 
Sure Fire

Jason Micheal Dunn

Copyright 2011 Jason Micheal Dunn

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Jason Micheal Dunn coming soon to Smashwords.com:

Poems by Metazoan

Jason and the Golden Thesis

Philosophy for Depressives Against Empirical Vampires

Dirty Pure

Something I Wrote the Other Day

Straits of Lightness

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Soul is the inside story

body is just folded soul

incarcerated to the cubby-holes

sandwiched with the other clothes

in our languid languages

### Chapter 1: The Victims

Dreaming again. Terrified. In the darkness he feels them surging impossibly up the rock slide. They hate him. They are going to rend his limbs from his body with their powerful arms and ravage his torso with their human teeth.

But it is their eyes that strike him with morbid paralysis. He can feel their eyes before he sees them. Their silently laughing faces are a hideous shock with gaping black eye sockets where reality has failed to assure us that Hell does not exist. Where the eyes should have been a sense of falling sucks at his guts.

He sees them manifest, shadows multiplying in the moonlight, racing in hideously inhuman leaps up the shattered slope. Their grotesque grins, trained on him like identical masks, insult any vestiges of courage that may have remained to him, rooting him in utter pitiable hopelessness.

Then he snaps.

As if some mountainous dynamo has roared into life, tonnes upon tonnes of mass pour into his body, a horrendous wail of weight mounts unbearably, trapped by the insane pressure, a tectonic scream locks his body in a rictus more profound than terror. The pent up agony of the weight of the Earth should have detonated his body like an obscene effigy, released firing pins in his optic nerves to shotgun volcanic gore from his excruciated face, exploding his lungs with the kindness of cataclysmic, fatal expression. But instead his pent fury drove his mind before a deafening crescendo of titanic power into the last corner of his limitations.

Then there was pristine tranquillity as suddenly immanent and unquestionable as tonnages of blue ice, expanses piled neatly inside him as if it were the most natural occurrence.

He was looking at the stars, but they were metaphysically altered. He could not help thinking that the vast firmament looked like a wondrously smeared windscreen, lambent arcs of white force speeding ponderously, as he knew they must. The heavens held velocities and distances that made the heart race with jubilation, even now he felt an elevation of his heart's colossal pressure. Except that his heart was now a slow storm, a rumbling punctuated just like a super slow motion V8, but deeper still, and far more numerously superimposed with impossible horsepower.

He had forgotten the monsters! They must be all but on top of him!

Attempting to look down revealed the syrupy viscosity of inertia with which his body was super-impacted. Looking down his face took too much time and he obliquely noticed that there was no longer any hint of midnight breezes, though a sensation of tenuous cotton sheets wrapped his body without impeding it.

At the very bottom of his curved field of vision he espied an astonishing spectacle. It appeared that time too had become an amber honey and the nightmarish horde had been trapped in its viscous ubiquity. Those sickening things were somehow before and after themselves all at once, streaks of Chinese calligraphy jumping off ancient sandstone parchment. His terror was astoundingly replaced with complete numinous astonishment.

He so slowly gathered himself and leapt down the escarpment of his dream toward the leading creep-show. As he fell through the almost tangible sheets of delicately rupturing air he allowed himself to be entranced by just the one scary face.

As a side thought, he wondered why his perception was as it was a blend of future and past made visible in the present. It was baffling in the most curious fashion, a tantalizing mystery that he savoured in spite of the macabre horrors and due to a sense of peace that can only come from absolute security.

They could not hurt him. He was intoxicated with physical and mental power.

Still he fell and he focused his attention on the manlike being. It was masticating something he was sure of it, working its jaw in almost imperceptible frequencies. Its whole body was a demented chimera of the ordinary though beneath its human surface was a ravening hunger in the process of digesting... it was feeding on his fear! The residual fear from a moment ago was funnelling into its ocular funnels, and that residue had just run out!

Before bewilderment could even register inside its malevolent intelligence he was levelling the structured tidal wave that was his advancing arm. Like a fluid hammer of meteoric velocity driven home by the inexorable inertia of his super dense body. The edge of his palm drove in an exciting arc straight into its hideous face.

Connect.

White light ruptured from the cracked porcelain mask as the hand, arm, and body followed entirely through the length of the rank shade. A dull crack reached his ears and light buffeted his body and vision as the two halves were cast aside by the epic concussion of his first blow against the seething hordes of his nightmares.

He landed on the precipice previously occupied by his enemy and he felt a fierce pride well up from the depths of his being to shout soundlessly into the far reaches of the ionosphere. A relentless conviction swore bloody murder into the depths of himself as the precipice shattered timelessly beneath his grey leather sneakers: he would destroy the civilization that masked the enslavement of man to this race of gaolers, thereby starving those empirical vampires of their complacent despicable gorging, and cut a swath of ending through their fetid ranks all the damn way to their regent here on Earth and smash its reign over us out of all possible existence, obliterate every last mote of its manifestation on every discernible plane of existence.

Wrecker had never dreamed so powerfully in all his life and he had dreamed as lucidly as the human heart can stand, breaking him with nightmares and visions night after night, as he suspected all people had suffered growing up. At least his sister and brothers had fared no better than him, this much he knew. Though most people never remembered their dreams, nor did he most of the time. Most of the time - but sometimes even as an adult he remembered or swore that movie horrors had crossed over into reality, if only for a moment.

Adults could not recall the fact of the matter. In the true sense of the word, this fact was insidious - an evil comfort that only hid the truth that the ugliness of this sick and twisted world festered beneath the glamour of true human values. Imponderable monsters feasted on human valour while they slept and it had been this way for millennia. He looked down from his furious reverie.

He saw their grinning masks had begun to change by degrees to a dismay that fed him instead. Their anti-empathy reflected in the glorious mirror of his puissant being and they all seemed to quail and cringe, frozen in the contradiction of their existence, caught begging for the mercy they would never grant by vice of their horrid being. It was Wrecker's turn to grin maniacally at the dismay of his prey. It was Wrecker's turn to bask in the terror of those who had hurt his family and his people.

For the almost innumerable generations since this twisted race had first beached themselves on the plentiful shores of our atmosphere and taken residence in our dreams, transmogrifying dreamscapes into hellish blue prints for the very real nightmare they had us visit upon ourselves in our waking lives, usurping our grand designers to ensure self-destructive ends, apartment blocks arrayed in matrices that crushed our natural ability to harmonize, societies that consumed each other with atomic pyres in honour of these self-made Gods.

The super-dense gravity of his certitude suddenly blazed as if with a billion lumens of triumphal emotion fusing the horde's craven numbers from the inside out, range mattered nothing. In slow motion, exaggerated phosphorous flashes seemed to take his picture like some obscene press conference, their cavalcade of slow turning light flares abruptly charged, leaping with unexpected acceleration straight at him, startling his perspective.

The inrush of hexagonal spinning iridescences slammed into his chest, infusing senselessly hilarious gyres of energy to his exalted consciousness. He erupted with hysterical laughter. Phosphors pressed his tearing eyes shut while his massive body quaked with his blasting cachinnation.

He was only dimly aware of the ticklish flinders through which he fell, falling through the broken face of the cliff, oblivious to all but his own roaring, world-shaking laughter.

*

Another day of sunlight. Wrecker wakes and remembers nothing. The curtains slowly stir, like a fleeing wedding train glimpsed at the edges of a dream. The sun winks through the split, like a glorious garter belt.

In the dark pit of his gut a confusing ball of electric anxiety threatens like secret Tesla coils.

Is he hungry?

Deep down, the anxious lightning coughs, splutters, and putts out. Who can be bothered with anxiety anymore? Lots of people he supposes. But not him. Not anymore. Its' cold and pain are welcome resources now, necessary in fact, like super-cooled rocket fuel or something, anti-matter maybe. Sadness is, in his case, a vast reservoir of power at his disposal.

So he tells himself.

When he needs it he just puts on his hideous, samurai face mask and detonates his suffering with righteous anxiety, and triumph roars out of his Klein bottle, terrible and furious and certain.

He smiles like honey at the golden window and the stirring curtains, his tummy dawning with a sunrise of its own.

"Let's eat," he winks back at the world, and gathers himself to leap out of bed.

### Chapter 2: The Defeated

The woman's sardonic face said it all, "Why did your parents call you 'Wrecker'? They weren't hippies were they? I thought hippies were meant to name their progeny after celestial phenomena or enchanted creatures or some such nonsense."

He could not believe what he was hearing. He thought he had heard it all, he had for the most part, but it was not the "Moonbeam" call, or the "Unicorn" dig, it was her choice of the word, 'progeny.' Now that was insulting. That just plain pissed him off. So he was taken by surprise. His ire warred with his decency precluding immediate speech. Only royalty bore 'progeny' and her implication, borne by the lowest form of wit, that his family, his people, were the opposite of regal on the sliding scale designed by monarchs themselves. And by his people, he meant good people, where ever you find them.

She thought she was some kind of princess or something, the stupid old bitch. Well, she can't possibly be queen, not behind that desk. This is bloody social welfare for Christ sakes. Then Wrecker smiled.

The corner of her mouth had been curled up ever so slightly, now it suddenly flattened out and the glint in her eye was extinguished just as suddenly.

Beginning to speak Wrecker shifted slightly, leaning back, opened up his wide shallow chest and spoke earnestly, "My mother had no desire to give me a Maori name. My mother told me she had no desire to visit upon me the scorn she had won all her life with her Maori name, scorn from Pakeha and Maori alike. My mother told me she hoped I would grow to be mischief and play rugby well and people would know who I am because when all my friends cheered my uniquely, apt name, it was not 'John,' or 'Peter.' My mother is dead."

The old bitch behind her plastic desk nearly died herself!

"Well..." she quailed, "I mean, I didn't mean to be rude, but it must have made life difficult as well. Other children must have teased you relentlessly." She was slowly recovering that illusion of composure by degrees. In fits and starts she furrowed her pencilled brow and seemed to want to say more but resorted to the comfort of her daily routine. "How can I help you today?"

"I just got back to NZ a few weeks back and though I've been job searching it is tough as you know with the world economic crisis as it is so I didn't want to take any chances with rent to pay and needing to eat and things like that so I'm here to hedge my bets and apply for the benefit just in case, though I really don't plan on ever receiving the benefit as I am hopeful that I will have employment before two weeks are up. Is that okay?"

"How long were you overseas? Where did you go?" She seemed genuinely intrigued and seemed to be looking him up and down as if seeing him for the first time. It's not like he had come in with his gumboots on (rainboots), and a Swandry (farmers' brand of tartan patterned raincoat), or rocked on in there with Hagrid's jeans on and a shirt cut like a neon muumuu. He was not fresh.

"I was living in Korea, lived there for seven years. Being tall and lean, but still a giant compared to Korean men, I had to buy clothes that were too short, see?"

Her prejudices had blinded her to the apparition now coalescing before her, and the integrity of her composure was starting to fray for too many conflicting reasons. You see, Wrecker was quite frankly classically handsome, and with the black framed news anchor glasses, crucial really, he was intelligent looking. He had an athletic build, though being six foot three he tended to exude more of a wiry strength.

His name belied his style, which he himself dubbed as "ghetto dapper." He never actually told anybody this directly. He would merely mention the failings of his attire in order to deal with and accentuate the fact that he looked like he just stepped out of a fashion magazine, quite possibly a huge, horrendous mistake beyond the contemplation of mere mortals. His dark grey cords were too short for a shy person, but made a model of the bold. Same too with his burgundy business shirt, the cuffs barely buttoned half way down his forearm, but he wore a deep blue V-neck sweater and while the stretchy sleeves revealed his strong skeletal wrists it was just enough to pull off eccentricity.

Thankfully the sweater managed, albeit barely, to hide a small drama: tucking the Korean man's shirt in was his only full time job. He may have been poor again, third time now, but he was lucky and open to advice and error, a bus load of error in fact, all of which contrived to make him look like he was simultaneously from a better, more stylish past or future, although not better insofar as that anachronistic era seemed not to have any bloody money whatsoever.

Now she could clearly see that there was something dangerous in this young man, something of the iconoclast - he was a chimera of the ordinary, making the commonplace alien by virtue of his timing and considerations. His misplaced elegance shamed her base desires. The single chord of her intuition had been strummed by Wrecker's silent refusal, and this time the thrill scared her.

What made him different from every other client she all but openly despised? What was he doing here? He should be elsewhere. He has qualifications. How can she get her bonuses if she is unable to deny his claim? How can she reach her weekly quota if she starts receiving more clients like him? People worthy of respect, people deserving of support, people better than her.

