Part XIII

With great power comes great responsibility.

And apparently when that responsibility has been fulfilled, the power is replaced all at once with a splitting headache. The bright colours that ensconced the world was already starting to annoy me. Happy colours speared into my irises and tickled the bottom of my brain with what can only be described as several sharp ended sticks. The music in my eardrums was being pounded out, progressively, monotonously, as if by some idiotic punk. Man, if someone could just wake me up, I would murder that guy with a baby shark.

I am very grumpy in the morning, even on the best of days. That’s why I wake up earlier, so that by the time the rest of the world wakes up, I’ve already diluted some of the grumpiness into a reused teabag cup of tea. The light shone in through the windows, bright and bold, even heckling the darkness out of the furthest depths of my closet. My body was battered and bruised from the battle.

The battle.

From the years of me trying to kill Santa, all it took was for him to become gender undefined for him to be defeated. Maybe evil is confined to not being confused about sex. I’m sure people with nothing better to do and not enough brain cells will start parades and hash tags and argue over the rights of the gender confused, but let’s be honest; there are more important things in the world to be upset about. Or confused about.

But one cannot forgive the lifetimes of atrocities. Because Santa Claus leaves behind a legacy of evil. Santa Claus had to die.

And finally, he did; the evil fucking git.

Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. True to all horror movies I’ve seen, ‘dead’ is a state of mind to the truly evil. Like hunger to the rest of us. It passed like the seasons. Without a body which I could kick; I doubted that Santa Claus would remain dead and like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger, I’m sure he’d be back when the writers in America run out of new ideas.

I managed to push myself up on one side, and for fear of accidentally doing exercise and performing a Turkish get up, I swung my legs out of bed and realised painfully that I had been asleep on the floor. A clamorous rumbling echoed from just above me, generating from the prison wallet of one very passed out Croc. I stood up avoiding his appendages that were dangling off the side of the bed and was happy to note that he had strangled his torso in the bedding, ensuring that my sight was not sacrificed by the view of any of his smaller appendages.

I quietly tiptoed out of the room and made a mental note to kick him out. Via email.

The morning brought with it a dawning of conclusion. My life goal had been achieved.

What would I do with my life now? Maybe that’s the problem with only having one goal. The impossible nature of it meant little to someone whose only discernible skills was coming up with useless lists and Croc puns.

I walked around a very messy kitchen cum dining room at the Fortress of Catitude. The curtains were drawn to block out the depressing happiness that now enveloped the world.

What other skills did I have? I didn’t think I could code monkey anymore. I never really began that life.

I could keep documenting my adventures, but would anyone care about my daily choice of cereal and my thoughts on pandas, pyjamas and pirates?

And what of the very true stories of Santa Claus Must Die? What about my legions of loving and adoring fans? This means you.

It’s a choice – evolve the concept into something fresh and new (maybe the tooth fairy had some secret agenda?), or milk what worked until that teat is dryer than the Star Wars idea bucket. Or maybe some fresh up-and-comer can make a movie out of it. It would be a vicious cycle though – when parodies parody parodies. It’s like making live action movies of cartoons. It’s telling the same story around a campfire with an accent. It wouldn’t work.

Perhaps my Ninja Bugs Bunny skills could be put to good use as a hair stylist. Because hare skills.

I lit a cigarette and put it up to my scarred face, now not even being able to face myself. On the table among the shrapnel of stale crushed biscuits – a little toy figurine of a CatMan type person with claws extending from his knuckles, lay impaled by a huge piece of wood. Pressing the tip of the woody caused a reaction which included a merry go round motion and some moaning music coming from it. I guess Mariah Carey still had to make money somehow. Or it could have been a cat dying from a lack of air supply.

I walked slowly in my Crocs (the shoes, not the bastard who was passed out in my bed). A stray practice knife had planted itself in a door frame. I wasn’t good at carpentry either. Distracted, I accidentally dropped an entire shelf of glasses. No one ever used them, as drinking straight from the bottle left less need for dishwashing. That scratched dishwasher from my list of career options. I checked that the stove was still working.

My mind was a blank. No new ideas. Maybe I could design the next iPhone.

