Bastard’s Doom
Bastard’s Doom
2a. To Fuck Off
Evening had fallen by the time Stud finished cleaning Dick’s house. Stud may have been an insensitive bully but he took great pride in his diligence when cleaning. Every room had been scrubbed, vacuumed, air-freshened and double checked. Several loads of laundry had been done. There were 18 black bags full of mouldy food, empty bottles and cigarette ends piled up in the front garden. Stud was exhausted.
He had borrowed Dick’s only suit, after washing it of course - a crushed-velvet jacket and trousers combo in night-black. There were a few stains and patches where the velvet had rubbed off but it fitted Stud perfectly.
He swished into the kitchen to try and rouse Dick, who was naked on the floor, snoring like a truck engine.
"Come on fuckface, get up."
Nothing happened.
He prodded Dick in the gonads with his bare foot. "Hey! Fuckface! RICHARD!!"
Dick stirred.
"DICK!!" shouted Stud.
Dick groaned and opened his eyes.
"What the fu.... fuck... WHAT? Fuck off."
"Come on, let’s go for a walk."
"A walk? Why? Just leave me alone, please?" begged Dick, his eyes slowly coming into focus, a slight morphine warmth still tingling within him. "I must get more of this." he thought.
The loving metallic hand of Toasty clamped gently round his neck and gave him a quick shot of amphetamine. Just a perker-upper, nothing too crazy, then released him.
Dick’s eyes opened wide. Stud watched with alarm, not understanding what was happening, fully prepared to run.
"Where’s Slender Brenda?" asked Dick, suddenly super-alert.
"She left," replied Stud, "she got out of the bath very rosy-cheeked. Told me I should tell you she thinks you’re a knob when you wake up. She took one of your bedsheets - it barely wrapped all the way round her - and said I was a knob too."
"Anything else?"
"She also said you have to look after her dog til it gets better, and to fuck off."
"What’s wrong with her dog?"
"Toasty zapped it in the cunt when it went to piss on her."
Dick nodded his head sagely at this morsel of information.
"Good job. That fucking thing had it coming."
He struggled to his feet and fetched a bottle of rum out of one of the cupboards, unscrewing the lid, taking a mouthful and screwing the lid back on in one fluid gesture.
"Want some?" he said, offering the bottle to Stud. Stud ignored him. His own battle with alcoholism had been long and torturous. One drink could easily send him over the edge and he wasn’t prepared to do that again. Last time he’d agreed to a pint of lager he’d been banned permanently from The Pig and Anus for shitting into one of the pockets of the snooker table, yelling "I potted the brown!!" then stripping naked, smearing his face with lipstick and falling asleep on top of the bar.
Dick frowned at the smashed window, then opened the back door. On stepping outside he was greeted by the sight of a blood covered Bastard humping a clearly uncomfortable and shit-smeared Sofia.
Stud pushed past him shouting "BASTARD! NO!" again. Bastard, having emptied his throbbing dog-balls tried to dismount but couldn’t, his swollen member being locked inside Sofia. Stud kicked at Bastard’s ribs and head to little avail. Both dogs started to howl and snap at each other and Stud. Dick, unimpressed by the noise and violence, uncapped his rum and started pouring it over the dogs.
Whether it was the alcohol, the smell or the surprise, it had the desired effect of separating the animals, who ran off in opposite directions and stopped at different ends of the garden to lick their various wounds, burns and sore bits. Stud marched over to Bastard and slipped the choker-lead round his neck and dragged him into the house. Dick walked up to Sofia thinking "I’m actually going to kill this dog.", which Sofia heard and understood perfectly, so naturally she ran away from him and back into the kitchen, hoping to run out of the front door and back to her mommy’s house.
Unfortunately for Sofia the other door into the hallway was shut. She ran into it full-pelt, stupid beast that she was, and knocked herself unconscious, sprawling in a curly-haired heap on the linoleum.
Dick entered the kitchen, kicked her out of the way, and followed Stud and Bastard into the hallway with the words "Toasty, sort this mutt out would you?" imagining Toasty’s healing magic to extend to all living creatures.
"Oh I will." said Toasty with a toaster-like sarcasm.
2b. Hippy Cunts
The walk to the cliff was uneventful. Both men were dressed ridiculously: Stud in his velvet suit, Dick in a slightly-too-small neon-pink shellsuit that covered neither ankle nor wrist. Both wore white socks and Crocs - the only footwear Dick would entertain. Both had hands stoically pushed down into their pockets, face-forward into the cold wind from seawards. Stud held Bastard’s lead in one pocket, dragging the filthy animal onwards to it’s fate.
