Author's Note: Wow! This chapter is long! And it's also a tad more serious, but still has some funny parts. Yes. Funny.
Chapter Two, Part 1: Spending the Night
Devi knew there was more to life than sleeping on a pile of dirty rags in a maniac's basement; there just had to be more. The basement all around her was like a scene from a horror movie. There were chains hanging from the walls, some of the chains still containing severed limbs. Most of it had been cleaned out and polished though, but not taken down. It was simply prepared – prepared to host more torture victims.
She didn't trust Johnny. He went into random poetic rants and his eyes would get really big, like saucers, and then he'd shake his hands madly and run all over the place like a lunatic. However, once he calmed down, he would sit and paint some rather lovely paintings. From bits and pieces that Squee told her, she'd figured out that Johnny loved her, which was confusing for her because she didn't really know him too well in return. She didn't even really know herself!
Squee was a quiet little boy and Devi found very little wrong with him other than just general trauma from being around someone like Johnny. Devi's dead ex-boyfriend had tortured Squee, and Johnny had freed Squee from the mental hospital and took him in. It was somewhat more believable to hear such tales from the mouth of a little boy.
Squee was huddled up next to her now, his tiny little chest rising in shallow, frightened breaths. For such a little vestibule of childish fear, he was rather bright. She saw him writing stories and poems all day in a ragtag blank diary that Johnny had given him.
" Should I be afraid of Nny?" Devi whispered into the night air.
" No." Came a soft reply.
She sat up and saw a dark silhouette sitting on the window seat, the starry sky behind it. The silhouette turned, now in profile to Devi. It was Johnny.
He blinked and added: " Sorry if I scared you. I was here for a while."
" Why are you staring out the window? Are the neighbors changing into their pajamas or something?" Devi joked.
" The moon's out." He brought his legs up to his chest, making himself as compact as he could. " It's funny that the moon sees everything in a completely different way. The sun sees the world solely as a wonderland, filled with colors and slowly moving cars. But the moon – he sees the world as dark and frightening, you know? A world of lonely highway stretches and speeding car lights. It's so skewed. Two things that are so same-faced see the world differently."
" I never thought about it that way." Devi said. " Were you always so poetic?"
" I don't know. I don't really remember too far back." Johnny admitted.
" What happened to you, anyway? I know less about you than I know about me." Devi smiled weakly.
" I don't know." He repeated. " It feels like I've been this way forever. Just confused and filled with… with desires."
She raised her eyebrows.
" Not sexual ones!" Johnny groaned. " I mean… predatory ones… you know. Eliminating those that hurt me, the whole cheese-filled chalupa."
" What makes you kill?" Devi demanded. "And was I a killer? Before?"
" Maybe." Johnny smiled wryly. " And as for me, I don't know. I've been thinking about it. At first it was just this idea that it was the way things were supposed to be. It was my slow desensitization towards others. But then - - then it became messy. The whole flusher thing."
" You told me." Devi nodded. " You think I'm the next flusher, don't you?"
" I think that's why it happened to you." Johnny said, honestly. " People don't wake up with an empty mind, with only my name carved into their brains, for kicks."
" It feels like I'm in a really bad science fiction movie." Devi groaned. " Were all my friends like this? Did they all think they were superheroes?"
" I am not a superhero!" Johnny shouted. He ripped something off the wall and threw it at her. " Take Mr. Samsa here! I kill him and kill him and yet he returns, like the death defying monster he is! What sort of superhero can go on like this, destroying something that will never be vanquished?" He covered his face with his hands, his body quivering as he laughed. " Can you imagine what it was like for so long? To kill people over and over, only to see more just like them appear? You think I want this? Sometimes I wish I could be normal! Sometimes I look outside and wish I could be one of them, but then they have to go and do something stupid. Insult me. Prove that the world is beyond repair."
Devi looked at the thing he'd thrown. It was a cockroach. She gasped and smashed it with her heel. " You don't have to do it though! Why can't you just become a hermit or something? Live on your own?"
" I've been doing that for a while. I tried to separate myself from the world." Johnny said.
" Why didn't it work?"
" You came into my life again. It was like a second chance."
