Breaking Holds: Episode Twenty Two
Today’s Episode: Bulldozer
It feels silly to discuss the death of another human being and constantly refer to them as “Umaga,” a fictional and, if we’re all being honest, racist and stereotypical name for a Samoan wrestler who fell back on the tried and true “wild man” gimmicks of his predecessors. As a performer, I was shocked to find that I enjoyed the matches that Eki “Eddie” Fatu put on in this new character, my most favorite being the war he had with John Cena where the babyface champ had to strangle his vicious juggernaut of an opponent with a busted ring rope after the turnbuckle broke clean off. Good times.
To make matters more tragic, Mr. Fatu leaves behind not only his enormous extended family, but a wife and children who will have to go through the rest of their lives without father there. There will never be another wedding anniversary for the Fatus, and his children will never get to play-wrestle with their big, burly father ever again. There’s no real bright side to such a loss, and there’s certainly nothing funny about it.
That being said, Eddie Fatu was an idiot.
It’s not right to speak ill of the dead, and while I find solace in the knowledge that his family will likely never read anything I write, it still almost hurts to type out that phrase on my laptop. So then why do it, eh?
Because Mr. Fatu stands as an example of someone who was given an opportunity to avoid being yet another dead young wrestler and, out of ignorance, pride, or stubborness, he rejected it.
Nearly every wrestling fan with an internet connection knows how Mr. Fatu was released by the WWE when he tested positively for drugs, how he was asked to go to rehab, on the dime of the company, no less, and politely told them that they could shove it. As Scott Keith pointed out recently, it may have been rather heartless of WWE to mention how he refused treatment while simultaneously extending sympathies to his family, but its a shrewd enough move for a business where fans and critics have a major, major problem with the list of dead wrestlers under 50. I don’t really have a problem with it, but if Keith wants to send some hate toward their way, I suppose its his prerogative.
However, the greatest crime here is not how Fatu was taken from the wrestling world so early, but just how easily this could have been prevented, and how ultimately selfish he was in his decision to refuse treatment and thus be fired from the company that had turned him from a joke into a huge star. We internet wrestling fans are notoriously fickle, but I don’t know how much we can complain about his elevation and treatment in the earlier days of his career as Umaga. Brought in as an unstoppable monster, Fatu actually managed to take a fairly racist and idiotic gimmick and turn it into something that nearly all fans eventually gravitated to. His hits were hard, his speed as surprising for a man of his size, and he came off as legitimately dangerous to the point where, if he was used as a threat the way that Kane often is, people bought him as a serious punishment by whatever villain was tugging his line that week. Sure, we all shook our heads in confusion when he suddenly spoke perfect English in the latter days of the gimmick, but no one can ever say that he was never given a chance.
But I digress, when ultimately I wanted to speak about the selfishness of his decision. Fatu’s rejection of WWE-sanctioned rehab was not only a blow to his career, essentially telling the largest and most financially successful wrestling company on the planet where they could stick it, but also an incredibly short-sighted and horrific decision based on his role as a father and family man. He rejects financial security, as well as his own health, putting him on a path that ignores what is best for his family and instead what he wants for reasons that, to this day, I cannot comprehend.
I am unhappy that we’re talking about the death of Eddie Fatu today, but when a man has a heart attack at 36, it can be a fair assumption that there is something unnatural about one’s physiology. It’s horrifically regrettable, but the warnings were there, both literally and abstractly, and he chose to reject and ignore them for whatever reason.
His death, as have many others, leads to discussion about the lives of wrestlers, and what they go through for the purpose of entertaining us, and while I love a knockdown, dragout battle with crazy head-drops and blood as much as the next fan, I think I’m done with it.
A few months ago, weren’t we all up in arms that there was no blood in any of the Hell in the Cell matches? What a bunch of wusses they are, and how despicable of Vince to deny us this in the name of getting his wife elected to the senate! Boo, I say.