With that final thought, I took a last pull on the cigarette and tossed it into the air. Sitting on drums of fuel. The cigarette did a pirouette in the air and in slow motion performed a slow swan dive, igniting the vapours of gas in the air. The drums exploded in an inferno billowing waves of flame coloured fuel that did disruptive and quite painful things to me.

I closed my eyes.

Fuck Wolverine.

I mean Santa.

Fuck Santa.

The fire was calming. Beautifully painful. Surprisingly wet.

Wet?

What the fuck?

I opened my eyes and immediately closed them against the force of liquid being blasted into my face.

Croc:	*pleasantly satisfied sounds*
Me:	What the fuck???
Croc:	Oh, Cap’n. What’s up?
Me:	What the hell are you doing?
Croc:	Well I was putting out this here fire you see.
Me:	With what?
Croc:	Well…
Me:	Did you just…
Croc:	Well………
Me:	Why is this sticky???
Croc:	Hang on a second, don’t move, think I missed a spot.
Me:	Oi, stop!

Croc disappointedly put away his fire extinguisher as I patted out the last of the flames.

“I suppose it’s a wasted effort asking if you brought any beer back with you?” he muttered scratching himself in a morning routine I would soon rather forget.

“Beer?” I exclaimed, “I just defeated Santa, Herr Klaus, The Guy We’ve Been Trying to Defeat! And I’m battle worn and look…look…this corner of my elbow is the only place that isn’t scarred! I don’t even remember getting back here. And you expected me to pick up a six pack on the way home, did you?”

He rolled his eyes as if I was making a bit of a mountain of it, “So I guess you don’t have any weed, either?”

I let out an irritated snort and walked out.

I decided I needed to get out as well. Home sometimes has too many memories.

I made my way to the bus stop. I had never seen a bus out here, but someone had built the bus stop and it was just courtesy for one to eventually turn up.

I had to do something with my life. It needed a new foundation. I picked up a nearby newspaper that was dancing in the wind, pondering how much longer newspapers would still be around. Maybe I should be a journalist. I could probably sneak some references to my blog and gather a couple more readers. But print journalism is pretty much dead. It sucks when you’re only good as a thing that is used to be anything else except what your actual purpose is. I patted it kindly on its headline.

The daylight faded into night time, which I was thankful for. Black was the brightest colour I was able to palate. I soon found that my victory didn’t add patience to my list of character traits. I called for an Uber.

Perhaps even the universe needed some shut eye as the moon hid in its own shadow. Or perhaps it was just drawing its curtains to do the naughty with some passing comets. Or maybe the planets were just huge eggs and comets were like sperm shooting off to get to a destination first. The universe was just some great cervical fallopian type of thing. That would explain the Big Bang. And would make the Milky Way quite disgusting.

Maybe I could do astronomy? I could present my theory on black holes.

“There’s no such thing as can’t!”

 “I didn’t say I can’t do anything?”

A man had walked up to me pulling a bag on wheels behind him.

“Oh, well are you the Captain? I’m your Uber.”

“Don’t be silly, I can’t get on that. What are you going to do? Push me?”

“Aha! There’s no such thing as can’t.”

He opened the bag to reveal a set of micro machines, selected a bike and placed it on the ground. Before I could explain to him that on the wiki page under ‘stupid’ was a picture of him; he pulled out a little remote control and pushed a button. The bike expanded to a full-size bike and with that, he straddled it, patted the seat behind him and said, “Come and jump on it!”

The Ducati rode off into the night with me clinging onto the back of my rider. The strange thing was, it felt as if something was clinging back.

“Shouldn’t I wear a helmet? Shouldn’t you be wearing a helmet?” I yelled into the ear of my driver.

“Driving at this speed? I don’t like the idea of wearing anything that has hell in it.”

His head had turned and in the moonlight his face blurred into a different shape. His eyes rolled white. Just for a moment. But the moment passed, and he kept racing to some imaginary finish line in the distance.

The strange feeling continued in my chest. Like fingers clawing into my skin, but like a tattoo needle, it held a comfort to it. The fingers felt like they were splitting into webs and traveling around my body. It must have been a combination of the wind and the injuries that I was still ignoring.

