Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.
Sam's eyes were closed tight, his pale-white lids exposing a sleepless blue shade of exposed veins around the bags of his narrow observers. His lashes were even sharp and short and covered the edges of his eyes very carefully.
"Oh, come now" Gott chided, reaching out and grabbing Sam's forehead. "You have lovely...eyes." He had to take a pause to breath in so he could growl out that word. His greedy, blood-stained fingers reached for Sam's tightly shut lids and began pulling up at them. He pushed them against Sam's squishy eyeballs and tried to forced them up and he tried raised them by pulled at Sam's groomed eyebrows. Nothing worked. "Are you that concerned for my health? I'm flattered."
"You can eat shit" Sam insulted "and go kill yourself. My eyes aren't meant to be open..."
"Then you've come here" Gott began "using all of your other sense?" Sam grunted and raised his head up a bit. "If you never open your eyes, how can you tell what the world in all its absurdity and strangeness looks like?"
"I wasn't being literal" Sam growled. "My eyes are cursed. I can't open them, and I can never allow them to be seen!"
"Cursed?" Gott repeated. His crooked smile grew and touched near his temples, all pearly white jagged zigzags of disgusting enamel. His eyes bulged out beyond the scope of tangible reality and nearly came out of his head. A thin layer of viscus mucus prevented them from hovering out and dangling down. "Why, silly boy, only science prevails in this world. People who believe in curses or demons or ghosts are just foolish! They only want to push the blame of their misfortune and idiotic problems on an arcane source that can store it all. That way they can remain innocent and blameless forever. You are just a coward, afraid of facing your own demented problems!"
"The world is absurd" Sam began, "and that's why ghosts and demons aren't so far-fetched. Who's to say that some of the major problems in life aren't because of some kind of mythological intervention? Maybe my arrival here is proof that mystic hands are helping me along through my life and teaching me my lessons."
"Doubtful" Gott said mockingly. "I'm sure if I dissect this little mystery I can find a scientific solution!"
Nice choice of words Sam thought sarcastically, mostly in response to the word 'dissect'. Dammit. These freaks are all pretty strong. I can't move anything but my eyes...and God knows if they get their fingers on my eyelids they'll be able to pry them off pretty damn easily. Just as he thought that one of the happy, cheerful clones moved its fingers to his face and covered his eyes with loose fingers. SHIT! Fucking cliché SHIT!!! When will it end!?
"Peek-a-boo!" the girly maniac cheered. She opened his eyes between her index and middle fingers. Now here is where things, as an author, get difficult. How am I to describe something that I myself do not fully comprehend. In his eyes there was nothing but blackness, darkness that made even the gaping black of space seem bright and sparkling. It was a terrible, fantastic black that can only exist in places where the human mind dares not probe and pry. His eyes were not human, they were blacker than any ink and pierced through the air with a graceful lethality sharper and faster than any sword or bullet. His eyes were those of not a demon, not a God, but something greater...
"OOOOHHH!!!" Gott squealed, his expression becoming almost comically distorted with joy. He even clasped his hands together and drew them up to his cheekbone. The clones holding Sam's arms made the infinitely foolish act of looking into Sam's eyes. After doing so, their own eyes faded to a dust gray and dissolved as dry dust.
"OW!" a male shouted, clutching his new empty eye sockets that started oozing his synthetic blood. "OOOOWWW!!!"
"I'm blind!" a female shouted. Those that saw Sam's eyes, aside form the demonically immortal Gott, were reduced to nothingness. His own eyes were transfixed gravely on Gott, as the darkness gave way to the shining white dots that were his inverted pupils.
"MAKE IT STOP!" another injured clone demanded.
"You see?" Sam said. "This is something best left to other places, outside this world."
"Wherever did those come from?" Gott asked. "I feel like...like a hot iron is being thrust into the darkest, unused depths of my mind! What amazing power do you possess, Mr. Killer?"
"All I behold" Sam began "is humbled before me. I hold the gaze of ultimate destruction, of obliteration. Nothing survives if it sees my true self...it is a curse."
"Sounds to me like a wonderful boon" Gott said, his teeth starting to crack under the pressure of his gritting smile. "Such a fierce, amazing sight. How do you see the world through such pigmented eyes?"
"I don't" Sam flatly said. He finally found his chance and diverted his stare into Gott's teeth. Like a pearly mirror, the concentrated blast of imperceptive power blasted off his teeth and into the eyes of several clones holding him down. The one behind him, holding his eyes open, was the recipient of such a gaze and as such her head simply fell off. No blood spurt from her neck, as a disgusting fleshy mold grew over the open would in an instant. Sam's right arm was now free, and he used it to elbow away the remaining creatures. They all fell with smiles, but those who met his eyes were writhing in uncontrollable pain and using emotions hat had never been programmed into their blank minds.
