In a few brief minutes Mullens was piling into the passenger’s seat and chuckling to Jackson, “Time to whoop some ass ma brutha! Casement pond?”

With a piercing intensity the dark-skinned man glared in the mirror at Pozer and answered no question with a voice like wet gravel, “Eshem was a good dude, working for his mamma back in Ghana. Mister Jerry was a good guy: set us up with a spread every Christmas; had a family; helps orphan kids—I’m gonna enjoy the shit out of workin’ yer ass boy!”

They rolled out onto the street and the world grew far away in his mind. He no longer heard what they said. He drifted high above looking out over a world of sorrow. He wanted to cry but could not. His eyes lacked the ability. But those same eyes had a limitless piercing ability to see all. He saw all of the individual sorrows of man: a naked baby drinking gasoline laced mud; a poor wetback scraping at a dry riverbed; death by bullet, fire, explosion, drowning, starvation, suffocation, loneliness…

A lonely bald man sat on the end of a rocky outcropping overlooking this cruel world of suffering. The man cried, unable to understand these sorrows. He swooped down and arced around and around, flying closer with each buffet of the astral breeze. At last the act of circling the sorrow-filled man put the pained human to sleep. He alighted and perched on his hard shoulder. Despite the grasp of his rending talons into the flesh the miserable man slept on.

“What the hell!”

Someone was shaking him awake from his idyllic condor nap. The best thing about bad times, like losing Mom, had always been the condor naps that set his mind right, set him at ease. When he woke he noticed that his eyes were already open. The car was parked in some remote wooded place, a new housing development that had not been finished, with a casement pond surrounded by heaped dirt and stone.

“What the hell are you on mo?”

He turned his head to look into Mullen’s eyes and saw an empty ceramic globe bobbing on a rubber snake’s body.

“Oh this cracker is on some shit!”

He was now looking up into the dark face of a horned bull with a nose ring, snorting hot wet mist and somehow equipped with hands to grab and drag him. The olive wreathe on his brow infused him with a soothing radiance. The sword on his hip shimmered in the sunlight as he was dragged from the maze to stand before the Guards of the Labyrinthian King.

A hard hoof drove into his belly. Another hoof slammed into his kidney. Yet another hoof—no, a balled up monkey hand—thudded into his ribs, and yet another into his jaw. The King sat solemnly on his throne of dried earth. As the guards of the Labyrinth attended to him vigorously the multitude of royal courtiers stood as silently as trees and swayed listlessly in the way of the things of the wood. The pain was dull and distant; as far removed from his concerns as the beating of faraway drums.

“Jesus Jax! What is this skinhead on?”

He looked up to see Mullens and Jackson standing before him, their knuckles bloody, their shoes scuffed, hands on their knees as they sucked in the warm morning air and looked at him, and then to each other, and then back to him in amazement. Jackson reached for another deep breath and then raised up, “Menth…menthaqualudes—horse tranquilizer—or some shit.”

Pozer was kneeling on the hard ground looking up at the two winded cops. Mullens’ eyes lit up, “The casement pond. We’ll put his head under water. Not being able to breathe messes with people’s minds!”

Jackson nodded ‘yes’ and they began to move toward him. Then the sound of a high-powered car pulling into the turn-around brought them to attention. Jackson seemed paranoid, “What-the-hell?”

They were now both looking over him, toward the asphalt dead end where their cruiser was parked. The looks on the eyes of the too stunned cops were a mixture of amazement, lust, worry and disbelief.

Jackson spoke in a high-pitched voice, “Is that a Maz, Maz?”

Mullen’s cut him off, “Yeah, that badass Italian car—and someone painted it pink!”

Jackson’s jaw then went slack. The sound of a car door opening with a whine rather than a creak was followed by the clomp of steel-shod high heels on asphalt. Jackson could not contain himself, “Good-goog-a-moog! Oh Ma Gawd dat bitch be booodiful.”

He could hear her strut across the asphalt, and then across the hard-packed ground. The two stupid cops remained as if in a trance before him, staring at something wonderful behind him. Then she came to stand behind him, and, when he heard her sultry voice and the toss of her massive head of hair slap across her bare back, he knew it was Tina, “I see you have a bad boy here!”

Then there was the crack of something whip-like and his neck screamed in pain, even as her mind reached into his like The Man in The Gray Suit had, You idiot! You do not kill in this timeframe!

For an answer he received a spiked steel heel just under his lowest rib, which caused him to pitch forward in agony. The world went black for a second. He thought he was going to lose his mind and did not want to bring his face up out of the dirt.

Pozer sat back on his heels and looked up to see Tina, or, perhaps a better version of Tina, standing before him. She was six feet tall, with a golden tan, black-on-pearl almond-shaped eyes, and a thick blanket of black hair falling to her hips. But something was wrong, really, erotically wrong. These golden hips were Brazilian hip-hop honey hips, not Tina’s athletic curves. Likewise her breasts were outsized stripper guns, not her athletic B-cups. What she was wearing was even more ridiculous: a pink police hat, a pink string bikini with heart-shaped cups and patch, and a pink ‘Love Police’ badge-shaped pasty over her belly button, all connected with dainty pink latex-looking lines rather than round strings. Even her lips had changed, becoming pouty—and heart-shaped.

Tina’s appearance, however, was not the most disturbing aspect of the scene. Jackson and Mullens were each on their knees, holding her shapely legs like children clinging to a mother’s apron in some fairytale. They’re eyes were glazed and they were panting like big dogs, looking up at Tina like she was a goddess.

Tina cruelly pushed Jackson away, and the big cop fell to the side like he had been stuffed on the line-of-scrimmage by an offensive linemen. Then her pink platform shoe whipped forward faster than Ray Robinson’s jab and Pozer’s nose exploded. His brain lit on fire from a force that seemed to blow out the back of his head and stress his neck. His eyes were watering and warm blood gushed from his shattered nose as his head whipped around on a rubbery neck.

The darkened world spun.

Pozer stopped his head from swiveling and looked up at Tina. Canine panting and licking sounds were coming from her feet. He looked down to see Jackson and Mullen’s on all fours licking his blood and snot from her platform shoe. She bent slightly to pet Jackson’s head and scratch behind Mullen’s ear with her unnaturally long hands while they continued to lick, “That’s my good boys, yes you are. Mommy is so proud of you for catching her bad Posie-Boo, she is. You enjoy your treat babies.”

Somehow, at the same time she said these insane things, she was thinking into his mind, If you were not designed for that kind of impact these two would be playing ‘go fetch’ with your head.

She blew him a vicious devil of a kiss and snarled with the corner of her crimson-lipped heart-shaped mouth.

Her boot was now licked clean and she was standing with her arms crossed under her breasts smiling devilishly at him, her voice dripping into the sky like scented oil “Posie Lucas Senski, you are under arrest by order of the Love Police.”

She then reached behind her hips and produced a leather horsewhip and grinned and winked with her now black-on-gold feline eye. Her voice was like a sibilant hiss gushing from overpowered lungs “You have the right to remain compliant. Anything you think, say or do can and will be used against you—and your lawyer is pegging his secretary who is in no position to answer your call. Drag him to the Love Mobile my loves!”

Jackson and Mullens then scrambled over to him on all fours like two furious junkyard dogs. They grabbed a hold of him and began dragging him off toward the pink supercar, shuffling on all fours like apes, all the while snarling like dogs.

Her thought entered his mind and triggered the smell of roses in his nose, No Posie-Boo, just them, all of them.

To be continued in The King and You: Out of Time #7