Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.
As these killers fought their selected opponents, some losing some winning and others coming to the purgatory of self defeat in between, the true face of murder stalked through the dark night streets with his hands in his pockets. The nameless painter who blasted himself outside of existence moments before arrived across town, uptown, in the most chic-douche-bag district of the city in which he dwelt. Nny, as the universe knew him, walked down an empty road where the zombie-like fear driven citizens had once been. He looked about at the abandoned scenery with a light smirk and built it into a happy smile with wide, dark-circled eyes as he stopped at a corner and stretched his arms out.
"AAAAAH!" he sighed loudly. "What a beautiful silence!"
"What a shitty town" the conscience roach-girl said. Nny turned around and saw his conscience tapping the ash off her cigarette on its long, slender rod. This time her dress was significantly more contemporary. Instead of the traditional Gothic-Victorian bell dress it was slender, form-hugging and seductive. Her ribs and concave stomach were shown plainly through the grave mud color of the dress. It didn't end, however. The color twisted into a terrible black as her gnarled root-like legs pierced through the concrete of the sidewalk like a haunted tree.
"A town is a town" Nny defended. "It's the people and the general life in the town that make it good or bad. In fact, there isn't even good or bad. You know what? Let's not talk about this. Let me just bask in the dim glow of the street lights before they get snuffed out!"
"By what?" she asked. Suddenly the stars beyond the sky were the only source of light. The moon turned pale with fright as Nny stood on the lonely street with a menacing, murderous gaze freezing his back from down the sidewalk. His roach-girl vanished in a puff of smoke and Nny's eyes went half-closed with his usual apathy to the building dread of humanity. He turned around and made a visible, glowing white smiled from the corner of each narrow eye.
"So you've arrived" Nny snarled. "How predictable..."
"I'm flattered, Nny" the composite voices of madness and insanity said as the figure approached. The body of a kid, no younger than 14, with a mushroom-cloud hat and swirls of disgusting paint that culminated into a jagged symbol that made Nny's eyes pop open in shock. The cryptic 'Z?' on its chest at the center of spiked ripples that led up to the horrid face-paint around its eyes and smiling mouth. "After all this time you bothered to keep the memories of me fresh in your mind. I must be a great friend to be honored with that amount of miniscule space!"
"I'm sorry" Nny began, pointing with his shadowy finger. "Who are you?"
"Ooohhh, Nny" the demon growled, "what a predictable disappointment." The fusion of Psycho Doughboy and Mr. Fuck had reached its most cruel state of self-evolution The twisted fiend began twisting further, morphing its already appalling physical form into that of a monster. Its arms exploded open, shooting plaster and plastic in all directions. Nny didn't flinch. The universe seemed to love him too much to even allow him to be hit by something as harmless as hardened foam. Thick black and white tendrils came out from the psychotic humanoid's broken arms and formed thick, spiral-stripped arms ending in ten-digit claws each. Its legs were curved back and inward like a horse's legs and had thick black hooves stomping into the concrete ground.
"Preeeetttyyyyy" Nny awed with a wide, gawking mouth full of teeth as the conglomerated monster grew and grew before him. Its body was a writhing, contorting mass of randomly moving tentacles that eventually formed into its static head. One eye had an angled spiral of black on its lightly bulging white surface. The other eye had a spike of a pupil that extended down past the bottom of the eye and formed a bolt of blackness that reached down to its smiling mouth full of disgustingly golden, straight fangs. The doughboy hat grew into a more demonic form as well. Two horns near its bottom sprouted out and locked it into place and then a crown of horns, each curving out and then up towards the sky, pierced out through the puffy top of the hat.
"Huhuhuhu..." the demon laughed. "What do you think, Nny? This form of mine can easily squash you like the roach you are!!!"
"Now let me see" Nny thought with a finger tapping his pouting lips, "which one of you wanted to kill me again? I know one of you wanted me dead, for some reason, but right now I'm having a hard time remembering."
"Our master was killed" they said "because of your selfishness! Your narcissistic want to live infuriated it and drove us both into its mad embrace! Our failure resulted in this, the fusion of all three of us, so that we may walk the earth and hunt you down to finally kill you!!!"
"Why?" Nny asked.
"NO MORE TALKING!!!" the Doughboy Demon shouted. It raised up one incredibly thick arm and extended its sharp tendril digits out. "YOU DIE! DIE AND ROT IN HEEEEELL!!!!" The hand came crashing down. Right up to the last moment Nny stood strong, glaring his foe down under his greasy brow. The road shattered at its motion. The arm and hand split apart the ground and flooring of the man-made plains. The streetlight flickered one last time before exploding with sparks and falling onto the road. Doughboy raised its hand, hoping to find a pile and pool of squashed Nny, but instead it found nothing. The ground was busted open down to the sewers where a nose-breaking stench came roaring up and an army of gut-wrenching cockroaches came skittering up from the depths.