Ever get a paper cut? Hurts a bunch, right? Throw some Neosporin and a band-aid on that sucker, otherwise it could get infected. Bad stuff.
Getting cut hurts. A lot. Now go take a look at Devon Dudley’s head, or for a more insane experience, read about how Abdullah the Butcher could fit poker chips in between his insane forehead scars. As far as I’m concerned, if someone gets busted open hardway, that’s fine. It’s an improvisation, and adds to the drama, but blood is also a crutch. There are other ways to show hate or fury or damage, and I don’t need the next generation slicing themselves up for the purpose of the art. No other job on the planet requests that its employees cut themselves, and I’m okay with wrestling joining that particular club.
Of course, we also like those awesome, Foley-style hardcore matches, right? Well, too bad Foley can’t remember a bunch of them anymore due to the ton of chairshots he took over the course of his career. Last I heard, Chris Nowinski had something to say on the subject as well.
But don’t take away our awesome, Japanese wrestling moves, those fantastic puro-style moves that the Brisco Brothers bust out and receive while forgetting to sell anything more than a gunshot wound. The next time you complain about how a finisher doesn’t seem awesome or painful enough, I want you to think of Mitsuharu Misawa, and how he and Kenta Kobashi have given us a blessing and a curse in their outstanding, and potentially crippling, styles of offense. You should think of Misawa for plenty of other reasons, as well, and I’ll leave those to you to figure out.
So that’s my message to the wrestlers of the world: block those chairshots, pull those punches, and don’t take crazy bumps “for the glory.” A lot of this has toned down from the “hardcore” rush of the 90’s, thank God, but I’m really tired of reading about these guys killing themselves for my amusement and then dealing with the pain with pills and their sagging pectoral muscles with needles. In a country where health insurance costs actual money, and a wrestler pays four times the costs of an average citizen due to the dangerous nature of their job, I don’t need my pretend fighting to have such a high mortality rate, because frankly, if the wrestlers of the world don’t change their styles and mindsets about what is acceptable and what is worth risking, then “bulldozers” aren’t only the people we’ll be mourning and eulogizing, but what will be needed to move the stacks of the dead.
Enough.
American Demigods – Part 1
When I was a little boy, my father showed me the movies and television shows that would influence nearly all of the cultural loves that would follow me the rest of my life. We watched and re-watched Errol Flynn classics like The Crimson Pirate and, in particular, The Adventures of Robin Hood, a movie whose love I would soak in even more when I bought it for cheap on HD-DVD. Perhaps I’ll need a blu-ray copy someday, but for now, I’m good.
We would follow the adventures of Zorro, “the fox so cunning and free” who “makes the sign of the ‘z’.” He also showed me the Arnold Schwarzenegger “classics” Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer, as well as the awesome Disney adaptations of the life of Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (which ends at The Alamo, where, in case you slept through history, Mr. Crockett didn’t fare so well) and Davey Crockett and the River Pirates (a prequel which was made because the original film proved so popular that Disney needed to put the guy in another movie despite him fighting to the death in the most famous last stand in American history).
I love heroes. It’s a topic that has always fascinated me, and something I imagine will stay with me for the rest of my life. Despite not really being into comic books until middle school, I always dug superheroes, which I’d see in old cartoons rented from the library or the old Fleischer Studio Superman cartoons, which still look fantastic today.
But what it is about heroics and larger-than-life characters that so strongly grasps the human imagination? Why are films such as The Dark Knight and Iron Man making hundreds of millions of dollars, other than simply being good or great movies? After all, tons of great pieces of cinema make a fraction of that, although they often lack a pop-culture icon like a Batman or Spider-man.
But then, how do these characters become pop-culture icons in the first place? Frankly, the concepts of their existence are a bit silly, something even I’ll admit as a self-confessed comic book fan. Batman lost his parents to crime as a child, so decided to spend the rest of his life dressed in tights and viciously beating criminals in the alleyways of his hometown. If we took an even remotely realistic view of something like this, we can all admit that someone like this would be locked up for assault and battery, and while they could possibly get off with an insanity plea, nearly every criminal they busted up would never be jailed in the first place. Superheroics and the logic that goes along with accepting them are absurd, and yet it’s something that worldwide audiences cling to.
