The Happy Snerd Chap. 5 (Patreon)

Mortimer didn’t consider himself a good person. He didn’t think he was a bad person either. He existed in a liminal corridor between unasked for life and undeniable death. Good or evil meant a choice was made. He was just wriggling through the tube. 

Although he tried to keep a positive attitude about that. “Fake it ‘till you make it.” “Embody your success and manifest it into the world.” “Nothing changes until you make a change.” The cliches and mantras helped, some days. It was an uphill struggle.  

He didn’t realize he was smiling as he looked at the bugs cascading down the steps. He didn’t realize that he was tapping his iron hook eagerly. His mind was lost in the future moment, scheming against the bumbling creatures. They were looking at him now. They were stacking up on the stairs closest to him. They weren’t just moving blindly, they were hunting. 

They thought he was food. He thought they were food. Let’s just see who eats who, he thought. Some days were an uphill struggle. But despite what he had thought, it turned out to be a good day.

It must be those green orbs. The bile, that energy. They are blind and deaf, but they can detect the energy from far away. And since I have a few bugs’ worth in me, I must look way more delicious than their usual prey.

He watched their flesh bulge and shift. Their clawed feet fit these narrow steps poorly. Those claws were good for hanging on to prey, but were lacking in traction on smooth stone. The weight of that long body was carried heavily on the front paws. Those pillowy sacks filled to bursting by gravity and the necessity of alien biology. 

Mortimer chanced a quick glance backwards, The stairs were much wider than the door he walked through. On either side of the door was nothing- a void deeper than he could see from his angle. It was enough to give you vertigo. Fortunately he had walked quite a way up the stairs. 

A wall would have been better for his plan. Mortimer’s smile grew wider, the sharp corners of his mouth hauling up towards his ears. Didn’t matter. It would still work.

Mortimer held the hook in both hands and charged up to meet the first bug. The bug used a bit more sense than Mortimer would have preferred, swiping at his head with just one of its front legs. Mortimer read the attack, shifting to the other side and sweeping out with his hook. He caught the critter just above the claws, pulled back as hard as he dared, and hopped backwards down the stairs.

If they were on flat ground, this would have achieved nothing. Even on a flat slope it wouldn’t have worked. But on the shallow steps, where the bug didn’t have much grip? The ugly thing slid on the concrete treads. It scrabbled to stop its slide, trying to get its feet under it. 

Mortimer thought it looked a little too likely to succeed, so he moved on to tactic number two- he body checked the side of the fleshy mass. His shoulder sank an alarming way in. The bug smelled, but oddly, not very badly. It smelled like concrete, iron and a faint sour yeasty funk. The check was just enough to overbalance the creature. The bug tumbled, rolling and scrabbling at the steps as it fell towards oblivion.

Then the next bug was on him, and there were two more besides it. He ran the same plan. Hook and shove, hook and shove. He kept to one side of the stairs, near the enormous railing and the oversized statues of alien saints. He wanted them coming straight down on him, or coming in from a sharp angle. He needed all that weight going forward. 

Mortimer didn’t dare risk a look back. The plan would work, or he was dead. Simple as that. He just needed to hook and shove. To move around just enough to keep those watery, bile filled sacks putting all their weight on their front claws. Not too much side to side. He needed them falling in the same direction too. 

He knew the plan worked the second he saw one of the descending monsters jerk its head to the side and look at something below him. The thrashing noises were getting louder and louder. There should have been screams. Given the battle breaking out below, there should have been so many screams. 

The rictus grin was starting to hurt. The muscles were cramping. It wasn’t a ‘happy’ expression- it was madness. Mortimer had given in to the joy of the slaughter. He couldn’t even conceive of losing here. Couldn’t even conceive of stopping or running. He needed what was in these bugs. To the very middle part of his bones, he needed it. Those bile cores let him feel whole. Alive. Strong. So the bugs had to die. It was just a question of how. 

He ran out of bugs. There had been… thirty, perhaps. A lot of them wound up ignoring him and charged directly towards the bottom of the stairs. Now there was just one in front of him, and the rest were thrashing down below. The slaps and scrapes of clawed hands ripping into baggy flesh sounded sometimes like applause, other times like a loose tarp in the wind. 