"Who's self-centered here?" Nny asked. The demon turned around with its static smile and saw Nny, stick-limbed as always, standing on top of a brightly glowing streetlight with two of his smiley-face daggers in his crossed arms. "You just want to kill me out of anger, don't you? Now that you know you can exist without me, you don't need me, and by that logic you think I should be dead. But in reality you can't cope with losing me because I fed you and gave you a home. You're like an ungrateful dog who comes whimpering back after its owner throws it out, hoping that a shred of human decency and empathy still exists in him after that cold night he threw you out." Nny raised up one of his daggers, sharp and dangerous with the tip ending in a nasty flesh-rending hook.
"But look around!" Nny ordered. "The world has changed! Even without a proper waste-lock, humanity and society has been able to flourish in its own, incredibly stupid ways! Without me filtering out all the undesirable depression of human life the people have learned to deal with the tedious boredom of everyday life. Instead of doping up constantly the smart survivors are embracing their negative emotions and letting it pass through themselves! I have removed myself as the liver of depression and look! The body of human life still lives!!! No amount of drinking could drown me, but it pissed me off good! Now, with all that in mind, what would my death accomplish if not just to remove one blade of grass from an endless, flat plain???"
"SHUT UP!!!" the psychotic monster roared. "IF I WANT YOU DEAD, I DON'T NEED A REASON!!!!" The tentacles from its arm extended out and made their way for Nny. The killer grinned and lowered his knives into a lazy, dangling-armed position.
"It's gonna be one of those days, is it?" Nny said. As the tentacles surrounded Nny and prepared to wrap and strangle his thin body, Nny held his knives between his thumbs and index fingers, wrapping the other fingers tightly around the end of the handles. They were held like paint bushes, light but steady, and then he kicked off with his goat-foot boots and spun around. The blood of the monster came out in a double-helix spiral as Nny severed each of the ten tentacles in one beautiful, artistic maneuver and then vanished into the night while the monster roared in pain. Its mouth opened up wide, taking up a portion of its wiggling torso, and roared.
GEEEYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!! The pain was terrible. Its black and white blood sprayed out, becoming indistinguishable from its skin, and stained the surrounding buildings in the terribly Gothic un-colors. The monster looked around and saw the silhouette of murder standing on a roof five stories up, his feet teetering at the precipice of an artist loft roof.
"Plenty of lofts around" Nny said, observing the empty scenery. "Must be a center for materialistic shit heads."
"DIIIIEEE!!!" the monster roared.
"Come up with something more interesting to say" Nny demanded. From the severed stumps of twisting psychedelic black-and-white, new barbed ends sprouted forth and twisted around each other to create a more human hand of five equal fingers. It threw that hand forward, the tendrils of fleshy skin reaching far, and grabbed at Nny. Nny simply stepped to the side and jumped to the next roof over, like some kind of perverse action anti-hero. He landed in a crouch and then got up to sprint. The darkness moved away from him as he ran across the rooftops and away from his enemy, heading for more populated territory to create more chaos than the psychotic thing could possibly handle.
"Well look at you" Nny's French conscience said. "Leaping about from roof to roof like a ninja."
"Don't remind me" Nny warned. "I'm pissed off that I'm even able to do this!" Nny continued sprinting across the rooftops, not unlike a ninja, until he saw a large group of people walking away from what seemed to be the aftermath of a spontaneous midnight poetry jam at a local douche-baggary/coffee shop. Nny landed in the middle of the crowd, being totally ignored as the universe intended, and sheathed his knives. Not until a certain young douche and his douchette, he wearing a wool cap and baggy clothes and she wearing a thick winter sweater and a crotch-length skirt with spiked stiletto boots, bumped into Nny did he enjoy the peace of his non-existence among the masses.
"Hey!" Mr. Douche said in outrage. "Watch it, stick! You nearly scuffed my shoes!"
"Your shoes?" Nny asked. "Those are more important than the efforts taken by all the authority figures in your life to raise you as a respectful, mindful individual in a world of generally malignant nutsacks?"
"They are" the man answered snottily "if they cost more than that piss-ass haircut of yours!"
"Who styled that mess?" the girl asked sarcastically, "A deranged chihuahua?" She and he went on to laugh through their nostrils, all uptight and egotistic, while Nny repelled the impulse to cut them to pieces and walk away. Instead, he insulted them in the highest regard he knew how, by scuffing the sacred shoes as he walked away with his head aimed up to the sky.