I was thinking about that today, and why the United States has created worldwide cultural phenomena in the form of masked vigilantes. Ultimately, I believe it’s about history and myth.
Countries such as Greece and Egypt have histories so extensive that they have created a series of cultural characters that are well-known across the globe, a small side dish that came along with democracy, architecture and mummification. Egypt may be a bit of a harder sell in the storytelling department (although tons of Americans have probably heard of Isis or Osiris, and nearly all know the story of the Ten Commandments thanks to The Bible and Charlton Heston), but Greek myths are told in nearly every school in America. Heck, I taught Oedipus Rex last year, and every kid at least knew who Zeus was. But even going beyond the Gods, a bunch of kids know about the Trojan War (thanks Troy, and Brad Pitt’s Achilles!), and others know about Perseus and Medusa, or Theseus and the Minotaur. These stories are so well known that they find places in cultures formed millenniums after their fall and half a world away.
The United States, a country only slighter more than 230 years old, doesn’t have an ancient pantheon of Gods and historical warrior kings to play with, although Neil Gaiman gave it a shot (a book, alas, I haven’t finished reading. Sorry, Neil), creating new Gods of television and radio to combat the old of all cultures, such as Loki or Khali. Certainly, the US has created a few tall tales and magic men in its short time on this earth, most notably Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, but there simply hasn’t been the time to create characters that can carry over to foreign shores. No one in Japan or Germany gives a damn about Paul Bunyan, or nearly any other character in the small patch of mythology called “Americana.”
But they know who Spider-man is, now don’t they?
(Next time, a look at comic books as the true American mythology…)
Interview’s Eve – Brain Drain
I can’t sleep, so I’m just going to try to write a bunch of stuff in the hopes that it will tire me out a bit (much like a child having a tantrum and falling asleep), and also to dump a bit of the anxiety out of my head. Thus, I apologize for typos or lines that aren’t quite as clever as I’d like them to be, but this is simply my way of talking to no one in particular that doesn’t make me seem crazy, because theoretically, someone is bound to read this eventually (thanks Mom and future wifey!).
And no, Mom and future wifey are not the same person, as I’m sure everyone knows. My, how horrifically Oedipal.
So, I have an interview tomorrow in a pretty good district, but it’s not even to finish the year, which means that I’m entering in December, staying through part of May, and then letting someone else give a final on a whole bunch of stuff that I taught in a way that they didn’t teach it, which I’m sure is hellish for youngins.
Okay, topic change. I tend to find that there are two kinds of people when it comes to me: people who like me, and people who can’t stand me. There tends to be very little middle ground, with people who find me charming on one hill, and people who find me obnoxious or, as one person recently described me, “hopeless.”
The sad thing is that I sometimes have trouble realizing the difference between the two, as even the rudest among us is unlikely to outright say, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t like you. Can you please stop talking to me as if we’re friends?” It is in this context that I admit something which everyone that knows me is already keenly aware of, and it’s something that I need to work on myself: I try way, way too hard and care way, way too much about people liking me. I can’t make one joke and then shut the hell up, but instead, I have to make twenty and quickly take the train from Charmingville to Annoyingtwitburg.
And frankly, I’m sorry to any people that I’ve annoyed. I really am.
Well, not former students. You guys were annoyed because, “Boo hoo, he’s trying to teach us stuff, why can’t we just do nothing everyday and curse in class and wear shirts with beer logos? Teachers are dumb.” It was a pleasure annoying all of you, really.
But I’m nervous about this interview, which now takes place in, oh, 7 hours and 45 minutes. I think that I can answer the interview questions well enough, but this is the only interview I have lined up, and it’s getting to the point where the next openings I find are going to be in April for the 2010-2011 school year. That’s a bit scary.