They reached the cliff edge and stopped. Each looking down towards the waves crashing on the beach in the moonlight. Stud was by turns terrified and bewildered as to what crazy shit might happen next. Dick was surprisingly clear-headed and resolute. Whether it was his recent epiphany or the shot of speed he couldn’t be sure, but he knew what he wanted - redemption, drugs and sex, and not necessarily in that order. Bastard couldn’t deny his fear, but was buoyed by the hundred-mile-an-hour stream of consciousness emanating from the pine-man, and the knowledge that soon the human would show a weakness - a weakness that Bastard could mercilessly exploit to destroy him - and Bastard would be elevated to his rightful place in the pack.
The beach was a beautiful place. Dick occasionally came down here on his own when wanking had lost its thrall or the booze wasn’t helping him to introspect. He would stomp, saunter or stagger down, depending on his mood, find the special bench, the one with DIK IS AWSUM scratched into it by Slender Brenda all those years ago, when they were just teenagers (he didn’t know she was talking about dick in general, and not him, or even his particularly). He’d take a seat and just stare at the clouds, the waves, the boats, the cliffs, the birds, the people, their fucking dogs, the pier, the pub, the streetlights, the fence and anything else that caught his eye. It was the closest thing he had to a safe place. "Brenda would like to know about this place." he thought to himself. "No way am I going to tell her. She’d just find a way to use it against me, or come down here to annoy me when I’m trying to think." He also uncharitably thought immediately after.
Bastard shattered his reverie with a guttural growl. The dog had sensed every nuance of emotion, and could feel Dick softening. He drew his furry lips back, revealing an almost complete set of glistening yellow teeth. Some had been lost to the toffees Stud gave him, some to the beatings. "Bastard... NO!" shouted Stud, realising something was amiss, but Stud’s reign of terror was over in Bastard’s eyes.
"I’m the fucking boss now!" thought Bastard and made his move, his back legs releasing their stored tension like a sprinter off the start line, veins standing out like whipcords: Bastard flew through the air, a perfectly focused dart of pure violence aimed at Dick’s throat.
At least that’s what Bastard intended to happen.
In reality, Stud - sensing but not understanding the depth of aggression in his normally docile dog - was just reaching down to hold Bastard steady, and the moment he grabbed the collar was the exact moment Bastard exploded forwards. Stud instinctively pulled backwards and dug his heels in, with the result that Bastard swung round in a short arc spinning Stud on the spot. Stud quickly realised what was happening and released the hound.
Poor Bastard flew over the low guard-rail, realised there was no ground but tried to run through the air anyway, back to Stud, back to Dick - his pack! - to no avail, because even dogs can’t beat gravity. The howl he began on the way down was cut short by a solid sounding thump - like someone hitting a cow with a long plank of wood.
The two men walked slowly to the railing. Stud stared open mouthed down at the beach. He could just about make out the inert form of Bastard, spread-eagled on the sand. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this at all.
"Fucking stupid dog cunt." said Dick.
"SHOW A LITTLE FUCKING RESPECT!!" shouted Stud, "MY BEAUTIFUL DOG HAS JUST KILLED ITSELF!!". His eyes were almost as wide as Dick’s and there was saliva spraying from his mouth as he yelled.
"It’s not dead." said Dick calmly, "Look."
Stud looked back down and saw that Bastard was spasming slightly. He could hear a weak whimpering noise. A group of ten or twelve of the local wreckheads, who had been enjoying a moonlit acid trip on the beach, had gathered round the canine wreckage, and were saying things like "That’s fucked up man", "Is it real?" and "Who’s a good little doggie? Are you lost?" to it and each other.
"O, rejoice, he is alive! Dick, go down and get him!"
"I’m not fucking getting him. He just tried to kill me!" said Dick in surprise.
Stud responded by pushing Dick as hard as he could, Dick tripped over the little fence and, eyes wide with drugs and fear went tumbling down the same way as Bastard.
"Cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu" howled Dick until his fall was broken with a sound like a cow being dropped into a bath full of jelly.
He landed squarely on top of the supine Bastard, spraying half the dog’s guts out of its anus and the other half out through its nose, mouth and eyeholes. A fair amount of blood had also squirted out of all the holes left in Bastard’s skin from his earlier altercation with the kitchen window. Most of the small group of local druggies were therefore covered in red and/or brown goo, slime and chunks.
Stud looked down at the devastation with dismay. His dog was completely flattened although obviously still contained some bones, some of which were sticking out through the skin at jaunty angles. The wasters were mostly vomiting in disgust, screeching in horror, and probably hoping that this was a terrible hallucination, although a few of them had already lost interest and had staggered off in an even smaller group to look at some really cool shells one of them had found. Dick was nowhere to be seen.
The remains of Bastard, which resembled nothing more than a dog-shaped bag with some sticks in it, rose up from the sand and floated away towards the concrete staircase that led up the cliff. One of the acid-heads thought she had seen two wobbly pink peanuts floating alongside it, but quickly realised that - in the circumstances, and taking into account what she had seen only moments previously - her eyes were not to be trusted. She spent the rest of the night sharpening a spoon against a rock fully intending to scoop out her eyeballs, but was distracted at the last minute by some really cool shells because she was just another fucking hippy.
Dick clambered up the stairs, still in stealth-mode, carrying the barely recognisable remains of Bastard. He had entered his infamous stealth-mode, not out of fear of retaliation from the barely cognisant drug-users, but so that he could raid their stash without being caught. He had pocketed three and a half sheets of Super-Mario branded acid, about three hundred and fifty trips in all, a good years worth, along with a big lump of sticky black hash, a bottle of cheap supermarket-brand rum with some sand in it, a small bag of white powder that he was looking forward to investigating and a bottle of pills marked ’Tramadol 100mg’ that would surely help ease the pain in his testicles, thigh and soul.
He reached the top about ten minutes later, wheezing with dismay, and slumped to the ground leaning against the guard-rail. Stud came over from his vantage point where he’d been watching the hippies freakout about everything that may or may not just have happened and accusing each other of taking all the drugs. Dick handed him the hash and the bottle of pills.
"Skin up Stud, and open these. I’ve never been able to get the hang of childproof caps."
Stud rolled a fat double-skinner and lit it. He took a few massive drags and handed it to Dick, then opened the pills and handed them over as well, after taking three himself. Dick was impressed. "This spliff is superb Stud, and your intake of opiate derived prescription medicine would leave a lesser man a drooling wreck."
"What, I thought these were paracetamol! What the fuck have I just taken?"
"Never mind, just chew some of this paper for a bit, you’ll feel much better." He tore off a strip of twenty hits from one of the sheets of acid and handed it to the man he was slowly beginning to think of as a friend.
"What is it?" asked Stud, warily eyeing the strip of paper with the computer-game character moustache on it.
"Field medicine, ex-army rations..." lied Dick, "they used to give it to us before battle to keep us calm and focused."
"You weren’t in the army." said Stud, chewing the paper anyway.
"I’m an army of one," said Dick firmly, chewing a strip of the acid himself, "and things are about to get fucked up."
"Yeah, because everything that’s happened in the past few hours hasn’t been fucked up at all." sarked Stud.
"There are degrees of fuck-uppedness, it’s a spectrum rather than some black and white binary thing, and we have been on the first grey rung of the ladder of fuckups, a ladder that reaches all the way into the fucking sky, and it’s time to get climbing."
"Wow... You are utterly fucked in the head. That made no sense except in a barely perceptible abstract way. What are we going to do now? What of Bastard’s remains?" Stud gestured to the dirty bag of skin on the ground by Dick, "we should give him the send off he deserves..."
"DESERVES?!" interrupted Dick viciously, "HE DESERVED TO DIE!"
Stud stared at Bastard moodily and muttered something vaguely resentful under his breath.
"What did you just fucking say?"
"I said what is it with you and dogs? Did one bum you as a child?"
"I was NEVER bummed by a dog as a child!"
Gradually, as the two men bickered, the drugs began to take hold. Reason, logic and reality all folded in on themselves in ever more convoluted ways. Time became an abstract concept rooted in a plane of existence that neither of them could perceive, let alone comprehend, and many hours of it passed before anything coherent happened again.
2c. Her Most Violent Appendage
Vague memories swirled. Something about an empty dog... a bottle of awful rum with a gritty crunchy after-taste... a conversation with a plant about how we are machines for collapsing wavefunctions so it’s not very surprising that so much stuff happens when we’re around... Stud bitching to the girl behind the cigarette counter in the supermarket whilst wearing the empty dog as a hat... The look of horror on her face... empty dog?
Bastard. Stud’s stupid fucking dog had killed itself in a failed attack on Dick. A wry chuckle escaped Dick’s lips.
He prised his eyelids apart with his fingers and attempted to look around the room he was in. It looked familiar. It was a lot cleaner than usual, but it was almost definitely his kitchen. There was Toasty humming away to herself. There was Stud, clothes ripped to tatters, face-down, arms by his side, drooling and gibbering into the linoleum. There was Bastard, licking the arse of Stud’s trousers, looking remarkably healthy.
Wait, what? He peered intently at the shit-hound. Tufts of curly black hair poked out of the various puncture wounds in its skin, and the skin itself seemed tighter, stretched almost. Bastard’s eyes were a different colour.
"What the suffering fuck is going on now?" said Dick.
"Ahh... the Kraken awakens," said Toasty in her most ultra-sarcastic voice, "I wondered if it would ever happen! Do you know how long it is since you were last conscious in this room?"
"Shut up Toasty, I’ve only just woken up and something... something isn’t right."
"Go on, guess. How long?" she said with extra perkiness, just because she knew how much it would annoy him.
"I don’t know," grumbled Dick angrily, "six hours?"
"You left this building to walk the dog about sixty hours ago Dick. Nearly three whole days! You got back this morning, pulling Stud on a lead behind you, threw the empty skin of Bastard the dog onto the kitchen counter and said ’Let’s have some fucking fun computer-face!’ whereupon Stud cried himself to sleep and we set about very carefully cutting open the skin..."
"Wait, what? Stud cried himself to sleep? That’s classic!" Dick chuckled even more wryly than before. He was going to have a lot of fun mocking Stud later.
"Indeed, as I was saying, we cut open the..."
"Toasty," interrupted Dick again, "are there any drugs left?"
Toasty flung the untouched bag of white powder to Dick and pressed on, "We cut the skin open and..."
"WAIT!! What’s wrong with Bastard? We accidentally killed it, I mean it was pretty cool how it all happened, blood everywhere, all over these stupid vegetarian cunts on the beach, I stole all of their drugs,” he waved the bag with a loose flourish, “but how is he alive now? And what’s wrong with him? I suppose the re-animation process must have taken its toll but what’s with all the tufts of hair and..."
"AS I WAS TRYING TO SAY," continued Toasty with a hint of digital anger in her beautiful voice, "we cut open the skin of Bastard and superglued Sofia into it, your idea I might add, something about ’fucking with Brenda and Stud’s heads’, it was even your idea to pull the tufts of hair through the cuts on the skin. Quite an artistic touch I thought."
"Hnnnngggh," said Dick, snorting a fat line of the mystery powder, "WOOOOOHAHHH, fuck yes! FUCK!" He danced from side to side slightly saying “Tight! Tight!” and tilted his head back, snorting loudly, then looked at Toasty quizzically, "I’m sorry what?"
"OH FORGET IT YOU ARSE-KNUCKLE!!" screamed Toasty.
"Oooh, who’s a bit touchy today then!" sang Dick. He felt positively refreshed and super-alert. He grinned facetiously and had a spring in his step as he fetched a fresh bottle of rum from the cupboard. "If we’ve really been away for that long then it’s Friday night Toasty... do you know what that means?"
"Oh let me guess... will you be visiting that hellish den of despair on Mildew Street with all the human wreckage in it... Calls itself a pub?"
"Well, if you’re talking about The Pig and Anus... and I think you are," at this Dick’s grimace could be recognised as the classic American-news-anchor-grins-at-the-camera-and-the-teeth-almost-sparkle pose, despite the fact that he was a vastly ugly, and scruffy to the point of derelict, cunt, "then you’re right!" Dick beamed proudly at the machine, imagining that Toasty somehow cared. "In fact, you can come out with us if you like girl."
"Erm, Bolted to the floor still dickhead."
"Stud got you that mobile power source you were after."
"Highly suspect Dick. You couldn’t even bring back an intact dog. Where would you find a battery that could supply twelve volts at between one and five amps that would have, say, at least forty-eight hours between charges that could be carried by simple mechanical means?"
"Stud got it out of his car." Smirked Dick. "We checked all the sums and you should be able to go about a week between charges girl. As long as you don’t make too much toast of course: them lasers draw an awful lot of current... Also, we got you a pallet truck to get about on. You’ll have to pull yourself along using one of your, well..." The right word was hard to come by.
"My appendages." She finished frostily, "My multi-function, super-advanced Toasting Hand perhaps?"
"You understand! Marvellous!" said Dick in the most patronising way you can imagine.
"Dick," said Toasty in a softly enquiring tone of voice.
"Yes Toasty dear?"
"If you ever call me ’girl’ again," at this - her most violent appendage: the one with the dangerous looking blade, whirred out and slowly snaked towards Dick, until the sharp edge was held inches from his wide wide eyes, "I will make you suffer until my components wear out."
***
The manly man with the moustache, the mirrored aviators and the beige zip-up cardigan held his son closely in his arms. The boy was nine, nearly ten, and had been frightened by noises in the dark alleyway. Noises while Daddy was inside, watching “A… a kind of... special dance, son. If the dance is good enough, we errm... the dancer gets a bonus..."
"It sounded like dogs Daddy." Legs dangling, eyebrows waggling.
"I’ve told you so many times son...” aviators lifted to reveal careworn eyes, “There’s no such thing as dogs. If you see one it is just your mind playing tricks."
"But there was barking... and growling too!"
"You know as a family, we... we don’t say those words anymore!" shaking the child gently to emphasise.
"I saw one again. It was like a tiny hairy horse! It had a piss up that wall over there!" The boy pointed triumphantly at a steaming puddle behind the car.
"Well, we know there is such a thing as a tiny hairy horse. Do you remember we ran one over the other day, and then looked up tiny hairy horse on the internet, and there were loads of fucking pictures of tiny hairy horses?"
"Yes." said the boy dejectedly.
Daddy put Dick down gently onto his tippy-toes, then gently-but-firmly pushed him back against the wall and knelt down, eye-to-eye.
"One day soon, you’re going to be the man of the house, and when you are, you need to look after your mum, and the house, there are things you don’t know about son, things that will surprise and scare you when you are old enough to find out about them," he gripped the bewildered Dick by the shoulders and shook him slowly backwards and forwards. Whisky breath was stinging Dick’s eyes but the boy tried his best to listen, "There’s no such thing as dogs son, please tell me you understand, it’s not just about you not seeing them, or even feeling them as they bite and claw at your throat and testicles," Dick shivered involuntarily, "you have to not believe in them as well, the same way you don’t believe in God or Shiva, I mean look at it - Dog/God - it’s basically the same word, and therefore it is the same thing, but if you believe in something, you make it real, and if you believe in dogs you make God more real, and you don’t want that, do you son?" Daddy looked expectantly into Dick’s eyes.
Dick said "No" in a small meek voice, hoping it was the right answer. Daddy hoped it was the right answer too, having forgotten every single word he had just said. He shook Dick again for emphasis and stood up.
"There is one more, errm, round of the dancing competition left son. I have to go back inside now."
"No!" yelped the boy, "Don’t leave me out here alone."
"Just close your eyes son. I will always be with you - inside your head - even when you think you are alone."
Dick closed his eyes and tried not to think about wanking or tits because he wanted to keep them secret from his Father who watched from inside his head. He wondered how long this had been going on. If Daddy had seen him looking through the underwear section of the catalogue, had seen him wiping his knob on the carpet, had seen him... had had had...
His Father meanwhile, strolled back into The Greasy Pole - ’Stripping! Tits! Fannies!’ declared the sign - ordered more whisky and lapdances, and congratulated himself once again on his awesome style of parenting. It was HIM who had turned the hyper-intelligent, creative and spirited personality of his amazing son into the emotionally drained wretch outside, it was HIM who had made sure to teach him the secrets of overcoming fear, fitting in and bland conformity by force of pain - "always the best teacher don’t you know...", and, most of all, it was HIM who the child respected most, and not his doldrum of a wife with her "put the child first" approach and feeding him vegetables all the fucking time. Give the boy meat, beatings and NEVER tolerate any weakness!
An awful, squashed looking pug sidled up to Dick and sniffed his leg.
"It’s not real, It’s not real." hissed Dick, eyes screwed shut.
The pug looked at him, head tilted to one side. "I AM REAL!!!" it shouted in the hugely menacing and dominant voice that only it could hear and leapt as high as it could to bite Dick on the kneecap and clung on, growling and tearing at the skin.
"IT’S NOT REAL! IT’S NOT REAL!" Dick was screaming now.
A stripper having her cigarette break in the alley, distracted from counting banknotes covered in cocaine and pre-cum, stuffed the wad back into her neon thong and came out from behind the bin to see what was happening. Her oiled skin sparkled like greasy diamonds in the crude lamp-light. She took one look at the situation and ran over, booting the dog square in the anal gland with her pointed stiletto-heeled boot. It bounded off yelping, and never shat straight again.
"What’s your name sweetheart?" She enquired gently, turning to the boy.
The boy opened his eyes and looked up at the magnificent breasts - barely contained, the tiny pink thong, the smooth skin and wavy lustrous hair of his saviour. "Are you... God?" He whispered. Then he came all over himself. A big sticky wet patch inside his pants.
The stripper sighed, used to this kind of thing, and sauntered back inside.
Dick stared at her bum swaying off down the alley, the tattoo just above it said ’Buttaphly’, then remembered Daddy was watching through a camera inside his head, and stared at the wall instead. His knee didn’t really hurt. He knew it was just his imagination playing tricks on him.
He was actually totally safe. It wasn’t real!
And besides, Buttaphly would protect him.