Filed under: Pirate Love Ballads
The all-too real streets of sludge and slime caressed the thin soles of my shoes as I started slowly down the entrance of a downtown mineshaft. I walked into the foreboding space as an endless wave of pushers and users crashed around me, grabbing at bits and pieces of my remaining cleanliness. The wave broke and receded, realizing I was no market for crushed opium or low-risk loans. I walked straight to the back of the enclosure, my head held high, even under the weight of my tremendous curiosity of the various freaks and spectacles in this museum of cultural devastation. Out of the fringes of my peripheral vision I could make out swirling shapes; women in flowing dresses, clad in beads and playing castanets in their hands. There were punks and Goths who seemed to be having an orgy in one corner of their underground palace. I scolded my wandering eyes and made my purchase, then left.
“These taste funny.” Said a voice.
“I think they’re supposed to.” Said mine.
It came on suddenly, without warning and without consideration for the women and children nearby. I was struck, hit, devastated. I began to slip; this was not good. I was going over the edge of the bridge, and below there were only rainbows and vampires.
I was grounded again. It was good, it was normal. Colours were a total gas, but other than that, everything was cool and groovy. Kids wandered around in their masks, clutching their sacks of loot like maddened bankers in the height of recession. Smiling faces bounced past, and I stood in the dead center of the rounded street, taking it all in. They were almost choreographed in their movements. To each house they would go, in perfect synchronization. Neat little line ups formed on each doorstep and once they finished, the freed child would move one house to the left. Every house they would go to, their sacks would get a little fuller and their faces would get a little brighter. By God, it was damned near magical.
They manifested; evolved. They turned on me, no longer clever elves of my own enjoyment, but satanic agents of my demise. Their faces glowed red and their eyes became slits. They grubby, pudgy fingers reached for my flesh, their darker purpose was to tear it off and stuff it into their bags. Later, they would bob for my eyeballs and play pin-the-tail-on-the-fleshless-corpse. The houses in the poorly lit cul-de-sac conspired with them. Their open doors became vicious sucking orifices, their foundations sprouting legs. They were dumb, blind and wild carnivorous things. They crushed cars and snapped trees on their wanton path of destruction. Their shudders flapped noisily and their exposed pipes gushed dirty water and blood. Entire families were trapped inside, screaming and bleeding from their mouths. This was the final destruction of the nuclear family.
A massive Galleon careened into the neighbourhood, destroying several unchained houses and pinning several demon-children under her magnificent, barnacle coated hull. Her mast proudly displayed the Jolly Roger, and they lowered me a lifeboat and voices in my head told me to get in. I made for the small dinghy, narrowly missing an infant’s razor sharp claws. The crew seemed friendly, albeit sloppily dressed. Ignoring the insignificant detail, I motioned to set sail, and we did. Once we ventured through one of the maddened house’s interior and made it to the open city, I rounded on them. Their eyes light up with a devilish glare. They showed their true colours; their peg legs were frauds, their bears were held on by elastic bands and their parrots were nothing but plastic and polyester feathers.
“What kind of pirate ship is this?” I said, frantic.
“Ar matey, ye best calm down before ye get yerself throw off sooner than scheduled”
“What? You picked me up just to throw me out again?”
“Aye, but we’ll be taking yer wallet before ye leave.”
True to their word, I was soon walking the plank, minus my wallet. I was given a hard shove and fell into the ocean of concrete, sinking down farther and farther. Fish skeletons swam past in a blur, dead bodies bobbed in the slate-gray water underneath the city. I resurfaced in what seemed to be an office building, facedown and drenched in sweat and sea water. I was in the main lobby, and it appeared to be recently vacated. The interior marble was still polished, but the floor was littered with paper and broken glass. The receptionist desk bared no signs of life, only scattered office supplies and a broken pair of women’s glasses. The logo, or what used to be the logo, was on the wall behind the desk, but it was covered in grime and all of the letters were peeling off or missing altogether. I kept on, going deeper inside the belly of the business beast, looking for a living being to accompany me through this living nightmare. It got darker, as more of the lights seemed to be broken. Evidently, power had not been cut off, yet many bulbs were either broken or just flickering. I pressed ‘up’ on the cracked elevator button that glared at me from waist-level. It light up to a sickly green and I heard gears churning behind it. The shining doors reflected me perfectly. I was a mess. I glanced briefly into my own eyes, but before I managed to get a decent look at myself, the light cut out again. Buzzing loudly, it tried to restore itself to no avail. I closed my eyes tightly and wondered where I had been all night, only recollecting brief chunks of insanity. I heard a soft scraping from behind me and my eyes snapped open. The lights returned from their early grave as I heard a loud DING. Before the elevator doors slid open, I caught a ghastly sight in the reflection; that of a decaying, green-tinted corpse in rags stumbling towards me, his face covered in the blood of family men and school teachers. His flesh hanged from his bones and his eyes bulged from his withdrawn face. I cried in shock and horror and jumped into the elevator without processing any thoughts. The doors closed slowly as the horrific figure approached, and I breathed a tortured sigh of relief. Slumping against the walls and sliding down its side, my face cradled in my hands, I wondered what the hell was happening. I checked out the inside of my moving metal tomb and came face to face with the bloodied corpse of the elevator attendant. His gaping mouth was full of flesh and blood and his teeth were broken and yellowed from all of his late night outings. His hair was patchy, as though chunks had been ripped out. His clothes were ripped and there were holes in his chest. The coup-de-grace seemed to be the axe protruding from his cranium at an odd angle. The bell chimed and the doors opened, showing me the ungodly scene that played out on the 13th floor.
Men, women and bankers were all scurrying to a common the mantel piece of the office; a poor teenager who lay naked on a large banquet table. His organs spilled out like so much spaghetti. The business-zombies who pawed at his dying body all groaned in an awful chorus of the undead. The young boy screamed with all the energy he had left, and gave one final plea for help from the new player in the scene; his head rose and his eyes locked with mine. His pupils were huge and bathing in salty water, he was so alive yet so obviously dying. Eventually, as everybody will, he gave up the ghost and allowed himself to become food for hungry monsters. I stood there, awe-struck. Those freaks had already lost their taste for high-risk loans and low interest rates, they had become connoisseurs of human flesh, and I wondered if I would be next. I slumped against the side of the elevator and shut my eyes.
I awoke in a hospital bed, chained and tethered to a filthy mattress and hooked up to all sorts of rusted machines and dead robots. Screams and satanic yelling pushed into my ears and the feeling of thousands of feet and feelers ran across my legs. A syringe stuck out loosely from my forearm, my eyes fluttered shut and my neck muscles tensed and relaxed sporadically. Shadows of doctors with chainsaws and nurses with hammers flew past the sheets that surrounded my bed. More sounds of rejected credit cards and eviscerated husbands fell onto my lap, which was covered in bloodied sheets.
It was black for awhile. I fell through the nothingness, enjoying the brief vacation from the devastation.
When I awoke, my costume had been left somewhere, and I had swapped various pieces of it with others; no doubt at the time having over-evaluated my bartering skills. I was now a grotesque Devil-Nurse-Ghost-Witch-Pirate-Robot hybrid, along with a few items I could not trace back to a profession. I was filthy and I had no recollection of where I had actually been. My wallet, of course, was missing and my throat was stripped and raw. I started to stumble back home, though the blackened streets of pumpkins and fireworks.
