XAT MARKS THE BOTCH: AN ACTUAL FAILURE FOR JOHN KRAMER

By Quillon42

SOMETIME APPARENTLY IN EARLY 2000 OUGHTS

Aggregated in a wayward warehouse well off the beaten path in what was already the riotous wilderness that was Mexico City were suffering now several miserable nationals and their Eurotrash authority—all of them…all of them…all of them (as was also stated by John Kille…er, Kramer, yeah that's it, Kramer…in triplicate in the source of this very story) all responsible for the deception of poor souls afflicted with terminal illnesses, as well as for the drainage of their dough and the harrowing of whatever hopes they had of emerging victorious from a struggle with death.

Never of course out of any spirit of retribution, of course, but rather a call for reawakening, the vengeful engineering gringo Kramer indeed collected and arranged into queue those who were allegedly medical by profession and actually miscreant in practice. From there he and his undyingly-ardent assistant Amanda Young decided to while away the time in three-minute increments by engaging in fun if flesh-flaying games with their guests, pursuits designed supposedly to rehabilitate but, much more often than not, in fact, really operated to execute from existence a given subject.

Eventually a seeming turnabout would transpire wherein the cruelest Kramer and his precocious compadre Carlos were placed in a "game" of their own, though. In instants very imminent indeed, both the campesino kid and his kindly (albeit quite abjectly serially homicidal) codger of a benefactor were going to be inundated with ungodly amounts of gore; unlike what John jauntily mentioned in the second official Saw, here the blood would be coming into every orifice as the unlikely friends would be fraught facially with such a tsunami so sanguinary.

As this pernicious party of claret carried on contumaciously for Jigs and Carlos, on the floor isometrically above them the most unctuous coupling of Cecilia Pedersen and Parker Sears were seeking to cash their way out of this intimately invasive encounter they suffered along with their accomplices. Somehow Miss Pederson, this C more cancerous than any kind which affected the brain or pancreas or otherwise, was not subjected to a trap designed to behead or break open the brain, as were her lesser evil underlings. Because of this in large part, she was still fully physiologically able to up and reach the control area where that duffel of dollars lay, atop the cabinet and against the wall of the chamber.

Upon wresting that same sack from its seemingly inconsequential space, there appeared from behind the telltale timer revealing that of course every action under this dingy dungeon's roof was completely predicted by that naughtiest of civil engineers whose favorite hobby was certainly not restoring classic cars, as Cecilia had gauchely guessed before.

"Dumma dumma dum, dumma dumma dum, dumma dumma dum dum dum…

"Dumma dumma dum, dumma dumma dum, dumma dumma dum dum dum…"

Without even looking back at Parker, Cecilia:

"Oh shit, it's the 'Hello Zepp' music! RUN!"

Beside her the scruffy significant other failed exactly to understand what she meant, so the prowling Pedersen realized she would have to whoosh him out of the room faster than a vacuum tube suctioning eyeballs out of a would-be hospital thief…and so she did just that.

(Took him out of the room, this author means…not suctioned out his eyeballs).

Yea indeed now, in no small part thanks to Cecilia's impulsive actions, the flimflamming fucks beat feet with their bag out the timed door before it could slam shut and start their scheduled recreational event of extermination.

Soon then the execrable couple would fall upon those American asses who would have made them turn on each other in that viciously-vapored room…but for the quick thinking of the alleged miracleworking maiden who was in actuality a naughty scammer from Scandinavia.

All this of course had gone down several weeks after the otherwise canny Kramer had "failed the test" or "lost the game" regarding the overly elementary task of researching into these crafty confidence individuals before even bothering to go south of the border. Had he exercised in this endeavor one hundredth of the effort he placed into designing and crafting headgear that could trap bears in reverse, John would have been able to instead torture these Distrito Federal double-dealers remotely from the Anytown USA location in which he usually tormented people and took effing forever to pass from cancer.