The waves felt like they were in my bloodstream now. Warm…and cold at the same time. Spreading through, not just my body, but into my mind. It felt like it was lifting me up – pain…power…happiness…sadness…love…hate all in one emotion. My body felt immune to any external pain but at the cost of being in constant internal pain. Better the pain you know. The pain that offers its comfort. The pain you miss when its gone.

And then…without warning…a hammer fell.

Darkness.

Silence.

***

My phone buzzed gently next to me.

My eyes opened.

A notification blinked out into the darkness.

[Please rate Eddie Brock]

I was hungry. No. I was ravenous. This overrode any desire to actually know where I had woken up, what day it was, or how much that Uber had actually cost.

Do not open that door.

“Eh?”

I looked around drunkenly for the voice but there was no one in the small apartment.     

There was a knock at the door that sounded like the start of a bad knock knock joke but instead of two knocks there were five. I tried calculating how many times I needed to say, ‘who’s there?’

Anyway, it never paid to listen to voices in my head, so I opened the unlocked the door; but as I opened it, a superior force tried to show its weight by pushing its way in. Four men entered, dressed like the Men in Black, but smarter, I assumed; as they weren’t wearing sunglasses at night. One of them pushed me into the middle of the room, and just as I was about to ask if he was a proactive Uber Eats driver with lots of food, the man behind him spoke.

“Hey Eddie.”

Who the hell is this guy?

The man was bald and had a dodgy beard and an unhappy look. One of those little Bluetooth devices dangled from his ear or it could have been one half of an Apple airpod set. I guessed that he was unhappy as he had lost the other one. He had called me Eddie. He must be an unhappy Uber customer and that’s where he probably lost the airpod; and was probably coming back to get it.

“I need Mr. Drake’s property back”

Yup. Definitely lost the airpod. It probably cost a bundle to buy a new one.

Suddenly the other four men pointed guns at me? Whoa. What the fuck.

Instinctively I shot my hands into the air.

“I’m putting my hands up”

You’re making us look bad.

A power overcame my hands and forced it down to my sides. I implemented Newton with a greater force and stuck them back up.

“No, I’m not.”

Yes, you are.

Back down. With a greater force I pushed them back up in a weird game of standing push ups.

“I…am…not”

Yes, you are.

“No, I’m not.”

Yes, you are! Why would you do that?

“Because it’s a very sensible thing to do.”

I will take care of this myself.

“Take him down,” said the Unhappy Man in Black. With that the men shot tasers. A feeling deep inside me that Newton or push ups couldn’t withhold rose up, and my right arm extended in a powerful punch to the man on my right. Only it wasn’t my arm. Long black tentacles extended from my shoulder to where my arm would be and with great force expelled the man out of a coincidental window. As it retracted, without giving me a chance to inspect my five little piggies, my left arm followed suit and the black mass connected with the man on my left and directed him without mercy into the ceiling. My body, getting into the hang of it and doing the math, used both hands with the same protrusions to dispel two more of my attackers, including pulling the Unhappy Man in Black towards me.

“I’m so sorry about your friends,” I said to him in a voice that wasn’t mine. The black tentacles wrapped around his neck and tossed him into what was a coffee table that had had grand ideas to become a closet to Narnia. Seeing the man who had met the ceiling recover, the tentacles continued its carnage by coming out of my right leg, grabbing a nearby dumbbell that I would never have been able to pick up myself, and throw it at the man. It slammed him into a fridge which, no doubt, contained a beer or two that seemed like a hellava good idea now.

With all attackers disposed of, I was left to contemplate what the fuck had just happened. The black ooze still radiated from my hands in a weird game of slinky between them. One of the attacked attackers made the silly decision of not playing possum and woke up. The coils caught him by the neck and drove him onto the floor.

I realised I was no longer in control of my body. It was a late realisation, but my brain was still figuring out which cells I was still in charge of, and which was simply a result of too much whiskey over the years. The next few moments was a blur as more random extras rolled in and received the wrath of the black prototype.

Outstanding. Now let’s bite all the heads off and pile them up in the corner.

