Kzine Issue 8 Read online

  “Let’s-go-Brawler!” he cried in response.

  “Brawler-sucks!”

  “Brawler-sucks!”

  “Brawler-sucks!”

  Jess couldn’t hear herself anymore. Within seconds, a thousand people inside the Cassini Arena were chanting against them with furious vigour. Victor got louder, until his voice started to crack and he couldn’t go on. He punched the back of his chair, giving a small girl behind them a shock.

  “Damn gelatinous idiots,” he croaked, with a scowl.

  Suddenly the chanting changed, like a breeze turning in midair.

  “Let’s-go-Reaper! Let’s-go-Reaper! Let’s-go-Reaper!”

  The arena seemed to shake with the words led by the boy in front. He wore the Reaper shirt, the matching sweat bands, baseball cap, sunglasses, and even the official Reaper giant foam hand in devil horns.

  “Shut your fucking face! Reaper sucks!” Victor yelled hoarsely. The boy in front turned around.

  “Oh shut up yourself, it’s all fake anyway,” he retorted. Victor’s eyes bulged.

  “Victor,” Jess said sharply, pulling the back of his collar. “Watch your fucking language and sit down.”

  “He’s a little shit! He’s starting them all off.”

  “They’d chant anyway. Chill out.”

  “Reaper fans suck,” he said as the lights dimmed. The crowd gave a thunderous roar.

  Reaper made his entrance. It hadn’t been impressive the first time, let alone the next hundred. He entered to a cheesy prog-rock track that made her think of her Dad’s terrible air guitar. He was dressed in his trademark red and white tights, knee pads and boots. The look was capped off with a ludicrous leather jacket and silver aviators.

  The audience ate it up. The more they screamed - the more he postured. Then came his signature move; giving his aviators to a small child next to the ring as a gesture of good will to all mankind. He slid under the ropes into the hallowed squared-circle and the bell-ringer handed him a microphone.

  “Oh God. So predictable,” Victor whined.

  Reaper’s voice was confident and assured. He was a born public speaker.

  “Brawler, dude. I’ve only got four words to say to you. Can you feel… theheeeeeeeaaaaaaat?”

  The crowd roared. It was their favourite catchphrase. Some had travelled tens of miles just to hear him say it. The ground shook.

  “He’s an ass. Why can none of these idiots see that?”

  “Calm down, Victor.”

  The lights came up, a marching band played, and Brawler came out to sheer indifference. Victor and Jess’s cheers of support were lost in the encompassing silence. The crowd didn’t even care enough to boo.

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this one,” Victor said, rubbing his hands together like Wile E. Coyote.

  Ninety seconds after the bell rang, Reaper pinned Brawler to the mat for the three count. The crowd cheered half-heartedly for the predictable outcome.

  “Never mind,” Jess said. She regretted it as she caught sight of Victor’s slack-jawed cartoon face. His eyes watered like he’d been punched on the nose.

  “Every damn month,” he whispered, shaking his head and gasping as if the air was being pushed out of his body.

  “Well, the rest of the card seems good. At least we might see some actual action,” Jess said, trying to encourage Victor out of his stupor, but he wasn’t listening.

  She sighed, defeated. Maybe next year they could go paintballing instead of watching a load of grown men in pants pretend to fight each other.

  “Who do you think will win this next one?” she asked as the lights dimmed for the next match.

  He was gone.

  Jess climbed the stairs between the rows of the arena and ran out into the wide open space outside. A few people were buying hotdogs and drinks in the short break. Jess couldn’t see Victor anywhere.

  She stopped at the door of the men’s toilets and wondered if she could get in and out quickly enough to look for him without being spotted. As she prepared to burst into a sprint, she noticed that the door for the disabled toilet was ajar by an inch. From within, she heard a soft, unnervingly familiar chuckle. She pushed open the door.

  The boy in red and white sat silently on the tiled floor, holding his nose. His hands and chin were covered in thick red blood, pouring like a flowing tap. His face was covered in small cuts, and his shirt was ripped at the cuff.

