Vomit and Lullabies

Having been told to get jiggy with it by a very large black man, shortly prior to his having beaten the holy living hell out of me, I began to question the sanity of my pursuit. After all, that for which I searched was just another dull item one might easily replicate no matter where they went. I only wanted it because I felt like wanting it.

But, as I lay in the muddy back alley behind what I think was Halverson’s Liquor Mart—though it may have been Cleo’s Nasty Shoppe—I decided that to give up now was to admit defeat. And, once the obviousness of that statement clicked in since I was of course in competition with Gruesome Toothy, I rephrased it as to give up was to bring shame upon my entire family.

It also occurred to me that, after being knocked around by some thug slightly shorter than the Chrysler Building and a little lighter than Mike Tyson’s beefed-up pet elephant Chompy, to give up at that point would be a monumental waste of my time and effort. I simply had to keep going; I’d gone too far to stop and turn around. Or even just to stop.

So I pulled myself out of the gutter, and kept an eye out for the sasquatch that had reduced my beautiful smile to a mangled, bloody set of mashed pulp and chipped bone. I found my bowler cap, my pack of Rocky Patel Cigars, and my trusty bottle of Jesus H. Christ That’s Some Kinda Hootch whiskey, and I got back on my way.

It took about ten minutes just to get myself out of the alley and onto cummings Lane, where girls in squid costumes danced in windows before the cephalopod half-men. On a street like that, it was pretty easy for a fellow like me to avoid suspicion, even with my bum leg, heavy bleeding, and keeping to the shadows.

Toothy was looking for me, that much I knew for sure. After all, how else would I get beat up by an ape who thought I wasn’t hep to the jive? That was his thing—making an ordinary jaunt past Squidette and Cephalopaula into something surreal and inexplicable. I knew I had to get the bastard before I could get that which I wanted. He’d decided the same thing—and I pitied that crazy negro for what would happen when Toothy found out I wasn’t dead or even half-dead, but just severely messed-up.

I hobbled my way down to the docks, right where cummings Lane met up with the great big strip of bars and nightclubs known as Fitzgerald Avenue. There wasn’t any way to find Toothy—not just yet—but there was a girl that walked the greasy sidewalks looking for an easy swindle who could point me the right way.

Her name was Cissy, the most devilish lady of the night ever to be born or grown or however they make sexy little units like her. I knew her because she once spent an evening in my seaside palace, and she told me of her escapades tricking mutants into the slaughterhouses where they were made into low-grade dog food. Charming girl, really.

She knew everyone in town—and by that I mean she’d given them all syphilis and tenticular sores—and she could get me to Toothy, if indirectly. Thankfully, I knew she wouldn’t be hard to find; with my bum leg the only thing to slow me down, all I had to do was ask a few humans and landsquids. In a half an hour I tracked her to Finnegan’s Pub, on the corner of Fitzgerald and Joyce.

A rough joint where all the mutants and Iggert poppers went to get their stuff, the place was in the midst of a gang shootout when I reached it. I kept to the shadow behind a truck full of executed mutants and waited it out.

There looked to be two sides—that meant the Iggert-selling Mudds were fighting it out with the Valiumites, since the Hogarth Boys were always a third party dragged into the violence. Mudds in pink jackets and leather skirts were on one half of the patio, shooting away with those damn vaporizor guns while Valiumite eunuchs and heshes fired off searing waves of Up Matter.

While I waited patiently for one of the androgynies to overload his Upgun and kill the whole lot of them, I noticed one of the Mudds, a great big hairy fellow in a short skirt, making a break for it the moment he spotted me. Naturally, I grabbed a severed arm with tendrils for fingers from the back of the truck and hucked it so hard it knocked the bastard out. I then hobbled across the street, narrowly avoiding a green ray of vaporizor.

The bear I’d knocked to the ground was coming to, still only a few yards from the calamitous battle unfolding in front of Finnegan’s. He saw me coming and made for his weapon. I fell intentionally so that when he shot it went clean over my head, exploding across the street in a window display, before I somersaulted and grabbed the garishly painted blaster from his hand to wollop him over the back of the skull.