“Why???”

Pile of bodies. Pile of heads.

I ran.

Out of the apartment. Out of the building. Out into the open. A vast field. A hill. All the terror behind me. I didn’t look back. Because if there is terror behind you there are two thing you make sure of: One – it’s behind you. Two – you’re running away from it. Only fools run towards danger. Some call it brave. Brave is a synonym for stupid.

There is only one rule in a fight – flight or flight.

I ran down the hill which rolled in front of me, with dreams of chasing a wheel of cheese. Flames tumbled down from the sky. My brain was obviously sorting itself out and I was hallucinating. Clouds billowed in the twilight sky. Among the smoke and flames, ghastly beasts ran with me as if we were in a race to prove the theory of evolution. It felt like the world was ending.

Heat dissipated through the electric air. I ran with all the energy I had in me. Branches and leaves whipped at my body, although it felt like light whispers.

A little vehicle appeared ahead of me. It would have been nice to have something else do the running for me, but I wasn’t one for little electric vehicles. A small oval door on the top of the vehicle slid over the opening and sealed shut and began a slow roll away. I could now make out two figures were already sat inside, screaming, though the thick plastic kept in the sound. And I probably shouldn’t drive under the influence. Creatures out of history books fought and the victors ran off into the distance.

The vehicle started moving. It was round so rolling is an adequate description of it. Towards a cliff. Gaining speed until eventually it ran out of road and embraced its inner lemming. It paused for a Wile E Coyote second before disappearing from view. The figures inside continued their silent screams as the ball just escaped the quiet hands of smoke, like a cricket ball trying to escape the sandy hands of an Australian.

It didn’t seem like a good direction to run towards. I paused and looked back but I didn’t have any other options. My legs burned with the fire of a thousand suns. My heart pumped so hard I thought my sternum would crack. I felt a million years of primitive sinew and muscle try to keep up with me. It could have been my imagination where my brain trying to comprehend the heat in my veins, but fireballs falling intensified in heat, igniting more speed from my shoes that were trying to keep up.

I raced after it and when I ran out of earth, I didn’t stop. It was too late to look before I leapt and looking down gave me a brief moment of vertigo. I performed a perfect swan dive.

Actually, I performed a perfect belly flop as I hit the water. I felt my legs breaking and pain overcoming the voices in my head.

The ball sank into the watery depths. I watched it. It was no doubt filled two Men in Black type individuals and they probably deserved what they got.

Eyes, lungs, pancreas…so many snacks, so little time.

What the fuck?

The strange strength was back. I swam away at the speed of water, which is pretty fast if you ask a tsunami. No real direction except forward, until finally I jumped out onto a platform. It was dark. And like a grandfather redwood tree, growing into the night sky was a rocket. I paid it no attention as there is always an elephant in the room that, if you acknowledge it, starts asking you for peanut butter if you’re not careful.

“My legs. My legs were broken. Now. Now they are not broken. What is happening?” I said to no one in particular.

I sat down. The night sky frowned upon me as I tried to digest the events that had seemed to happen in the tick of a clock hand.

Suddenly a figure extruded from my back and a liquid plasticine mess began to form from my face. It ebbed and flowed in shape until…A face. A sick, twisted face. Teeth and eyes and…a slight red glow on the cheeks.

Captain UG…we meet again.

No fucking way.

“Santa?”

Yes. You see what I’ve become. See what I must do to survive. Live off another. A mere parasite. Unicorn blood can sustain me. But it cannot give me a body of my own. But there is something that can.

“Oi, will you stop prattling on for a minute. Didn’t I kill you? You’re a nasty penny. And the fact that you’re inside me is the creepiest thing ever. I see that you haven’t become less evil, just weirder.”

Don’t be a fool. Why suffer a horrific death…when you can join me and live? There is no good and evil. There is only evil. And those too weak to seek it. Together we’ll do extraordinary things.

“Hmmm, how about no?”

The voice was getting louder, and I put on my headphones to drown it out. There was an agonising yell in my head and I felt my soul being ripped out of my body.

I looked at the now playing.

Deicide.

Guess Santa doesn’t like death metal.

