Iconoclast

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© 1996-2008
æthereal FORGE ™



The MUD Slide


Iconoclast -- "Scythe"

Scythe...by aeon

"Pray for me, OK?" He looked up at me with a blank look on his face. A mirror in a dark room. Dirty chrome.

"Pray yourself," I said, returning the look. We were in his apartment, waiting 'til 12, listening to the dull arhythmic thumps from a very bad bass player in the bar below. Some assassins we were turning out to be. It was like 'Oh, sure, we'll kill some vampires for you, but we have to watch Family Fued first.' I sighed and looked at him, listening to family members answering survey questions, envisioned them blasting each other with shotguns. The audience laughed and cheered and wiped blood from their eyes in my mind's eye. How utterly puerile. I was insane.

"I can't. It doesn't work when I do it." He paused, as if he wanted to say something more, then looked back down to his weapon, tried to find an oily spot on the blade but couldn't. Sometimes people are like that -- trying to find the flaw in the diamond, just to give them something black to hold on to in the wake of all that clarity. Purity can be scary. You look down and don't see anything but clear beneath you and you feel like you're falling from heaven. Sometimes it's easier just knowing that there's a big black spot somewhere to catch you. Evil can be comforting at times. Like now.

He wiped at the blade for a moment and then gave up. He didn't look at me, but looked to the ceiling instead, trying to peer beyond the sky but only seeing cracked yellow plaster.

"I talk, but he...it's not that he doesn't listen, because I know he hears me. I can almost see him sitting there, watching me talk to him. But..."

I shut the television off and laid the remote on the coffee table.

"It's like he ignores me. Like I don't matter. Like all of my problems aren't worth a shit compared to the rest of the world." He picked the remote control up and turned the TV back on, flipping through channels.

He didn't have to say anything -- I just watched, feeling like God, maybe. Watched all of those images of horror and pain and misery and death flash by, war and famine and poverty and disease and purple dinosaurs and whatnot. And amidst it all were the televangelists, preaching a message that no one would hear, selling a vacuum attachment that peeled potatoes and saved your soul. Nobody cared. Not anymore. God was dead. The TV flipped off. Or flipped us off, maybe. I dunno. I depressed myself sometimes.

"I know he doesn't care, but I don't blame him. I'm shit. But you...hell man, you got a chance. You're worth something. You been on TV. God's seen you talk. He knows who you are. He'll listen to you, maybe."

"You think so, huh?" I asked, unexcited. I remembered my shot at glory, all thirty seconds of it. Selling batteries, or myself -- I still wasn't sure. I looked at him. He'd put his sword into the wooden sheath, silently and carefully, as if it were the only thing in his life that mattered. Aside from the TV, it WAS the only thing of value he owned.

"Yeah, I do," he said. "It's like we're all things man, dogs, but you're someone. God knows who you are. Me? Hell, God don't notice me unless I piss on the rug, and then I get smacked in the head for it." He stood and put the katana into his belt samurai style, blade upwards.

"God's got cable." He pulled his hood up and rechecked some straps. "So pray for me. I'm not begging nobody." He walked into the kitchen to grab his coat and gun. And a beer, apparently -- the fridge opened and destroyed the dark. I didn't have the decency to tell him that it wouldn't work for me, either. But I think he already knew that. God's got cable...I smirked -- it was something some televangelist guy had said one night, assuring his audience that God, too, was watching. Yeah, God has cable alright, but with four billion channels to watch, what were the chances he'd ever watch me for more than a second? God was a hell of a channel surfer, I'd bet.

"Wait up," I yelled as he opened the door, grabbing my coat and sword and gun on the way out onto the Skywalk, just like some fucking hour long cops-and- robbers show. I wondered what my theme song was. Probably something jazzy.

***

We found them in the alley, right where they were supposed to be. They were good. Very good. Dangerously good. Better than they were supposed to be. Both of them were, espeically the one tearing at my buddy. But I didn't have time to worry about my friend, a fact I was forced to remember as the vampire slashed at me with a small knife and hissed, fangs glistening.

I hit the wall hard and rolled to the left just a second before his blade bit the stone. He followed me down, etching an inch deep channel into the building, moving effortlessly. I continued the roll and came up on my feet as his sword reached the nadir of its arc, and as he brought it up for a second slash I stepped in closer and ducked a bit -- he caught a few strands of hair and a trailing wire from one of my symbiotes, but nothing vital. He'd realized his mistake almost as soon as he'd swung, hissing at me, but I was already inside his guard and he couldn't reverse fast enough, his natural reflexes no match for my experience. He spun around to go with the momentum, his only real option, and before he'd pivoted completely I'd unzippered his spine with my long and hamstrung him with my trailing blade. He folded up as his spinal column fell out, and died rather noisily.

See, ma, you don't need a wooden stake to kill them.

I heard voices down the street and remembered to check on my friend. He didn't look so well -- I had to kneel down so I could see some pieces of him. Even then, between the three bodies on the ground, it was hard to tell who was who. The voices got louder and closer. The moon grinned more loudly from behind the clouds, and I got a better look at him. Bad idea.

"Did we get em?" I checked on the one he'd been fighting, then nodded. The voices down the alley got louder, and I tried to lift him.

"Go," he said weakly, pushing his body off the ground, his left arm dangling. He looked like a burnt scarecrow. "Run."

I shook my head to clear it as he yelled this and collapsed. Dark shapes loomed in sillhouette down the alley. Many dark shapes, not all of them the proper shape. Some ran on four legs. I swear at least one ran on six.

I ran. It was the first time I'd ever listened to anything he said. I figured it would be the last. But for now, I just ran. Half from him, half from the enemy, and half from myself. Or something like that; I was never very good at algebra. It wasn't so much the fact that I saw him die that bothered me. I don't mind death much at all, not anymore. It wasn't even the violence of it, watching his life spill out from between his cracked fingers, clutched over his left breast, trying to breathe with a punctured trachea as grey things oozed out of the hole.

It was the look.

The look of giving up the fight, of relinquishing your soul to the enemy, of letting the waves take you down to hell. I paused a few blocks away and swore I'd never look that way, God as my witness.

Pausing was my last mistake.

I never saw the morph step from the shadows and slit my throat. I didn't even see the vampire who led the gang pick me up and throw me against the wall. I did, however, see the shifters pop fangs and settle down for a meal above my face.

I wish I could have passed out, but peace had to wait for four minutes until I died. It seems that Death walks with the Scythe Gang, and he likes to watch.


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