"Hey, fag!" the man shouted as he snapped around. Nny stopped and looked up at the sky.
"Those stars are beautiful" Nny said. A distant rumbling and roaring disrupted the relative tranquility of the masses and all eyes turned to the street where lights flickered and the colors seemed to somehow fade. "I was once envious of them, getting to watch all the human strangeness from so far away, yet always seeming so close. I wanted to go beyond them and watch them watch all of us, just an innocent dream to be above that which transcends humanity. I guess that selfishness is what ended up killing me...and granting me that kind of power I have."
"What's happening!?" some lady dramatically shouted.
"Is it a steamroller?" a man asked. From the darkness it came, and whatever it was, it was mean. Nny turned around and glared from the side of his lowered eyes to see the manic beast rampaging through the crowd, stomping and squishing many civilians with no regard for them, and he smiled at it.
"It seems no matter what I do" Nny lowed, drawing his knives back out, "a part of me will always exist with those selfish ambitions..."
"A discouraging act, Johnny" the beast lowed. It made a stomp on its hands, now using them as front feet with hideous barbed tendrils running all the way up to its writhing, tentacled shoulders. "You honestly think these mere humans can stop me? Is this some ridiculous recruitment drive for your hopeless battle!?"
"No" Nny said. "I just don't see the point in fighting you in some dark, abysmal alley when we could be here, where's it's all nice and shiny! It's almost like this show was staged specifically for our benefit, right? So that we could have some residual light to fight from and some unnecessary casualties to get away with!"
"Call the military!" a woman shouted. "There's some kind of monster here!"
"What the fuck is it!?" someone else shouted.
"Whatever it is" another panicking voice answered "it's not a moose!"
"HOOOOLD MEEEEE!" some frantic male bellowed. "Someone hold me! I'm so scared that I shit myself!"
"Someone shit in my pants!" someone else yelled. "They were so scared they shit right in my pants!!!"
"Doesn't the noise bother you anymore?" it asked.
"In a way" Nny answered "it doesn't. I suppose losing my humanity long ago gave me a strange tolerance to the imperfection of the human condition. However, that's not to say all this incidental racket is at all good for my health. If anything I'd like everyone to shut the fuck up and lie down for a nap. I mean, they've been up so late and God knows most of them are probably drunk or high..."
"Hey man" the douche from before said in a shaking voice. Nny turned and saw him and his girlfriend on the ground, curled up in the fetal position. "Can you, like, make that thing go away?"
"It burns!" the girl whispered in pain. "Looking at it burns my eyes!!!"
"Bear with it" Nny said, glowering down at them. "Oh, and don't worry, I'll try to save as many shoes as I can!" Nny turned to his monstrous foe who began to charge, ripping apart every measly human body that touched its deadly bladed fingers. Nny waited, once more, unflinching and patient, for his perfect opportunity to strike a killing blow. The beast stopped just short of Nny's range and the maniac smiled. "What's wrong? You scaaaaaared?" The mocking tone with which he spoke made the Doughboy Demon step back and snarl.
"You're so much trouble" the demon complained. "Do the world a favor and die! Without your designated position in the universe there is no realistic point for you to exist!"
"What about my opinion" Nny said. "Aren't you going to at least hear it before lording your galactic knowledge over me? Or is thinking outside of a functionalist perspective too confuuuuusing for you???"
"You were brought to life" the demon began "so that you could die, just the same as any worthless being. Your life without its intended purpose is not a life but a dismal, hopeless struggle against the infinite power of a cruel world. You are a universally shunned hobo of existence, one who exists out of the selfish want and not the driving need like the rest of these...maggots! You lack the need to live and therefore your life is worthless!" The demon, now enraged, made a desperate sweeping strike for Nny, raking apart the majority of the crowd. Nny held out a hand with the knife pointed outward and stopped the demon's sweeping hand, impaling it with his bizarrely sharp knife. The tentacles dared not move and even drew in closer to the blade, constricting it and keeping it in place.
"The universe" Nny said "begs to differ. Like a beaten hound, it always comes to my aid...because I was the only one to feed it in those rainy days..." Nny's knife somehow migrated in an instant, a spacial blink of time, into the demon's lowered forehead. "You'd know about how dogs act...wouldn't you...you dog?" His calm, almost passive voice was interrupted by the sickening splitting of skull as Nny made a long fissure down his enemy's face. Once it ended and his knife drifted down back to his side, the monster threw itself up to its feet and heaved dryly in pain to the cruel sky.
WHY!? it shouted internally at the swarming stars. WHY HIM!? WHY!!?? WHYYYYYY!?!?!?!?!?!?
...
Why indeed?