(Respect to real cancer fighters, honestly; this author has a friend suffering from the brain variety (just as John did here actually) and it is no laughing matter).

Regardless, throughout the ineffectual fucking Plavix commercial that is the entire first half of this Xth of Saws, complete with slow motion shots of a profiled perspective of John as his head-bandaged self meanders relievedly onto a sunny terrace and sits in a park and placidly contemplates his future and all of that, the viewer un-blood-boardedly seesaws between near-sympathy and well-past-boredom, waiting for the inevitable rage-triggering event of realization regarding the surgery scandal in question to cause the film to really begin. (Oh yes…there would be blood…and side effects including decapitation, excessive irradiation, overexposure to mustard gas or whatever it was in that room at the end and such, and the like).

Of course, from the Sawnematic experience many had in theatres recently, one could easily observe that the exceedingly generous three-minute allotment of time that subjects such as Mateo and Valentina had to contend with totally took into account all factors involved in this process of pain, totally objectively evaluated one's striving to survive, totally considered all parameters including but not limited to panic, fear, coming to terms with losing an entire effing limb or other vital portion of the body, working up the courage/nerve/guts to actually go through with the necessary maiming maneuver, and then actually going through with it. And then when said subjects impossibly managed somehow to get as far as they did (yes, echoing Detective Kerry's statement about Paul in Saw 1 that, there too, "it's amazing he got as far as he did"), their unfortunately falling short by a matter of seconds completely reflected the sentiment that, as Amanda in Saw 10 utterly-not-fucked-in-the-head-ily opined, they just in the end "didn't have the will to live."

(Just like former Nike Cofounder Phil Knight in Michael Moore's The Big One, after seeing a videotape of several Americans in Flint, Michigan plead extensively and almost symphonically for shoe factory jobs, decided to himself that "Americans don't want to work in shoe factories" despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary right in front of him).

Because, after all, forcibly capturing people by tasers or with sedatives or through some other aggressively subduing mechanism, and then placing them in a predicament wherein they will much more likely than not part with enough of a percentage of their corporeal makeup to cross over into the sweet hereafter as bitterly as possible…all those undeniably innocent orchestrations add up to nothing even close to constituting fucking murder.

Thankfully, though, the "games" in this Saw-ternate reality arbitrarily gave Valentina the extra five or six seconds she needed to get the red-velvet-confection-resembling combo of blood and marrow upon the scale and save her from that Gigli to the gullet (not to be confused with the Gigli Affleck flick from twenty years ago which, as was the case for Mateo, was torture to the brain). Surely this now-disabled sexual worker would celebrate in the near future with the appropriately crimson and cream flavored cookies or cakes reminding her of those red and white femur-fillings she had to give up to survive her trap. (And surely neither this author nor you the reader will ever have red velvet anything again for a long time to come…sorry about that (it's not the healthiest anyway, so this did you a favor)).

Similarly the indigenous-mask-resisting Mateo managed to have another twenty ticks on his timer to allow for his freshly harvested noggin-noodles to stew sufficiently so that he could get that key and unlock the precarious contraption upon his cranium. Unlike the thigh-trimming trollop before him, though, here the kennel keeper would shun anything reminding him of his game—so nothing along the lines of Ramen which would bring to mind the pasta he plucked out of his pate, nor any meal requiring the use of a toaster or other appliance operating through the use of heated coils.

Certainly the seemingly-guileless Gabriela would get through her game as well, although, as with the mainstream showing of this Mexican slaughter, she'd have to become cooked a little more than over easy in order to emerge alive. Regardless, once done, so prone upon the floor of the tepid testing grounds did Gabriela remain, with no evil presence standing upon her neck thereafter.

Not to worry regarding the boy warrior Carlos as well; in this version also he would still live and endeavor through his lever-pulling prowess to save John Kramer…and in doing so the soccer-kicking elementary schooler would indirectly cause the deaths of dozens in endless Saw sequels to come, despite the escape of Cecilia and Parker in the past several beats just now.