Also, Christine just sent me a message on gchat that said, “So, what are you doing, sitting in the dark typing an emo Facebook note?”
She’s pretty good. I don’t know if this is that emo, though.
I once had a student who had the beginning e-mail address of “cheerupemokid.” That always made me crack a smile.
This whole thing has been fairly nonsensical and nonsequitorial (which I don’t think is a word, but it kind of fits), but I knew it would be. I ramble and I roll, and I hope that maybe someone can make a lick of sense out of the idiocy that I spew. Yes, I complain, and I mope, and I rattle about how much I suck or how much people suck and yadda yadda yadda, but sometimes, we need to write for ourselves, and not for anyone else.
Of course, that doesn’t stop us from posting it on the Internet for everyone to read, thus showing our hypocrisy. And, apparently, our multiple personality disorder, if we keep referring to ourselves as “we.”
That, or we’re Venom. Or Queen Victoria.
And, that’s enough for one night. I think I feel a little better, and it’s getting very, very late for someone that has to wake up at grown-up time. So, I will say “goodnight” in the hopes that it takes, and leave it at that for now.
A bit of premeditation and a plug
At around 5 PM today, I went to my local Barnes and Noble and, luckily, didn’t get a cookie, marshmallow square, or slice of cheesecake.
That’s not the news.
No, the bit of premeditation is that I spelled out the events of the next few chapters of Carnivore, and, frankly, I wrote until my hand hurt. Is that good? I mean, I guess it’s not good that my hand hurt, but the fact that I wrote with such ferocity that my hand ached in the course of keeping up with my brain? Hooray, brain.
So, a number of chapters are now outlined, and I also actually have a theme, and it seems to be one that I’ve been inserting subconsciously since I started writing Carnivore, something I started doing when I simply thought the title was interesting.
As far as NaNoWriMo, I’m not quite sure what to write about, so if I did it, it would be something I was generally making up as I went along.
Oh, and one more thing: I strongly recommend that, if you enjoy a fair bit of fiction, go over to http://annawritesstories.wordpress.com. I was involved in a college theater show with this girl, and she’s a pretty good writer, so give her your patronage.
Thanks.
Kidsitting – Day 3 – I love the smell of napalm in the morning…and by napalm, I mean poop.
And I don’t love it, so that part was a joke, too.
Today, after somehow managing to avoid changing a dirty, dookie-infested diaper over the last two days, today was all potty-time.
When he woke up this morning, he had soaked through his diaper and PJs, and the sheet, and both blankets. THAT’S how much he peed over the night. So, I changed his diaper (obviously), got him into some clean clothes before breakfast, and then when I discovered the issue with his sheets and blankets before his nap (where he didn’t nap – more on that later), and changed all of that, too.
Then, during his “nap,” I noticed through the intercom that he was consistently making noises including singing, banging and, I shit you not, playing the guitar. There’s a full-size guitar in his room, and while he certainly doesn’t know how to play it on any formal level, he does know that strings make noise when you pluck ‘em. Had he emerged from the womb a fully trained mariachi, I imagine I’d have something far more interesting to write about.
When I got up there at the designated nap end time, he was awake, and greeted me with a heartfelt “I pooped.” And so he did. And thus, I was introduced to the world of baby poopage, post-poopage clean up duties, proper poop disposal and post-poopage therapy and psychological testing i.e. the kid has to understand that flushing more wipes down the toilet won’t actually make his butt cleaner if he doesn’t use them on the aforementioned tushie.
So, the kid’s been a bit of a pain today, but we watched very little TV, which is good. Yesterday, we watched NONE and it was good, but this morning we watched an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine, but part of that was for me, too, I think. He’s such a useful engine, so says Sir Top’em Hat! We then went until around 4 before watching anything else, which was an episode of Kids Next Door, which *I* love, but the DVD stopped working, so that was fate telling us to stop that silliness. However, I felt I owed him a bit more media, so I hopped onto hulu.com, and they just so happened to have a bunch of Sesame Street clips at the ready, and so we watched a few of those until I decided it was enough.