  Victor stood over him, his knuckles grazed and sore. He looked up at her, and smiled as if he had been caught scoffing the sweets.

  “I showed him wrestling isn’t fake,” he said, and shrugged.

  The boy on the floor pulled his hands away from his face, revealing a broken nose. He looked at his bloody hands, and cried his heart out. Jess grabbed some paper towels and rushed over to him.

  “Here, put this over your nose,” she said, before turning her attention back to Victor. “You’re in serious trouble you little-”

  She stopped as she heard voices - a woman was calling the name ‘Freddie’, and the little boy started screaming for her.

  Jess couldn’t think. She grabbed Victor by the forearm, pulled him out of the toilet and ran for the nearest exit. She couldn’t let him be caught like this, not on her watch. A steward tried to tell them they were going the wrong way, but Jess stared ahead until the exit was close enough to touch.

  In the cold night air, Jess became aware of Victor’s protests.

  “This is so unfair!” he bellowed.

  The journey home, and the rest of the evening, was spent in silence. When Victor’s parents came back, Jess said nothing. The relief overwhelmed the sting of guilt. Almost.

  Weeks passed.

  One Thursday, Jess found a pile of clothes had fallen from the linen basket in the hallway. She picked up one of Victor’s father’s tops, a hideous blue and red Hawaiian shirt, to find it was covered in holes where the material looked to have been burned. On the plus side, the design had been improved. They were like singed eye sockets, as if a cigar had been stubbed out on the cloth. It looked deliberate. As she checked through the basket, she found more of them, on almost every piece of clothing.

  “Victor!” she called.

  She thought Victor was upstairs, but she heard footsteps beneath her. The basement door opened. Victor walked across the hallway, carrying his father’s briefcase.

  “What were you doing in the basement?”

  “Needed some of Dad’s super glue,” he said, and ran up the stairs before she could quiz him about the clothes.

  Realising it was close to dinner time, Jess went to the kitchen and delved into the freezer. Nothing but fish fingers and ice lollies was visible, so she reached behind them into the ice with outstretched fingers. Next to the ice cream tub at the back corner, she felt something leathery. She grabbed hold of it and pulled.

  It was a small, human hand and forearm, icy blue like a glacier.

  Jess laughed, and pictured herself as a screaming starlet from a hammy horror movie. It was rubber. There was no blood, or goo, but it carried a certain weight. She touched the knuckles. They were hard and slightly pointed. It had a bone structure. She inspected the other side of the forearm, where the skin folded back inside itself. Loose wiring split either side of pencil-like strip of metal that crossed the arm’s insides like girders.

  She set it down on the floor and stared at it as if it were a dying bee. If she hadn’t been close enough to touch it, she could have sworn the thing was real. The only other distinguishing features were the black marks on the inside palm and fingers, like scorch marks.

  Well, it certainly wouldn’t do for dinner, but next door’s cat disagreed. It had started licking at one of the arm’s outstretched fingers.

  “Where the hell did you come from?”

  It gave her an arrogant look and dismissed her. It was a cute breed – a female Asian Semi-longhair, a light grey colour, almost silver. Jess pulled the hand from its reach and set it on the kitchen work surface.
>
  “Poor kitty, I’ll get you something too,” she said to it, giving it a stroke. The poor thing had a scar on its belly where a ton of thick grey hair should have been. The surgery hadn’t been particularly well done, the stitching was uneven and the shaving was haphazard, though it seemed to be healing well. Then she remembered the silver hair on Victor’s hoodie. Surely… no, he couldn’t have.

  The cat looked up at her, suddenly expectant.

  “Been in the wars eh? Better make it a special something then.”

  Some time later, Jess ferried some mac and cheese up to Victor’s room, setting it down on his bedside table next to a copy of today’s paper. He’d finished with the paper and was moving onto reading the Iron Man comic she had bought for him.

  “I found a hand in the freezer,” she said, holding it up.

  “Ah?” he said, not looking up.

  “A hand. Know anything about it?”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I left it there to scare Mum.”

  “Where did you get it from?” she said, eyeing it again as if the fingers might suddenly come to life.

  “You’ve seen it already,” he said, not answering the question.

  “No I haven’t.”

  “Yes, you have. I used it to pick up Mecha-Mouse before. The hand’s heat resistant. I built it.”

  This surprised her, but she didn’t let it show.

  “Whatever. Oh, and be more careful when you’re coming and going. You let next door’s cat in. Poor thing, had a massive scar down its belly.”

  She watched him for a reaction – nothing. He hadn’t even heard her.

  “You can get fake skin from tattoo websites, but it didn’t work so well so I used a thin rubber,” he said. “I just built an aluminium core with some elastic actuators and a prosthetic mould over it. Not hard. It’s not tough enough, though.”

  “Tough enough for what?”

  “Killing Mecha-Mouse. Just bounces right off.”

  “Why do you want to kill the mouse?”

  “It’s got a little flywheel energy storage system in it that makes its surface too hot, it’s gone on a rampage and burnt half my Dad’s clothes. Stupid thing,” he said, shaking his head. Then his eyes went back to the pages of his comic, and it was as if the conversation never took place.

  “I’ll put the hand back in the freezer then,” she said. “Enjoying the adventures of millionaire genius philanthropist Tony Stark?”

  He shrugged and gave a ‘meh’.

  “Better than Green Lantern,” he said.

  She smiled.

  Progress.

  “You finished with the paper?” she asked.

  “Have it.”

  She tucked it under her arm and went down the stairs. She passed the cat, who was on its way up.

  “The cat’s coming your way,” she called back to Victor. He didn’t reply.

  Well, that was her day over. Victor would stay in his room, leaving her to either watch TV or do her coursework. Neither option sounded great, so she settled for the paper instead.

  The front page was of little interest. Some sort of important football was happening somewhere, so important in fact it had coverage across the entire paper. No wonder Victor let her have it. She flicked through the pages looking for celeb gossip and found none, but she did come across a familiar face. Brawler, the wrestler, had made it into print. For a split second, she was pleased for him and for Victor, but then she realised it was bad news. He had been missing for two weeks.

  Victor hadn’t said anything, he didn’t even seem upset. He had trouble keeping his emotions pent up. If it had fazed him then he would have shown it.

  Perhaps he didn’t care. Perhaps he had gone off wrestling.

  Eventually, Jess’s visits became less frequent. She liked to think that maybe Victor’s parents had finally decided their son was more important than their social lives. Poor Victor, always plan B.

  But eventually, the call would always come. The next time she went round to baby-sit, she found Victor waiting for her at the doorstep.

  “Did you hear? Brawler’s returning!”

  “I thought he went missing?”

  “Nah, that was just a storyline.”

  “Newspapers don’t report wrestling storylines as news, Victor.”

  “I’ll tell you more about that later, first I gotta show you something!” he said, and she followed him upstairs to see what his next project might be. She was his paid audience - a one-woman focus group.

  Up in the bedroom, the wardrobe, drawers, books, even the work desk were gone, along with all the mess. All was dark, but in the middle of the room Jess could see something sitting on a chair, a throne for something limp and animal-shaped. Its head hung back on a broken neck, the weight of its skull held by nothing but fur.

  Victor turned on four tall, new lamps, one in each corner of the room.

  “Well?” he said, expectantly. “Cool, huh?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  On the chair lay next door’s cat, dead and distorted. A crude, metal exoskeleton ran down its curved spine and stiff limbs. The fur on its head had been shaved clean. Between its pointed ears sat a small plastic box stuck with super-glue. Too much had been applied, and some of the glue had run down the cat’s face and over its fur. It looked stiff with fear, its legs outstretched, rigid to the claws. The absence of any sentience in its unblinking eyes completed the twisted horror.

  Victor sensed Jess’s sudden nausea, and mistook it for awe and astonishment.

  “It’s not finished anyway, just a prototype. The next one’s going to be even better. Do you want to see it move?”