Devi's face warmed in a blush she couldn't control.
" I think its nature taking its toll. There must be someone out there to just go out and remove the weeds so that some flowers can grow." Johnny sighed. " And as long as we're flushers, we're protected. We can't be discovered. The cops will never catch on."
Devi sighed in relief. " I sort of cut off a cop's fingers yesterday, you see…" She explained, seeing Johnny's expression.
He let out a manic laugh and then threw the window open. " I'll be back." He whispered, and then crawled out, looking like a praying mantis, thin and all angles. Wherever he was going, it was a fascinating impulse of his.
She laid back and tried to fall asleep again. But she saw that she couldn't. Her body didn't understand sleep. It was a lost function now. Her brain was in flusher mode – completely capable and self-reliant. Outwardly impulses like sleep, sex, human contact and food weren't necessary any more.
Suddenly, being so close to Squee was all too close, it was as if the foot of room between them became only a hair's width of distance, as if their flesh was stapled together. Being so disgustingly close to a human…
What's going on with me?
Devi shuddered and backed up against the wall.
Suddenly she understood Johnny completely, but she didn't understand anything else at all.
The window stood open beckoningly. She felt the impulse, like a magnetic tide. She wanted to go out; follow Johnny.
Would I dare?
o-o-o
Chapter Two, Part 2: The Nightclub
A large, colorful sign was taped to the door of the nightclub. It showed a happy couple dancing together, their eyes sparkling, both looking perfectly handsome, and not at all influenced by the booze flowing happily around them or the thick smell of cigarettes in the air. Just like that, they looked horridly, gruesomely happy. Yeah, except it's nothing like that, Johnny thought, entering the club.
It was dark inside, absolutely and horribly black.
His eyes adjusted very slowly. The one thing he could make out was the dimly-lit stage, on which a girl in a short white skirt and tall pink go-go boots was dancing around, stomping her feet on the floor, shrieking into the microphone: " YOU TORE MY HEART OUT! I'LL GOUGE YER EYES OUT! FUCKIN' MEN! FUCKIN' MEN!" The chorus was impossibly annoying.
All the women in the club were bobbing along to the song. There were woman couples dancing on the floor.
Johnny slunk back into the shadows. A lesbian club?
But then he saw them – the men, all lined up against the walls. They were there, too; they were simply embarrassed to dance to a song like this.
Suddenly, someone jumped up, screaming. " My hand's on fire!" The man shrieked.
Laughter broke out.
The man ran out into the middle of the dance parquet, scattering the dancing women. The man raised his fist, which was not on fire at all. He flapped it around in the air. "Don't you see the flames? Don't you?"
" I think someone's pierced their head too many times!" One of the stage performers boomed into the microphone. " They must've let all their brains leak out or something!"
" Someone get him off the DAMN FLOOR!" The singer screeched, her voice booming from the speakers.
" Is this part of the show?" A girl asked Johnny uncertainly. " It's my first time here."
He turned and saw it was Devi. " What're you doing here?" Johnny exclaimed.
" I followed you." Devi smiled. " So you're pretty social, huh? You're just psychotically insane on your free time?"
" I only come here to inspire myself. To realize what the world has come to, and how bad it would be if I were to neglect my flusher job. Can you imagine some of these people reproducing and filling the world with their filth?" He glanced at the stage performers.
The band had moved off the stage and ran towards the crazy man kneeling on the floor.
" Your hand isn't on fire, you dumbass! This is our show!" The bassist was saying.
The vocals girl was looking bona fide angry. She shoved the man back into the crowd. " Go take some meds and come back when YOU'RE NOT A FUCKING MAN!" She shouted, and then burst into song again.
" That's cruel." Johnny said, finally. " They should help him."
Devi nodded. " They booked the stage though. It would be oh-so-terrible to earn a few dollars less because they chose to help another human being."
Johnny looked at her.
" Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Devi asked him.
" That we should leave?" Johnny said miserably.
" No! We should take the microphone and give these people a talk. This jerk group is just too much." Devi stamped out onto the parquet.
" What are you doing?" Johnny shouted after her.
" Nny! Come on! Live a little!" She laughed.