One of them happened to be an old favorite of mine, where all of the Muppets are members of the Continental Congress, and they’re trying to pick a national bird. It’s how I learned that Benjamin Franklin (beautifully portrayed by veteran player and Golden Globe nominee Telly) wanted to pick the turkey, which is absolutely true. The rest, I don’t believe are correct, where Thomas Jefferson (Bert) wants the pigeon, and, perhaps Alexander Hamilton (Oscar) wants the cockatoo, basically so that he can teach it say “scram” and “beat it.” John Adams (Ernie, in the role that would earn him even Emmy nods) suggests the bald eagle, and while I’m not sure that part’s actually true, it wins with the majority of the votes, namely those of Adams and, of course, Elmo (Elmo).
Dinner was Hamburger Helper, which went over well enough, and was surprisingly delicious with a bit of ground up pork. I’m just about to go give him a bath. And so, we reach our inevitable conclusion.
After spending three days taking care of the little bugger, or two and a half to be really fair about it, my view on having my own children is altered, but only slightly. It’s hard at times, and tiresome, and patience is an absolute requirement, as is putting up with tantrums and just letting the kid get it out, and not just giving in because they have an uncanny ability to want. I still want my own kids, but I think of how much they cost over the course of a lifetime, and how in surveys, the unhappiest people were the ones that had chosen to reproduce. Still, even if taking care of Leo isn’t the highlight of my year (especially with nowhere to go and nothing to do over a course of three very rainy days), I’ve found out that, if nothing else, I can take care of a little one, even if it’s not something I’m crazy about doing. That being said, when it’s your own kid, it’s different, or so I hear. You have that biological tick that just sends you into insane love spasms over the wee tike, and that sends you a long way.
Of course, I just cured his injury by rubbing his foot and saying all better…and then it was. Now that’s power. Jesus Christ, eat your heart out.
Carnivore – Part 8
Little Lamb and I move a few feet from the helicopter, and the pretty bird is up and away; now, it’s the agent and the animal, left in the jungle to burn it all down. The bird flies off, and it’s then that my stomach decides to eject every bit of the MRE that they tossed me on the flight to keep me sated.
It is not the most dignified that I have ever looked, and Little Lamb certainly isn’t going to feel any better about the mission. It’s the last place I ever wanted to see again, and here I am, stupid beast, easily persuaded with a promise of vendetta, wanting blood and bone, vengeance and blood-
“Mako?”
Lamb’s bleat wakes me up like hot coffee in the eyes, and I force myself up and wipe the vomit from my chin, leaving a small wet splotch on my right sleeve. ”Where are we, Melville? Sitrep, or whatever you’re calling it now.”
“Catatumbo rainforests, a few dozen klicks west of Venezuela. It’s where Pena keeps a number of hidden camps, and it’s the closest we have to anything remotely resembling his whereabouts. He-”
“We were never able to really find him. I remember that much, even though it’s been the better half of a decade since I’ve even cared to follow his movements. Anyone we ever captured would never give up a thing on him. His soldiers were, and I presume still are, better paid than the Colombian army, and they’re scared enough of him that there was nothing we could do to get them to give us a location. He’s the richest man in the country, and we couldn’t get so much as a region, let alone a forwarding address.” Spitting all of the information out somehow settles my stomach and my nerves, as if they’re the sickness disguised as knowledge.
Melville nods. Professional. ”Not much has changed on that front, except that the amount of cocaine coming in from Colombia has tripled in the last year, even though the government has gotten a lot of the drug violence under control. Really, as long as Pena’s soldiers aren’t causing any trouble in Colombia-”
“Then he’s not going to worry about them, and they can do whatever they like.”
“Exactly.”
I look around the small clearing that the helicopter dropped us into, with nothing but enormous trees and delightful equatorial heat to give us a sense of where we are. Then I realize that we’re in a clearing, and feel like a fool.