  “No,” Jess said with more force than she meant. “This is horrible.”

  “It doesn’t move that great anyway. But look…”

  Victor took something out of his pockets and presented Mecha-Mouse in two pieces on his palms.

  “We got the little git in the end. Bio-robotics worked a treat. The sentience of a once-living creature is the key. Plus I’ve found a use for the heat generated by the power source, though it keeps singeing the cat’s fur … I’m going to have to shave it entirely.”

  “Where is all this coming from?”

  “Like, the parts? That’s ebay.”

  “No, where is it coming from in your head? Why are you building this stuff? You can’t go around killing for your stupid experiments.”

  Victor smiled, revelling in a secret he wouldn’t share.

  “No-one will miss the stupid cat.”

  “I’ll miss it,” she said, raising her voice. “I’m telling your parents right – oh God.”

  The cat twitched, and started to purr. Jess’s hands shot to her mouth to cover her gasp. Victor moved over to it and clasped the back of its neck.

  “It won’t do that again,” he said, fiddling with the wiring behind its head.

  “I’m telling your parents,” she said again. “This is sick.”

  Victor laughed, and produced two slips of card from his back pocket.

  “IWF tonight. Brawler against Reaper again, at last. It’s finally happened,” Victor said, full of excitement. “Come on, you want to go right? You don’t really want to ruin this do you?”

  Jess held back tears - she couldn’t show weakness.

  “You’re not going Victor, first you’re going next door to tell them about their cat, and then you might be going to the police.”

  “Listen to me. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” he said. “We’re going.”

  It didn’t register for a few seconds just how Victor had said it. He had ordered her, like he was her commanding officer. She didn’t get paid enough for any of this, and Victor’s attitude was getting worse.

  “You don’t speak to me like that Victor.”

  He scowled.

  “I’ll speak to you however I want,” he said, advancing on her. “You’ll take me to the wrestling, or I’ll do to you what I did to the cat. Understand?”

  “Shut u
p,” she said, trying to hide her growing fear.

  “It’s a simple procedure. First I sedate you, and rip the skin from your spine so I can begin implanting the electromagnetic pulse generators. That’s how I get to your mind, strip away the free will” he said, only inches from her, acting it out with his hands. “You have to be awake of course, so I know your brain is still active. So I advise that you take me. Then you can tell my parents everything if you like, I don’t care.”

  “Say no to me again, and I will kill you. Killing is easy, just like the villains in the comic books.”

  Jess sat perfectly still for two hours, not saying a word, not daring. She just concentrated on clenching her hands to stop them shaking.

  Same as before, the ring announcer passed a microphone to Reaper.

  “Dude, I know we’ve had our battles, but man, I got to hand it to you brother, you’re one tough dude to keep coming back. Even with this new attire, and this kooky electro man gimmick.”

  The crowd laughed. Brawler stood in the ring dressed like something out of a crappy 50’s B-Movie. He was wearing a shoddy-looking metal suit around his limbs and torso. He wore a metal plate on his head, a plate she recognised from Victor’s kitchen. The poles on his arms looked a lot like the disused tent poles in Victor’s basement.

  Jess stopped breathing for a few seconds. A fear took hold of her as she watched a familiar scene unfold below.

  “But, I’ve only got one thing to say to you. Can you feel… theheeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaatbrother?”

  The bell rang. Time stopped as they stared each other down.

  “I was getting bored of wrestling, but I’ve found a way to make it better. This one’s much better than the prototype, huh.”

  “Victor, what the hell…” she trailed off, he didn’t hear her.

  Reaper was the first to break the stare, and punched Brawler’s chest. Brawler didn’t move an inch, but Reaper fell to his knees in a grand fashion, holding the hand he punched with.

  A silence took hold, until Reaper started screaming.

  The crowd booed. Reaper kept looking at his hand, then back at Brawler until Jess realised that Reaper wasn’t holding a hand at all, but a bloody stump. A red puddle formed on the mat.

  The crowd suddenly started cheering.