No bones, and what organs they do have seem to float around inside these bloated sacks. Must be pretty good at absorbing a big fall. 

Mortimer whirled the hook around, smacking the bug over and over. The claws came swiping over, but the bug didn’t dare rear up for its slam attack. Its attacks were telegraphed horribly, and completely predictable. 

Good thing too- I’ve never been in a real fight in my whole life.

He fixed his hands up like he was swinging for the bleachers at the K, and stepped into the blow. It made the most incredible THWACK sound, as an explosion of green spread the length of the creature. It was already shining like a glowstick. The bug was ready. 

The alien thing hauled back with its right claw, ready to slap Mortimer’s head off. Mortimer didn’t wait around for it, dipping around to the bug’s left. He jabbed down with his hook, snagging a chunky fold of skin just after the second pair of legs, then, careful not to dislodge the hook, slammed into the bug with his shoulder. 

The flesh, thoroughly abused and flushed to swollen by the beating, ripped immediately as the bug tumbled down. This time, Mortimer didn’t just let it go. He quickly dropped onto the steps, laying on top of the rod and doing his best to brace one stretched foot against a bannister. The iron rod ripped through his fingers. It very nearly got away from him, pulling him down the steps, slaloming face first towards the void. 

The concrete tore up the back of his hands. Tore up his face. But he managed to stop. The bug thrashed its life away at the end of his hook, the bile spilling down the steps. Mortimer watched it fall, panting, breathing through the pain. 

The bug hung on his hook like a trash bag full of water. Most of it spilling out. His grin was painful, but there was no chance of it leaving his face. Most of the fluid spilled out… but not all of it. Looked like he had about half a garbage bag full.

“Why no, Professor, I don’t think this meets the standards for a proper field test. And, I will admit, not running it past the IRB was a severe ethical violation and could severely impact my future prospects in the field.” Mortimer giggled, lightheaded with the pain and horror of it all. “Why, I could even be forced to change careers. Again.”

There was a slaughter at the bottom of the steps. The bugs had fallen into a furious melee. They had clawed and ripped each other apart. Some had survived, but most were dead. The long fall, and then the ripping claws of their ‘comrades’ meant there were few chances to survive.  

A few is not none. He watched one bug shove bite through the leathery skin of a pinned rival, then shove the straw like maw in, slurping up everything inside. Others were slurping up the spilled bile, not willing to wait for it to pull together and gell. 

They were turning on each other. They would feed madly, ripping open the corpses, barely tolerating the competition also eating. When they couldn’t stand it any longer, they spun and attacked. It was a constant race between getting stronger and killing others before they could get stronger. Only one would survive. 

Me. I will be the one to survive. He waited until the last two were ripping into each other. They were already multicolored galaxies, the brilliant green of twenty minutes ago now just one swatch on the Pantone hurricane inside them. It had formed a cycle- get stronger, bleed, feed, get stronger, bleed, feed, and so on. It took time to eat and to heal. The strategy was pretty simple. It just took patience. That, and making sure his science experiment wouldn’t slide away.

His hook was dripping with bile. He carefully tapped it against the steps, trying to shake off the drops without making too much noise. Then he realized he was being dumb, and let it clang off the steps as he walked down to the fight below. 

Some of them must have fallen off the bottom. No way this is thirty bodies.

The two slapped at each other with their claws. He could hear a difference in the sound of the impacts. The bodies of the aliens were changing. Hardening. They were hitting harder and faster too. They weren’t any smarter, though. Both lifted their first two sets of legs up off the ground, trying to be bigger, get more reach and leverage. Somehow missing that they were about the same size. Then they smashed together.

Neither had figured out blocking. Both got holes torn in them. They both lunged for the holes, trying to shove their mouths inside and eat their enemy from within. They both clawed at the other, trying to open more holes, bigger holes, make them bleed out before cannibalism could heal them.

By the end of it, Mortimer just walked up with his hook and dragged one away from the other. It had lost so much bile, the beastly thing was manageable for an office nerd. A couple quick pulls to widen the rips in both ‘victors,’ then it was just down to waiting. 

