Writer's Journal

((Many apologies to those of you who liked “Nameless,” but I think that this will probably be the screenplay I work on.))

The body lay in a coma, and its mind looked down at it through borrowed eyes. Beaten, swollen, and left for dead, the body of a young man lay in the hospital bed. The mind had reached out and seized the body of this other man, almost on reflex.

The mind glanced down, and saw the syringe in this new body’s hands. Was it a doctor? No. Doctors wore white coats, not suits. Chances are, this man was sent to finish the job.

He couldn’t tell what was in the syringe. It looked clear, but was vaguely blue. A washed-out watery blue.

Test the plunger. Squirt.

He put the needle to his borrowed throat, and found the artery that fed the brain, oxygenating it and keeping it alive–or did it?–before plunging the needle in and applying pressure.

Dropping the syringe into a wastebasket, he walked out, going outside and allowed the body to drop dead. The mind remained standing.

A young man of unremarkable appearance, save for his white suit, and save for being a disembodied mind. The world took on a chiaroscuro appearance to him: people were bleached out and glowing, while the world they inhabited darkened to a saturated charcoal-sketch world.

He looked down, and saw the dying embers of the hitman’s spirit, fading and darkening, sinking into the inky black background.

Turning, the mind considered the street, the river of lights of the people going this way and that. He walked out, and touched one, flowing into the homeless man.

Dropping the “THE END IS NEAR” sign in the gutter, he walked into the alleyway, and checked the hitman’s pockets. Jenkins, Eddie. Sounded like a pseudonym.

He found an address, and took the keys in the man’s pocket. It was time to do some investigating.

Things get strange

Cicatriz Episode 3×06

(this is an attempt at writing something that is simultaneously believable and vile.  I think I succeeded, for certain values.  It probably needs more description.)

It took him a while to work up to real villainy.

He started by taking scissors with him on the bus, and clipping stranger’s hair and putting tears in their clothing. He was fast enough to avoid being detected. As soon as he could take a clipping from a stranger’s hair in the middle of a crowded bus without being seen, he felt he was ready for the next level.

Cruelty to animals was laughably easy. His neighbors never suspected that he was stuffing their pets down into the storm sewer. He sat on his porch and drank a cup of coffee as they combed the neighborhood for their missing animals.

“Have you seen Fluffy? Persian cat, about yay-big?

He thought for a moment, began to shake his head and then acted as if a revelation hit him, and pointed off down the street:

“I think I saw her over that way.”

He felt a twinge when he put a child in the storm sewer, chloroforming him and stuffing him down. But, when he tried to think of why this should be, why it should make him uncomfortable, why he should care…there was nothing there.

He couldn’t think of why it should bother him at all.

Realizing what he had done, he began on all the stages he had planned to happen before murder. He began robbing people walking alone, holding them at knife-point and taking their wallets. He didn’t spend a cent, though.

Burn the money.

Burn the photographs.

Leave the wallet in the ditch.

Sometimes, he would chloroform someone for the hell of it, leaving them sprawled out on a lawn or park bench. Sometimes he would snip their hair, sometimes he would take their wallet. Sometimes he wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

He began working on his masterstroke.

For a start, he began to sew a unique mask. Something to hide his identity more than the anonymity of the crowd would give him. He kept it in his glovebox and would sometimes work on it during his lunch breaks, if he wasn’t feeling hungry.

He began gathering raw materials. Cleaning supplies. Fireworks. Remotes from radioshack.

He chose a day, and called in sick.

The bank didn’t suspect anything, and everyone was shocked when he shot three hostages at random, without a second thought. They cooperated after that, filling up a large sack with money for him and sending him on his way.

That’s when he hit the power button on the device in his pocket, setting off his bombs.

The explosions weren’t the real danger: he’d built the bombs so that the charges would break the two containers inside: one of bleach, one of ammonia, in large enough quantities that the resulting cloud of ammonia would make people ill.

In the confusion, he escaped with most of his money.

He took the money, and sat on it for a while, letting the trail go cold. He burnt some, and gave the lion’s share to an orphanage in an anonymous donation.

Then he waited.

And waited.

And watched as they built a new wing.

Then, one evening he took a gas can and some chains and secured the building except for one door, and doused the bottom floor with gasoline. He lit it aflame, and sat on the back hood of his car, drinking a bottle of Old Crow and watching as the orphanage went up in flames. When the fire department got there and tried to put out the gasoline fire with water, he laughed.

That was when the police decided to put him in cuffs.

He confessed to everything, and suppressed a grin at their looks of horror and disgust.

“Why? Why would you do those things?”

He blinked twice, and tried to come up with an answer. When none came to him, he just smiled and shrugged.

The interns surrounded the building, a two story commercial structure, with a ring of salt, making sure to bubble it out around the truck parked in front.

In the back of the truck, the three operatives were laid on palettes, and given an injection into the common carotid artery. Their eyes turned glassy, and the breathing tubes were inserted to keep the meat fresh.

The three individuals—two men and one woman—awoke in a chiaroscuro world. An impassable wall encircled the truck and the building, and they sat in a rusted truck with rotten upholstery.

“No problems,” the first man said.

The woman checked her watch, looking at the inside of her wrist.

“We have fifty-nine minutes,” she said.

The second man wordlessly stood, and opened the back of the truck, he hopped down and helped his two companions out.

The building was awash with watery light, a shade of pale blue in the gray.

The first floor had been a restaurant. There was a dining room with a counter in it, and a kitchen. Things slithered under the floorboards, chittering and muttering.