She was out of her chair and walking backwards before she opened her mouth, "I'm sorry, excuse me. Amanda will be with you in a moment. Why don't you go over to her desk just over there and she'll be with you in a second. I haven't had a break all morning and I'm dizzy all of a sudden, need something to eat and drink." Then she about turned and was striding away in that stilted gait that only high heeled women can strut, as if urgent hauteur were a natural consequence of platform engineering principles.

"No worries." Wrecker Lionel Rasmussen said to himself. Born 1977, 33 years old. High school drop out. Degree in philosophy. Divorced eight years ago. Separated ten years ago. They were "soul mates" together seven years through heaven and hell. A marriage of seven years destroyed by drugs, psychosis, clinical depression, all of which were ultimately just a few of the indefinitely many spokes under the pitifully lightning struck umbrella that was an utter, ruinous, dearth of hope offering no protection from the most paltry of elements: the horrifying drizzle of modern civilization.

Wrecker stood, stretched, and strode to the desk, all the while compressing time. There was nowhere to be after all.

Thank goodness the "umbrella of inestimable doom" was chucked in the bin that day he got off the begging floor for the last time. He had wailed mournfully at his wife's feet like he was an elderly man who had lost his wife after decades of love, being there for each other through tribulation and indignation with pride and adoration for each other because they had outlasted and endured because their love was inscribed in the bloody stars for God's sake!

All gone.

He terrified his wife with his abject loss of ancient innocence. On that floor he wailed just like the old ladies on the marae when a mokopuna had died probably from a car accident, too damn young. Their rent ululations had spooked the hell out of him, even from a mile away, but he was too broken to do anything but wail his heart out right there on the cheap grey carpet. His grieving haunted himself even as he cried aloud in the autonomic waves of pre-civilised chant, even as his beautiful love tore his heart from his chest and told him it was his own fault. Not in so many words, but in her actions, as she walked out the door, even though he had pleaded with her not to leave him alone, not right then. Not when he was so afraid to lose his grip again when it had only been half a year since he'd been released from the asylum.

Right there and then, on that floor, in that room, so absent of everything he valued more than his own life, the child in him died, and smiled back at him from beyond the veil, as a sun unexpectedly shone just beyond his boyish face radiating light flares down that corridor of light, glorifying its brooding bank of cloud, and limning for the first time in his 25 years of life that hitherto fictitious silver lining.

It was as if his dead brother had moved on, and having let him go finally, the ever hurting crucible of his cracked heart had been welded whole. A lightning crack seam of argent now pulsed beyond the cloud of privation beneath which all people were until such a breakthrough thought to be alienated and alone.

He felt joy without the permanent backdrop of doom. It was a miracle. How had she put up with me for so long?

Wrecker ambled along casting his gaze through his prodigious brow along the factory floor. Row upon row of open plan work stations seated case workers and their prospective clients in a cross hatch array that better reinforced a productive quantum state of despair, not to mention its proportionate acceptance. The Defeated coupled meekly with their Despisers posing varying deflated postures whilst plugging into their respective impatient sockets.

Beneath it all however, there was a lack of pity on both sides. There was valour yet in the very hue and cast of their endeavour simply because they persisted, never mind their essential and mutual lack of self-regard, still there was the indelible human spirit, hidden in plain sight, finding their improbable way through the thicket of self-imposed interdependent spiritual mutilation.

Despite Wrecker's hard attained irascible mauri he recalled his love for his mother who was far from dead, the old cow, and determined that unlike her he would temper his rattled mauri to a keener pitch better suited for delicate interface with these people at large. Employing that frequency of mood he would endeavour to strike a harmonious chord with this Amanda woman and the system she represented, taking into consideration that he was no better than anyone no matter how coarse they might be with him.

He took the seat at the empty desk Jane had indicated and casually hung his arms on his shoulder hooks awaiting Amanda's imminent arrival. His sternum, scapula and clavicles creaked and cracked inaudibly, satisfied to dissemble comfort in such a readied poise.

"Hello, Wrecker." Though unsurprised he had not seen her approach. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, comely, dressed smartly in cerulean, and her smile was comfortingly rosy. "What can I do you for today?" she ungrammatically joked. Humble. Cool.

He explained his situation, that he needed any help he could get getting any job he could, and that was why he had come since, things as they were in the world, jobs were hard to come by and he could not afford to rely purely on pride, intentions, and applications, to pay rent, put food in his mouth, and satisfy his craving for worth, needing guarantees to shore up motivation as well. Applying for the dole in the process afforded a financial safety net of sorts.

She nodded and smiled the whole time agreeing or supplying information where needed. She even suggested arranging a phone since there was no landline at home and cell phone calls in this country would kill his funds. A friend had assured him that contacting the English Academy directors directly created a connection that would bump you to the front of their mental cue.

He disregarded the inevitable mental icon that peripherally reminded him of what others think when they find out he's an English language teacher- the icon is represented by a fake smile that screams silently, "I know everything about you, loser." How does the saying go? Those who can't do, teach.

He thanked her sincerely saying, "Wow, you have been so helpful, last time I was here seven years ago seeking the arts assistance wage for my book publishing venture the lady had screamed and railed at me slamming the desk just because I had calmly and quietly asked questions about the details I was unsure about. Of course when I stood up and said I was no longer interested in even filling in the application she tried sweet talking me into it." He was indirectly referring to those bonuses case managers made for denying claims.

Amanda laughed and frowned simultaneously, "Strange. No, we're a nice bunch here now." She was indeed a nice one and Wrecker felt something uncharacteristically cheery toward the government institution - hope.

Smiling on the way out those automatic doors something paranoid in him twitched wondering if it was indeed hope for man-unkind he felt or had he just been dealt a spin doctor from the house of cards, was there some great power observing him. Nonsense! He laughed to himself shaking his head slightly at the idiocy that sometimes, no, regularly, side tracked his sane self.

Though he still remembered the psychotic vision of the world as a technocratic hell on Earth that had robbed him of his will eleven years ago, and a shudder passed through his body sobering up his mood, clearing his mind of the unnecessary.

He couldn't afford to give credence to insane convictions anymore. He had to select from the superabundant menu of his convictions only the choicest practical forward moving assertions, disregarding the life defeating counter-productive DEFCON 1 dire warnings that blinked in his peripheral soul.

He squinted up toward the New Zealand sun and its five minute burn time. At least that was what the weather man had said. Intense glare, do not look directly through the gaping window in the ozone layer.

Heading home up the hill, the big old blue sky raising its prodigious brows of cloudy profusion, passing veritable cottages caught unavoidably in the omnipresent leafy beard of this almost toothless city, Auckland: city of rain.

And then it rained. A sun shower chatted harmlessly like some innocuous madman before catching a bus somewhere else. The freshly fecund spittle pretty much dried up before reaching the front door and the slight giddiness one feels before sliding the key into place, casting aside the door, and retreating into your exciting little bolt hole, locking the door back in place to sigh senseless giddy relief.

### Chapter 3: The Tortured

The rooftops looked like natural formations, worn like ancient marvels, except that in the place of bald dignity, their varied grey heads cowed below the black cloud that seethed with moments of menacing light, too white to be observed directly, phosphors would ping his eyes with televised afterimages, lurid rainbow static news flashes nauseating.

The buildings were like enslaved titans. Their might was pitiable under the black yoke intermittently slashed with sinuous blood lightning, slow whips like red metal blood vessels cracking into reality, a torn heartbeat of agony achingly fading from corporeality.

Wrecker bared his teeth every time that gory x-ray painstakingly ripped away the skein protecting the veins and nerves of this reality. But he had to come this way. He knew balls to bones that his determination was a yellow brick road to some kind of dark emerald citadel.

Somehow everything he had ever known was more integrated than it had ever been. Every fact of science or experience he had imbibed, every fiction of folk or conspiracy he had exultantly survived, every cause and reason alchemically combined, every logos, amalgamated enough pure substance to echo the source, true power, and thus come to know, know that he must forge his own golden path through the doom that cloaks this nightmare kingdom in impenetrable misdirection.

Disdainfully, Wrecker almost laughed at the thought, almost snorting. Of course, 'impenetrable' is a nonsense word. Either God or Nature penetrates all things.

Just then a lamp he had never noticed before blinked on just below him on the next roof top, and the next rooftops after them. A random path of fluorescent lily pads seemed to buzz off into the demented hop scotch horizon.

He smirked playfully feeling certain that somebody up there must like him, so to speak.

So Wrecker gathered himself, drawing up every microgram of his tonnages so as to alight from the roof without shattering his eroded launch pad. Subtly peddling his sneakered paws he pounced.

His inertia seemed to fling him more strongly than he had intended. But he would have to see.

Mid-lope, he allowed his perception to attend the ruptured tissues of air caressing his augmented sense of the is-ness, before preparing to deposit his exorbitant mass in increments according to the bell curve as it relates to contacting surface areas and densities so as to decelerate on the flight path perfect for mutual exchange of forces and stresses.

Launched out over the black abyss between the buildings, he could feel the dark chasm yawning impressively. He was exhilarated as the circle of light grew in diameter. Passing the lip of safety, like some kind of coasting lunar module, he entered the glowing dome of diffuse light with his arms reared up like wings while he thought himself not unlike the hulk, but without the bulk.

His gradual landing spread a web of impact fissures, but the weather eaten concrete withstood the adumbrated brunt of his curtailed force. The delayed dull crunch tickled his ears.

Squinting beneath the lambent cone he felt clean, but vulnerable. Looking backward to see how far he had leapt was taking forever. It must be about forty feet.

Knowing where the next lamp lit building was without looking forward, Wrecker spun around heaving his compact body into the next arc.

He had decided it was safe to frog leap from rooftop to rooftop without pause, when all of a sudden glowing red metal lanced out of the roiling black cloud. One lance became two, became four, eight wicked hot blades stabbing down toward him, eerily silent and swift. Twisting to change his trajectory and avoid being impaled by the fey lightning, the atmosphere shattered around him, thunder should have surprised him, the concussion of air should have ruptured his tympanic membrane such was the cacophony that exploded against him.

Instead, the anatomy of that single second really started to compress as a myriad of searing knives withdrew from his blackened right shoulder.

Twisting through the air he noticed the edge of a building just before cannon-balling through concrete and steel as if it were a wall of grey shortbread laced with red liquorice lattices cooling from the sudden stresses.

The chip-board desk seemed to explode away from his feet before he had planted them where the desk had been. Fragments were expanding away from him while he looked at his blasted shoulder. Sixty four half inch scars scored the marred skin, smoking faintly.

Snapping his head forward, concrete flinders and ergonomic popcorn collided in the growing wave that pelted the sinister staff of this penultimate division.

Frankly, they looked more like a vampire boy band than a crack team springing a supernatural ambush. But whatever. This was his dream and he relished the thought that he was gonna feed their nightmare back to them.

These ones didn't smile. Their immaculate pallor suggested impeccable disdain. They were attired in flat shadow, featureless. The debris and shattering glass strained like forlorn jazz, underwater afterthoughts.

Then they moved ahead of themselves. Perfect brush strokes writing off ceilings, writing off walls and each other, deliberate masters working as one toward him.

No, not masters. There was only one master, one brushstroke. They had recognized his ascension and they had not taken any chances. He barely moved in time as red hot lightning pierced his back, perforating his right lung, there was no pain, just the colossal sundering of mountains rocking his ear drums.

Then Hell froze over.

Wrecker's icy fury froze the flow of temporality rock solid. The radiating filigree blades protruding from his chest darkened to silver steel, frosting over with delicate flakes of icing.

Arrayed around him in their attack poses, seventeen odious faces hated at him with all their torturous intent. Their hands were human too, but their nails were all torn away. They were the dream bodies of tortured torturers. And those hands were still moving toward any part of him they could get a rending hold on.

Reaching up behind himself Wrecker grabbed the jagged steel lightning bolt. It was still hot closer to the source and it seared to the dense flesh of his fingers and palm, knitting equal measures agony and ire within his nerves. The blaze of damage flash froze the steel, embrittling it enough to lever with all his titanic body weight snapping free. The clean break pinged a knell that keened through his body and rang through the whole world it seemed. Then they had him and they began to grin like senators.

Except that they only thought they had him. Wrenching the lightning steel free was an eternity of dental nerve agony that only amplified his strident rage and concomitant acceleration. The five feet of razor titanium excoriated from his back, swept around and through each one of the bastards millimetre by millimetre raising their chorus of woes in concert with Wreckers triumphant roar against the fading keen of a dark God's shocking pain and rue-filled failure.

Light erupted from the split shadows and sucked into Wrecker's body, doubling his mana with Gordian knots of unmistakable power. Only his hand wouldn't release the iridescing steel holography restlessly forking from his fused fist.