The green bile dripped down the steps. A waterfall of life pouring down, pouring off the edge into the void. Mortimer didn’t try to stop it. He did everything he could to stay out of the way of it. He remembered very clearly what happened the last time a drop touched his skin. He stepped to the other side of the stairs, and watched life drip away. Waiting. Waiting to see if his experiment would pay off.

Watching the rain fall, pouring off the curb, flooding the street, then down into the storm drain. And after a couple minutes, the rain started running in reverse.

The bile wanted to clump together, and two parts didn’t have to be touching for the attractive force to be effective. He saw droplets flying up from below the stairs, their impacts on the puddles above leaving ripple after ripple. Mortimer went back to the corpse he left above, and did his best to nail it down with his rebar. 

The green droplets met and merged, colors slowly being added to the mix, getting brighter and brighter. The motion of the lights inside the growing jelly ball becoming violent. The ball seemed to be hardening as it grew more dense. It was taking on a glassy sheen, making a cracking noise when it bounced and rolled along the steps. 

A psychedelic glass lacrosse ball rolled up the steps to the corpse-bag Mortimer was standing over. It rolled up the alien body, through the long rips in the skin, and inside. Mortimer watched the remaining bile vanish, the flesh withering. Sucked dry by the core. 

What he pulled out of the corpse was no color at all. Not clear, he knew it was full of colors, just not ones his eyes could perceive or his brain could comprehend. Colors from beyond space. Colors from beyond the world he knew. 

Cool. Glassy. Like a paperweight, he thought, pressing his teeth against it. He didn’t think, didn’t even hesitate, before biting down. 

Something shattered. Several things shattered. Mortimer was one of them.

It wasn’t bliss or ecstasy. It was a sudden release from pain. He had been in agony his whole life. Every irreducible fraction of every second since the moment of conception was an infinitely repeating fractal of suffering. But now he was free. He was alive, free, and strong. The pain had stopped. At long last, he could draw a full breath. Taste the air. Feel the oxygen burning in his body and driving the furnaces in every cell.

With the absence of pain came room to think. He could sense his thoughts moving in the high parts of his mind. He knew them by the shadows they cast, like clouds of imagination passing between the wet meat in his skull and the burning immaterial light of Truth. The light was too blinding- his meat had gone numb. That was alright. Imagination gives room for new thoughts to grow. Still far from the truth, but striving ever upwards.

He convulsed. A second time. A third. Tickles of animal comfort came as tendons unknotted. Nerves smoothed out. His meat was so much more than a vessel for his mind. It was his mind. Thinking, feeling, existing was something done in one piece. There was no divide between body and mind. As the mind unknotted, so did the body. As the body healed, so did the mind.

The moment passed. Mortimer didn’t know how long it took before he came back to himself. He wasn’t lost in wonder anymore. He didn’t exist on some transcendental plaine. He was, however, stronger. He knew that his body was not the same, that his mind had changed. He wasn’t evolved- he was complete.

He could feel again. When had he gone numb? It must have been long ago. He could feel again, and the world was reborn.

He blinked hard, and started paying attention to the world around him. He wasn’t on the stairs anymore. He was standing on a concrete slab in front of a door. There was nothing else around except darkness and the void. There was a brassy “Clink clink clink” noise from near his feet. He had been hearing it since he arrived. 

When he looked down, he saw a grinning monkey, slowly bashing a pair of cymbals together. Another puppet, his key spinning endlessly in his back.

“I remember you. Aunt Ruth gave you to me when I was… six, or something? I hated you. You look creepy and your little spring was busted right out of the box. No matter how much I turned your key, you always bashed the cymbals slowly.”

Mortimer crouched down and poked at it. “Mom wouldn’t let me throw you out until I was sixteen. She said you were a precious childhood memory. Precious to who?” He picked up the doll. It felt just like he remembered. He tried the knob on the door. It swung open, and the blinding white light pulled Mortimer inside.

“Wheeell I’ll be! I would've never thought you would like eating bugs so much. Wish we had you round the farm when the locust came. ‘Course we had such bad luck with the harvest that year that we wound up eating up all of them! Green Corn, Momma called it. Just roast ‘em, peel ‘em and lots of salt.”