The black ooze crawled up into the rocket, and I picked myself up and ran, as the fuel ignited and lifted off.

I watched as it forced its way into the atmosphere, secretly hoping a coin got stuck in the wrong coin slot and the whole machine would explode burning up Santa in the resulting explosion. They really should make rockets like that – where you need to insert a coin like an old arcade game to get it going. And if you get it wrong, it explodes.

But it didn’t.

It quietly worked its way past the exosphere and disappeared. Past a moon that now was forebodingly a dark, crimson red.

Other than the moon, the night sky was pitch black. It was like a dark blanket covering my head in the middle of a snowstorm. There wasn’t a single star in the sky.

And then, there was. A single, bright star, shooting its way through the thick air in a way that a man who hasn’t walked in years, suddenly gets the ability to fly. Drunken. Happy. Ecstatic.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

The star burned bright and began to fade as it began its adventure to understand the universe that the chains of humanity will never allow us to fully discover.

Santa was not dead. The evil fucking immortal fucker.

I needed to recover. To hide. It had started to rain. I wandered into a nearby cave to avoid getting wet. Well wetter.

The cave was moist, and water began filling the inner chamber forcing me inwards. The darkness was illuminated by little firefly like boojies. I trudged in the early makings of thick chocolatey mud, further and further down a long tunnel. I was becoming a little concerned about the water that seemed to be chasing me. The metres became kilometres.

The tunnel suddenly bloomed into a bigger cave. I realised I wasn’t alone. It sounded like a drift of wild boars.

“Hello?” I said into the damp darkness.

“Shush, we’re meditating”, said a voice from one of the corners.

“Oh, sorry.”

I decided to go back the way I had come. There was no value in spending time in a dark hole with guru type people, as only guru type people occupied deep, dark holes in silence, no doubt thinking deep, dark thoughts about deep, dark holes. That were wet.

“I would get out of here if I were you, the cave systems seem to be flooding quite quickly.”

“Well if you were me, then I’d be you, and I’d use your body to get to the top, you can’t stop me no matter who you are!”

For fuck sakes, even though the statement made no sense, it was one of my favourite lines from a movie and I was thoroughly depressed that it wasn’t me that got to use it. The water began raging into toilet flushing whirlpools.

My inability to swim made me rush to the cave entrance and I just managed to make it out without becoming a statistic. It would be an absolute unfitting way that the Captain, after years of raging war against evil, died because he drank too much water too quickly.

Speaking of drinking too much too quickly, I decided it was time and a half for a proper drink. I made my way to the nearest bar.

It was a dark, dingy place that merged itself into its surroundings, and the inside was none the brighter. Well, any port in a storm, so to speak, as the rain continued to fall.

The place was mostly empty. In the darkest corner sat a lone figure huddled over and surrounded by the empty souls of beer mugs and cocktail glasses with spirits that had gone off to much worse places.

“Croc?”

A rumbling noise confirmed it was indeed the Croc.

“Have you finally reached a point of drunkenness?”

“No, I’ve just run out of weed. You wouldn’t happen to have any on you? No? Why the fuck are we friends, mate?”

I pulled up a chair opposite him and ordered a double whiskey and asked the bartender to leave the bottle. There’s no such thing as a bad whiskey, only bad people.

Me:	So, what’s been happening?
Croc:	Oh, did you know Santa is back? I thought you said you killed him? Piss poor job that was.
Me:	Yes, I know. He was inside me for a bit.
Croc:	Inside you?
Me:	Yes.
Croc:	That’s a bit sick, considering his size.
Me:	What do you mean, though, he’s back? And what size? He was a sick, formless entity the last I saw him.
Croc:	That’s not the Santa I met. Fucking big bugger now. Goes by Santa-nos.
Me:	Santa-nos? Sounds very European.
Croc:	Yeah, I assume he’s like Santa but on NOS. you know like in Fast and the Furriest XXX.
Me:	You have met him?
Croc:	Yeah, there I was minding my own business in a nice pub and he walks in and kills everyone. Bastard even tried to hit on me.
Me:	Slap some sense into you?
Croc:	Actually, he came in and drank my beer, so I tried to smash him.
Me:	You got some hits in?
Croc:	The fucker is strong. Hit me all over the place like a rag doll.
Me:	Well I’ve never known you to even get into a proper fight with him.
Croc:	It was the last beer.
Me:	Fair enough.