Whatever! He was out of there.

Exploding from the rooftop straight through the circle of light, arcing like argent lightning from lamp light to lamp light. Sparks geysered from each destroyed lamp. Wrecker leapt swiftly, transformed into a torrent of light for brief moments. The harm done to him had altered him even further. Each rush of lightning speed cost him his composure, but from each lamp he siphoned unadulterated numen.

Who had secreted these lambent oases?

The cumulative effects of sucking from each divine straw wiped Wrecker's mind cleaner and cleaner. Until all that remained to him was the exhilaration of approaching infinite speed as by orders of magnitude he leapt more and more incandescently into the brightening hop scotch horizon, drunk on mellifluous metaphysical milkshakes.

*

Wrecker wondered how in the hell he was meant to get a job. He was no superman, not on paper nor in self-regard. Sure, he had performed the odd physical feat, emphasis on the word 'odd.' There were of course a few handfuls of precious gems written into existence by his eccentric hand, but he was still unproven.

He had the sneaking suspicion that like the other impossible dreams that had come true in his relatively young life, the security earned by his achievements was merely the transitory cessation of stresses for lack of the moonlike gravity his old destinies, his old future plans, had exerted on his mortal coil.

There was always that "moon goddess" setting his oceanic currents straight, magnetizing his chaotic and conflicted mauri with "battle plans," rallying his nature into the cunning arrangement belied by his semblance of disorder.

This limbic period of his life was in certain respects no different, equally humiliating or humbling, two parts peripheral second guessing, one part best foot forward. A good battle plan was simply a pragmatic solution committed to action. When a battle plan had been made you could relax until the plan was executed. A good stratagem guaranteed victory or at least laid unnecessary concern to rest.

For example, one might be stressed out ruminating on how to tell your boss what you thought of his micromanaging, when of a sudden struck by intuition a battle plan unfolds the assuring architecture of its design, and the anxiety diminishes until only the thought "first thing in the morning" lingers like a lullaby. Only then can one cede to blessed exhaustion, secure in the knowledge that one has done all that one can do to assuage the ire of inequity, so deviously construed is a battle plan.

The sun was almost up already that particular time, having tied himself in flannelette knots all night battle planning.

That morning at the Centre for Culture and Education he had planned to call the whole complement of preschool staff and students to assemble under the pretence that he would be telling the legendary story of Maui and the Sun, inviting our illustrious leader to draw parallels between the antagonist and himself. He would be made to see those parallels the way it was actually occurring from the staffs' perspectives.

The story goes that Maui, the greatest Maori hero, wearing his best flax skirt, was trying to eat something one day, but the Sun had raced across the sky, smoked the zenith and begun to set so fast that he remarked, "Aue! There isn't even enough time for our people to eat." Fed up, Maui had gathered his brothers together in the dark and told them of his battle plan, "We're gonna teach Ra a lesson!" His brothers all exclaimed at once, "How are we meant to do that?!" "Te Ra is too powerful!" "Don't be stupid!" But deep down they were too afraid of their youngest brother to doubt his conviction. He had already proved that he was capable of astounding feats and they were sick of living in darkness.

So he ordered them to weave flax ropes and he cast his enchantments on the ropes and he took up the patu fashioned from the jaw bone of his great grandmother, his sacred weapon, and set off with his brothers in the dark to the place where the sun would come up.

They waited for just the right moment at the edge of the world and when they could see the fiery glow heralding Te Ra's ascent Maui shouted, "Now!" Their flax ropes flew over the rising sun and caught him fast. The maakatu cast on the fibres resisted the fierce heat of the enraged sun and Maui pounced, his patu held high.

Maui beat Ra's nose until the sun cried, "Enough! Enough! Can't you see I'm nearly dead?!"

"Will you slow down so our people have enough time in their day to do everything they need to do?!"

"Yes! Yes! I promise"

Beaten, Te Ra, The Sun, rose slowly into the sky.

Wrecker opened his eyes. The silent blaring sun had already risen. Sighing he pulled his head back into the darkness beneath his duvet.

Yes, there always was hope, ever since the silver lining of his path began to run a shining seam through the doomed bedrock of reality. Burrowing his face deeper into the mineral phosphors in the cave of his own making he blanked out the argent shine of necessary hope just a little bit longer. Yes, this time was much like any other trough on the karma graph.

But this time was the most humiliating, or humbling, either outlook depending on whether one could take just the right amount of responsibility for the current turn of events. However, this time there really was a goddess of immeasurable beauty behind the scenes, both inciting and easing the storm. This time her embodiment in Wrecker's woven destiny revealed the fullest form of her influence to be sufficient to unmake the last remnants of his self-imposed obstinacy.

Smeh was a Russian American, dancer, actor, engineer, and spelling bee champion. What kind of dance? All kinds, rock, hip hop, ballet, she was a natural. What kind of actor? School plays; lead, singing, commanding the attention of all who had thought her just a four eyed nerd, not a talented starlet. What kind of engineer? Automotive; military or civilian; interiors or body (as she was wont to mention in her mellifluous articulation, "You can't have rivets shooting soldiers like bullets just because their AV rumbled onto some mine"). What kind of champion?! She was a wordsmith, jigsaw junkie, scrabble master, and the most exciting conversationalist Wrecker had ever been spellbound by. He started to smile in the darkness recalling their introduction by a mutual friend.

Smeh's large grey-green eyes, 1930's smile, rock-glamour sienna hair, brown aviator jacket, cerulean summer dress, and sonorous laughter, sung the harmony of ratios with her full breasts and hips to slim waist and face, of classic style to modern guile.

We were unafraid to smile and wryly jibe of how jaded we might be if not for levity. As Wrecker was wont to quote his Maori mother smiling, "If you don't laugh, you cry," and she would smile her joyous Russian smile for his cruelly Maori wisdom, which in that moment, the moment that lasted all drunken night and was never spent apart, they found kinship in the ideas of their most sacred worship, their love of necessary and rational cruelty.

He had felt so comfortably spellbinding himself, he had never realized he was being picked up, elevated beyond the lofty polluted climes of mountainous Seoul, to a softly illumined bed at the very top corner of the dim world, to lie with The Imperial Czarina of all Golden Forevers incarnate. He undressed her dawn, and her his, then she lay down gazing up as he loomed resplendent glorying in her sunrise.

She was the last love he would ever know, and there had been quite a few exquisitely beautiful, melting women with whom he shared intense affairs, but he knew that she was and still is yet the last love he could ever want.

He knew he had said similar things before and friends and family alike had ceased to remark on the subject of his undying devotions. He knew how people perceived him. But he was not a playboy! He did not consider himself that guy who could have any woman he wanted, as their mutual drop dead gorgeous best friend had told Smeh later when she had inquired about him. He was at heart still that hopeless loser looking for his lucky break, cursed with the combination of antiquated empathy and fatal charm.

She was so worth it, he swore happily in his heart. He could see in her soft eyes that her heart too deliquesced, swearing gently his name and making him swear hers, as they rose together, he chasing her, into the garden of forever, and catching her, without a single moment to spare. Gasping, all breathless smiles, clutching each to each other just shy of fiercely, with the kisses and adorations each felt the other deserved and deserved immensely.

They were in love from the moment they met, just like old friends who had crossed deserts to meet for the first time. They wanted to believe in all fierceness that they could rely on each other, despite the fucking doomed world, and because as they looked into each other's smiling eyes and resumed their wryly playful jibes, they felt their love was different, since they were enough the same and enough intoxicatingly exotic.

Cmex Praporshchik. 'Cmex' is Russian for 'Smeh.''Smeh' is the romanized 'Cmex', pronounced the same spelt differently, kind of like that love of theirs.

He needed a job if he was gonna move to the states to be with her and after all this drama, the whole emergent broken record feeling thing, he needed to get out of bed first. He suddenly envisioned her crying, like after a fight and...

He opens his eyes to the luminous grey morning, dull as crystal salts, and climbs out of bed through the interview in pink business shirt, same blue sweater, same grey corduroys, completed with striking red and navy blue tie, commuting by comfortable, carpeted, upholstered, ponderous, screaming train, into the bio for his columnist application, reading the articles on the same topic, free thought as it relates to atheism versus theism, suddenly in court rooms and chat rooms, and there's talk of another room 500 miles away in which an antagonist, the evil atheist reflects the fanatic in the mirror, is said to be angry at god, good call for some atheists, not all. Then "writing" his book into the sunset, dapper ghetto, font-slinger.

He figured the only way he was gonna get the girl then save the world was if he forgot about his lack of pertinent qualifications, he was gonna have to write his book into the sunset every night for months, and there was such an absurdly over-superabundant supply of emergent sunset that surfing it was hard to stand, thank the maker, thank the indistinct unquestionable unified field, thank mystery, thank controlled falling, mmmmm yessssss, controlled falling.

Just as he frazzes out, buzzed to the max, Two gets home, his brother.

"That you, Two?"

"Yeah, Bro."

"Just you? No, Fabes?"

"Nah, just me."

"Cool. Cool. How was your day?"

"Awesome. Awesome. Yours?"

"Yeah, really awesome. Really. Lots of writing. When does Crissy get in tonight?"

"Late ay, bro. But I'll wait for her to get home before I eat"

"Cool. Good one, bro"

Two is massive. Not as massive as Lionel, but massive. Lionel is a force of nature, picking up the quad bike and just putting it on the back of the truck like it was a box of apples. No, Two was not that crazy massive, but massive and succinct in his movements, a steel sculptor and car aficionado. They call him a tin-arse which is kiwi-speak for lucky bastard. He's the golden child of the family. Crissy is his fiance, she's a haemotologist. Totally CSI.

Honey's home too it seems. Wrecker's sis is the middle child. Honey and Two are not speaking or rather Honey is not speaking to Two. Long, long story.

Anyway, Honey is an air hostess. Finally at long last that unbelievable drama is over, what a mare it had been. Stretched out over years before at long last, she fulfilled her dream, the first of us to make it. It sucked when the airline downsized all those people to survive the economic nightmare and that whole hiring division just disappeared overnight. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen.

It happened overnight! There was not a single soul to confirm that she had aced every arduous step of the Shaolin stewardess school, given everything to seem as if she had overcome her pathological shyness and slam that gig, and the airline would not even return her calls. Suck!

She could have been qualified to get employment and experience after all her hard work facing practicum after gruelling practicum. It's like training to be an actor since you have to pretend you're really serving people. It was said to be more difficult than attending university by every graduate, and her phone calls were just ignored when the airline's school just ceased to exist! But Holy Smokes, Bay! She did it all again with an Auzzie airline and studied every night, apologized to all her friends, declining to make it to parties or dinner dates. Honey rocked it! We were stoked.

This is Two's bio Wrecker wrote yesterday for his new exhibition:

Two Mark Rasmussen

Steel Sculptor

Born 1982 in Wairoa, New Zealand. Two resides in Auckland where, in his personal bat-cave, his weighty ideal exults the spaces he patiently flows through, transforming over time the merely new into a natural formation; necessary and numinous.

Having exhibited in the Matariki Festival at the Corban Estate Arts Centre, with a permanent installation in the Kaipara Coast Sculpture Gardens, and another installed in pride of place in the bustling Japanese shoju bar Anami in Epsom, not to mention pieces in private collections, Two continually establishes himself. His influence is a natural occurrence by virtue of the shadowless intent immanent in all his works and relationships, marking him as a burgeoning fountainhead or tupuna.

Summing up Two's direction in all things he remarked, "If you don't know, you know you don't know." His granite certainty and lightness of being shape and imbue his steel with unaffected valour.

This is Wrecker's auto-bio for the Examiner gig:

Wrecker Lionel Rasmussen

New Zealand Freethinker Examiner

Wrecker, the freethinking educator and poet behind goldenthesis.weebly.com, has returned to family and friends in Auckland after seven years living overseas, six of them spent in South Korea soaking up the language and culture. Having published six books of poetry, art, and creative essays with a writing career spanning two decades, Wrecker is a philosophy graduate who has worked, lived, and loved as a freethinker.

His thesaurus knows no bounds! Grrrrr. Invited to join the extinct gods his thesaurus declined! Raarrrrr. His dream would never become extinct. Scarce? Certainly. But extinct, by crikey, no. Never ex-stink.

Of course, Wrecker had no illusions, the real dictionary was as big as a 26 volume encyclopaedia and his thesaurus merely tested its own scaly limits on a regular surfing basis.

But back to recognizable reality.

Wrecker's condition was the subject of a study. Like those individuals who are autistic crossed with those who are kinaesthetic, Wrecker was emotionally pathetic. His joke. His quirky perception of the littlest datum. It hid the fact that he could not hurt a fly, so to speak, even though he could put a guy away in a split second, as he had shamefully done before, and had done since he was little himself.

