The Enlightened Path [2/2]
Dextro steps out of the alley to come face to face with Claudius Rose, the younger brother of his former lover from the marine days. His light brown skin is orange under the vomit colored street lamps. "Don't rookies have a curfew? Go nab some hookers, kid." Claudius stares unchanged, his face looks as if he hadn't slept for days...Something was keeping him up. Then he speaks, but his face and eyes don't move, just his lips."I know why you're here, and I can't let you kill him." "He's your father..." Dextro says. Officer Rose stares down, his face scrunched up in anger. "...so I'll let you kill him. But I need to get some info first if you don't mind..." Claudius waives him off and follows into the elevator. Fifteenth floor. They get into the hallway and Claudius stays behind while Steve pulls a keycard out of his stonewashed jeans, along with Harry's revolver. "That gun isn't protocol." Officer Rose proclaims.
"You stay out of this, Rose. It's purely a family matter."
"Sure." Dextro enters the apartment. A TV is buzzing. It's just as flashy as the hallway. State-of-the-art furniture, expensive lamps, and pictures everywhere. All of little children. Dextro's senses heighten. He follows a new sound. A squishing noise, then a scraping noise, then a crack and thud. The smell of a dirty cigar and something rotting. Dextro finds himself in the kitchen behind the culprit. James Auerbach: The Photographer. He's balding and bloated; the face of a frog behind a pair of thick bifocals and a big grey beard.His black skin looks like tough leather. He slaps a slab of bloody meat onto the skillet. The hiss of human meat roasting. "Why is everyone in this goddam town a goddam cannibal??" Auerbach turns around as fast as he could and charges at Dextro with a meat cleaver. Steve shoots him in his portruding stomach, his shirt expands and a few buttons pop off. He falls back to the counter and slides down to the ground as the meat fries. "Now...you're losing consciousness. Your vision is probably blurry, and your body temperature is dropping. Shit's gonna get real painful if you don't tell me where John Beetle is." He coughs up some blood.
"I've been through worse, kid. I fought Zack MacDonald.I wont tell you where he is. I created the fucker. why would i put him on blast like that?" Dextro gets a little antsy. "When the FUCK did Zack MacDonald become the epitome of killing...don't answer that." Steven goes into his bedroom and looks in his drawer for something useful. Pictures, camera parts, envelopes. Everything is all cramped up in it. A real junk drawer. He comes back into the kitchen with an envelope and a nail clipper. Auerbach is dying slowly, convulsing and shaking. He's a sweaty, bloody mess. "This is gonna get disgusting, Mr. Auerbach. You're not under arrest...no...the best rest you'll find here is the one you're not waking up from..." Claudius hears his screams and barges in. Steven screams at him to stay in the hallway. A few minutes later, he comes out with blood on his hands. "Alright I got what I needed. He's probably blind, but he can't close his eyes anymore...go have fun kid." Claudius looks, horrified at him as he walks over to the elevator, then at the room.Dextro holds the gas down and doesn't let go. The siren is blaring red and blue notes to a moderately crowded freeway. He's speeding through the city to the westside rail yard. A dirty bomb went off there last year, and some of the noxious residue is still lingering. Dextro turns the radio to the alternative station and the siren off as he gets closer to the rusty old trains. They rise up the horizon like towers, some suspended by chains, others on tracks. It's far from a graveyard, as some of the trains are just discontinued. He steps out of the car, onto the gravelly sand, wet from the earlier rain. The sky is glowing dark purple, tinting everything in monochromatic view. The only thing that sticks out is Zack MacDonald's green desert eagle in his hand. At the end of the night, things will be either better or dead. He keeps saying this to himself as he loads the magnum rounds into the pistol. He thinks about some things he hadn't thought about in a while. The wife he loved gunned down and raped by a man named John Beetle. The sentence rings in his head and makes turning around in the face of a gun an impossibility. Beetle has to die...and he keeps saying this to himself. Then he stops. Sniffing the air...a soapy quality too it. Almost like...bubbles. He follows the smell of the bubbles and it gets stronger until he finds a giant bubble machine rigged to Mack truck. The lights flash on and he's blinded. Only the sound of the flaming red hot engine roars as it barrels straight ahead to him but he can't see it. On impulse he leaps to the right and misses the truck narrowly, latching onto the back and finding his way to the top of the rig. bubbles fly off of the front of the truck, taunting Dextro. The passenger side door opens and the perp has a shotgun. He unloads off the side of the trailer to keep the detective at bay. It's up to Steve to decide if the gunman is pump-action or automatic...He waits for the second shot and rushes to the passenger side to the man, juggling two shotgun shells in his hand. Before thinking and before the man can look up, he's tumbling onto the asphalt, a bullet wound through the throat before it's broken by the crashing inertia of hard black land. Dextro is hanging on the door of the truck and the driver reaches for his gun. He strafes back up to see an empty open door. Then black on the windshield. Dextro's jacket blocks the driver's view as he fires three shots into the cab. Just far up ahead is the pungee pit; a huge canyon of rusty serrated metal artifacts. And with the driver out of commission, the runaway trailer is headed for it. In no way slowing down, Steven turns to the back, stays put for a few seconds, then makes a dash for the back and leaps off just as the truck trails into the pit. He misses the ledge and finds himself hanging by a metal branch sticking out of the wall that should have killed him. on the ledge comes none other than John Beetle, looking more ghoulish than before. His gums are dark and red, under brown teeth and a lip-less grin. The sunken eye is the topper. The golden boy was no longer a dapper lad: he's a monster now. Crouching down with a lead pipe in his hand, "Tetanus is a bitch, ya know, Steve?" He slowly pries his bloody hands off the branch, "I think she'll warm up to you though, something tells me." The detective slides down the side of the canyon, catching every splinter and fragment on the way down. He lands, and so does the lead pipe with him in a sort of clearing in the pit. A figure moves in and picks up the lead pipe. He has slick black hair, pretty fit. Not too big though. His eyes hold horrors of a kid lost in a world of stained steel giants. The pungee kid. Steve comes to and is amazed at the circumstances. "Revolver versus lead pipe. Take one." The kid goes in quicker than expected and even faster is Dextro back on the ground, his head ringing. "Whoa...ok that won't happen again." The boy slams the pipe into his head again. "Round 3. This'll be differ'nt", Steve is battered and his nose is probably broken, he gets up and whips the kid with the pistol, then a kick to the kidney, then a punch to a specific part of the leg that makes him quiver and get down to one knee. He quickly aims between the kid's eyes and that's where he sees the innocence that was once there. But preserving innocence isn't on his to-do list tonight. He fires one square into the forehead of the pungee kid. He falls flat backwards, the stare still in his eyes, two big blue disks and a small trickle of red down the middle. He looks back up to Beetle, who's laughing at the whole thing. "Hey Detective, it's not dead..." Instantly he's tackled from behind by the Pungee Kid. He proceeds to beat into his face with the pipe. Steve aims the gun at his other leg as best as he could and fires. A kneecap is gone. Another step up, he wants to end this all right now. He grabs a large narrow shard of rusted alloy and swings it quickly, lopping off the Pungee Kid's head. He goes over to a big hunk of complicated looking machinery and smashes it onto the decapitated head until there's nothing left but metal, bone, flesh and sand. "I wanna see him get up from that." Dextro looks up to the ledge and sees no Beetle, only bubbles.Steve reaches the top of the cliff and follows the trail of bubbles through the maze of metal and dust, blood trickles from his forehead. He can't run but he does the next best thing. He has a few bullets left in his pocket but he only needs one. Beetle dies tonight. He hears a train starting. One of the huge freight lines from older times. He's close enough to hop on, chipping a tooth on the floor. It's an old circus train, all rusty and polka dotted. Dextro screams, "It's over now. You have no where else to run. We've been here so many times. But I'm not a stupid rookie and you aren't the "criminal mastermind" you used to be. You're predictable and short sighted!" Beetle comes down into the car wearing some outlandish trench coat and dagger in hand. Steve keeps going. "You're getting old, Beetle. See? There's a few grays on your head." Beetle looks alarmed, but reverts back to combat mode, breaking his poker face for only a second. "Reflection of light is all...so you want Cindy back, is that it?...well that's not gonna happen. We had some fun for the time being... I ate her labia." Beetle smiles a dirty smirk that resents nothing. "You sick stupid fuck!!" Dextro charges at Beetle, who pulls out a shotgun at last second and blasts Steve in the chest, bows politely and walks away. "Hey look at it this way, at least you can float in water now. We're going into the city now and the docks are the next stop." He crawls over to his cell phone and sees an incoming call from harry twists a smile. Harry is on the same route Steve took earlier, now chasing after the coordinates on his phone. Harry steps out of the car, still in hospital clothing, beside the train to try and catch on to it. He runs for his life but he just can't get it. The second he stops the first train explodes and the rest follow, taking out all cars and civilians in the way. Harry walks back toward his car slowly in pain and agony, revs the engine and drives off into the brown and orange dawn lights.
"You stay out of this, Rose. It's purely a family matter."
"Sure." Dextro enters the apartment. A TV is buzzing. It's just as flashy as the hallway. State-of-the-art furniture, expensive lamps, and pictures everywhere. All of little children. Dextro's senses heighten. He follows a new sound. A squishing noise, then a scraping noise, then a crack and thud. The smell of a dirty cigar and something rotting. Dextro finds himself in the kitchen behind the culprit. James Auerbach: The Photographer. He's balding and bloated; the face of a frog behind a pair of thick bifocals and a big grey beard.His black skin looks like tough leather. He slaps a slab of bloody meat onto the skillet. The hiss of human meat roasting. "Why is everyone in this goddam town a goddam cannibal??" Auerbach turns around as fast as he could and charges at Dextro with a meat cleaver. Steve shoots him in his portruding stomach, his shirt expands and a few buttons pop off. He falls back to the counter and slides down to the ground as the meat fries. "Now...you're losing consciousness. Your vision is probably blurry, and your body temperature is dropping. Shit's gonna get real painful if you don't tell me where John Beetle is." He coughs up some blood.
"I've been through worse, kid. I fought Zack MacDonald.I wont tell you where he is. I created the fucker. why would i put him on blast like that?" Dextro gets a little antsy. "When the FUCK did Zack MacDonald become the epitome of killing...don't answer that." Steven goes into his bedroom and looks in his drawer for something useful. Pictures, camera parts, envelopes. Everything is all cramped up in it. A real junk drawer. He comes back into the kitchen with an envelope and a nail clipper. Auerbach is dying slowly, convulsing and shaking. He's a sweaty, bloody mess. "This is gonna get disgusting, Mr. Auerbach. You're not under arrest...no...the best rest you'll find here is the one you're not waking up from..." Claudius hears his screams and barges in. Steven screams at him to stay in the hallway. A few minutes later, he comes out with blood on his hands. "Alright I got what I needed. He's probably blind, but he can't close his eyes anymore...go have fun kid." Claudius looks, horrified at him as he walks over to the elevator, then at the room.Dextro holds the gas down and doesn't let go. The siren is blaring red and blue notes to a moderately crowded freeway. He's speeding through the city to the westside rail yard. A dirty bomb went off there last year, and some of the noxious residue is still lingering. Dextro turns the radio to the alternative station and the siren off as he gets closer to the rusty old trains. They rise up the horizon like towers, some suspended by chains, others on tracks. It's far from a graveyard, as some of the trains are just discontinued. He steps out of the car, onto the gravelly sand, wet from the earlier rain. The sky is glowing dark purple, tinting everything in monochromatic view. The only thing that sticks out is Zack MacDonald's green desert eagle in his hand. At the end of the night, things will be either better or dead. He keeps saying this to himself as he loads the magnum rounds into the pistol. He thinks about some things he hadn't thought about in a while. The wife he loved gunned down and raped by a man named John Beetle. The sentence rings in his head and makes turning around in the face of a gun an impossibility. Beetle has to die...and he keeps saying this to himself. Then he stops. Sniffing the air...a soapy quality too it. Almost like...bubbles. He follows the smell of the bubbles and it gets stronger until he finds a giant bubble machine rigged to Mack truck. The lights flash on and he's blinded. Only the sound of the flaming red hot engine roars as it barrels straight ahead to him but he can't see it. On impulse he leaps to the right and misses the truck narrowly, latching onto the back and finding his way to the top of the rig. bubbles fly off of the front of the truck, taunting Dextro. The passenger side door opens and the perp has a shotgun. He unloads off the side of the trailer to keep the detective at bay. It's up to Steve to decide if the gunman is pump-action or automatic...He waits for the second shot and rushes to the passenger side to the man, juggling two shotgun shells in his hand. Before thinking and before the man can look up, he's tumbling onto the asphalt, a bullet wound through the throat before it's broken by the crashing inertia of hard black land. Dextro is hanging on the door of the truck and the driver reaches for his gun. He strafes back up to see an empty open door. Then black on the windshield. Dextro's jacket blocks the driver's view as he fires three shots into the cab. Just far up ahead is the pungee pit; a huge canyon of rusty serrated metal artifacts. And with the driver out of commission, the runaway trailer is headed for it. In no way slowing down, Steven turns to the back, stays put for a few seconds, then makes a dash for the back and leaps off just as the truck trails into the pit. He misses the ledge and finds himself hanging by a metal branch sticking out of the wall that should have killed him. on the ledge comes none other than John Beetle, looking more ghoulish than before. His gums are dark and red, under brown teeth and a lip-less grin. The sunken eye is the topper. The golden boy was no longer a dapper lad: he's a monster now. Crouching down with a lead pipe in his hand, "Tetanus is a bitch, ya know, Steve?" He slowly pries his bloody hands off the branch, "I think she'll warm up to you though, something tells me." The detective slides down the side of the canyon, catching every splinter and fragment on the way down. He lands, and so does the lead pipe with him in a sort of clearing in the pit. A figure moves in and picks up the lead pipe. He has slick black hair, pretty fit. Not too big though. His eyes hold horrors of a kid lost in a world of stained steel giants. The pungee kid. Steve comes to and is amazed at the circumstances. "Revolver versus lead pipe. Take one." The kid goes in quicker than expected and even faster is Dextro back on the ground, his head ringing. "Whoa...ok that won't happen again." The boy slams the pipe into his head again. "Round 3. This'll be differ'nt", Steve is battered and his nose is probably broken, he gets up and whips the kid with the pistol, then a kick to the kidney, then a punch to a specific part of the leg that makes him quiver and get down to one knee. He quickly aims between the kid's eyes and that's where he sees the innocence that was once there. But preserving innocence isn't on his to-do list tonight. He fires one square into the forehead of the pungee kid. He falls flat backwards, the stare still in his eyes, two big blue disks and a small trickle of red down the middle. He looks back up to Beetle, who's laughing at the whole thing. "Hey Detective, it's not dead..." Instantly he's tackled from behind by the Pungee Kid. He proceeds to beat into his face with the pipe. Steve aims the gun at his other leg as best as he could and fires. A kneecap is gone. Another step up, he wants to end this all right now. He grabs a large narrow shard of rusted alloy and swings it quickly, lopping off the Pungee Kid's head. He goes over to a big hunk of complicated looking machinery and smashes it onto the decapitated head until there's nothing left but metal, bone, flesh and sand. "I wanna see him get up from that." Dextro looks up to the ledge and sees no Beetle, only bubbles.Steve reaches the top of the cliff and follows the trail of bubbles through the maze of metal and dust, blood trickles from his forehead. He can't run but he does the next best thing. He has a few bullets left in his pocket but he only needs one. Beetle dies tonight. He hears a train starting. One of the huge freight lines from older times. He's close enough to hop on, chipping a tooth on the floor. It's an old circus train, all rusty and polka dotted. Dextro screams, "It's over now. You have no where else to run. We've been here so many times. But I'm not a stupid rookie and you aren't the "criminal mastermind" you used to be. You're predictable and short sighted!" Beetle comes down into the car wearing some outlandish trench coat and dagger in hand. Steve keeps going. "You're getting old, Beetle. See? There's a few grays on your head." Beetle looks alarmed, but reverts back to combat mode, breaking his poker face for only a second. "Reflection of light is all...so you want Cindy back, is that it?...well that's not gonna happen. We had some fun for the time being... I ate her labia." Beetle smiles a dirty smirk that resents nothing. "You sick stupid fuck!!" Dextro charges at Beetle, who pulls out a shotgun at last second and blasts Steve in the chest, bows politely and walks away. "Hey look at it this way, at least you can float in water now. We're going into the city now and the docks are the next stop." He crawls over to his cell phone and sees an incoming call from harry twists a smile. Harry is on the same route Steve took earlier, now chasing after the coordinates on his phone. Harry steps out of the car, still in hospital clothing, beside the train to try and catch on to it. He runs for his life but he just can't get it. The second he stops the first train explodes and the rest follow, taking out all cars and civilians in the way. Harry walks back toward his car slowly in pain and agony, revs the engine and drives off into the brown and orange dawn lights.
