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DOOM MAGNETIC!!! - CHAPTER SEVEN:
QUEEN BITCH
William Pauley III
Gusto Geraldo Herrera, Jr pulls down the pair of magnifying goggles resting on his forehead, adjusts them over his eyes, and hoists the drill up to the top of the glass jar containing Qoser’s severed head. Even though it’s storming and the weather is relatively nice, if not a little chilly, Gusto’s body temperature is sweltering. He’s nervous and tense. The goggles almost immediately begin to fog and drip with condensation and sweat.
“Hey, boss,” Gusto says. “You sure about this, bro? You ask me, I don’t think it’s safe. Maybe we should let a doctor do this, you know, someone a little more qualified.”
Qoser’s lip twitches. “You mean to tell me that you can’t handle the one assignment I’ve given you?”
Gusto aligns the tip of a giant black screw, about two feet in length and six inches in diameter, at the center of an X, painted in red atop the jar. “I mean, yeah, I know my shit and all, but I’m no expert at this drillin’ bullshit. Seems to me like this is gonna fucking kill you, man.”
A cold chill runs through the three pieces of vertebrae that are left in Qoser’s neck. He appears almost lifeless, except for the twitching, which seems to be getting progressively worse. His mouth is open, his one eye stares up at the stars, not even blinking. His mandible is loose and moves about freely in the liquid that surrounds him. Even his skin looks dead—pocked and dyed from the chemicals.
“Do it, you gutless pig!” he shouts. “If this kills me, then you’ll only be putting me out of my goddamn misery.”
The twitching is furious now, his lips stretching almost to his ears, exposing every one of his gray teeth, like two rows of rotted tree stumps.
“And if this doesn’t kill me,” he continues. “Then mother and I will be the most powerful being in the entire macroverse. Nobody will be able to stop us. Nobody and no thing.”
Gusto shakes his head. “I can’t do this, boss. It doesn’t make any sense to me. If we take this risk and lose you, then Japan doesn’t stand a chance against the Starman. We’ll never be able to get our hands on the purple television again. They’re too powerful. We need you, bro. We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this.”
“Gusto,” Qoser says with a short sigh. “Let me tell you a little story about mother. Mother was a powerful woman in her day—very powerful. In fact, she used to be a queen.”
Gusto’s face lights up. In all the years of knowing Qoser, he had never once talked to him about family. He didn’t even seem to be the type of person who had a family. He always seemed to be something more than human—divine, maybe. Something else, certainly. Hearing him talk about his mother now changes his view of him completely. All at once, he’s been humanized.
“I won’t lie to you, Gusto,” Qoser continues. “Mother was insane. But her insanity didn’t cripple her, it actually did just the opposite. She was an incredibly—how should I say this—driven woman.”
“Driven?”
“The woman always got what she wanted, no matter the sacrifices that had to be made. Any person, male or female, that stood in her path was immediately dealt with in the most extreme way possible. I’m not ashamed to say that the trail mother walked along was a long and bloody one. Hundreds died at her hand, possibly thousands. And she wasn’t clean about it either. Mother liked to snap their spinal cords and rip the meat from their necks with her bare hands until their heads were completely detached from their bodies. She even killed my father immediately after I was conceived, like a mantis, eating the innards of his skull before his seed had even completely emptied into her body.”
Gusto’s mouth drops open. “Holy shit, man, you mean to tell me that your mama, this woman we have tied up right here, is Queen Bitch?”
Qoser smiles proudly. “In the flesh.”
“This is fucking wild, man! Queen Bitch is in the hizzouse!” Gusto pumps his fist into the air. “Okay, okay, so tell me what happened to her. Why is she here now?”
“Well, this is a little embarrassing for me to say, but essential to the story. I won’t go into details with numbers, but I’ll just say that Mother was a bit promiscuous. Like I said, she was a very demanding woman. If she wanted it, she got it. And she had no problems fucking in order to get it. The men that fucked my mother, though, they were never around to fuck her twice, I’ll tell you that much. What she did to my father was what she did to all her lovers, well, all except one. Her final lover was a magician. Not a birthday party-type of magician, but a true practitioner of magic. Unfortunately, he had the last laugh. He knew who she was, and as punishment for her many crimes, he cut off her head and threw it into the dark woods of Black Fuji. Then he cursed her dead body to roam these very hills for all eternity until she found her head. And now, after all these pain-filled years, she’s finally found her head. Me.”
“Whoa. Heavy. So, by doing this, we’ll be breaking the curse?”
“Gusto, my boy,” Qoser says, laughing. “Once mother and I are attached, not even the blackest spell in the devil’s handbook will be powerful enough to stop us.”
Qoser’s breathing heavily now. “So, do it. Get to work.”
Gusto smiles, nods his head, then pulls the trigger of the hand drill. Sparks and smoke pollute the air as the drill forces the tip of the screw into Qoser’s head. The glass walls of the jar spider-web, and the chemical liquid seeps out from each crooked fissure. Qoser’s head goes into convulsions as the screw pushes past his skull and penetrates his spongy brain tissue, twisting around the spinning metal until it is the consistency of hot glue. Qoser howls in pain.
Gusto pushes all his weight onto the drill, causing the screw to pierce through Qoser’s nasal cavity. As it pushes down into his mouth, the spinning steel sends bits of brain and bone spewing out his mouth, now floating free in the chemical liquid, until there’s so much of it that Qoser’s jar resembles a kitschy snow globe from hell.
Once firm inside his mother’s corpse, the screw finally stops spinning. Gusto tries pushing the screw down even further, pulling back on the trigger as far as it will go, but the screw doesn’t budge, it only causes the drill to screech and smoke profusely. He tosses the drill to the ground and pulls the goggles from his face.
“Qoser! Qoser! Can you hear me, man?” Gusto taps gently on the glass. “Shit, man. Come on! Answer me! Open your eye or something!”
Gusto grabs the corpse’s arms and pulls the body up so that it’s resting against a tree trunk. Qoser’s head falls limply to the side.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” Gusto says, pacing nervously around the body. “I knew this shit wouldn’t work! It’s fucking crazy! Why the hell did I let him talk me into this?! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit…”
He’s so nervous and afraid that he doesn’t even notice that Qoser has finally come to. He doesn’t notice until Queen Bitch pulls herself to her feet and begins to strangle the life out of him.
“Mother, no!” Qoser shouts. “He’s one of us!”
She throws Gusto against a tree with such brute force that the trunk cracks and bends backwards. He rolls on the ground, frantically gasping for air.
Qoser looks up at the stars. His new legs are trembling. He hasn’t had a body in such a long time that he’s forgotten what it feels like to have one.
“I want my goddamn purple television!” he shouts into the heavens, then unleashes an army of phantoms into the sky, each riding on spectral mares. The combined spirits of Qoser and his mother are now so powerful that he’s able to send these phantoms further than he’s ever had before—outside the world and into the atmospheres of other planets, and in bigger ghosslings too, without being winded or even phased in the slightest.
Gusto watches in fear as the herd of ghosts ride out from this new, impossible creature, and cover the sky within seconds, not fully understanding the power of the beast he’d just created, but knowing that this is definitely the beginning of the end of something.
Paid subscribers! The next chapter of this story will be posted on June 20th! Stay tuned for Showing Teeth.
Queen Bitch
© William Pauley III, 2011
All rights reserved.
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