Consumer Amputee Land Whale Zoological Clinic, Meteorological Anomaly Class 3

Gray risings fired in his soul as he heard the burning, gurgling passion of his dying mechanical war steed gasp to its last. The rear tire had just crushed off the front passenger tire of the now rolled over SUV. The old soldier was dead, he knew, saw him depart with his inner eye, folding around that steel bumper.

‘Strokes, My Pretty Man, strokes worthy of song!’

“Yes, yes, yezzz!”

Embarrassed that he had to be reminded to arm himself, shame striking his gory cheek, Brit looked over his shoulder and was able to clearly see through his shot eye.

‘It must have just been glass.’

He saw his tool belt there and knew, ‘The claw hammers!’ and snatched his darling helpers from his good working days into his right hand, out of their leather cradle, where they had languished too long. He caught a glimpse, while doing so, of another police SUV pulling up, about thirty yards off to his right. On pure rageful impulse, he smashed out the already shattered windshield with both hammers, and used the clawed backs to drag himself out onto the hood, heedless of the scratching of his shoulders, actually welcoming the feel of his own flowing blood alike on cheek and shoulder.

“Freeze,” he thought he heard a voice say from behind him as he leaped down beside the driver’s side window, now upside down and on his driver’s side, and joyed to see that big, burly bastard of a cop crawling forth. Brit helped him to his feet by backhand up-hooking the left hammer claw under the cop’s arm pit, helping him to stagger to his feet, and then looking the dazed man in the eyes as he mechanically drew his service weapon with his right hand and pulled it forward to meet his left hand to engage the slide...but the left arm was pinned by Brit’s hammer in a haft-lock. [1]

The cop’s mouth opened to say, heard barely through the keening in Brit’s inner-mind, “You are un—” and was shattered into bits with a forehand cross stroke and the man fell, fell with sideways grace, as a lady cop clearly cried, “Oh, God, no!” from behind Brit and the keening in his mind stopped, the sound of the Whirl clearly reaching out to be heard by his renewed audio-cognition.

Brit saw the body fall and then saw clearly, yet ever so faintly, the confused, wan shade of the mere fallen eek forth with a start into the unhabitable Whirl, rest a moment in fetal shadow...and then a pallid white hand thrust up through the sand, and snatch-dragged the whimpering thing down to Oblivion.

The twins, ‘They must be twins,’ were looking at him from down by the water, framed in a rosy risen moonrise on the far horizon.

“Freeze, motherfucker!” came a shrill half-man call from behind him, from behind the spent jeep..

Brit dropped his hammer, knelt, took the handgun and racked the slide, having no idea if there were 13 or even 17 rounds in this model, being a firearms novice. While doing this his over-mind heard the half-man tremble-walking towards him and heard also the soul quiver of the half-woman behind him.

Having mind-mapped the fold of two, he snatched his two hammers in his left hand and charged down the driver’s side of his slain jeep towards the half-woman, who began shooting wildly, staggered back and kept shooting, hitting the back of the jeep once and hitting the now staggering half-man with a bullet in the back of the leg.

The man screeched, and screamed shrilly, “Motherfucker! Hit, hit, officer down, oh my God—I’m hit...hit hit, officer down!” and popped off a round into the sand at Brit’s feet as he fell back, the next round winging way high and wide.

“Yezzz!” snarled Brit as he ignored the half-woman and ran at the half-man, firing wildly, a number of rounds hitting the sand, and the vest as Brit closed and the half-man wept and wailed and rolled wildly trying not to be shot instead of steadily returning fire.

Brit was out of bullets like that, not having hit the rolling coward other than in the vest. But the half-man had rolled onto his handgun and was trying to clear a jam and…

Brett backhanded the back of the half-man head with the left claw, impaling it with a pleasing “sclitch” sound, and then knocked it into twained, split horizontally into mush with a power forehand from the right hammer head.

The half-woman wailed from behind him, screaming, pulling her hair.

The Oversky was a, inspiring vision of tumbling awe.

Thunder smote the sky from above the wafting clouds of gray, crawlers of murky gog tailing wisps of mist. Brit charged her, to which she stood monkey-faced and startled, the roiling gray and slate thunderheads framing her pathetic form with a pleasing menace.