"You don't know your own strength, son!" Mum would scathingly admonish.

He was too empathic and principled at the same time. Maybe it was the Danish power conflicting with Maori power in his genetic code. Later on, when Wrecker's cycle of destruction and heartache had scratched him back to the beginning of himself three times his Mum had said, "You're too kind hearted, Son, but I don't think that's ever gonna change."

His name was too ironic. What was his Mum thinking? The ache always accompanying that question had been worn away years ago, had it not? The broken record never played the same song twice, did it?

Wrecker had on his white tiger one piece pajama suit with tiger hood. It was instrumental finding the other friends from your mental zoo at dance festivals and concerts. There's a wolf, that's Browntown. There's a seal, that's Alley. There's a kangaroo, that's CD. It was an Ark of trippers. But he wore it over his clothes to keep warm during the winter nights now that he was back home in NZ.

Curled up under the blankets he thought of Cmex and felt happy thinking he was gonna finish that book and have the money to clear the debt, start a career that knows no borders, move to the states, become a tourist for the rest of his life writing books, and of course the ultimate goal, finally holding her in his arms again.

He didn't deserve her, but none of that figured into his calculations. He loved her. She loved him. It was too late. The thought of her crying, not that she was, she was happy, but the thought that he would be responsible for her suffering if he didn't find a way to get into the states when a visa was impossible...

Well it got him out of bed every morning doing the impossible anyway and maintaining the impeccable mind-set that admitted he had passed through doom many times and anything worth doing goes against the tendency toward destruction prevalent in our day and age. Submerged in the pall of hopelessness that robs us of our will to dream of bliss, that tsunami of misinformation has no point for someone determined to do what he can with complete equanimity.

Wrecker mentally swore louder than his fear, effacing group fear from his identity. He learned Mana motuhake at school without realizing years later how it had changed him, how it had prepared him. Mana is power, prestige. Motuhake is separation. Before a haka, a war dance, men are called to "MOTUHAKE!" to make fists, at which point each man becomes a warrior! In other words they hyperventilate and tense every muscle bursting with visibly psychotic energy.

He was gonna prove to Cmex, his gorgeous love, that he could increase his capacity at will. That he could write a fantasy novel about all the interesting things he had studied since he was eighteen, write as fiction all the truths he could never share with anyone, not even with himself, yet he could share it with everyone so that it might work on them implicitly.

How would he be able to go to sleep every night if he allowed himself to consider details he could not begin to change yet, especially when the finite amount of attention available would best be spent balancing the mercurial volatility of the will.

"Goodnight, Cmex," Wrecker's voice sounded strange and small, uttered into his lonely room in little New Zealand.

His intention defined his path into the phantasmagoric land of dreams.

Like Maui he dared to dream the impossible because there was no recourse.

### Chapter 4: The Shadowed

He recognized this Marae, this meeting place. Wrecker had been there once before, in another dream. It was made of wood, no walls, just a big roof from apex to floor. The interior was completely covered in ornate carvings depicting genealogies of stylized squatting figures with only three fingers on each hand squatting in powerful stances, chests full and narrowed. They were like taniwha, godlike creatures that lived in the rivers and the forests they protected.

There were people sleeping around him. Last time an elder was awake and he had asked the tupuna to help free him from something that was grabbing him in his sleep. When we had awoken to his room that previous time something was still grabbing him. The shock of being held in that grip terrified him then, but he knew he could overcome them when they came at him like that. It had been years since they had pulled that trick. Was this a warning? Was it about to recur?

He lay back down with these ancestors he didn't know and fell asleep promptly. He had a suspicion he knew what was gonna happen when he started to dream reality again. He had this excited anxiety that an event that had never occurred before but he had lived through thousands of times before was about to happen again, for the first time, at long last, the beginning.

Wrecker opened his eyes to the blue darkness in his room. He was staring at the dim chiaroscuro resolving itself into the varnished double slatted-doors to his closet. Then a shock ran through him, he was sickeningly terrified. He couldn't move a single muscle. Something was grabbing him from behind. Someone was lying in bed with him, wrapping their powerful limbs around him.

Panic threatened to choke him, but he knew what to do. He relaxed, exhaling air calmly. He told himself it was sleep paralysis, caused by waking up during the effects of sleep hormones on the nervous system that normally neutralize muscular function and thereby protect the sleeper from themselves so they are unable to act out their often dangerous dreams.

Dangerous was not the half of it. He had been waiting for this opportunity for too long to screw it up now. He had studied Ving Chun Kuen Kung Fu during his university days. These shadowy bastards had tried for the last time to drain his pre-civilized energy.

He inhaled as deeply as possible and then focussed all his breath into the only action still left to him: exhaling.

Through the tiny aperture left him to expel CO2 and nitrogen, with all the rage he could summon to banish the leaching effects of his own terror, he let burst his stifled yell through the keyhole of his paralyzed lips.

The pitch of sonic force cracked the crystallization of terror and he spun instantaneously striking with the tips of his rigid right hand, arm, shoulder, body, simultaneously raising left forearm and elbow, blocking the force of a colossal blow that shuddered innocuously through his torso.

Then he noticed that his right arm had gone. It was elbow deep in horrifying shadow. Frozen in the act, he hoped like crazy that he had just killed one of these malign shepherds. He hoped like hell it was dead. His arm was numbing with cold, up to his elbow in nothing but a meaty silhouette.

Starting to breathe again, Wrecker eased his heart rate to a patient jazz, making slow deliberate inhalations. Then without warning his entire being was kicked in the shins and that jolting pain was a blinding light without eyelids or arms or anything in fact. Just as suddenly he felt a flood of relief. The shock was not actually painful, just absolutely alien to any sensation he had ever experienced before.

Suddenly he saw the room again, facing the window as he had a moment ago, but the shadowy fiend was gone. The curtain kept out most of the moon light. He was alone. He was not scared anymore. He was not tired. He was also not himself. The room was too bright somehow. The dimness was impossibly limned with details that whispered indecipherably. His breathing was too loud, like waves crashing on rocks.

He could hear the entire house now, hearing as if he was instead watching, watching everything in each room in the whole house with his real eyes. Realize!

The realization felt like a muscular conviction flexing and posturing greater dynamic tension in his microcosmic perception of the macrocosm at large. The fundamental truth, that each particle is cut from the infinite and eternal, made complete sense now. If you cut out a piece of the infinite and eternal, that piece would also be infinite and eternal, made in the image of the one true hologram, the universe. Wrecker understood that he did not have to attend to the details that separated him from the universe. He needed only to attend the truth that the universe could only interact with him insofar as he and the universe were identical in some sense, connected width, breadth, and depth, from beginning to end.

If the universe was a hologram of an apple, tangibly it would be a flat sheet of plastic with a three dimensional image of a rainbow coloured apple projected within and beyond the surface of the plastic, three dimensional.

If a small piece is cut from a dark empty corner of the holographic film and we looked closely at that alienated tiny cut out, we would see the whole apple projected within and beyond that plastic fragment. There would be less detail naturally, but the same whole apple nevertheless.

The universe was like that in many ways, but more complicated.

Everything he observed was the microcosm of the macrocosm.

Then he was standing in the dim lounge as if he had forgotten that he had walked there. Then back in bed, then in the kitchen. He looked at the analogue clock in his room. Then the digital microwave clock, on the other side of the house! Analogue clock. Digital clock. Analogue. Digital. The two images superimposed and the rhythm and pace of the tick, tick, tick, and blink, blink, blink were synchronously tick blinking.

Stunned with joyous surprise, he realized that he was freed from certain limits of space. He had detached himself from the confines of distance. Those rules no longer applied to him.

Wait. This is real. This is happening. It cannot be happening. Last time anything like this happened was eleven years ago and that ended up with him being manhandled by a bunch of hospital security, having his pants pulled down so they could stab a needle in his glute, inject him with a sedative, putting him in that machine with its infernal mechanical howl terrorizing him plain out of his wits. It turned out to be just an MRI scanner, and it actually happened days after his admission into the higher security ward outside the city.

But he was calm. This was another miracle he simply needed to take for granted if he did not want to burn out. He had to pay a respectful distance from the source. After all, he was not as massively detailed as the universe, there were limits to the power of creation clearly delineated by the limits of his personal perception and personal conceptual concatenations.

The revelations kept emerging and he pacified his percipient oscillations.

This is the way the first people were before our hidden slavers came. Our ancestors were Godlike. Wrecker translated outside to look up at the stars and perceived that his being took part in the journey of light from the far reaches of the galaxy. The living present breathed throughout the cosmos in time with his own breath. He was both insignificant and equal to everything.

Every exhalation was a sigh diminishing stress he had been unaware of. Every inhalation filled him out, pushing the positions of his shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, ankles, and neck into their rightful places.

In cabinetmaking one surface is said to be proud of another surface in the sense that it is raised above the other surface. His breathing continued pulling his head up and cracking joints all over his body as his pivotal points came to rest in their natural hollows and the tensions bowed with a cabinetmaker's pride, his physical form was elevated above the plane of expectation prevalent in this day and age.

Then there was silence inside himself, the solid silence of vast stone, the starry silence of the cosmic aquarium weighing perfectly on the parabolic firmament, scintillant concentric arcs languidly inscribing their concentricity. His heartbeat slowed to just two beats a minute. He was at peace feeling as if he was all over the neighbourhood and out beyond in the tranquil void between the stars. His elliptical discernment engrossed in the electromagnetic race of hundreds of thousands of micro-meteoric impacts on the magnetosphere.

Lost in the astonishing interchange of forces cosmic and geomagnetic, awed by the humming bands of electromagnetism he was bodily observing, Wrecker smiled beatifically, contented for what might have been hours before he realized that only five minutes had passed.

The potential somehow widened his eyes further allowing more starlight to shine in his ocular orbs and metaphysical heart. Wrecker thought to himself that the whole world could be liberated from the unending inquisition and healed of its lasting taint in sure time.

The hint of a smile lit the determination set in his steely mien as he passed out of the moonlight into the comforting shadows swaddling the familiar chattels modelled in the home of his brother. His body swung unerringly through the rooms like a weaving fist inured to surprise. His body was virtually in three places at once, three unerring fists that wove through the blanketing chiaroscuro.

He stole entirely unexpected upon the shadows in the beds of his loved ones dispatching the nigh tangible intruders, although he employed the tenderness saved for wild cats unwittingly destroying wildlife in local environs, nevertheless he swiftly cracked them open syphoning back millennia in recompense, the effulgent redress poured like luminous yolk into the awoken and startled children of his heart, discarding the phantasmagorical cloaks of the intruders before the horror stricken eyes of his brother and de facto sister, and in Honey's room before her eyes also, he held up the ruptured crystal effigies, turning them this way and that for their shocked benefit before transmuting the last lattices of life-force back into their shaken forms exulting them to themselves, making them whole again, the first humans to be whole again since the dawn of our kind, before the coming of our usurpers with their technical gifts which became our arcane manacles.

The skeins of shadow twisted and writhed on the floor before dissipating like windblown ash.

They looked at each other then, in the warm dimness, and smiled with knowing kindness and grim satisfaction. Wrecker in three places at once, then one. Honey walked into Two and Crissy's room. All of them smiling foolishly at each other as their breathing eased.

Then their worlds were ripped apart again.

Wrecker heard them outside at the front door before they smashed it in. The sliding glass door out back was next to shatter inward. They had come to contain an outbreak!

Of course, this must happen from time to time, dismay threatened their peace of mind. The disenfranchised would certainly on occasion happen to recall their birth right despite the all-encompassing ignorance that chokes individual sovereignty.

What would they send against them? What would the mongrels send against this family in their own home!

Wrecker and Two met them before they had set more than a steel capped boot through the doors. Wrecker confronted the new intruders out back, Two those out front.

The intruders were just black clad police men pointing guns and yelling, "POLICE! GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!" At least they knew what they were trying to say, if only they could carry out their intention to complete their warning before Two whipped their guns out of their hands and threw the men bodily out of the house slamming them sickeningly onto the ochre tiled ground.

Bellowing in eerie unison, "WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO KICK DOWN OUR DOOR!" the brothers intimidated the intruders utterly. If this crack team had not woken the neighbourhood when their failed bust was first attempted Two and Wrecker had shocked them out of their beds to stare out their windows through their obscuring curtains.

The brothers stood indomitable before the thoroughly bested experts. They exuded terrifying strength and their outraged voices had chastened the men with all assurance. All their years of dogged training and corrupt inculcation were set straight with one deafening question. The fact that Two had assaulted police officers completely slipped their minds. Their heads rang with the echoing erasures of clamorous implications. Their faces were hot with shame for they felt like betrayers and they knew not why.