(So when you think of those hapless employees who were really just doing their jobs and then were blasted by the shotgun on the carousel in Six, or, or people who committed not malicious but rather just negligent actions regarding a drunk driving incident in Three, or similar scammers also deserving justice but not necessarily execution in 3D, know that it was all just as much the fault of some naive bicycle-breaking child as it was the deranged elderly engineer who helmed these myriad "games.")

At present, in any case, Cecilia and Parker opened and closed their hands that were quivering with anxiety and animosity, they realizing that the gym tote they took out of the control room contained nothing but the printouts implicating all the ill acts the mistressmind that perpetrated in years past. As such, the desired cash was nowhere in the most vicious of vicinities to be found.

Consequently the bills-bereaved blonde looked at Parker, looked back at the now gassed-out alcove from which she and her malevolent man had narrowly escaped.

She thought for a second longer and then just shrugged.

"You know what, Jig-Cocksucking-Saw," taunted Cecilia again as she did before, "we don't want this lot of the money anyway. Not if it means falling afoul of your perpetual ever-so-clever fatal snares in the end. It's not like, as you always-unerringly-calculated, I haven't made almost ten million from the 'curing' I perpetrated in the past."

"Yes…we don't think we'll be taking any chances with you at all again," chimed in her cockney coconspirator, "we're not even going to try taking any of the doors or windows out of here, given that you've probably set all those up as fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth-possibility scenarios in your fucking prescient omniscient mind there."

Parker then unbuckled his belt for a long second, reached far down behind his back. Puzzled for once himself now, John wondered here if the lurid limey would whip out some feces to fling at him.

Almost disappointingly on that front, the surliest Sears instead produced a small glinting grayish rectangle of a sort…which upon the press of a certain small switch would occasion the appearance of a weapon that could take out a wall.

"Really I don't own my particular first and last names for nothing here," the man said, starting to maneuver in a way that looked like reaching into a back pocket or some such.

"I am Parker, as in Brothers, a descendant of perhaps the greatest game designers in history—so I've got you beat in the ludology business.

"And Sears, well…" He managed at last to whip out the small doodad that he inserted into his rear entrance several hours ago. "They didn't sell just revolvers and rifles back in the day."

Then the man unpacked in full the portable rocket launcher which his paternal family's department store discontinued in the late 1950s.

"You're even more cancerously cerebrally incorrect than the two of us thought if you believe we're really taking any of the available doors out of here," Parker muttered, aiming for the nearest wall.

Just before this most resourceful Sears shot off his rocket, Cecilia alongside him threw up a pitiful attempt at a Mexican gang symbol to Carlos, who was still wiping blood off his face with all those new bills he inherited from the wayward enterprise.

"HOLLA!" she cried, completely misunderstanding the Spanish "Jala" command that the kid and John had shared ever so tenderly.

[SSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHBBBOOOOOOMMM]

And just like that an undeniable impromptu egress was established regarding this storage area of garish carnage. In the seconds to ensue, to boot, there would befall the jiving Jigster an actual loss concerning his former streak of vivisecting victories; yea, just as with Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger, here John Kramer would actually know what it was like to lose to the side that didn't pose an immediate threat of gross and gory homicide—irrespective of how morally corrupt that other side might have been in fact.

Gloating about the same after his unique way of making an exit now, Parker anew:

"Bet you didn't exactly plan for that possible circumstance here, now did you."

And then because for a second the big Jig kind of resembled Stone Cold Steve Austin with all that blood on his face at that moment, Parker and Pedersen alike became inspired to perpetrate one more evil action quite personally in the presence of their enemies. Approaching Amanda and John respectively were Cecilia and Sears respectively, the latter duo duly giving WWF/E Stunners to the former Gamers before they could gather their otherwise omniscient senses even more.

And as the two trudged through that crudest of openings, the letters "SAW X" appeared in that huge garish red print as it did at the start and finish of the real film itself, as if the nastily unsightly font were inspired or even personally designed by the friggin' Channel Home Centers logo people from the late twentieth century.

By the time Carlos's loser stalwarts from the States themselves managed to their feet and made it out of the de facto Wayward Bound Clinic, that palliating place set up for the "reawakening" of those who absolutely needed to lose whatever from gams to noggins in order to realize rehabilitation, yea John and Amanda could track neither hide nor hair of their haughty victorious antagonists…

…but they did espy a totem imitating those same indigenous poles found north of the border in fact, a "Xat" by parlance of those in the know that was not authentic by tribe, but here was a mockup to commemorate a certain poignant loss just as that steaming mask ultimately covering Mateo's frazzled face in the canon film. Specifically this particular pole did not sport the mug of any angry god or other similar significant symbol, but rather the very countenances of just the trio of Saw suckas themselves.

Forsooth, there was at the bottom the Americans-genociding child Carlos, in all his dopey-ass wide-eyed glory; then in the middle was Amanda Opposite-Of-Young with her wondrous Beatle-bowl-haircut and facial wrinkles placing her well beyond the Oughts; then at the top for certain was the identically-unreasonably-aged Johnny K himself, consistent with this iteration not looking so much like the bald Mister Clean badass that he was at the close of the first installment but rather like the wizened Wolf Fucking Blitzer that his kisser approximated in this same sequel (that is, when he did not have the blood on making him out to be more the Texas Rattlesnake as said above).

In the end, at any rate, there became quite gracious pairings off between certain survivors, culminating in multiple marriages like the conclusion of some smacked-ass Shakespearean comedy. Mateo and Gabriela through connections made both narcotically through past illicit transactions, as well as necrotically through the atrocities sustained under Jigs Kramer's watch, the twosome flourished to become more than just product-pushing pals or mercilessly-mauled mates; they each eventually ran the veterinary clinic at which the supposed anesthesiologist worked, caring for Mexicanines with greater flair than anyone else in the trade infinitely more able-bodied than them, for sure—although because he took out part of the frontal lobe during his infamous game, Mateo's cognitive functions were affected such that he ended up one more than one occasion being arrested for attempting to sell drugs to dogs.

Through her Kramer-caused trauma, Valentina somehow ended up meeting Lawrence Gordon and the two became almost as one, with the fraught physician giving himself a foot transplant from his left ankle to the right (as both Val and Larry committed their cuttings on the right side such that a changeup was necessary for one of them in order for them to bond in tandem as they so wished), and from then on the famed doctor and faux nurse quitting their earlier pursuits to become Paralympian three-legged race medalists.

Thence John and Amanda as well, thoroughly shaken from this looming loss, would decide to retire their fatalistic schtick and perform one more kidnapping, stealing Carlos from his custodian father and raising him as their own. (It was a major rationalization that Kramer used to cancel out his conscience on this, as he believed this turnabout was fair given that he lost Gideon so long ago). Focusing upon the new life he had with his paramour Amanda and his ad hoc adopted child made the man cancel out any desires for death that he had on his own or for others either; indeed through this Kramer became once more the beneficent philanthropist he sought to be via civil engineering in what seemed like another life ago.

And perhaps most happily of all, Cecilia and Parker decided to anonymously recompense almost all of their former victims, keeping just enough to live comfortably back in Norway with Papa Pederson. Blissfully the two took a cruise on an old-fashioned ship to make their way northward, and all went off without any issues…

…except for that one petty slap fight they had on the way over, involving the single solitary kind of thing they would fight over (which Jigsaw of course knew in advance as he always effing does and which he might have exploited in that gaseous game of his, had the couple not beat on out of that upper enclosure in time)…

…such squabble concerning who would spend more time sticking his or her head out their craft cabin's lone porthole to breathe in the fresh salty air.