I finished my last shot, and left Croc to his own devices…and the bill, which I’m sure he’d find a way to pay in kind.

I chose a direction at random and started my next journey to somewhere.

What Croc had said was disturbing. A stronger Santa. This did not bode well for me.

I found myself walking in a large open barren land. The tone can be described as brown. Sand and rocks fought against monoliths of fallen buildings.

I sat down on a rock to gather my thoughts.

I was alone. Until I wasn’t.

A swarm of clouds appeared as if sucking the colours out of the sky, turning a royal blue to swirls of brown and black. A figure walked out of the vacuous void.

A tall, muscular figure standing a monolith himself against the broken toys of the world. His purple face was angular, like a solid rock sculpture with an idea of a long beard chiselled into it. He wore armour, a rich gold reflecting against the sun.

He looked around, staring at the rubble.

He caught my eye.

Me:	Oh yeah, you’re much more of a Santa-nos.
Santa-nos:	This day extracts a heavy toll.
Me:	How did you get the body?
Santa-nos:	It is called a Rudimentary Body Potion. Snake blood and unicorn blood and just a splash of Croc…bodily liquid.
Me:	That’s way too much information. What is this place?
Santa-nos:	It is the future. It is here. What one day we will look back and say, it was beautiful. This earth. Too many mouths, not enough to go around. And now we face extinction. I offer a solution.
Me:	Genocide?
Santa-nos:	At random. Dispassionate. Fair to rich and poor. You will call me a madman. But what I predict will come to pass.
Me:	Congratulations, you’re a prophet. Who wants to murder billions.
Santa-nos:	With this power now, I could simply snap my fingers and it would all cease to exist…I call that…mercy.
Me:	And then what?
Santa-nos:	I finally rest. And watch the sun rise on a grateful universe. The hardest choices require the strongest will.
Me:	I think you’ll find our will equal to yours.
Santa-nos:	Our?
Me:	No, fuck it, it’s just me.

All this talking was taking too much time. I had beaten him before. I didn’t see why him becoming purple would make it any more difficult. I ran from a sitting position, which is pretty difficult to do, and slid through the sand and stone at his feet, avoiding his flaying punch. I threw a series of punches aimed at his legs, his core and an uppercut to his weird beard. He reached out to take my face in his huge hands, but I caught them in mine in a test of strength, albeit it was his one hand against my two. I screamed as I grimaced, but he pushed my hands aside and hit me in the face with his free hand.

My hands felt a shape in my pocket and after pushing it to one side, I realised I had an old lighter in my pocket. It wasn’t just a lighter but a tool from days of magic passed. It had been deluminating lights from Croc’s room for years and had become pretty powerful, to the point where it had a sharp edge. It took the shape of an axe in the way that an old stick looked like a cricket bat. It had all the beliefs of becoming an axe, one day, when it grew up. I played possum for a second, then while his back was turned, I fired a bolt of electricity at him from a very old lighter that had delusions of grandeur. 

He tried to block the lightning, but the strength of the energy pushed against his force in a weird tug of war. It didn’t last long. The axe shaped lighter jumped out of my hand and with a final push sped through the currents of power and wedged itself it his chest.

I couldn’t believe it. I was winning. Two in a row. I was on a streak.

He fell to his knee. Like he was proposing for a new beginning. I came up close until I could see all the emotions in his eyes.

“I told you, you die for that” and I pushed the axe shaped lighter deeper into his chest cavity. I held his head in my hands as he struggled for breath.

“You,” he wheezed, “You…should have gone for the head!”

With that he looked at me with a twinkle is his eye. He unclenched his fist. In the blink of an eye but in slow motion, he touched his middle finger and thumb touched in a first dance embrace. As with first dances, the fire was implied.

He snapped his fingers…

Ever the UnderdoG,

Kamal

P.S. I don’t feel so good

P.P.S. ‘nuff said