There were four men in each team. Although they were not visible to each other the brothers felt that they stood back to back, not just against these innocent dupes in their boyish uniforms with their demeaning weapons, but against a malevolent entity rallying to the clarion call as alarm spread through the whole malignant system.

Honey stood at the shattered sliding door out back and Crissy leaned against the ruptured door frame out front. Neither of their demeanours was forgiving.

In the intermittent security light out front one officer piped up, "We're sorry. I'm Sergeant York. We were given an anonymous tip that this house was at the centre of a drug syndicate and normally we would need a warrant, but we were ordered down here by our superiors to forcibly detain the occupants immediately. We were led to believe that there was an element of danger they were not at liberty to share with us and that we need only carry out the orders. Duty bound, we didn't question why we were commanded to break with protocol. Even now I don't know why I've told you all that, or how you were able to disarm us all. You were so fast. Suddenly we were on our asses. Your training suggests there is in fact an element of danger and yet..."

Wrecker and the soldiers out back, everyone, even some of the neighbours, could hear the exchange. Stoic, unmoving, the eyes of the four family members reflected the light, making their dark eyes menacingly black. They gave no quarter to the enforcers, and yet...

"Yet you guys seem to be good people. If you could just let us check your home and make sure that..."

"When you have a warrant you can check my home." Two informed the officer in a manner that brooked no further queries on the matter. "Will the justice department pay for these unlawful damages to my property?" It was expected without any real question.

"Of course," the embarrassed sergeant lowered his gaze as he made his tacit promise.

Then Wrecker passed Crissy at the door walking down to stand with his brother. His eyes were looking down the driveway as a figure hove into view striding impatiently.

"YORK! What's going on here? Why aren't these criminals detained?" The old voice held bitter power behind it. There was movement in the lawns of their neighbours, shadows slipping silently across the tiled roofs and under silvery foliage.

Wrecker murmured under his breath, "This is not gonna be pretty, Two. I think I've made a mistake. These aren't normal men, none of them are. I should have thought this through. Ready yourselves," because he hadn't readied them enough. Nor had he readied himself enough. How could he have brought all this down upon them? He knew that he knew better than this and yet he had acted blithely, unthinking as he acted to save his family from veritable vampirism, he had needed to free them without raising alarm, whatever form that might take, always impulsively with him!

All these things he thought without any real conviction. He was inured to that depressing voice installed in his mind. He had been through too much to be at the mercy of doom's voice any longer, but still the propaganda went through the motions in his brain, like a broadcast when the owner of the voice had long since died, most likely in a POW camp with a gun in his back, or maybe in all seriousness it was he who had in some sense died, in hell, all those years ago, freeing him from the black magic spell of his own self defeatist litanies.

He stepped forward.

Loud enough for all the neighbours to hear he challenged the bitter puppet. "If you have a warrant you can rifle through our home, but you already know you'll find nothing. Why did you send these good men to kick our faces in? That's what they do, right? Even with a warrant they kick the teeth in of hippy drug users and hardened criminals alike, just like in the news. But you don't even have a warrant so who is it that you think we are?"

The senior officer was a white haired, furiously red faced man. The first two teams had gathered together now and looked on in confusion. Their dorky helmets only added to the bad comedy made plain on their faces. It was obvious that the old fellah made them all feel uncomfortable, as completely insane men are liable to make anyone feel when they hold a position of power.

More and more lights were coming on from the neighbouring houses revealing another dozen black clad officers in dorky helmets.

The old fellah looked ready to burst. His hand twitched as if eager to go for his holstered firearm. Then the twitch disappeared and for a split second his eyes softened, imploring, sorrowful, and he was going for his gun, no, his chest.

He looked a little surprised seizing his own chest with every heartbeat. His knees were going out from under him as his face and torso turned to the sky, hands clutching awkwardly before him and before he hit the ground a faceless officer caught him, lowering him gently to the cobbled driveway.

He was dead.

*

"What the hell's going on, Wrecker?" Crissy was pissed. He had heard the undertone struck on his name, but he knew she didn't really mean it. They hadn't bothered to turn on any lights. They felt less vulnerable in the bright dark. "There were two of you in our room, Wrecker. I thought I was dreaming. It was a nightmare then we were powerful somehow." To emphasize she alighted upward to touch the fifteen foot high ceiling of their bedroom and descended as if she weighed less than a wafer, talking excitedly as she came down, "How is this possible?" She laughed then too happy to remain angry.

They had renovated the old house together. An artistic streak ran through the whole family. The end result was somewhat modern garnering the same response from all visitors. They felt comfortable and often stayed an extra day if they could, and came back whenever they felt like the world was getting them down. Actually, Two had bought the house off their parents six months ago, and visitors had always mentioned how easy going their mum and dad were. Wrecker was looking around at everything now. He seemed to be looking past the objects to another time.

Wrecker knew he couldn't just answer her and expect her to accept what she heard. He had given up talking about his flights of fancy a long time ago. Only particular friends had accepted his quirks of nature and personality, enjoying his anecdotes layered in too many hidden possibilities. Even then he always wove humour into his more jaded account of their falling civilization.

Honey spoke first, "We need to go see Mum and talk to Grampa, maybe Nanny C will be having a lucid day." Two looked at Honey and nodded, his eyes pursed with gravity.

"Why? Do they know about this stuff?" Crissy was surprised, but the siblings kept so many particular kinds of memory safely hidden behind a portrait of disbelief. It was safer that way. Two and Wrecker both knew Honey was the authority on things that go bump in the night, and she was the only one of them that had stayed in contact with Mum's side of the family. Except for that one time before he flipped his lid, Wrecker had never talked to Mum about all this stuff, and after they had come to rescue him from hell, he had never burdened them with the memory of watching their eldest son in mordant agony. Honey had to talk to Mum and all them about this stuff most of her young life. Her brothers had only learned later when they were adults that she had been afflicted with night terrors.

"Yeah, I used to be grabbed by those shadow things all the time when I was a girl. So I would have to go tell Mum and she would call Nana and Grampa and they would make it all better"

"How?" Crissy was concerned and a little scared even though Honey had softened the details intentionally. The thought that this concerned elders always elevated the danger to their descendants.

"I don't know. They would tell me it's alright now and that they would take care of it, and sorry," Honey's eyes were agleam with sadness and they all could see that her well of sorrow was deep, its depth touched them all and fury began to fuse within the brothers. Their eyes too were agleam, with obvious bloodlust. But the sisters placed a hand on their shoulders and honey spoke, "It's okay now, we'll take care of it..."

"Don't you dare say sorry, Sis. Don't you dare." Wrecker syphoned power from the insoluble losses of his family and he was inconsolable. He would make these shadows suffer their liberation.

"Yeah, Honey!" Two mimicked his older brother's voice and tone flawlessly, except for a hint of exaggerated pomp. "Don't you know there's no word for sorry in the Maori language!" That was it. Everyone cracked up laughing.

"True. True," They all laughed because it was indeed true that before white people had come there was no word for sorry. And Two had disarmed everyone again. The tin-arse, cracking up at his own joke, shining eyes laughing at his brother, his brother laughing back, at himself, and at the cruel world. Two always reminded him that things didn't have to be so god damn dark all the time. However, Wrecker needed to know something.

"You, guys, tired?"

"Wired, bro," Two grinned.

"Totally," Crissy and Honey chimed.

"Well, I think we need to learn as much as possible about what we're capable of doing, don't you reckon?"

"Yeah," they chorused.

"Good. Then I'll meet you in the lounge." He translated instantly to the sofa. The others had to ambulate the traditional way taking a seat, girls on one sofa, boys on the other. All four were grinning like Cheshire cats. It was a little spooky, four faces made pale in the darkness grinning maniacally. To his senses they moved a little slow, but faster than normal humans.

"So cool!" Honey squealed.

"I know!" giggled Crissy. They had been living together on and off for over a decade and had become real sisters, bickering, bragging, and ball bashing like they had grown up together.

"I'm sure your sense of time is altered and I wanna know how much so. Why don't you count to ten when I say and I'll keep track of time? Are you ready?"

Two made his hilarious mocking face, dropping a brow and screwing up his mouth before he quipped, "Bro, how're you gonna keep track of time without a watch?"

There was a section of the wall taken out during renovations that allowed for a view between the lounge and the kitchen. Hidden from anyone in the lounge was the microwave digital clock. Though sitting next to Two on the sofa, Wrecker's sing song voice sang out from the kitchen, "If you lean forward and take a wee gander you'll see I'm in the kitchen as well." Sure enough, while smiling at everyone from the sofa, he was also waving with mock severity from the breakfast bar.

Honey raised her eyebrows quizzically then brought her left brow and left lip closer together for comical effect. "How do you do that?!" She laughed percussively.

Two threw his big arms in the air, the backs of his hands facing Wrecker. "Hell yeah! Come on. Tell us, bro. Bring it on," Two made himself look like a giant teddy bear with a dumb expression on his face, inching toward the edge of his seat, eager for more magic. We all laughed a little. They were all keen either to learn, or in Wreckers case, to teach.

"First, I want to know approximately how much time you guys perceive, just a rough test. For example, a fly sees humans as unmoving statues, as slow moving as trees, at least until we execute our fastest manoeuvers, like fly swatting. When you watch a movie there are around twenty five frames a second creating the illusion of continuous movement. Perception is cinematic in that way."

Two chimes in, "Or a cold crocodile barely sees us because we appear to blur with speed, their nervous systems are so cold they have a slow circuit, or something. But after they've baked in the sun a while, they're deadly quick."

Crissy was nodding her head, "Chemical potential and mass, right. It is the difference between cold blooded and warm blooded, like the difference between warming up and not warming up before exercise, not to mention bigger and smaller nervous circuits, like the 1000 beats a minute of a hummingbird heart compared to the nine beats a minute of a whale heart. The bird's perception of time is acute while the whale's is protracted."

"Exactly. The humming bird perceives more time per minute, its circuit from sense data to interpretation is completed many more times a second, meaning there are more personal moments of time per second. Ready to count to 10?" They all nodded or murmured, "Aye," and "Yip."

"Ready, set, go."

The four of them silently counted, signalling ten in almost the same moment. Crissy, then Honey, and Two last, but the difference was negligible.

"You guys are perceiving approximately ten seconds every two seconds." Wrecker was trying not to grin so much. He was well aware that his brother and sisters were chuffed, awestruck, totally in wonderland. "That's approximately five times faster than a normal human perception of the flow of time however I would hazard a guess and say that it's actually four times faster, based on my assumptions about the dimensionality of consciousness. You see I would guess my perception of time to be closer to seven times faster and that we could potentially compress time to twenty seven times faster."

Honey put her hands on her hips and smirked as she complained, "Great one, Wreck. We get super powers and you have to go rain on our parade!" He had to chuckle at that.

"I don't care, this is awesome!" Crissy started to do back flips, and somersaults. "It's so easy now." She beamed and cackled, rolling her hands like an evil genius.

"Let me try too." Honey leaped up and started tumbling through the air like an astronaut, mistiming she landed in the press up position and we all cracked up laughing while she started doing urgent press ups with her best Arnie face.

"Oh my Gaat! I'm four times straanguh!!" Everyone was doubling over with laughter. Their family had been pirating movies since the 80's and if anyone had seen more than 10,000 movies, it was one or all of them. Honey was the Empress of movies. She knew every single actor's name. At least, she seemed to think so.

"Bro?" Two was still smiling, but his eyes had something serious to ask. "Can you tell us now, what's happening?" The three of them were still smiling even though concern worried their faces, like ripples.

"There's a part of you that already knows what's happening. That part of you has always been able to suspend your disbelief and enjoy a fantastic movie or animation or comic book, or novel, and be thrilled by its message. However there was always another message hiding in plain sight, confounding your, let's call it spirit, or hidden physical, or wairua. That second message is subtle, subtle like "minute changes in geography over the eons" subtle. It is the master chess move of a player that lives millennia like we live years. For it to exist like that it has only the subtlest influence on our plane of existence. It must have contingencies upon contingencies planned hundreds if not thousands of years in advance. It can't just decide to crush us if it hasn't anticipated this eventuality. Its consciousness is slower than a tree's. 'Cause that's what you're asking, right? What's happening to us? Are we in danger now? What do we do? Well, we have to go off the grid to ensure there isn't another contingency coming here soon. I had been careless just before, but while we've been acclimatizing here," he meant while they've been acclimatizing, more than he at least, "I've been ranging far and wide, all over Avondale and Mount Albert making sure nothing else was coming." He could see that the gravity of humanity's truly horrifying state of affairs had grounded the corners of their mouths and entrenched their eyes, making them soldiers on the front line overnight. "So we're gonna buy us time to finally face all the unknowns we always knew were there, in every fiction we ever heard, but were too afraid to look foolish and ask, 'What is reality?'"

Intuitively he recognized in them that on the one hand they had been un-stabilized and therefore terrorized, but on the other hand they were re-stabilizing on a new centre of being, their true centre, he could see in them the truth sounding deep inside of them like the ohm struck from some ten ton bronze bell, spreading its profound emanation outward, the frequency of its infrasound was the knell of the spirit in all things.

"You know what I'm talking about, we all do, and even though it seems like we've just lost everything connected to this sham world, I think we can set our people free, and all people are our people. We can call on Nanny C's knowledge, she still knows like the entire oral tradition. None of us ever had hope that it could matter before, feeling ashamed that we could never carry on that tradition, glad that somebody else would.

"We have tasted hope now. With our whole being we are experiencing the way we use to be before we came to loath human nature, thinking it was our own self-destructiveness. I have been studying esoteric knowledge," obliquely, for to believe implicitly would invite darkness again, "for more than thirteen years, and the dream I had always nourished, and that had always nourished me through the hard times, even though it was a hopeless fantasy that always left me feeling guilty, was that...I could change the world."

Wrecker wanted to say 'save the world' but saying it out loud was too much.

"We can make a difference to everyone on this planet if we quickly learn all we can about our rediscovered power so that we can liberate as many people as quickly and as safely as possible. We could turn the tables on our whole perception of human destiny, hell we could have a destiny, instead of the doom and gloom everybody always sees in the headlines with the environmental destruction and wars."

He could see their eyes agleam in the dark. These were not tears in danger of falling: their spirits were soaring with purpose. The optimism welling up from deep inside was an overflowing updraft making their flight through vaunted perception a pure breeze, exhilarating.

Two, Honey, Crissy, all looked at each other, sharing the unspoken caginess and determination that made people essentially pack animals. They had work to do. They all nodded, eager. Then Two relaxedly boomed his mind-set out loud, "Hell yeeeah!"

### Chapter 5: The Slain

Ajax was a serial killer that had never had good enough reason to fulfil his destiny. He was dead inside, but few could see it. The few that could were his mates, real mates, and they didn't have a problem not telling him what to do with his life, that was the province of girlfriends. Not that his girlfriend ever did that, she was a good sort, one of the best. And not that his mates wanted him to go all out Vlad the Impaler planting randoms on pikes while he et his dinner to the music of their 10,000 agonies, etcetera etcetera. They just wanted him to find some channel for the senselessly violent images that incessantly assailed and relieved his truncated spirit. He threw himself into deejaying but hadn't cracked it yet. They just always pinned it on the fact that he was a Ginger, a red head, freckles etcetera etcetera. But he insisted that he was auburn.

The late afternoon sun was warm still on his closed eyelids. Ajax opened his eyes to peer through yellowed spangles and look out from the rooftop over the hodgepodge mosaic of low lying apartments encrusting the hills below. The dirty corona of the sun was just beautiful, and its streaks of exhausted light knighted the city of Seoul and all its harried denizens carte blanche with the right to do and have whatever their sullied souls desired, not that Ajax felt desires anymore. Something had been denied him and he couldn't even remember what it was, only that he felt responsible for the lethargy trapped behind his easy going dashing exterior.

He was sure he wasn't evil, he was socially sensitive, not strictly a sociopath, Jasmine and him had been together for years, he was well known to such a large social circle, played in the Seoul Survivors rugby team, drank from time to time when the inspiration to suspend disbelief took him by the ginger curlies. He could have fun and hope that something better was around the corner, for a couple of hours, under the influence of synthetic Korean beers.

John nuzzled his balls.

"Oooh, boy, be careful there, Johnny." John is an abnormally heavy set golden retriever, with the demeanour of Doug off that animated movie UP, but other people pretend to speak for him, saying dumb things and such, and he's huge, like golden pony huge.

"Hello, Ajax."

Ajax nearly shit himself.

He spun around and started cracking up with surprise. He felt alive with shock.

"Wrecker, bro! What're you doing here?! How did immigration let you back in? Weren't you back in NZ?" He was rapt. Everyone loves surprises, especially a sociopath seldom surprised by anything. Although, Wrecker did always have the knack for giving people a good heart pained fright.

Him and Wrecker had lived next to each other during their studies down at Otago Uni. They had met the moment after Wrecker had picked himself off the floor for the last time, when Wrecker grabbed the bottles of Mississippi Moonshine and chocolate milk he had been inspired to buy earlier that week, even though he had given up drugs of all varieties for nearly a year, and had gone next door to introduce himself. Wrecker had lived right behind Ajax for six months and they had never met or acknowledged each other, still recovering from his incarceration in hell, Wrecker would look away at the last moment every time there had been a chance of saying 'hi'.

Ajax had lived with a bunch of good people, but they were away on holiday, when Wrecker had just come out and approached Ajax with his friend John, the person John, while they were smoking a J and he'd said, "Hi, how's it going?" That whole time leading up to this moment all Ajax's flat mates had wondered if Wrecker and his "wife" were just snobs. But here he was, balls out, introducing himself with the candour one expects from a known friend.

"Not bad. What about you? How's things?" And here it was. That moment Wrecker had always hated growing up, the moment when you were meant to lie and act like nothing was wrong. But he felt no such compulsion. He was simply not obliged to lie anymore.

"Terrible actually," Ajax passed the J to Wrecker and he pulled on it then passed it to the left, holding the smoke in for half a minute until every single mote of entheogenic vapour had been ingested by his bronchial tubes to spread the heady word, anointing every cell in his triumphant body with its evangelical benison. Then he continued speaking without any hint of smoke escaping his lips, "My wife's leaving me and I just picked myself of the floor. I haven't been drinking or smoking up for nearly a year since I got out of the mental hospital, but when I walked past a liquor store the other day I saw Mississippi moonshine in the window, and I know what you're thinking, we're adults now and this stuff is like jelly bean training wheels for teenage drop kicks, but I was inspired to buy this and chocolate milk, not as a mixer, but as a chaser. I predict that the chaser will rob the sickly sweetness and seal the deal. Game to try?"

"Sounds great," they chimed, nodding and accepting everything without hesitation.

"I think," John chirped up, "If we're to do that, when my friend gets here, we should play Buckie-bong Trivial Pursuit. You ever played?" He queried leaning forward slightly, looking up through his sandy blond dreads like some debonair Rastafari. It turned out that this PHD in geology was bound to win even though every correct answer earned him a prodigious cone of bud, his soundness of mine was enscribed in the basalt of eternity.

To which we both responded with shaking heads that we hadn't and started to grin like good devils, nodding now. Ajax extended his hand.

"I'm Ajax, by the way." A nickname Wrecker guessed, but wondered still if maybe Ajax was his unlikely Christian name. Who named their kid after a cleaning product after all? Sure, there was Ajax and Cassandra, but regular New Zealanders would've given him shit. They shook hands with the short sharp vigour expected of honest men.

"Wrecker."

"John, mate."

"Cool. Nice to meet you both."

Ajax nodded still smiling, eyes like slow turning blue sapphires, they were sinister but comforting somehow, as if something raw in each other resounded. Ajax gestured inside, "Well met, brother. Well met."

That was a decade ago now, and though it had only been a month since Wrecker had fled the country under less than ideal circumstances, he was here hugging him. Somehow he had gotten through all the red tape that should have detained him, heftily fined him, and had him immediately deported, if his old boss' heavy connections hadn't conspired to trump up cause for further detainment, or even a little rough treatment. The mystery was vivifying.

"It's a little complicated, bro." Wrecker was rapt to see his friend and his smirk shone with their friendly shared arrogance, implying secrets and stories to be told in a self-aggrandizing style, so as to invite good natured scorn and hearty ridicule.

"Awesome! Well, then maybe we need a beer, none of that Korean shit..." Ajax was starting down the steps when Wrecker's face erased its smile.

"We don't have time for beer." His tone had frozen Ajax where he stood, stunned him. Johnny whined, looked to get up but remained sitting, looking back and forth between the two brothers from different mothers.

The last rays of light were redolent and hollow. A chill wind blew a smattering of dust motes into Ajax's eyes, and it was in that blinking moment that Wrecker closed the distance between them and with one flat palm pushed Ajax bodily off his feet, flying out into the space between apartments.

He was too surprised to think, or fear. His imminent death rushed up at his back while he looked up at the sky through a growing corridor of glass and concrete. He hadn't even breathed since Wrecker had struck the air from his lungs, gently he thought, masterfully, he feared. Before he hit the ground he saw Wrecker gazing down dispassionately beside Johnny's wrinkled alarm.

Then all of a sudden there was nothing.

*

"Ajax."

"What the fuck happened, man?" Ajax was dazed. He thought he'd died and yet he wasn't at all surprised to be alive, but he felt strange, like he was wrapped in sheets. He had the reassuring sense that it had been a dream on the roof, a freaky dream.

"I had to bring you here. It was the only way I knew how." Wrecker's voice was echoing, like it was coming from everywhere.

"What are you talking about, bro? Where are we? I can't see anything." He was confused because he couldn't even work out which way was up, if he was standing or sitting or lying down.

Just then Ajax heard Wrecker's voice in his ear. "Just open your eyes, bro."

Slowly, by increments, light returned to his world. It was a glaring light, right in front of his eyes.

No, wait a second, it was far away.

Then he felt the cold hard surface against his back. He was lying down. The glaring white light was high up above. It was a street lamp. He brought his hand up to his face, blocking the light and leaned over onto his side to look around.

A sickening feeling began to creep into his gut. Outside the circle of lamp light there was a gaping void. He forced his hand to crawl along the asphalt toward the edge of darkness in an attempt to test his horrified theory that there was no ground beyond the safety of the light. His hand felt a sharp lip descending around the edge of illumination but he fought the involuntary recoil that shook his arm probing further to make sure it didn't descend in steps like a dais until his whole forearm had disappeared from sight down the sheer drop.

He snatched his arm back. He felt like a scared little boy.

But only for a fleeting moment.

His fear was beginning to infuriate him. It boiled up inside like magma.

"Wrecker!" he yelled, almost breaking his voice, unused to such visceral yelling, not even on the rugby field. He jumped to his feet spinning around with his fists balled and his body hard, ready to take any punishment.

There was nothing but the grey metal lamp, its clinical buzzing glare, and himself.

"WRECKER!" his voice sounded louder than was possible somehow. It stopped his rage cold, as if he'd frightened himself. This angered him even more insanely than before and he started to quake with fury, going red in the face and hyperventilating.

His eyes were almost popping out of his skull.

He dropped to the ground and reached over the edge as far as he could without falling. Furious, he had convinced himself that it was another dream, and the fact that he'd been scared pissed him off to no end.

He wasn't afraid of anything!

But still he felt nothing different down the unlikely dais. It was a seamless surface as far as his fingers could tell, and it felt so damn real. The assertion that it was real screamed through all his senses and this set his mental stability on a precarious kilter.

He stood again and peered into the impenetrable black, looked around and up the lamp. Everything visible was nondescript, exactly as he'd expect asphalt to look and feel, perfectly granulated black, almost volcanic but for its perfect flatness, precisely what a street lamp is supposed to be, like the lightweight partly hexagonal strut for a spindly lunar module. He dropped to the edge once more and started feeding his legs to the cold dark maw. He was virtually holding on to the edge with his armpits.

Somehow the thought struck him as hilarious and giggles began to bubble up in his rib cage, abruptly he slipped a little so that only his forearms were holding on, and this didn't help his mistimed sense of humour.

The visceral bite of the sharp edge bit harder into the skin of his forearms as he held onto the only stable thing in his absurd situation, in his whole life right now, and that it was his choice to abandon that stability in an attempt to find something more, something familiar, was the funniest thing he'd ever heard.

He began to laugh harder, and harder, and the hysterical pitch of his laughter only made it funnier, his fear of plummeting into illimitable pitch black waiting for the exponentially mounting expectation that at any split second his soft body would smash into solid unforgiving concrete shook him physically with fits of constrained hilarity.

Only his sweating fingers were hurting on the edge now, and desperately forcing himself to quell his fits of jocular madness seemed to draw out the comedy further. And just like that the humour vanished.

The utter oppressive silence that loomed around him muffled his ears from the lamp's electric hum. Painfully he pulled himself back up and rolled over on his back to catch his breath.

Then after only a few seconds, he popped up suddenly and slapped the lamp. Its high pitched subliminal whine died out quickly, fading to black briefly then whining back into glaring life.

He danced around a little like a boxer with his guard up, jabbing at the air, smacking around some invisible combatant. One, two. One, two. One, one, two. Then he danced up to the lamp, ducking and diving a little, and jabbed a flat plane on the lamp. Wang! And the lamp switched off, fading to utter deafening blackness.

"What the hell!" He muttered to himself, feeling foolish as if he was being watched. Wait! "This can't be real. It doesn't feel right somehow!"

He punched the hollow metal again, guided by the touch of his left hand on the lamp, and the light sprang back into being. He had made up his mind. He turned to look into the void facing away from the lamp.

He lifted up his head and set his shoulders back. His intention gave him all the fear he needed, which in turn gave him far more hot determination. He was bloody angry with this impossible bullshit. He didn't care what was going to happen to his body. He'd thrown himself into harm's way countless times on the rugby field, and outside pubs. He wasn't afraid of nobody or anything.

He'd flown planes, jumped out of planes, jumped off cliffs, bridges, and buildings. As far as he knew he was already dead for all he cared. Then it dawned on him. Even when he had been alive and had everything, work, income, the love of a woman who would please him whenever he wanted if he felt like it, and he had been dead inside, walking dead... a zombie.

He was everything to her and he couldn't even care.

He snapped.

An almighty roar belted out of him, not just from his rending mouth, but shuddering in inhuman vibrations thrumming through his chest, impossible tears of all consuming rage streamed from his fiery distorted visage, but he had only begun to roar louder, and the spasms that shook his chest cavity in tectonic vibrato took hold of his arms and legs shaking them full with fierce liquid metal, as if a hundred million calcined flood gates had bust inside his irate veins, spewing the coronal fury of the Earth's steel core.

Scorching down his face, red hot metal tears burned brighter and brighter, imbuing the lamp light with bloody amber. And still his breath, like a furnace, roared from the depths of his revolving core until all that was left was molten dissatisfaction, filling his lungs with embittered burning. Then the realization that he was drowned in super-dense superheated slag cajoled him to simply, irrevocably, let go, too far gone to care.

He had only to inhale, the air instantly igniting flames in his chest glowing bright inside his heart, and his exhalation was glorious: flames erupted from his nostrils in silken sheets that waved to its own exotic music, dancing into thin air.

He looked at his body. It was white hot and tiny black motes of void in varied sizes swam languidly across the surface of his skin, like sun spots. His rugby shorts and running shirt were immolated in blue flame but appeared to be impervious to the sun-like heat. His body looked like a white hot metal statue, and the asphalt beneath the soles of his feet had vitrified a glassy obsidian blast radius.

Finally he noticed that the overhead light source had moved. His extravagantly heated tantrum had melted the lamp making it look like a giant aluminium match stick that even after being used up still refused to give up the light it had determined to provide.

Ajax was emotionally plumbed, his depths had been sounded. He was weighty with intentions.

He eyed the abyss with head held high, smirked, then loped to the edge and threw his body into the great unknown, ecstatic with the knowledge that there must me more than this.

His ecstasy beat slow and hard in his chest as he followed the trajectory of his colossal leap further and further from the light. He could feel the receding glow at his back disappear altogether and then there was only his plummeting through the howling abyss.

His arms were now eagle-like, raised up as majestic as wings. His legs were stretched downward, ready to take the monstrous impact of his rapid descent. He could tell from the pitch of the wind as he fell that he had reached terminal velocity moments ago, or was it a lifetime ago.

Was that light he could see?

Then he was blinded, winded, and deafened, in that crushed order. The thunder had that movie quality, like the dramatically protracted reverberation of a gunshot in a canyon, except that it was echoing in his ears and over his skin like waves propagating gently.

He realized his knees were rammed into his face, his chest flattened against his thighs. He could hear a twinkling sound all around and then he felt hundreds of pinpricks raining down on him, tickling his exposed neck, shoulders, and arms. He jerked his head up and the last fragments of glass peppered his face like some screwed up blessing.

The twilight world he found himself in came into focus with an effort. He was outside his apartment, sitting in a tiny crater. Up here on the steeper slopes there were only concrete roads with deep grooves cut into them to deal with the ice and snow during the winter months. He had pulverized a three foot circle of solid concrete, and standing up he realized he felt fine.

The impact crater was not quite a foot deep, but it was dawning on him that there was greater concern than accidental vandalism. He could hear a growing chorus of human alarm chittering and chirring behind still closed doors and the susurration of feet scuttling cumbrously to windows blown inward by the peace shattering detonation.

He could sense the fear of foreigners and Korean civilians alike. They feared that North Korea had finally dared to attack the innocent heart of Seoul for the second time.

Warring inside Ajax was his natural predilection toward internal apathy, a sucking void against a primal glee not unlike the old highs that used to vaunt his spirit across the carpeted gyres of moonlit dance parties overlooking the luxurious black velvet ocean spread out below the Egyptian blue marble dome wondrously flawed with billions of stars. He recalled that the moon itself was a window lambent with the cool divinity of the even greater universe at large. The shawl of its light lay across the mysterious surface of the knowing deep.

Then as if he too knew, peace descended through him like slow snow in an internalized snow globe.

The war inside was as fallacious as the war in the minds of those fearful neighbours mustering around him, almost at their peepholes. Fear made the war real. But he had found something deep inside him, coursing through all the days of his life. Something that gave his void what it had been starving for: unromantic love.

Everything he had thought lost to the virtual antiquity of his past had never left him. His love for life itself had always been there to define his loss, his pain, and dreary listlessness. His heart had merely wandered from the course of his lust for life, or so he thought it had.

Looking up between the two devastated facades he saw Johnny's roly-poly face looking down at him. Gravity had a good hold on all that loose skin in that golden furred face, giving it the severity of Winston Churchill before D-day.

Ajax' face split with a grin.

He was no longer burning full with super-dense magma but felt the newfound potential in his exulted ligaments. He gathered his potency and sprang up, up and onto the lip of the low wall on his rooftop, three or so stories, hopping down from the low roof wall to sit next to his canine son, allowing himself to be licked in slow motion from mouth to eyes and ears, laughing at the growly simpers of concern.

Still grinning from ear to ear he re-imagined the scene before him of Wrecker real as real could be before he had struck him with a lightning fast push that sent him over the edge, to his death he guessed.

For that's what seemed to have happened. He had died and gone to hell, except that it wasn't any kind of hell he could have ever imagined. It was some infuriating lamp lit ledge on the way to hell, a kind of purgatory, except that it was a purgatory for one.

Was it really Wrecker? Had he put him there on purpose knowing what it would do to him, knowing that such a scenario would test him the way it had? He could imagine other people just sitting there in that island of fake light. Sure that light had been comforting, but that had only pissed him off more, in light of the circumstances.

If it was really Wrecker, he was somehow too much. How had he done all this? What is all this? How is any of this even possible? Wrecker had always asked him over the years, at the most random times. "If you could have any mutant power in the world, what would it be? Magneto's? Superman's?"

Wrecker was definitely one of the weirdest of his mates, but they were all mostly on par a host of cool freaks. Wrecker had called them all the gold mine on a great number of debauch occasions, tweaked out of his gourd. A gold mine of new kin, he'd sometimes said. He even told him once that he had referred to his family as his x-team, when he was attempting to sound sane, arguing calmly for his release from Waikari Psychiatric hospital down in Dunedin.

He'd retold his story remarking that he couldn't tell the psychiatrist at that time that he was actually still quite out of his mind. While that Doctor, with the unlikely name of Doctor Grace Lockaway, was arguing against Wrecker's release, his Psych Nurse case worker was arguing on behalf of his family, all gathered there in support. During their civil discussion, Wrecker had sworn that he was deafened by the sound of duelling light sabres humming and thwocking electrically.

His wife, mother, father, sister, brother, aunt and great aunt with her little dog had come to stay with him in that ward. He said that the first night and morning were the worst. He thought he had died and gone to hell and it was his shame that his family had died too and were brought there to increase his despair, convinced it was his fault they were there.

Wrecker had thought himself an atheist, but madness had taught him that belief was the conclusion of knowledge. Brainwashing made sense to him because of his experiences. Isolating the right kinds of knowledge led to specific beliefs. He had slid into a world where reality could mean anything.

Wrecker's psychosis had always fascinated Ajax, their telling had always sung to him.

The visiting hours had ended and his family had to leave Wrecker to his shattered self that first night. He had been placed out in the country in a maximum security unit after a violent attempt at escape from the minimum security psych ward in the city centre. During that escape he'd said that maybe eight guards had come out of nowhere when the exit was right before him. He'd nearly gone through them all when he'd been brought down and injected in his ass.

The thing he'd remembered most was using all his strength to keep his arm from being forced into a painful position too far up his back before they'd pumped him full of drugs and he'd promptly lost consciousness.

Much later after his full release from Waikari he had read his file knowing that they had to give a copy of all the information held on him. He was well within his rights and they were only happy to oblige. Apparently during that attempted escape he had even kneed a guy in the balls.

After that first night of being alone with his other dangerous peers his family had come back first thing and found that Wrecker was abjectly afflicted with clinical depression, so severe had been the visions of his wholly personal horrors that he bore the weight of his unspoken responsibilities in his broken posture.

He had said that he thought himself at that dark time any number of betrayers from the underworld pantheon of fantasy. Among them he had identified himself with Morgoth from the Silmarillion. An open sore was festering on the sole of his foot and he likened it to the hand Morgoth had wilfully half fed to the first werewolf Carcharoth, the red maw, and he also thought it akin to the stigmata of the possessed.

He sat in his cane throne staring at evils and wouldn't eat or acknowledge anyone, suffering an eternity of failure.

That night when visiting hours had come his mother, being a nurse herself had acquiesced to the staff's admonitions that by law they couldn't stay any later sorry, but Wrecker's wife Juanita had refused to leave. Defiantly she had said, "Look at the way these freaks flock to him, hugging him, just look at the state of him, I'm not going anywhere!"

Wrecker's mum had never made it easy for Juanita over the years, until that moment. Suddenly she saw that where she had failed her son Juanita had saved them all. Together the whole family refused to go and the cops were called to enforce the law. They were to be physically removed.

A Maori case worker had come up to Wrecker's mum and asked her where she was from, asking what her marae and iwi was. He had asked with the manner of someone who was stage acting, like he was saying something more than his mere words implied.

Then she clicked, recalled that there was a loophole in the system. She had forgotten that Maori were allowed by law to care for their ailing loved ones as they saw fit, almost nobody actually used that clause, and she told the cops as they arrived on the scene that she and her son were Maori and needn't abide by pakeha laws.

The officers were needled but half had to admit that the law was the law and the other half skulked back to their cars and wagon with their whetted violence far from sated.

Half the hospital staff were also irate, brooding with disappointment, while the other half beamed with a triumph they had forgotten existed on such glorious scales, having had to be sated with the tiny victories of tentative smiles and pyrrhic breakthroughs.

Wrecker had told Ajax with his famously huge grin that during those two weeks other concerned parents had said to Wrecker's mother and father, "You're lucky. We wish we could stay overnight and protect our," daughter or son, "from their night terrors."

His Mum had said, proudly looking askance at Juanita who smiled back, "Why can't you?!" and those families too stayed with their children or parents and half the staff said it was the happiest it had ever been in that ward.

They had also figured out how to feed Wrecker's emaciated husk. He had lost twenty kilograms. Juanita too had forgotten to eat and was wasting away, so forlorn was she. Wrecker's mum had had to force her to eat, but one day she had given a subway sandwich to Juanita in front of Wrecker and he had blindly taken it from her hands while she was in the middle of eating it and chowed down on it instead. They had all laughed and started to feed Juanita in order to feed Wrecker.

He said that during that whole tortured time in there he was like a prisoner in his own mind, he could look outside, but the fortress of his thoughts had conspired to rob him of all will. He remembered so many things but reality and fantasy had blended. He had thought he'd seen people run through walls and pop out of bushes. He had been in rooms that were filled with billions of spikes and passed through the razor bowels of demonic eternity.

He said that he had thought that the entire living world was a sophisticated organic machine and that plant species were Gods we had been enslaving at the behest of some dire purpose. He had said so laughing, but Ajax wondered seriously about it in the light polluted dark of his apartment rooftop, with red and blue light eerily strobing behind him.

He wondered if Wrecker had been desperately filtering the mind shattering force of implications too great to encompass ever since his psychotic break from reality. He wondered if the world as it was remained true, the world described by sophisticated scientific theories and tools, but had been reinterpreted from a greater overarching perspective that would not shy from a brutal hideous fact. Maybe he had brought something back from Hell, some kind of knowledge that slowly worked its way out of his tainted essence.

Suddenly he recalled a moment Wrecker had related the night he had escaped from that first place in the city. He had said that he was actually happy, filled with power and vision, but something had changed that. Moments before that he had been doing a striptease for the predominantly student pedestrians in the street below. It was late afternoon turning twilight. He had felt liberated from shame, and guilt had been the one constant through-out his whole existence until that welcome break from the norm.

Then something had got his attention from up in the high-ceilinged corner of the room. He had turned to look up, jumping down from the ledge of the old school sash windows. He then had a vision.

Far up in the heavens in the corner of the ceiling he saw an innumerable host of megaton angels clamouring toward the earth and terror struck him insensate. After that he had felt monitored by power sockets, thought that the phalanx covenant, a techno-organic virus in the x-men comics, had assimilated the ward, so he had only pretended to eat his medication feigning catatonia, while in fact he was ready to do harm to anyone that intended to thwart his escape.

Remembering that Wrecker had written about one of his experiences in a zine he'd published. Ajax got up to go down stairs and find it on his chaotic book shelf.

Stealing a glance over the edge he saw the cute little boy-scouts in their overlarge blue caps standing around the pock in the cheap concrete. There were a few boy soldiers too. Their helmets made them look like caricatures as well, like some Lego star wars urban shock troops. Their slow motion made it all seem like slow motion in the movies, totally cool.

He just loved how syrupy time had become. He felt like he had all the time in the world and his only care was the sluice gate of his golden thoughts. He spun and flowed down the thickly painted green concrete stairs and his golden furred shadow followed in delayed time.

In the apartment he found the thin oriental looking book, snapped it up out of the haphazard stack, and floated in a recumbent position, slowly descending across the room, to the sofa while he read in mid-air the particular short story from the book 'Jason and the Golden Thesis' dedicated to him and the rest of the gold mine:

The Room

The room is approximately three by three meters. The illumination is a shadowy fluorescent. The embattled varnished bed installation has a glossy toy blue plastic covered foam inner mattress. There is a shelf desk varnished the same as everything else in the room, but in better condition than the bed. The door has a small safety glassed portal at eye level. The portal cover is on the outside of the door. The occupant is in the shadow. He has lost twenty kilograms in the last two weeks. This is his first night in who-knows-where. He is insanely terrified. The door is not locked. He doesn't know what will come through the door. However they come, whatever they are, he is going to have to go for their throats and their eyes. He is going to head-butt faces. He has upturned two toy-green moulded plastic chairs so that the eight legs in total form a palisade facing the very entrance to the door. He has covered the obstacle with a grey standard issue blanket so as to obscure its haphazard nature. He has crushed and uncrushed a Marvel universe poster of Onslaught and a red hot chili peppers poster from their album 'blood sugar sex magick' to strangely ornament the hazard so as to baffle assailants or mislead them into thinking the occupant is harmlessly deranged and therefore easy to take. His feet brace the chairs whilst he assumes a mock catatonic posture with his head lolled. His elbows are tucked and hands are at chest level so that his angles are strong. His knees are bent to lower his centre of gravity and ground his entire body. Beyond the door nearly all previous random transient noise bursts had subsided. There were no more unpredictable fits of maniacal laughter. There were no more indecipherable jeers or claims. There were only the last doors closing. But the quiet brought a harrowing half muttering too faint to hear above a hurting heart and pounding ears. Then the portal cover deftly moved aside and an eye peered in. The door opened fast, but not too fast. A tall skinny young man with cowed shoulders stood in the doorway. He appeared concerned as he looked at the occupant to the hazard and back in a completely natural darting fashion. He spoke in a hushed tone over the din of the occupant's heart...

"Are you okay?"

Just then his body touched down, gently pressing into the welcoming embrace of his street-found couch. Peering into space Ajax was hooked by an unnerving hunch, and wondered if Wrecker was trying to tell him something through a story he'd written years and years ago. Was he trying to say something about the innocent people that were only trying to help him?

So profound was the depth of change he had experienced thrown physically into his little pocket of eternity in what must have actually been no more than a few minutes or so in real time, and so acutely had his hunch focussed his attention upon the conundrum of his new born existence, that he nearly didn't notice the baited breathing just inside his open door.

Where was Johnny?

The inner sliding door was made of wood and distorted glass. It was left open wide enough for his dog to easily slip in, but from where he was lying he couldn't see it, he could hear it! It was protesting a rapidly mounting pressure, as if being leaned on massively. He heard it rupturing and shattering before it would surely fly apart.

He was vertical, facing the fractured framework in an instant. Six feet from the brooding explosion, readying himself by lowering his centre of gravity and tucking his elbows, he raised his balled fists. His scarred brow furrowed his cold fury as the embattled glass and wood burst outward and flying through it all lengthwise was Johnny's furry body.

They had thrown his prone boy at him.

And he felt nothing. He felt nothing as time stopped almost completely, as he walked casually through the drifting splinters of timber and fragments of glass and took his dog, looking into the matt black combat masks of the armoured cowards frozen mid-storming his home. Their plate-like obsidian eyes flashed liquid reflections.

He turned and tenderly placed Johnny on the couch, even though he was already dead, throat slit to forestall warning of their approach, then he went back to the door, through the debris that collided harmlessly against his face and neck, and between the flashing paths of ponderous bullets.

He punched the first three throats, cancelling their flashing black weapons.

Moving out his front door sloughing off their bodies like they were filled with air, their utterly broken skeletons seemed to be pinned to the walls by the inertia he had lent to their backward flying momentum. He walked out and met the four standing on his balcony. They were still looking past the mayhem into the house as if they had yet to witness what had already transpired before their eyes.

He head-butted the nearest on his left caving in his carbon fibre face mask, the synthetic material was harder than steel and its breaking point did not bend, the bonds that held the remarkable substance together released as violently as they were unyielding.

The fragments blew the unknown soldier's head off like a grenade to the face. The shards of skull and diamond hard graphite peppered the soldier behind like a micro meteor shower, piercing weaknesses in his body armour, some meteorites going clean through vital organs and arteries and killing him before he even knew the dangers of his fruitless mission.

Ajax felt nothing but the cold hard dictates of killing logic. Spinning to the right his open left palm slammed into the right side of the next murderer's chest. He observed the body armour deflate almost instantly into the familiar shape of a crater half a foot deep and the soldier's body jumped back humorously, like a puppet on strings collecting the mannequin behind him. Their crumpled bodies danced back stupidly like thunderbirds characters, sliding along the concrete gangway.

He noticed that the good people of the neighbourhood must have been ushered into their homes, all the windows had their curtains drawn, though many were behind a police manned cordon a hundred feet up and down the narrow lane he lived on in this warren-like hillside.

Regular soldiers, both Korean and U.S alike, had taken up positions behind the regular slew of illegally parked cars.

He could see their faces. He could hear their heartbeats. They weren't the same as the seven he had dispatched. They were still more living than dead. They weren't those who in slaying innocent others had in essence slain themselves. They weren't completely puppets fully hardwired with insidious neural strings to do the malevolent bidding of.., of what he didn't yet know, but Wrecker had woken him up to the possibilities, and as he retreated to the roof before the cinematic perceptions of his observers detected his subliminal speeds, he considered how Wrecker had also warned him about the part of innocent others in the wild machinations at play in the sham of reality as we knew it to be. The skinny guy at his hospital door was a caring individual, a human being.

Slipping between their frames of attention he reached the roof top wary of the two snipers several rooftops above.

What he didn't know was if his waking up had brought that team of killers down on him ending his Johnny boy, or if they had already been coming. Their reaction time was far too swift. Even though they lived right next to three army bases here in Itaewon it was as if they had been just around the corner, ready to take him down.

He leapt straight toward the closer sniper, closing a hundred feet like a human artillery shell, and landed on him, crushing him like wafers in a packet.

Then vaulting up onto the defunct bungalow's roof, he leapt again, without spending another heartbeat, toward the window of the next sniper, cannoning into him. Ajax' knees drove the last of The Slain into the yellow vinyl. Stepping off the lifeless packet he worried about Jasmine, his girlfriend of five years. He could see her face. Maybe his fierce concern for her safety made it so vivid. He saw her as clearly as if she was standing in front of him.

Then she was. He was no longer in some random apartment where he had killed his ninth deserving victim with only the might of his native strength, he was now on a crowded bus crossing a bridge over the great and filthy Han river in early evening traffic.

Jasmine was standing directly in front of him staring at his chest then she blinked slowly and began looking up to his face. Other people also seemed a little startled then they lost interest. Ajax guessed they had been so self-absorbed, bored or daydreaming, that they simply didn't credit their senses.

Jasmine beamed her pretty tanned face, looking more like a native American princess with her plaits than a young Korean woman, and began to speak he supposed. Making an effort to lose his cool even more by hyperventilating he noticed that he could control his sense of temporality somewhat. Although it was still too slow, Jasmine was only just starting to get her first word out.

Waiting for her to make sense he tried to kill time. Incidentally he was thrilled with his ability to simply teleport wherever he wanted, but if it wasn't for the extra visceral sensation his senses were awash with, he would have sworn he was dreaming. No experience had ever been more real than what he was experiencing now. He was giddy with the powers he had inherited in short order.

Taking stock he realized it was all starting to take its toll on his mental limits. Burgeoning hints of torpor were bringing Jasmine's slurred speech into regular time frames. He guessed she was halfway through expressing her surprise asking, "How long have you been just standing there?"

But something else had stolen all of his attention before she had finished teasing that his seriousness made him look like a stalker. Sitting behind Jasmine on a seat, Wrecker turned jerkily fast from the view of the river side city scape out the window to smile his huge smile right at Ajax and say clear as day, "Let's drop Jazz off at the creche and go get that beer ay?"

Wrecker's smile was infectious, even though Ajax still felt like killing one of his best friends.

Abruptly the bus collided with something unmovable and in the next instant there was only darkness again.

Just bloody awesome, sighed Ajax, before a titanic vortex of vertigo twisted away his powerful grip on awareness, as if he was an infant. He wasn't sure if he vomited into the abyss.

### Chapter 6: The Ruled

Wrecker had told Two it was better to take the back roads so it would've taken them a lot longer than it would have had they taken the main highways. Nevertheless it had still been the shortest trip from Auckland to Wairoa ever since Two had made himself and the car one. Two had poured his weight into the steel and rubber strengthening them. He had poured his ions into the fuel increasing the horsepower many times over.

This had amused everyone immensely. The car was Crissy's tiny Japanese thing with an 1100cc engine (He had given up having a car for six months in order to cope with the mortgage once he'd bought the house), but it had handled like a rally car doing speeds like a concept car, it felt like they were breaking land speed records as they seemingly defied the laws of physics hugging acute corner after next in the dead of night.

It was the greatest roller coaster ride of their lives and they the four of them had laughed and whooped for what seemed like hours with a ton of butterflies in their stomachs.

Two had made the ride absurdly, ridiculously hilarious as he played on the fact that he had made himself look like a shaved ape in a mini, hunched over the wheel, brow all Cro-Magnon, eye cocked suavely, hooting his protracted chimp lips and screeching all ferocious teeth as he pretended to freak out on the impossible corners. Everyone was hurting with laughter.

It was just like them to be cracking up at times like this. It was Maori culture to see the beauty of life even during times as grave as a funeral. Maori often claimed that some of the best times in their lives were at funerals.

The Maori word for a funeral was tangi, it literally meant 'cry' or 'tear,' and there was no fear to cry. Many Maori wailed and cried freely, they were honest to a fault. More often than not Maori people tended to say what they thought. They were often tactless and showed their disdain openly. These were gross oversimplifications usually expressed by Maori themselves. But this lot weren't actually Maori.

They were half, less than half. They had been brought up in the culture, attended Maori schools, but they were pretty much white, or olive skinned if they got a good tan, which they certainly could, just as much as they could pale during winter, looking almost sickly white. Wrecker prided himself on being a mongrel both genetically and conceptually.

Crissy was Filipino so she seemed always to exude tropical health sporting the perfect beach tan all year round.

They were all pretty good looking, though none of them had ever been made to feel good about it. Wrecker and Honey especially had been mentally bashed with the ugly stick, their self-image was much abused and they had only reached a semblance of balance in their respective self-regards late into adulthood.

You could say these days that they were even satisfied with the way they appeared. Appearance was no longer one of their obsessive concerns. As Mum had always said, "You're big enough and ugly enough to know."

Each one of them had their own particular tendencies toward obsession. Two had disassembled a dozen solar powered hand held games when he was just seven. