The Marissa War, Part 7: Warty Hugeman vs. A Lack of Constructive Interpersonal Dialogue

Lurching and shambling, you might have mistaken them for merely drunk until you saw a part of them fall off or the wind turned the right way for you smell them. Some force animated them, a hunger. Slow and relentless they came.

"Hey, asshole… there's more coming down the street." He ducked his head out to see if she was lying. She wasn't. Five metaphors were headed straight for the storefront they were hiding in.

"Give me a weapon," she demanded for the twentieth time. She shook her time manacles at him.

"It took me years to get to you Marissa. I'm not about to let you go," he said.

He checked his ammo again. Twenty-five rounds. He thought about bullets as hard as he could: the shape, the feel, the smell, the weight—he built one from scratch in his mind and then a huge box of them, identical and beautiful. A single round materialized when he open his eyes and his hand shot out to catch it before it hit the ground. It was thought made real. He rolled it in between his fingers and then tossed it into the darkness at the back of the store. Only one and it wasn't even the right caliber. They were going to die.

"I told you to scrounge for ammo, idiot. There's probably even an extra gun in one of the crates."

"Shut up, woman, or I'll rape you something to bitch about."

He stalked off to the back of the store, unzipped his timesuit and began urinating on one of her precious crates. There were dozens of them. The only two he had managed to get open had been empty.

"If those metaphors get in here, they'll kill me too. You brought me here, asshole."

Shifting them into Fictional Space was the only way to get the manacles on her. She could plunge into the time stream without a suit, the wiring and circuitry carved into her nervous system by the TechnoPriests of 37th century. Marissa was rebuilt as a living time machine by the Matryoshka Brainarchy to root out and destroy the last pockets of resistance in its known downstream history. But she already had blocks in place to foil their conditioning. When they finished with her, she kicked the TechnoPope in his fashionably large genitals and disappeared. In a temporal pocket to protect her precious upgrades, she destroyed their recursive AI god when it was still dumb matter in the form of Jupiter’s moon, Callisto.

"I need to take a piss too, you know." She was smirking again. He thought about cutting off her lips to see what kind of face she'd make then. He kicked an empty can over to her.

"You're a real asshole, Hugeman. When I get away from this, I'm going to go back and cut off your dick when you're a baby and feed it to you."

"You are terrible at flirting, Marissa." She just screamed at him and struggled to break the manacles again.

"You'll never get out of them. I had to kidnap three alternate versions of the same genius to build those things. When we get out of Fictional Space, I'm going to have them rip all of the Brainarchy's muck out of you and strand you somewhere."

"Fuck you," she spat.

"Somewhere cold and lonely."

The new pack of metaphors started scratching and tugging at the boards and broken furniture he had piled in front of the door. It was six more hours until he would be able to shift them back to Real Space. Something boring about pulsar alignment. It wouldn't have mattered if he had brought them to some sanitized Historical Drama Zone or Romantic Comedy sub-strata. The only place worse than Allegorical Horror was one of the Cartoon unrealities where broken physics would kill anything Real in seconds. Now that the metaphors were close he could hear what they were all moaning over and over again" "Symbolism." Heavy handed nonsense, Warty thought.

"I could get us out of here right now," she taunted him. "I don't have the same restrictions as your janky old timesuit. Did you get that thing as a prize in a box of breakfast cereal?"

Ignoring her, he shot the first metaphor that managed to get its head through. It shrieked and slumped forward, blocked the hole it had made. Twenty-four rounds. At least he kept a mechanical gun with him when he traveled. Nothing on the suit worked, it was in a completely wrong sort of story.

"Hey, asshole," she said.

"Shut up."

"Warty, goddamn it, turn around."

When he did, he saw the back of the store was gone. A featureless grey wall of nothing was in its place. He walked toward it with his hand outstretched.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, asshole," she said. "No unless you want to wank with a hook for a hand from now on."

"What is this?" he asked, stepping back.

"Beats me," she said. "But I think we need to get out of here."

Warty pulled her to her feet by an arm and they both started dismantling the barricade, Marissa doing what she could with her chained hands. He stopped to shoot the remaining metaphors when they presented themselves. In the dim and eternal twilight, he saw the storefronts across the street were gone as well, replaced by grey.

When they stepped out, Marissa pretended to stumble against him. Face to face, she smiled and then bit him savagely on the cheek. She turned, spat a piece of his face into the street and began running away. He followed her, trying to stop the flow of blood from his wound.

Warty hadn't felt like this in years. He was falling in love.

END PART 7, FLIP CASSETTE OVER NOW