Born Hard Again: Book Three of the Future Remembered Chronicles (26 page)

"Ceres?" I cocked my head in disbelief.  "Really?  Are you sure?"

"tracert doan lie, muthafucka," he retorted sharply.  "His ass hidin' behind some damn two hundred sixty nine vpns, but his pointa or'gin be Ceres.  Fo' sho."

"Hmm...." I stroked my bearded chin.  This was an interesting twist.  Last I had heard, Ceres had disappeared from the celestial map.  It was assumed Directive 34 had consumed it entirely.  But if that was the case, how could it be the point of origin for Felix's broadcast?  How was Felix related to Directive 34?

"And what about Becky?" I wondered aloud.

"What?" Koochy questioned my partial thought.

"Oh, I was wondering how Becky is related to Directive 34," I explained.  "If Felix is on Ceres, then I figure he must be somehow related to Directive 34.  And that means..."

"Dat all caps Becky bitch prolly roll up in dat D34 shit to!" Koochy's face lightened at the revelation.  "I thank you right, P!  We needa get our asses back to Ceres!"

I nodded.  He was right.  That's the only way we'd really find out what was going on with Felix, Becky and Directive 34.  Also, hadn't Aoas told me that one of my scrolls was on Ceres?  It was starting to seem like more than a coincidence that Ceres was our next destination.

Looking around the room, I began to remember the mess I had created here on Earth.  I wondered if I would see Aoas and the twelve tribes on our way out of the building or if Andar had already put them to new purpose in the taco salad prep lines which coiled for miles on several floors of our stratoscraper.  I hoped sincerely it was the latter.

"Come on," I called to Koochy.  "Let's go see Ms. Dewey and get that scroll."

"Aww yea, my sweet light skinned Ferrilamoy," Koochy said dreamily.  "Big Kooch fixin' ta come visit yo booty, gurl."

"We don't have time for that," I warned him.

"Fuck you mean?  Dis ain't no Domino's Pizza!  We ain't gotta be no where in no damn time 'ceptin' where tha fuck we wanna be when tha fuck we wanna be, ya hear' me?  Unnnghh!" he pushed back.

I rolled my eyes. 

***

Ms. Dewey's office was unassuming and vacant looking.  Had it not been for the significant amount of soldiers who made the rest of the facility look very lived in, I would have believed it to be a charade.  Ms. Dewey was already in the room when we arrived, sitting behind a modest desk.  The desktop was almost as empty as the rest of the room, sparely populated by only three items: a pen, a piece of paper and the chest I had seen previously at the penalty kick.  I noticed the chest was still speckled with TK's dried blood.

"All right?" she greeted us.  There were no chairs in the room except for hers, so we stood in front of her desk and faced her squarely.  "You blokes are barmy," she shook her head, chuckling.  "You know, off your trolley shite like you gents pulled is what got religion kicked to the outer colonies in the first place!  Trading your people for religious texts!  The nerve!"

"Argh!  You already made your point.  Thanks!  Now can we just get to the part where you give us the chest?" I said.

"Ay, ay, ayyyy," Koochy interrupted me.  He laid a calming hand on my chest atop Bronson and I got quiet.  "Ain't no need to go bussin' balls, P!  Dis fly ho jes speakin' her beautiful mind.  You go 'head, ho.  Speak yo mind!"

"Hee hee," Ms. Dewey blushed and smiled at Marcus.  "Oh stop, duck!"

"Duck?" Koochy snarled his upper lip.  "Tha fuck you mean?  I look like a duck ta you?"

Ms. Dewey looked concerned for a moment, then laughed.  "Right-o, it's a British thing.  Never mind."

"Why don't you speak proper English, you bitch?" I yelled.  "Give me my chest!"

"You chav, you wouldn't know the Queen's English if it hit you in your fanny," Ms. Dewey answered curtly.  She turned to her desk, where the pen and paper were positioned in the center of the immaculate working space.  "Ah yes, here is the contract indicating that I'd give you the chest in return for your penalty kicks and labor from your twelve tribes."

"Unngh!" Koochy cheered.  "Das right, bitch!  I mean, you fly-ass ho."

"You tosser," Ms. Dewey continued, smirking.  "There isn't anything on this paper, you gormless twit.  Get stuffed!"  She tore up the blank sheet of paper and threw it at Koochy's face.

I was shocked that Ms. Dewey had reneged on our verbal agreement.  Had she not taken her standards of business conduct training?  This was not fostering a good partnership.

Ms. Dewey strutted around the desk in her patent leather high heels and put her face close to mine.  "I hope it was worth it," she spat.  "Your woman didn't want to join my harem?  No one has ever rejected me!  I relished every kick... and I split her open like you never could, you small-dicked midget."

Bronson responded with indignant anger and whipped out, smacking her across her cheeks.  "
Brrrrooooonssssssoooonnn
," Bronson hissed.

"Ho steps up, ho gets da dick!" Koochy yelled.

"Are you daft?" Ms. Dewey shouted back. "Look at where you are.  You are surrounded by my soldiers out there.  One word from me and you'll be torn to pieces.  I should have you gutted for that.  I haven't been slapped like that since I was in primary school in Northamptonshire!"

She pressed a button on her desk and a compartment in the wall opened up, revealing the spiky iron boots that were still freshly covered in TK's blood.  I noticed the right boot was crumpled at the toe for some reason, I guessed because she had driven it up into TK's sternum.

"Having the guards take you down is too easy.  I'd rather kick you myself."  Ms. Dewey kicked off her heels and slipped her elegant left foot into one torture boot.  "I bet you two would just stand there and take it like the airy-fairy religious cock-ups you are.  Ha!  Ow!"  She flinched as she put her other foot into its boot.  "Dammit, now you made me break a nail!"

I looked at the tangle of iron spikes in fear.  My fear turned to confusion when I saw the spikes folding in on themselves slowly.  What was going on?

"Ay!  Dat shit looks like dem wormholes, scraight Lorentzian up in dat topological manifold 'n sheeit," Koochy rapidly and quietly explained.  "Scrrrrr!" he added.

"What?"  I had no idea what he was talking about.  But I recognized the strange warping of the light around Ms. Dewey's boot, I felt like I'd seen something like that before. 
Of course!
  Koochy's weed-smoke teleportation device had created some of those spacetime defects before.  Then TK had gotten a wormhole in her ass after getting teleported into a big blender in the bio-labs on Ceres, because teleportation technology wasn't that great yet.  Technology would never be great at anything, I realized.

I'd been concerned at first, since TK had been getting gradually smaller over time.  However that was offset by the fact that she didn't have to poop anymore, and that was pretty sexy.  But then TK's entire digestive tract had been opened up by Ms. Dewey's spikes... and so now that wormhole must have relocated to Ms. Dewey's lovely toe!  It all made perfect sense!

I shared a look with Koochy and grinned.

"What are you two smiling about?" Ms. Dewey chastised us as if she were a sexy school headmistress.  "You plonkers are going to get a right proper kicking in your twigs and berries!"

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" I asked Marcus.

"Hells yeah, son!  Muffuckin' dance battle, unngh!" Koochy replied.

"What?" Ms. Dewey and I said simultaneously.

Marcus threw down with a c-walk.  "Das how we live, you ain't e'en 'bout dat no how, son!  Immean, ho!  Best belee dat!"  He twirled on his toes and strutted with fancy footwork, mean-mugging Ms. Dewey the whole time.  "Yo' eassyde bitch ass cain't hang wit dis wes' side propa bes' side, oh sheeit, you ain't e'en eassyde, yo' ass like, cross da damn ocean east.  Whafuck you thank, ho?"

Ms. Dewey got flustered and a soft pink flush was visible on her cheeks even under her caramel complexion.  "I'll have you know I was the ladies' ballroom dance champion at Blackpool!"

"Oh hell naw, you din't juss talk 'bout blacks and pools!" Koochy exclaimed, offended.  He did a few more heel-toe moves, waving his fingers in front of his face while staring her down.  "My cuz done drown cuz he cain't swim none, and you be talkin' shit?"

Ms. Dewey couldn't take the insults to her honor anymore.  She started doing a tap dance routine which was still elegant even in her huge spiky stilt-like contraptions.  She scowled back at Koochy, baring her teeth in a feral grin. 
Tap tap tap
went her boots against the hardwood floor.

"Oh, so now you can't keep up with this two-step, can you, old chap?" Ms. Dewey taunted.  "Getting a tad knackered there?  Ow!  Fuck!"  Ms. Dewey clutched at her right foot.  "What the fuck?  Aaahh!" she screamed as her toes folded over themselves and entered an alternate dimension.