No sooner had I done this than one of those damn he-she Valiumites frazzled hisher Upgun and blew apart the whole storefront in a great big puff of pseudogas.

Needless to say, I was momentarily paralyzed and in a vivid hallucination involving my mother’s bedroom on the other side of town and some ginger changing the lightbulbs in my fishtank. Fortunately, the bear was worse off than me, and once I figured out that I wasn’t seeing my universe—as evidenced by my goldfish telling me I really should have gotten jiggy with it—I hurled myself on that great big woman born a man and pinned him down.

I tried to demand where Cissy was, though at first it came out as “Adolph Hitler makes for a pancake roommate” on account of my delusional state before articulating myself.

“Cissy! Cissy the squid-lover, where is she?”

“Get offa me!” Snarled the burly quasigirl. “Get offa me or I’ll make a lady out of ya when my buddies come get me!”

“Nanoo, nanoo, little lady. Just lemme know where Cissy is.”

“She’s dead! Toothy, Gruesome Toothy wanted us to whack her so we did. Hacked her up myself and threw her in a barrel.”

“That ain’t right, little half-fella. Now where’s Toothy?”

“You think I’m gonna tell you where Toothy is? You think I’m gonna put myself in his way now? With him looking for that?”

“I got your vaporizor, hefty girl. I’ll make a puff of noxious gas outta you with it if you don’t lemme know where Toothy is. And doing that to poor Cissy? Damn.”

“Bitch had it coming. She chopped up Sifty and Shifty, you know. Fed ‘em to the hounds.”

“Toothy, man, Toothy.”

“Toothy’s off Zeus & Jupiter knows where. Maybe he’s loving it up with what you want already.”

“I’ll kill him if he is. And that ain’t right, either. You shouldn’t love it up with that.”

So I’d been beaten to the punch. I let the Burly Vixen go and got to my feet thinking there had to be some other way to get what I wanted. Hell, what I needed; it was getting too costly to stay with the thought that maybe I could jump ship if all hope was lost. I packed away that vaporizor and hailed myself a cab just as some more Mudds were showing up. All over the place there were chunks of Valiumite warrior’s limbs, tits, and balls. I’m sure San Francisco was weeping.

With my brain still a little hazy thanks to the pseudogas, I hardly even noticed I was being driven around town by a Cthulhuan thing that would’ve made H. R. Giger crap his xenomorph pyjama bottoms. I didn’t even remember where I told him to go or if I did at all—he just drove and drove and finally brought his nonair hovercar to a stop outside some abandoned factory. In a voice that reminded me of vomit and lullabies, the monster said,

“That’ll be 37.50. That’ll be 37.50.”

“I heard ya the first time.” I grumbled, reaching around in my pockets for the money. The taxi driver whipped around, wrapped his tentacles about my throat, and with eyes the color of piss and balsamic vinegar gazed into my skull and the tattered remains of a soul that lay behind it.

“That’ll be 37.50! 37.50!”

I tossed forty bucks in the backseat and fell out, the hideous thing from the sea tumbling after me. As we grappled on the ground, the nonair car zipped off—though I had no idea how that was possible. Eventually I kicked the Elder One’s ugly nephew off me, reached for my vaporizor, and found only my half-full bottle of whiskey.

It didn’t matter, though. When I looked up, the squidthing was gone and I was left outside a twisted factory warped by countless decades of exposure to what had probably been nonair and pseudogas. Some dimensions of it were neo-cubist, others were completely inconceivable, and still others were just slightly bent or warped. I stepped inside, sipping heavily on my bottle and hoping what I saw next wouldn’t be Toothy.

Sure enough, I found inside—an empty place save for wispy silhouettes of machinery that briefly almost appeared every few seconds—Toothy and the black guy who didn’t find my style all that appealing waiting for me. Gruesome sat in a forlorn office chair, the black man stood with a crowbar in his big hands. I stepped closer to them, trying not to fall in dips in the floor that were less than an inch deep but appeared to be vast craters.

“Hey man, what I tell you?” Said the thug, “Hip, hip. Not so tight.”


“Toothy,” Said I, “Just lemme see it. Do whatever you want after, just let me see it!”

“But you already have it, don’t you? You already have it but. You. Can’t. Love. It.”

End