"Tricky little human" Gott sneered. His smile was finally frozen in place and his teeth shattered. A moment alter a myriad of terrible spikes grew from his gums and clacked together loudly. Now he resembled the monster he really was. Sam grabbed his glasses from his coat pocket and began running away down the cell block. He looked back once, noticing how little movement there was in the horde. Then he looked forward and continued running. All at once the army moved, as a unified group of soulless soldiers, and started simultaneously running down the stretch at him. More came from below, and more came from too far away for Sam to realize.
I've been through shit before Sam told himself as he picked up his pace and rounded the corner. I've survived worse odds. I've beaten out the universe at least once in my life...that's all it really takes...
And now Sam's mind wandered back to the day where he cheated death and then laughed in its face...
The rain came down hard. Even through the canopy that blocked out the sun during the day, the droplets that formed made enormous splashes. Thunder flashed occasionally, offering but thin columns of white light in brief flashes. A squad of men, tired and war-weary, sat under the shade of the trees that all sat in the shade of the rain. Three men were on the dirt ground with their arms down in the jungle thick beside them, one stood guard with his gun held tight. One man with oval glasses, prescription, shining in the dark like flashlights. Samuel Coroza was his registered name, but for the sake of significant army-related troubles he only went by the name 'Eyes', as his were the best of his squad.
"It's quiet" one shouted over the loud, heavy rain.
"It's almost creepy" another called from a few meters away.
"You alright Eyes?" the third shouted to Sam. Sam just nodded and checked his gun. "Maybe you should sleep."
"No sleeping" Sam said sternly. "My dreams never end well. I don't like to sleep if I don't need to. Besides, I'm wide awake right now." The sky suddenly split open with a huge crack of thunder. None of the men flinched.
"That sound is getting annoying" one of the thick-jawed soldiers muttered. "I'd rather hear gunfire right now."
"That's just what they want" the other with mud on his face replied. "They want us vulnerable psychologically, like in the mind."
"Chill out" the third said calmly. "Just stay chill, alright? It's just a rainy night. Our shelter is set up whenever we want to sleep even those bastards aren't crazy or stupid enough to come out here into the jungle to kill us in our sleep."
"I think they are" Sam said. "If there are panthers and monkeys and other blood-crazed creatures out here, who's to say they haven't trained their own brand of inhuman monsters to fight in extraneous circumstances..."
"Because that sounds fucked up" thick-jaw said.
"We should be on guard for panthers" mud-face said "if they're really out here. They won't hesitate just because we have weapons. They aren't afraid of guns."
"Lucky creatures" Sam said. "Fear is what killed squad Bravo, and tenacity is what killed squad Bug-Eye."
"Good men" thick-jaw said.
"Amen" the third agreed.
"They died manly deaths" mud-face agreed. "Just like we will soon..."
"How nihilist" the third noted.
"Don't joke about shit like that" thick-jaw demanded harshly. "This is a warzone, and I intend to return from it!"
"Oh, always the worrier, you" mud-face said. "This is a war, and therefore we will die in it. There aren't any heroes out here. We're all just villains fighting under different banners."
"You're one of the prisoner corps" the third asked, "aren't you?"
"Yeah" mud-face answered. "That doesn't make you any better than me and it doesn't make me any less than you."
"I agree" Sam said, trying to break the building argument. A huge crack of lightning, hitting dangerously nearby, finished the job for him. "We are all equal here in the war. As men we fight, and as corpses we burn."
"Now if that ain't nihilism" thick-jaw said "I don't know what is." The rest of existence kept on going while these men whittled away short moments of their life in idle chatting. The genocide occurring just outside the jungle thick, one that would be marked as the last great atrocity of the modern era, had taken an abrupt halt as the last true bastion of the soon-to-be obliterated people was holding out very well. All things continued on as they normally should. Then the universe took an abrupt and unorthodox shock to its system.
The cosmic freeway experienced a grizzly eighty-car pile-up and all that despair, all that death, all that was released with the brutal resonance of energy, landed into the thin clearing where these four soldiers sat and rested. Thick-jaw, Mud-face and What's-his-name were blown away by abnormally powerful lightning, while the brilliant cosmic flash scarred the eyes of the sole survivor Sam. He too was thrown through the air, but his body landed.
Theirs did not.
"What the fuck!?" Sam shouted into the darkness. His eyes felt strange, in that there was no feeling in his eyes anymore. The fall he took must have jarred his nervous system, and mo matter how much he moved his eyes around he could neither feel them moving nor see where he wanted to look. His vision was set on some unknown cluster of stars within a dusty backdrop of evil purple and benevolent red. The black between the stars seemed to form the shape of some slender man moving through the infinity, frozen in mid-step forever with hands in his pockets and hair messed and laying in all directions upon his head.
"What is this!?" Sam demanded. "What's going on here...what happened to me! GAH! BY BODY! IT BURNS!!!"
This is fate.
