but the man lunged forward a few inches and thrust the stone into her hand. Hundreds of images flashed into her head and thousands of sounds rung in her ears and she screamed in horror at each and every one of them. Moans and screams and a hideous laughter, and images of mutilation and destruction and burning and of a man wrapped in armor as piecemeal as his shattered mind, talons of metal on his fingers and teeth that would crack if he tried to smile any harder. Very suddenly, she found that she was not herself. Her memories were not her own, the scars across her body were not hers, not even the way she thought and the way she moved were hers. They quite suddenly belonged to a man whose name came from a very stupid joke on extrasensory mental abilities. Psychokinesis. PK. Psycho k. Psycho Kay. Moans. Moans of suffering and ecstasy and joy and of many more feelings that he would never consider experiencing. The ones of suffering made him grin. He was always grinning, a narrow grin that bared teeth that were always clean despite ignorance towards his own hygiene. None of the necessities of life ever crossed his mind. He didn’t know how to live, just how to survive. He didn’t care about that anyway. All he knew of life was that it was easy to ruin, and that it was so very fun to end. All he wanted to do was have fun, and to have lots of it. It was easy to have fun, especially in a place like this. A large decrepit house where the squatters didn’t know if he was a fellow druggie or just a hallucination. He wouldn’t be lonely here, not that he was lonely anyways. The first person he saw was some trembling girl lying on the floor and making the sounds that a shivering-cold person makes. She had OD’ed, nobody in the house had noticed yet, but he didn’t care. He walked closely, looked her over, staring at a pair of eyes that stared into nothingness in return. He cocked his head to one side, and grabbed her head between his hands. Slowly he began to twist, turning her head inch by inch. Her trembling intensified into a full-blown seizure as her neck popped. He kept twisting. She stopped trembling as circulation was cut off, merely twitching from time to time. Kay turned her head a full 360-degrees before deciding to take a closer look. He ripped her head clean off, and looked for a while. He laughed. Muscles in her eyes and eyelids still twitching from neural overload. He could even hear her tongue clumsily flopping around in her mouth, as if she were trying to say something. “You’re funny. I thINk I’lL KeEP yOu.” Blood pooled out onto the floor. He knelt down and began to sniff. “Hey buddy...” A man walked up to him and held out something that smoked. It was small and gray, but he didn’t care. He was much too busy staring at the man’s head. “Want a drag? It’ll help ya see God.” Anybody with an iota of intelligence would probably say something like “Give him my regards,” before doing what he was about to do, but he wasn’t into words much anyway. Instead he leapt up, knocked the man down, and straddled his chest as he began to bludgeon the man with his newly-collected plaything, laughing all the while. The squatter whimpered before his head cracked open, but Kay continued beating him. He stopped just to look at his still-breathing handiwork, then noticed the smashed hunk of flesh and bone in between his hands. “yoU BrOKE it!” He snarled, ripped off the dying squatter’s broken head, and threw it against a wall. The splatter marks it left made Kay happy again. Then a scream, a harsh yell of authority mixed with fear and apprehension. He turned to look at the source - a filthy man in tattered clothes, standing with legs apart and holding a gun at full arms’ length. An undercover cop looking to make a potential bust at the wrong place at the wrong time. He had found more than he had ever possibly hoped for. Kay’s narrow toothy grin returned, with teeth clenched just as tightly and still thrilled with all the joy the day had given him so far. His mind began to work, fueled by acts of rage and happiness and spontaneity and more. Hold fingers in place, bend the arms, yes. The officer watched as he slowly began to point his own gun at his left knee. He tried to resist with everything he had, tried to fire off all his bullets before it reached its target, but he had no chance. A shot went off. His kneecap separated from the rest of his leg. Kay wouldn’t let him fall down. Point to the other leg, yes. Another shot rang out. The officer shrieked in pain. It excited Kay. He began to clap. Gun go up, yes. Make the gun shove against officer’s temple, shoot his brains out, yes. He began to giggle as he had a better idea. The gun clattered to the ground. Arch back, arch back, back, yesss.... The poor officer began to scream again as he started to bend backward, but he could scream no more as he bent just a little too far back. And so he ran rampant throughout the house, randomly killing whomever he thought might scream the funniest. Someone was tying off their arm for an injection. Kay grabbed his lower jaw, ripped it clean off his head, and fell into a giggling fit as the corpse flailed in its death. Another one was sniffing a white powder through a straw. Kay decided he wanted to know what blood tasted like, ripped the poor fellow’s heart out, and stuck the straw in the left atrium. A man began to hallucinate that he was a gorilla, and started beating on his chest. Kay figured he didn’t want that anymore, and tore out all of his ribs, one by one. One of them came out still attached to the sternum and another rib. “mAKe a wI~iSH!” He pulled them apart before continuing tearing out the contents of the man’s chest cavity. Faster and faster he went, bringing misery and release to all he came across, Death itself hardly able to stay at his heels. The people who still had sense began to panic, started to run or hide or find ways to leave. One made the mistake of running by Kay. A hand went up, two fingers in particular, adorned with eternally industrially-sharpened claws, pointed forward. The poor fellow quite literally walked right into it. He screamed for only a second before Kay leapt out a window, dragging the man after him amongst a hail of shattering glass. His neck snapped instantly with the force of the motion. It was better that way, as they were many, many stories up. Down they fell, Kay enjoying the sensation of air rushing past him, the newly deceased a dead weight behind him. But only for a few moments, as the ground came rushing up to meet