Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.
At one fated gas station in the middle of nowhere, the god of gore walked through the doors. The redneck clerk leaned onto the counter with his squinted eyes and paid the customer no mind.
"You take credit?" asked the stranger.
"Yup" replied the clerk. With a nod, the man kept walking, searching through the aisles. He searched through each rack of old and expired candies and various other oddities found only on the sticks like this with a goal. Still searching, he became irked that his goal was not in sight.
"Shit" he cursed in a whisper. "There aren't any Gummi Heads (gummi candies shaped like voodoo heads). There's plenty of old shit, but nothing gummi. I need my gummis!" With a sigh, the man admitted brief defeat. As he passed the freezer aisle of ancient and otherwise rotted foods, he saw a bottle of proverbial heaven. Marked at the aged price of 70 cents, a glass bottle of Cherry Fizzy with snow-like frost at the bottom. So he took it, floated to the counter, and slammed it in front of the clerk's face.
"That it?" he asked.
"Yup" the customer said. Without looking, the trucker man ringed it up and uttered the price.
"77 cents" he grumbled. The paying man put down three quarters and two pennies, then sped happily on his way.
"Nice day" he called as he left, shutting the door behind him.
"Yup" the old man croaked.
"Hee!" Johnny squealed, his frosty drink in hand. "This must be good luck! Finding holy water in a swampy desert, I'm a lucky bastard!"
"Don't do it, Johnny" the French voice warned. This time her dress was cut from the crotch to the brim, but her back was turned and the exposed area didn't show. Her hair was down, adorned with bows and black roses that stood out in her ashen-gray hair. She held a fan that blew the trail of smoke she breathed into a fog of twisting faces and agonizing visions. "Drinking during your exile is a sin! Your feet will fall off!"
"Eh?" Johnny grunted. "I'm not diabetic...yet. If I want an ancient cherry Fizz, I'm getting it!"
"Well, how hypocritical" she said, skittering closer without turning. "If you truly wanted it for yourself, why did you pay for it? Why is that store clerk still alive?"
"Why shouldn't he be?" Johnny asked. "He didn't try to stop me or slow me down. He was just minding himself and letting me do as I please. He was trusting me to act civil towards him, so why shouldn't I?"
"So you'll do only what people expect of you?" she asked.
"No" Johnny retaliated. "I'll do what good people should do to other good people. I won't conform if others push themselves on me, and I'll kill anyone who refuses to accept me for all my faults and chastises me for them. Men who mind themselves, like him, are the only good people in the world. I could have walked in there in a bloody jumpsuit and hockey mask, but as long as I paid on my way out he would've smiled as I did." With an angry twist, he uncorked his soda and started drinking it. Perfectly preserved and fruity in the extreme. His imaginary cohort smirked and pulled out her cigarette. When Johnny was far enough away, she threw it to the gas pumps and watched the sparks build.
The poor old man inside saw the fire, got up lazily, and locked up shop before the explosion consumed him.
"FUCK!" Johnny shouted in shock. He spun around, keeping his drink at his side, and watched the building fireball.
"Misfortune loves you, Johnny" she said, cockily passing him. "It clings to you like the scene of pot on a college drop-out. You can't avoid utterly disappointing yourself at every turn. There is no peace for you in this world or any other. There is only doom and gloom..." So Johnny just stood there, watching the shrapnel fly past him. It never nicked him, although his bottle got shattered by a passing chunk of metal. It was like a vortex in reverse, with Johnny at the untouchable center.
"...so the good people die" Johnny lamented, "for the wrong reasons." His figmentary companion turned to him with her high and mighty smile to watch him sulk on his coat. "...I should take a walk..."
"A walk through where, Johnny?" she asked. Johnny whipped out a revolver from deep within his coat, put it next to his head and turned with a grin.
"The Cosmos!" A shot was fired. The French devil grinned. Johnny was gone...physically gone!
"I'm going for a walk" Devi called. Of course Tenna didn't hear her. Her sex comas usually drowned out enough that she wouldn't hear a nuclear explosion go off. Devi left anyway, wrapping scarf around her neck as the weather called for dry, chilly winds that would chap and crack her fragile skin. She pulled out a cigarette before hitting the street and was smoking as she walked away from the apartment.
The winds were indeed there, although more moist and chilling than dry and plain unpleasant. Still, the scarf stayed as a testament to her own worry. She didn't realize how neurotic she looked with the scarf until the first half-mile when she decided to take it down and keep it lazily draped around her back.
Nothing makes sense anymore Devi dreadfully mused. The dreams and the paintings...all coming up at the same time as someone else. Who else is making these paintings? Who am I sharing these visions with? Does this have something to do with Clara disappearing...? No way, that's way to weird to be true. Something freaky is happening...something just plain fucked up. I need to get my mind off this weirdness for at least a day or my head's gonna explode...
As Devi sulked over the overpass of the abandoned train yard, a man came happily humming along. There was a skip in his step and a bright carrying tune in his whistle. Devi's melancholy was too thick for his pleasantness to penetrate, but he ignored her and continued to move on his own merry way, right down the middle of the road.