Beneath the ominosity of the Oversky, he struck not her as a foe—murdering witch that she was—but struck out against the entire coven of civic witches that ruled the mythless Whirl of the Aftermen, and struck hard, for Her. It’s screaming head folded in half down the middle. Like a worm form an apple, the inner thing, the blind, quivering shade that slithered out of it dropped from between its legs, affirming that it had been created to be a woman, but had been transmogrified into something less. The corrupt and maimed shade slithered in circled just enough to announce to the lowest worms of the Underdark that it was time to feed. They emerged like shadowy maggots and hungrily devoured the shade in a feast of swirling sand.

More cops were not in sight.

‘The Foundlings, My Pretty Man.’

He had time to prepare for the gathering of their brittle torrents of might.

Belting his hammer hafts, Brit bent over the carcass and retrieved the hand gun, which was spent. He then checked the slide and saw that the woman-thing had had a spare clip on its belt, which he placed into the gun butt, then racking the slide to chamber a round.

A poor shot and unschooled, Brit pocketed the handgun—thought about the safety and then harshly laughed at his vestigial underself—took up his hammers.

A sultry kiss of eternal bliss surged like sea foam across his suddenly parched lips; and brought concern for the two gifted children alone among the panicked eaters down at the surf’s foamy edge.

More sirens were heard in the distance.

His inner sirens were gone or silent...or…

‘The Foundlings, My Man!’

“Yes, yes, yezz!” he snarled and some fat bastard waddling away from him blubbered, Fucking mental patient—another mass shooter piece-of-shit.”

Something within him that was not him took offense. Brit spun like those guys that throw the shot put or discuss and heaved his right hammer, hammer of hate, tearing across the ten paces like a famished thing that had not yet ate.

The hammer buried its claw back between the shoulder blades diagonally and the whale giggled, wiggled and staggered, squealing like the two-legged king of all pigs. Brit was charging after his thrown hammer, each of his darlings lonely for the other and not wanting to be apart for long.

‘We like the cross haft guard, master—we loves it!’ they sang to him across the inner mind.

“Yes, yes, yezzz!” he snarled as he leapt out twice as far as he had ever lunged to catch a ball or a frisbee. Leftclaw arced out and buried his fangs into the neck of the staggering land whale and ripped back, tearing the ascending artery and gouting blood skyward!

As the thing flubbered squishy to its death and its wan inner maggot tried to stay upon the fleshy back to avoid alerting the worms of the Underdark, Rightmaul, animated himself out of the blubbery back and shoved the wan wiggling shade off the whalish back to be devoured by the basest things of teaming Underdark.

‘Together again, at Master’s hands!’ sang Leftclaw and Rightmaul, keening in his hands with a battle hunger that no mere man could fathom, or no man who had not been kissed by the cosmic consort of their heavenly craftsman.

Lifeguards north and south, the one to the north a potentially pleasing slave, whistled for the Eaters to move north and south, away from him and the trace of Her Beauteous wake. They sought to defile her trace, the memory even of her giving passage of grace.

‘They are an impious and mundane race!’ sang the chorus of Leftclaw, the tenor, and Rightclaw the baritone.

Eaters were waddling away from him as quick as they might, which reminded him.

He bent and took off his sandals, tore off his bloody shirt, and looked out over the ocean and saw her smiling there, her face as big as the sky, her teeth bright as the nighted moon, her hair woven of sunshine.

Then it occurred to him, that Leftclaw and Rightmaul had taken off his sandals and shirts, as they sang, ‘Your love we serve, Lady Love!’

Thunder split the sky behind him and a cold gust blew him hard enough to propel him into a jog to keep from falling. All about him the Eaters fell, and blew over and wailed their stranded whale song, bellowing like slaves driven by the lash to man a furnace that’s very belch burnt their soft skin.

‘Come love Me, Your Lady—quake the Whirl with our mingled breath,’ She sang as His hammers scarped in time.

“Yes, yes, yezzz!” he growled out loud as he ran to her, two the two little ones encompassed in the shadow of her smile...

The Eaters waddled, whimpered, staggered, fell, begged not to comprehend their wretched end; cringing, they mewed, like things suffering where the damned were penned.

…

Notes

-1. Brit did not know what a haft-lock was, had never trained with any kind or weapon other than a few trips to the gun range with Jose. It is the act of using an ax or hammer haft while the head is in a lower orientation, to pin the foe’s shoulder or elbow. These were tasks, however, that Leftclaw and Rightmaul had been versed in for ages unnumbered, in hands once piously named.