him. He stopped, inches above the ground. The corpse smashed against the asphalt beside him, with a crunch that made him gleeful and a snap that meant Kay’s eyepoke had done even more damage upon the fall. He loved the sensation, the unconscious knowledge that he had rightly defied death yet again and the conscious lack thereof that amounted to complete obliviousness, overcoming even his love of murder. It felt like happiness. Without a thought he flew up into the air again, leaving the mangled, eyeless corpse behind and greeting a flock of birds that were overhead. There he soared, just briefly. His face held a malicious grin again. His arms spread, welcoming the winged creatures that tried to fly faster, fly away from the strange being that sought after them. But they would fly no more. Most of them burst into flame with a horrid collective shriek, all of them falling to the ground either dead or stunned. He went down with them, flying down headfirst before making that landing the birds unfortunately did not hit, stopping in the air with a half-flip and gliding to his feet. A child holding a toy space shuttle sitting on the front steps of an apartment building watched him as he made his descent. He somehow appearing graceful amongst the falling debris the boy didn’t grasp were dead or dying birds. The boy looked dumbly at him, that man clad in plastic armor of glaring orange and purple tinged with a strange rust-colored red crust, with that clean grin and that filthy look in his eyes. Kay sat down, crossing his legs, and grabbed up one of the stunned, unsinged birds in his hands. He held it tightly, staring at it intently, yet it did not make a sound. The boy walked up to him, unfazed by the talons on his fingers or the fire in his eyes. “I wanna fly too. I wanna fly like the birds.” The boy looked earnestly at him, eye flickering to the bird every so often. “Well, you kNOW whaT thEY say....” The birds squawked in alarm as the grip changed. “...you are what you eat....” In an instant Kay reached out, grabbed the boy by the jaws, stuck the bird’s head in between his teeth, and forced him to clamp down. The bird gave one more pathetic squawk before dying. The boy began to cry and scream after he spat the bird out, too upset to realize that running away would be the best way to avoid more trauma. There was a horrified scream somewhere from behind him. The mother, coming to check on her child so they could go out to eat. Kay laughed. But there was another sound. Something he didn’t expect. It was quiet yet harsh, determined yet not guttural, behind him once again. He turned around from his seated position to look, and saw the sole of a shoe rapidly closing in on his eyes. A flash of white. Pain, a swirling sensation quickly enjoyed and then shaken off. The haze disappeared. In its place? A gray-haired man, piercing blue eyes, and a mostly-black business suit quickly removing throwing knives from within his jacket. Kay felt happy, opening his mouth for a thrilled crow. “Greyson Black, Greyson BLACK!” The man, the mercenary, the legend of one life who had died a thousand times and lived to tell the tale. A man whom he had tried to kill as many times as the other had him. Greyson wasted no time, tossing the knives as quickly as his ability allowed, one after the other after the other. Three cut through the air, hiss rising above Kay’s blithering before lodging nicely into his breastplate. He didn’t seem to notice, instead focusing on the old man even more still, a man he wanted to kill, a man who would actually put up a FIGHT in the process. He so loved to fight. And so he stood, and he charged, bloodied claws raised and hungry mouth hanging open and broken mind reeling at the many things he could do to his newfound prey.... Then as soon as the dream had begun, it was over. She was Felicia again, all of Kay’s hungers and feelings and urges suddenly gone from her mind. But the memories were still there, all there in her head as if she had done them and it was making her feel sick. The old dark-skinned man was smiling now, not like he had been before, but now with a look that brought up four words into her head - ‘You have been warned’. He let go of the stone, sure she had a good grip of it. “Now go.” He waved her off, and she did as she was told, dazed beyond her own comprehension. She didn’t notice that her throat felt chapped, like she had been screaming for hours. Completely disorientated, she began to stumble back downstairs, having a distinct desire to go back home and take a shower. She felt filthy, not only in that she felt sweaty and covered in something not unlike blood, but like she had a disgusting taint forever staining her being. Guilt and sorrow and loathing began to well up in her, not to mention fear, but was it towards Kay or herself? She tried to shake it off, hadn’t been her, had been Kay. She did nothing, though her thoughts tried to tell her otherwise. That, she was able to forget within the next few seconds. But her imagination did not let her forget the other sensations, her face tingling from where Kay had been kicked, her newfound surprise at not even feeling the very tips of the knives poking into her chest, and the armor that clung to Kay’s skin like it was pasted on. That’s what struck her the most, her skin running rampant with a tingling sensation that told her something had been there. When she stopped in the middle of the building’s destroyed lobby, she did not notice the officers staring at her, asking her if she was alright and wondering why she was sweating so much. She was instead staring at herself. First at her forearms, then pulling up the legs to her jeans to check her calves, then pulling up her shirt to see her stomach. Nothing there. There was something underneath the armor. That something felt like it was on her skin, but it wasn’t. No matter how much she checked, there was nothing. The paramedics made note of her strange fascination as they drove her to the nearest hospital.
Written by Ren Start - 03/18/2002 End - 01/04/2003 Now, I know what you’re thinking. “He almost spent an entire year on something this short?!” Yeah. I did. I started it awhile ago, sorta gave up after a month or so, then completely revised it upon a tip from Mr. Graves of FPL fame. With the advice of Chyron (who now owns me), I was able to put the final revisions on it and gain a final product. So here it is, hope you enjoyed. |
The C. Force © 1996-2002 Matt Laskowski --- The R. Force and other assorted crap © 1995-2002 Ren