“I don’t have any salt.” Mortimer looked himself over. He had lost his iron hook at some point. The monkey was still there, which seemed unfair. He had also lost all his wounds. He had expected to heal after eating the orb, but healing his shredded clothes seemed a bit too much. Yet here he was. Fresh as a daisy.

The doll looked him over and nodded. “Reckon you’re salty enough. I’ll lay it out for ya. You won! You ate up so much that the buffet showed you the door. That means you get to keep more now and can buy more when you start next time.”

“The healing, the clothes?”

“Gonna let you figure that one out. Ain’t too hard to suss. If you use the ‘ole noodle.”

“Buy more…?”

“Yep. He’s been trying to teach you for so long, but you kept not learning. Well, not just you. So now he’s trying something different. Now you gotta pay for your lessons.”

“The energy?” Mortimer asked, noticing the way the doll evaded the question.

“Your tuition and school supplies, yes siree.”

“And… what happens if I don’t get teleported to the door?”

“That ain’t exactly… you know what? It’ll keep. Ah. Lessee. You either make your way to the door, which might take a fair while, depending, or you get eaten by something else. Make it to the door, and you can leave but without everything you could have. It’s alright. And if you die, well. All that energy in you gets hollowed out and gobbled up.”

The puppet’s mouth dropped open into its signature dopey leer. “You noticed how it seemed to fill ya up? Healing up bits of you ya didn’t even know was broke? Memories coming back? World seems like a bright place?”

“Yes.”

“Reckon you don’t want to lose that feeling. Again. Anyhoo, until next time, pardner.”

Mortimer was sitting in his despicable rental car on the Ogallah side of WaKeeney, parked on the grassy verge of Old Route 40. He was pretty sure he had pulled over some miles back, but maybe he was wrong. It was still night. It was still chilly. He tried the key and the engine turned over straight away. Four thirty in the morning. He had lost hours. He felt better rested than he could ever remember.

The positive affirmations are just part of it. It turns out that hard work, inner focus, and murdering giant alien insects are the keys to self fulfillment. Mortimer smiled and got back on the road. For all the orbs he ate, he was hungry. And it might just be Kansas, but the night felt unreal. Checking to see if he’d had a psychotic break was necessary.

Even by Kansas standards, the ‘city’ of WaKeeney didn’t have much going for it. Flat country with flat, mass produced houses with all the charm of a cinder block in a ditch. The biggest buildings around were the metal roofed barns and sheds for farming equipment, and they weren’t even all that big. 

Affordable housing, though. At least that was his bet. Something that was rarer than hen’s teeth out on the edges of the country. This seemed like a place where you might not have a rich life, but you could have a full one.

The Alta gas station had a big lot, plenty of room for a sixteen-wheeler to pull around and fuel up. It was completely empty, the gray concrete almost invisible in the predawn darkness. Like you were on the surface of the moon, trying to get back to the sunny side. 

The gas station only had one pump. All that space in the parking lot, all that gray concrete, and floating in the middle of it all was a single pump. Somehow, Alta managed to alienate a gas pump from a gas station, and both from anyone who might use either.

Mortimer couldn’t help himself- he laughed so hard he drummed his hands on the steering wheel. There was doubtless a very sensible reason for it, but it just looked goofy to him.

Mortimer went into the little shop. He put twenty in the tank, bought himself a cup of inexpensive coffee and a doughnut that was, at the very least, sugary. 

“You sell any playing cards?” He asked the sleepy clerk.

“Yes sir, next to the Armor-All wipes. We got some funny ones up by the register, too.”

The ones next to the car supplies were a two-pack of Bicycle playing cards. One pack in red, the other in blue. He grabbed them. The ones at the register were ‘funny’ in that they had pictures of odd looking cats on them. Even with his current good humor, they barely rated a half smile. He bought a pack of them too.

Mortimer went back out to his economical rental, settled breakfast on the roof and popped the trunk. He opened the packs of cards and dumped them out, stirring them around inside the trunk like he was making soup. 

He made a little shape with his mind. Out of the mess, a perfectly neat stack of blue cards appeared. He flipped them over and checked. Blue Rider Bicycle Cards. All in order by suit. Didn’t work on any of the other cards.

It was all real.