“Let the records show, that we began the extermination at 2207 hours, Thursday Evening,” the woman said.

The first man pulled up the floorboards, and looked down into the space beneath. Cockroaches as long as a man’s forearm looked up at them with too-human eyes.

The second man pointed at the nearest one, and his finger shifted, changing into the barrel of a gun. He extended his fingers one by one, and each changed.

With an effort of will, he tracked the five he could see, making absolutely sure he could hit each one.

One of the giant roaches screamed, before being silenced by the sound of gunshots. They dissolved into a wriggling mass of meat.

“Gestalt creatures, results of extermination that survived and ate leftover scraps of identity. We don’t need to worry about these,” the woman noted.

The gunman grinned.

“I disagree. It’s fun.”

“We don’t have time,” the first man said.

The three checked the kitchen. The stainless steel surfaces were rusted, the pans pitted and burnt. Hanging from one wall was a long row of knives, seemingly in pristine condition.

“That’s unusual,” the first man noted.

“The knives? Yes,” the woman said.

“It’s upstairs,” the gunman said.

“How do you know?” the other man asked.

“Listen. Feel.”

There was a high-pitched but organic-sounding whining noise, and the first man looked down, and noted that the hairs on his arms were stirring, as if in a wind.

“Upstairs,” he noted.

He reached into his coat, and pulled out a knife, and the woman pulled a lighter from her pocket, setting her left hand alight.

“Okay. Everybody ready?” he asked.

The woman and gunman nodded.

The three found the door to the stairway, and the knife man jimmied the door open, going in first. The gunman followed, and the woman brought up the rear.

The stairway was dark, and a cold wind blew through it. The light from the woman’s hand revealed bloodstains on the stairs and the railing.

“Something bad happened here,” she noted, before amending, “is happening here.”

The floor itself was devoid of internal walls. A single figure sat in the middle, the target of the extermination. The being was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the building, resting its hands on top of its distended belly.

It had gray skin, and its hands only had three fingers, but the most inhuman trait of the figure was its head. Instead of a flesh-wrapped skull, it had a sphere of dead black, from which the whining noise emerged, pulling air and dust into it.

The figure hopped up and skittered toward the three in a crouch.

The gunman began to fire, and it began moving sideways, dodging away from the hail of gunfire.

The knife man stepped back as the thing approached, and slashed at it, cutting into its shoulder. The flesh parted and wept a dead-black fluid.

It plunged its head forward, and kissed the man with the edge of the black sphere. Where it touched the man’s face, the flesh disappeared.

The gunman took this opportunity to fire into the thing’s side and back, tearing great jagged holes in its body.

The thing dropped, jerking and twitching.

“All yours,” the gunman said.

The woman nodded, and seized its foot with her left hand. The fire spread along the gray thing’s body and consumed it quickly, leaving only a small black sphere that fell through the floorboards and down, down, down.

The woman breathed a ragged sigh.

“Operation complete. 2231 hours.”

Cicatriz Episode 3×05

Here we are.  Take this.

More exposition.  Of a sort.

Cicatriz Episode 3×04

I hope you all can forgive me for my technical difficulties.  Here’s something to placate you.

San La Muerte

For your reading pleasure(?)

Cicatriz Episode 3×03

John F. straightened his tie, as the Dealer brought the three safe deposit boxes out and set them on the table. This was a mere formality, they both knew–the decision had already been made, the amounts settled in advance, everything but the check written–but a necessary one.

The first box was opened.

A glass bottle, shaped roughly like a bullet with a cylindrical neck attached to it was removed. It contained a reddish-amber liquid that sloshed thickly like syrup. Something clinked lightly inside it when the bottle was moved.

“Fig brandy,” the collector said.

“Fig brandy?” John F. said, as he felt his throat closing up.

“Made from the fruit of the bodhi tree. Mixed with a portion–as little as a teaspoon–of the ashes of the Buddha, and distilled until almost completely clear, then repeated with the ashes of the third dalai lama. Over the years, it took on the remains of nine boddhisattvas. It is said to be the sweetest, most intoxicating of liquors, but overconsumption leads to a terrible fate, as far as most drinkers would be concerned.”

“How so?”

“Upon waking, one will experience something that is half hangover, half enlightenment, and lose all desire to drink.”

“No.”

The collector put it back, and pulled a small box. Opening it up, he showed a disk of fibrous, brown meat.

“One of the Lanciano Hosts, transformed in the eighth century into human flesh during mass. To all measures, they are indistinguishable from fresh human cardiac muscle tissue. Blood type AB.”

John F. shook his head.

The collector sighed, made a show of being unsatisfied, and brought out the final treasure, a bone tube, which he opened with gloved hands, and from which he pulled a document written in calligraphy. A signature in red was at the bottom.

“The Contract. Signed here at the bottom by Johannes Georg Faust.”

“No.”

The collector sighed, and put the parchment back in the tube. John F. produced a taser and shocked the collector. He pinned the man down, and injected a syringe of ammonia into his jugular vein, and waited. When he was sure the man was dead, he packed away the contract, and put it inside his jacket. He considered taking the others, but felt no need.

As he left the room, and walked out the back way, he pulled out his phone and placed a call.

“Mr. M, I handled the situation. Maybe now we can clear up this DNA test, and we can get to work…”

I uploaded these the past two fridays:

Acting as a Wave 1

Acting as a Wave 2

Now, I present the third and final installment of the interlude:

Acting as a Wave 3

I’m going out of town next Thursday, but I will do my damndest to have Cicatriz 3×01 up for your reading enjoyment.