Suddenly a blast of consciousness invaded Sam's brain. His eyes were forever set into that horrible state, and he saw the world form so far away that it existed to him as a lonely speck against the black murkiness of everything. He saw himself moving as the slightest and tiniest of things, he saw the galaxies spinning and imploding all around him, he saw the center of all universal gravity collapsing the weight of existence upon itself...he saw everything, but when he looked into his own eyes from so far away...he saw nothing at all.
Can you see now?
"No..." Sam answered.
Can you see it now!?
"NO!" Sam answered in pain. "I can't see anything!!!"
Then your fate is decided...you are dead......And here I am Sam thought in the present, running into the deadest of all ends. Dead again... He looked behind him at the empty stretch of walkway just as the first of the clones came with its head whipping to find him. It spotted him and grinned wide.
"Over here gang!" it called in an oddly 70s voice. The army came roaring around the corner, pushing bodies over the railing and down to the far-below floor like a living wave throwing foam all over the place. "Let's get him!"
"He's so dreamy!" a girl shouted.
"I'll rupture his colon!" another girl exclaimed quite cheerfully.
"Strange subject matter" Sam muttered. He gripped his fingers in anticipation and jumped to the right at the last moment, just before the first body slammed through the wall and into the open street. The clones who made it outside were faced with the thrones of hellish animals who had just finished devouring the last of the mercenaries who could not hide themselves well enough. The swarms of carnivorous birds still clouded the sky and covered the roofs. Sam grabbed onto the lowest bar of the railing and managed to flip himself directly into the lower leveled walkway, suffering only a mild blunt impact from the concrete wall he hit.
"Apparently" Sam observed, adjusting his glasses, "most of these walls are just part of the fake backdrop for the town. Somehow...that doesn't add up..."
"How observant" Gott said, hovering in on his little device. He stepped off his flying platform, letting it drop down automatically to the ground far below. Gott took two steps forward with his evil face and narrowly slit yellow demon eyes until he was just adequately far enough from Sam to stand against whatever threat he pulled from his jacket.
"Being awfully cautious" Sam began "for an immortal being, aren't you?"
"I can't be to careful with you" Gott said, "my future prize subject."
"Just what can you learn" Sam began "about human nature through me? I'm as inhuman as a corporate executive can get. I can ruin a man's life in less than three seconds without changing my expression from total apathy. I can destroy an entire franchise that employs thousands and not bat an eyelash."
"All thanks to you powers" Gott said. Sam wanted to retort, but he didn't have the means to do so. Instead he just nervously shifted his face towards the bars of an empty cell. "I have taken such a grave interest in you, Mr. Killer. Please, join me in my own plans. Together, I truly believe we can change this world for the better of human evolution!" Sam looked down and thought about the proposal for a moment. Then he saw it: a golden lapel pin. Dropped from one of the rushing clones, no doubt. With his eyes hidden behind his glasses he looked all about and formulated his plan of attack.
"Sure" Sam said, slowly removing his sacred glasses with two delicate fingers. "Why not? In this game of live or die, we only have so many options anyway. We can either adapt and live...or we can give up...and die." At his growl he sprang forward, throwing his glasses at Gott as a distraction. Gott opened his disgusting maw and ate the glasses, then clutched Sam's head in his clawed hand before he could grab for his weapon.
"What a pity" Gott said. His muscular furrow turned up and moved the skin from his mouth up to expose his bloody-rotten gums."Here I was planning on working with you and prolonging your own little game."
"You knew about it!?" Sam exclaimed.
"Of course" Gott said. "I'm not an ignorant bounty. How may of those do you think exist? However, I do indeed agree with your position. In life you can either adapt and survive...or you can die." Gott drew out Sam's gun, the one of mythical caliber, and drew back the hammer. A clone came down in the same fashion that Sam had just moments later and his amazing black eyes shot open with distress.
Shit Sam cursed. Gott smiled and furrowed his brow back into a demonic anger as he held the long barrel of the gun to his temple. Shit, no! That won't count! IT WON'T COUNT!
"STOP!!!" Sam demanded. Too late. One explosive blast and thunderous rush of air later, Gott was without a head. His body flew on after the mist that was once his brains while Sam's holy weapon dropped to the ground with him. The clone behind him, which he saw from a cosmic distance, was twitching in some strange epileptic manner. Foam started building at its mouth and its skeleton started shaking violently with its spasms. With Gott gone the clones would also fall, all part of his plan prematurely executed...
"Shit" Sam cursed. His eyes bored small holes of vaporized dust into the concrete floor beneath him. He picked up his gun and checked the ammo. Empty, of course. Now he could not punish himself for his disgraceful failure. "Shit...I...I failed..." Failure lives strong. It goes form person to person and brings hardship and curses to one's life. Even when one does everything right and is an inch away from their ultimate goal, the cruel universe can still stop them dead in their tracks.
And now these three killers have failed. Their progress down the road of kingdom has been impeded and their records tarnished. But what of the last one standing, that madman Mort? Can he still succeed?