“This area, where we are now…this is new. There shouldn’t be clear space here, because after any length of time-”
“The plants at the bottom would eat up the sunlight and start growing.” Little Lamb almost – almost – smiles, and it is not undisturbing to me. Which is disturbing in and of itself. “We’re not quite sure why it’s here, actually; the, um…the “face” just thought it would be a good place to drop us off. There’s not too much activity in this area, just a crossing or stop-off intermittently, sometimes weeks, sometimes months.”
Face wanted us here. Messages hidden in side notes and coincidences, just as spec ops always likes to do it.
Immediately, I fall forward to the ground, my fingers plunging into the soft earth as if it were a bed of tiramisu, pungent and filling. I tear up the soft ground, looking to end the ultimately meaningless lives of would-be trees and ferns and other such flora, and find only the absolute simplicity of nothing. Little Lamb shouts something – probably “Mako, what are you doing, stop wasting time, you’re disgusting and should be stabbed in the eyes, blah blah etc. – but I only hear a muffled cluck, as if in the aftermath of an explosion, deafening all around it. I carve through the earth, happy little hedgehog I am.
My fingers tear in, tossing dirt aside that should be full of life, the endless circle of growth and destruction in rainforests that every grade school boy is taught in Ecology if he’s interested enough in listening, and it’s when I think of Mrs. Truncher and the odd green sandals she wore to school every day that I feel the ring and pointer fingers of my right hand slide into something soft and gooey, and smelling of something that would empty my stomach if I had any more to give.
Little Lamb steps back from the stench and covers her mouth and nose as I emerge from my hole, and look at the filthy muck covering my fingers like some vile pathogen. We both know what it is, and both know what it means.
“Why?” cries Little Lamb, turning back my way, fighting back the bile that threatens to leap from her esophagus. “He…he razed this whole area, spent the time and manpower to…to-”
“To make a graveyard, Agent Melville. A quiet graveyard that would still stand as a show of power to people who knew what to look for.” I kneel down and wipe the residue of newly spoiled human remains on the grass, the liquefied flesh and organs fighting a bit to stick to the ground. I remind myself that gloves should not be ignored in lieu of enthusiasm and a bit of drive. “It’s almost subtle, except for the obvious expense of clearing an acre in the middle of Catatumbo. But those who knew who they were looking for…they’d understand.”
I consider turning back to the pit and seeing who or what it was, but it doesn’t matter. A sack of rotting meat, whether it’s a poor nobody who stumbled on something they shouldn’t have or a former el presidente, is still a sack of rotting meat that isn’t going to help me tear Pena’s face apart at the outer canthases. Ooh, that’s pretty horrible; I should try to remember that.
Little Lamb seems to have found a bit of her constitution, and turns back toward me, although she has to look at me, so her stomach probably doesn’t settle quite as much as she’d like. She pulls some little lit up device out of her right pocket and looks at it instead, tracing something along the screen with her finger.
“Let’s…let’s start heading northeast, a bit deeper into the rain forest. We have records of camps that used to be in that area as way stations for drugs traveling into Venezuela, Puerto Barco, and other regions where Pena has buyers. The intel might be outdated, but it’s the best we have.”
I don’t answer, and she doesn’t wait for one. In one motion, the device is away and a pistol, a Beretta M9, is in her other hand, locked and alert. The M9’s a piece of garbage, but it’s the standard for five different branches of the armed services, and so, naturally, Little Lamb has it at her disposal. Still, the slide can fracture in the midst of firing, sending the broken half of it flying back into the face of the shooter, so if you don’t mind the possibility of facial lacerations or broken teeth and always have a spare around, then it’s all gravy.
Without a word, she’s moving, and I follow. She’s fast, running low through the grasses and out into the darkness and the trees, looking like the teeth of a great beast welcoming us into the true face of night. Effortlessly, she finds the wholes in the forest and bounds over rocks and logs like some great gazelle, her dark hair forming only the slightest shadow as it bounces incidentally in the moonlight. It mesmerizes, and I’m behind her like the fox and her tail.
