[Note: This never would have happened if Kmart hadn't forced me, at gunpoint, to watch Neon Maniacs late last year. An awful movie with certain charms, I couldn't stop wondering if such a shitty, shitty movie could be successfully turned into something halfway interesting and/or chilling. Thus the Psychedelic Kimchi Maniac Dawn project began. As is too common with my generation, however, I quickly lost interest in the experiment when I realized I could be doing other stuff in my free time like playing video games and criticizing everyone and everything on Internet message boards, and so Maniac Dawn, like Blood, Sweat, and Eye Water and my Brothers Karamazov sequel*, got pushed to the back burner in favor of Chrono Trigger and trolling hipster websites. But I'm back on track, for now. Maniac Dawn has been resurrected, and we'll see -- you, Constant Retard, and I -- where this admittedly pointless exercise in fan-fiction takes us. All aboard.
If you want to get up to snuff, here are the previous chapters in the Maniac Dawn oeuvre:]
Samurai
Soldier
Surgeon
Deformed Infant -- Father
Deformed Infant -- Mother
___
*Ahem*
"You're under arrest for possession of a concealed weapon," Nicole said as she turned back to him, one hand on Jack's crotch, the other on his shoulder.
Girl doesn't waste time, Jack thought. They had only just stepped into this dilapidated cabin -- nearly half of which appeared to hang over a bluff, precariously so -- when Nicole took him (took him) by surprise. Jack was quickly discovering that Nicole was all about surprises.
"Got a permit for that sucker, Paladin?" she giggled.
Jack couldn't speak. A dry croak would have been impossible. So he simply stared at her. At Nicole. Nicole Westbrook. That was her name, and he promised himself he would never forget it, not ever. Nicole Westbrook. Nicole Westbrook. She wanted to have sex with him. She wanted to make love. She wanted to take him higher, lead him from the desert and into the Promised Land, the fraternity of all men, and Jack was more than willing to join them. Men like his father.
Men.
Jack hadn't had many experiences with women (read: none, unless you counted that time in the fourth grade when he unloosened Bree Daniels's bra clasp from behind and over her shirt during a school assembly, ironically enough, about harassment), and did have far too many with men -- dirty, greasy men who gave rides in exchange for touching, sometimes more, the degree of "touching" determined by how far Jack was willing to go, literally and figuratively, but usually out of his hands, because, they said, and Jack used to actually believe it, that was part of the deal, The Rule of the Road -- so when Nicole took her hand off of his increasingly bulging, increasingly eager denim surprise and led Jack into a door to their immediate left, he followed like a purebred in the Westminster Dog Show.
"Good boy," she cooed, and Jack was alarmed at what he saw in this new room, but it was more what he sensed. Musty and mildewy, the room was more dust than air. Jack stifled a cough, sneezed in spite of himself, and wiped dry eyes.
Nicole walked toward the bed, her blue ankles the only part of her visible in the moon-drenched night. She turned on a table stand and walked back to Jack, her arms upraised, her chest bare.
"Nice trick," Jack whispered, the words puffed from his mouth with no support from his diaphragm. His head swam. In the new light he could see motes of dust rising all around, collapsing on that abject light like matter into a black hole. Her feet were -- inexplicably, irrationally -- bare now, and as Nicole approached he could hear crunching sounds.
Thousands of dead flies on the floor. Tens of thousands. Millions, maybe.
Get out of here. Run. Run! Lose your virginity another time, boyo. You're only sixteen, you got plenty of time. An eternity. Because if you stay here, you'll likely lose something, and not your virginity. More like your life. Hear me? This is no joke.
"I need to go," Jack mumbled, his lethargy betraying his panic. "'Nother time, maybe?"
She smiled. The wood paneled walls lurched. The multi-colored checked bedspread (red, all shades of red) slid down to reveal not a mattress but a grave of dead insects, ground bones, and a viscous, bitter-yellow liquid.
"You know you're not going anywhere. I want one thing from you, one thing only. And vice-versa. I told you I was raped tonight?"
"You did," Jack answered, swaying.
"A half truth," Nicole said. "I was raped, but it wasn't today. It wasn't last week or a month ago, either."
Jack teetered like a pendulum, his tongue instinctively trying to find the back of his throat.
"I was stoned, actually." Her eyes flared. "In the biblical sense. I was called a whore and stoned to death. All for something I didn't do. This was hundreds of years before your grandparents were even born."
"Bloodied, my face caved in and my heart weaker than a feather, someone came to me. He wore a tattered black robe and he promised me I could be redeemed. All I needed to do, he said, was recruit somebody, somebody like you. 'Don't worry,' he said, 'he'll have the same chance, one life taken, one life given.' And the result, he promised, would be miraculous. I believed him, and I still do. He brought me here, a millennium later, Jack, so lie down with me. Make love to me. Please? I need to have a baby, Jack. I need to."
Jack could only look at his sneakered feet.
___
* Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri have a Mexican standoff, and that's just the first chapter!
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