He shook his head and stayed put. He wasn't getting involved. Everyone would laugh at him; the whole damn club.
Devi grabbed the microphone from the singer woman and screamed into it: " Hey! Having fun, everyone?"
A few people booed. I don't know why. My new nickname is Filler Goth. That I do know why.
" Look at yourselves. You call yourself outcasts, but look at what you just did! You had no desire to help the weak, the battle scarred psychotic people!" Devi crowed into the microphone.
Johnny looked around nervously. The people in the club didn't seem to like Devi's speech too much. Perhaps it was too much reality for them to stomach. There was a wave of silence, then a wave of tittering similar to the sound of a dissatisfied crowd at a concert after finding out the show has been cancelled. The place was just asking for a massive riot. This was the perfect powder keg to spark it.
" Devi!" He shouted suddenly. " Duck!"
A glass of absinthe flew over Devi's head, smashing into the wall behind her. Glass sprinkled her shoulders.
That's when something scary seemed to happen to Devi. Johnny couldn't really put his thumb down at what that change in her eyes was, until he recognized himself in the dangerous gleam in her eyes.
" So, you unforgivably drunk, insolent fools!" Devi thundered into the microphone. " You want to resort to senseless violence to get to your ends? To beat up every little roadblock in your way! That is the life, isn't it?"
" Shut up! We want to listen to Road Killed Girl Toad!" Someone spoke up.
" Shut up." Devi repeated. " Shut up? Do you say shut up to your conscience? Your voice of reason?"
" Get out of here, you weirdo!" Someone muttered.
The stage singer kicked Devi in the butt with her pink boots and then yanked the microphone from her hands. " I think you've had a bit too much to drink too." The singer laughed into the microphone. The singer's voice then resumed the song: " YEAH! I WANT TO CHOKE YOU WITH A CORD! SUFFOCATION DEATH! FUCKIN' MEN! FUCKIN – GACK!"
Everyone stared.
The cord of the microphone had been wound a few times around the thin supple neck of the singer. She looked on the verge of being asphyxiated suddenly; and then all the veins in her neck began to bulge, and suddenly she passed out on the floor. A knife sailed through the air and Devi caught it.
Johnny had tossed it to her.
Johnny stepped up onto the parquet and pulled out a knife as well. " I could use some senseless gore right now." Johnny said, looking at Devi.
She looked nervous, and a bit frightened by the astonishing power of letting her emotions take over. But then, she succumbed and nodded. Devi flexed her wrist and stared at the frightened looking crowd. It was so much easier to be able to just let every wave of violent emotion and every surge of anger and pain wash over you, to wash over you like a wave and smash you against the shores of satisfaction. Quick, easy, meant to be.
They worked swiftly as the single lightbulb on the ceiling flickered dimly, blood splattering it and sending it swinging back and forth.
Many miles away, Squee woke up all alone, looked around, and hugged Shmee. " Did you just hear screaming, Shmee?" He asked softly.
The teddy bear stared back blankly.
o-o-o
Meanwhile… Somewhere That Doesn't Have Much Fresh Air
A group of children were sitting around a lunch table, enjoying their lunches like most people sitting by lunch tables do. There was a lovely spaghetti for lunch with garlic bread.
Little Mandie was the head of the table. She was popular, a cheerleader, she was gorgeous and had long flowing golden curls all the way down to her buns. She was right now cutting through her spaghetti when she saw IT.
She shrieked and jumped up.
There was a severed tongue in her spaghetti!
And then her friend, Brittanie, found a finger in her salad. This would probably frighten any girl, but Brittanie was REALLY scared because once, as a child, a truck the shape of a dismembered finger ran over her dog.
Brittanie and Mandie were shrieking for help.
Just then, the pipes over them burst and acid poured all over them. They melted in slow motion, and so everyone could see their skin slowly melt apart and their brains ooze out. It was like poetry, except violent! And everyone knows that Poetry + Carnage = ART!
And out of nowhere, Maggie, the magical fan fiction writer of doom, appeared. She looked around, saw the mess around her, and wrote something on the wall:
Please Review, See you Next Chapter!