At first, I run behind as if I’m the man at the end of the evolution of man, upright and forward, striding forth like the runner at Marathon, but it all feels so false. I run and somehow keep up, but my mind ticks and my tendons cry for more. As we dash through the night like two great wolves, my back arches higher as my face lowers to the ground. I breath in, hard, and feel the hot night air seeping through my nose and out of my eyes, my brain picking up the traces of a world that has for so long been absent, viciously fighting, and now finds it can no longer be denied. The forest calls, and my hands pound into the ground as I propel myself forward, the great beast I am, bounding and hunting for prey, a creatures that tears throats with tooth and claw.
I’m sweating, and swear to God I might be drooling a little bit, wanting my tongue to loll freely with my mouth agape, like a Saint Bernard with its head out the car window. Still, I hold some dignity, and instead just smile with the hungriest grin I could ever hope to muster. This is life again, and it’s everything I have shut away, terrifying and wonderful.
We run for what feels like hours, but may only be minutes – some scattered light pops through the trees, but I have no idea what time we were dropped off anyway – as Little Lamb makes decisions with a quick snap, assuming I’ll follow, and I do. She bolts left, and so we go left, or veer toward a hill with no warning, and I am only a step behind, in tune with the pitter patter of her feet on the hungry dirt.
And then we stop.
She holds up her right hand, and I freeze in place like an obedient and curious puppy. She looks through the trees to a lone man just a few feet away and below, a local in some faded jeans and a white, stained tank top. Of course, the AK-47 slung over his shoulder as he takes a leak probably suggests that he isn’t a naturalist lunatic interested in a rare species of lemur.
Melville turns her face slightly towards me, her bright green eyes still on the man in the gully. “Mako, stay back here, I’m going to try to go around and get behind him. That way, you can flank him if he…Mako?”
It’s then she realizes that I’m already behind him.
I wrap my right arm around his face and over his arm, the bit of armor mesh in the arm of my sweater preventing his teeth from digging into me. I imagine his eyes go wide and up as my left arm wraps around his and separates his olecranon from the outer condyle, effectively annihilating what used to be his elbow. It must be unbearable.
He tries to scream something that would be assuredly horrible, but he’s muffled by a mouthful of my arm. I bring him to his knees and quickly move my left hand across his face to the right side of his mandible as the attempted screaming continues. Melville comes down into the gully, horrified, unsure of what to say as his shrieks finally subside into plain old panicked moaning.
“Mel…” Discretion, idiot. “Lady, you speak the language?”
She hesitates, still reeling from what she’s just seen.
“Espanol!? Lady, espeake the lingua?”
Shaken, she finds herself. “Yeah…yeah, I speak eight different languages…”
Overachieving nonsense. “Well we only need one now. Ask him if he works for Pena.”
When I say the word “Pena,” he tenses up, and the moaning dies down a bit more. Little Lamb finds her bearings and says some words, and he doesn’t do a thing. It’s then that I tug a bit on his jaw, and he murmurs loud and nods his head. Apparently, breaking the elbow before issuing a single demand or request is proper interrogation etiquette for soldiers at the bottom of Pena’s organization.
“Wonderful. Now, tell him that if he doesn’t give us directions to his camp, I’m going to open his face like a gate.”
Tomorrow it is
Okay, so I’m a bit more tired than I thought I’d be, and it looks like I’ll be finishing the story tomorrow instead of tonight. Still, more Carnivore was written, and it will most likely end up available to read in the next 24 hours! Isn’t that great! Hooray for actually doing something remotely productive!
Been writing!
Spend a bit more time writing Carnivore, Part 8! It’s shaping up to be the longest chapter thus far, and should sate the fixes of those eagerly awaiting more Alan Mako (i.e. Liz and my Mom). Hopefully, I’ll finish the chapter tonight.