"Oh" he began in sing-song virtuoso, "what a beautiful mooor-niiing! Oh what a beautiful niiight! Oh what a beautiful..." and his voice was gone. The wind stopped for a second, the clouds changed places instantly in the sky, and the stars were rearranged for about a split second behind the deep blue horizon.
"It's not a beautiful life after all, is it?" asked a voice to Devi. She slowly turned to face the face that made the voice, but she only saw a hand. That hand pushed her off the overpass and she went falling. There was nothing but the cackling madness of absolute black overhead. No forms anymore in the shapeless sky. Even when the ground should have killed her, she passed through only darkness, and that's when the madness clutched hard at her throat.
"Devi, Devi" a choir of childish songs sang, "the one that got away! She went to live her life but just can't stand another day!" Devi's mouth gaped in fear and her body went limp as the air from nowhere went blazing past her. The childish voices started laughing in hideous distortion and soon started another terrible verse.
"Devi, Devi, painting in her room! She never ever leaves to find a man to fill her womb!"
"Hey, wait a second!" Devi began harshly protesting. "I've had sex! I just don't want to have a kid if I'm not married!" Now suddenly upset over the judgmental demon fourth graders who sang from the impenetrable shadows, she pouted and let the disgusting voices giggle at her.
"Life for the innocent" a new, familiar man's voice started from a distance, "is short. The innocent are always cut down first so the corrupt can take their place."
"Now what?" Devi groaned. "Some bull-shitty new age poet form hell?"
"I never thought of myself as a poet" he responded. "No one's ever thought anything I've done was ever very poetic. I'm sure if you look hard enough, some strange poetic themes can be dug up in what I do, but it's not something I'd pride myself in admitting."
"Why not?" Devi asked, now uncaring that she plummeted infinitely to what she thought would be death. "Poets are hard to come by today."
"What about Goths?" he asked.
"Well, good poets" Devi responded. The man's voice gave a warm, almost humane kind of laughter. "So, uh, what's going on right now?"
"Just taking a walk" he said.
"Where?" she asked. "I don't see any roads." Suddenly, the darkness lifted. Devi's stomach did a fatal back flip and she nearly vomited. Whether from the sheer magnitude of what she saw or the shock of her body realizing there was no gravity in deep space she couldn't tell. The shaky, shadowed silhouette paced with hands in pocket across an invisible strand of walkway in the middle of the starry black. His hair was all in a disorganized mess. His coat hid a zombified logo on his bloodied shirt. His face was like the undead itself, what was once lifeless now brimming with a mystical energy that reflected life around it.
"Of course not" Nny said with blind eyes. "You can't build roads in space." Devi's brain turned off. She felt her body get lifted up and thrown with cosmic speed back down to earth.
And so she returned. The pupils of Devi's eyes, for those who would see them as she leered terrified over the overpass, were sharply refigured into psychedelic shapes. The black of her seeing eye stood out from the twirling colors indescribable as what looked like question marks.
"Those roads don't really exist" Nny said as he walked away, taking the place of the man that he walked into from the cosmos. "I'm not sure why, but they've been there for me to walk on for as long as I've been walking...have a nice day..."
Devi stayed stunned in a cosmic coma until nightfall. She came out of her trance panting, nearly hyperventilating, when an earnest couple passed her by.
"Oh my" the guy said, rushing to her side. "Are you alright, young lady?" Devi fell forward into the guy's shoulder. She felt desperately at her face to make sure it was there, and her scarf to find it coiled neatly around her neck. She felt like screaming, but her heart beat the air into her throat.
"What happened?" the girl asked.
"I'm not sure" her guy said. "Hey, are you okay? Are you alone? Talk to me?"
"...cosmos..." was Devi's first word. She shook her head and came back to the present with a start. "Ah! Where am I? What time is it!? Did I leave my oven on???"
"Oh no!" the girl shouted. "She's an amnesiac!"
"Let us take you to the hospital!" The guy politely demanded. Devi looked between them, the childish verses stuck in her brain. Could she take her life? Did a child really matter to her...where had she gone...?
"Yeah" she finally said. "I need...a hospital...and morphine...right now..." And so she was carried and carted to the closest facility that would allow her to sleep an opiate induced sleep for the night.
The spark of intellect shot off somewhere in the alleys of the city. Among the drunkard and drinking hobos sat a short, middle-school looking figure. Around him were the tarnished, cracked skulls of elder men with distinctly square looking finger marks at the temples.
"Welcome back" he said as he stood. His hat drooped over his face til he brushed it back up. His clever nightmare-clown design shined in the pale light of the moon and the empty reflecting bottles of liquor around him. "Hmph. Maybe I should throw a party? Some kind of 'welcome back' affair? It might not be a good party, though. I can't think of anyone to invite." In a limitlessly evil low, the tiny figure laughed with clenched teeth. His white eyes and painted face rang echoes around the foreign walls around him in terrible ways. "First though, 'He'll' have to know. It's my job now, that is..."
The word 'Fuck' stood out particularly upon his chest. There was no fashion behind his selective word, as the hand of someone much crazier chose it out of spite long, long ago.