"Hahahahaha!" Koochy yelled.  "Got you so good!"

Ms. Dewey fell to the ground.  As I watched her crawl around, her foot disappearing into a compact Minkowski spacetime, I suddenly understood why amputee porn was a fetish on CumTube.com.

"Nooo!" she shouted.  She glared at Koochy.  "And to think we might have had a shag," she said with contempt.  "Take this, you bloody wankers!"

Ms. Dewey stabbed at a button hidden on the bottom of her desk.  The floor opened up and suddenly I was falling.

"FUUUUUUUCCCCCCK!" I yelled.  Bronson was flailing frantically, trying to reach anything to grab onto as we free-fell into darkness.  My gigantic prehensile penis wrapped itself around Koochy and brought us together.

"FUUUUUUUCCCCCCK, MANE!" he was yelling.  "CHRRRRRP!"  I briefly figured that if this were our last conversation, it would just about sum up our friendship together.

My life seemed to flash before my eyes, memories appearing in random order and not at all like one of my miraculous visions: the first time I'd left Earth, Ronnie and Penelepony together, feeling Bronson's love against my chest, my immense power as Cleveland, hanging out at the DQ, riding Jennifer, slipping a VAG over my head, sharing jenkem with Putin, imagining whatever TK had done with those middle-aged guys...  TK... all those guys...  No!  I wasn't going down, not like that!

Still falling, I inhaled and prepared to bellow my holy god-name.  With a force greater than I thought possible, my vocal cords emitted a thunderous utterance.

"JEEEEEESUUUUUUUUS CLEEEEEEEEEEEEE--" I was cut off as we plunged deep into a mass of sticky liquid.

My breath was knocked out of me by the high-speed impact.  Bronson slapped against the fluid and bounced back to wrap around my neck.  My diaphragm and esophagus were both painfully constricted.  I opened my mouth in abject panic, and a foul porridge filled it.

No!
  I thought. 
Not again!
  The slurry filling my mouth was horribly familiar.  Chunks of fetid material stuck against my molars and lukewarm juices sluiced around my tonsils. 
No!  Fuck!  No!  Fuck!
  My thoughts were useless.

Finally Bronson released his panicked hold around my neck and my lungs eased.  I hacked up a cough, swallowed some of the putrid sludge, and finally took a deep pungent breath of moist air.  The inky blackness of oxygen deprivation was replaced by the inky blackness of our surroundings.

I now knew what had happened and the gravity of our situation was overwhelming.  We had been dropped into a huge septic tank, likely the one serving the entire area of New London and fed by the chunnel itself.  I bobbed up and down on the surface, moving my arms and legs to keep afloat in the raw sewage and feeling various bumps and lumps in the dense soup.

The whole situation eerily resembled how my father had met his end when I was a child. 
Could this be another one of my trials for the prophecy?
I wondered.  There was no way Ms. Dewey could have known her attack would be so deeply personal for me.  Rage built up inside of me and I screamed into the vast darkness.

"DAMN YOU!  DAMN YOU ALL!"  Echoes from the tank walls reverberated.  I panted, catching my breath the best I could while immersed in the damp gases.

"Ay, you don't hafta sound like a lil' bitch," Koochy said.

"Thank Jesus!  You're alive!" I excitedly replied.  I turned in the direction where I thought his voice came from.

"Sheeit, playa.  Sheeit.  Nah fo' rea' doe, dis some sheeit.  Muffucka you thankin' Jesus, nah, make some miracles happen!  Ain't nobody got time fo' dis!"

Nodding, I bellowed again.

"JEEESSSUUUSSS CLEEEEVELAND!!"

My shout was strangely empty.  There was no booming thunderclap, no shifting of continental masses. 
No!
  Why had I forsaken me?

I begged my holy father, myself, to do something.

Nothing happened.

What else do religious people do?  I thought frantically.  I begged the baby Jesus, also myself, to save us.

Still, nothing happened.

"Fuck!" I shouted.

"Ay, we coul' just wait in hurr.  Shit'll be jenkem, den we just drank our way out!" Koochy suggested.

"No, that won't work," I replied.  "Even if we could finish it all, the access hatch is hundreds of feet above us.  You remember how far we fell?  You think we can drink and shit ourselves up by our bootstraps?"  Fuck, everything was really terrible.  All I wanted to do was save the love of my life and I ended up getting her eviscerated and then falling into a pile of shit.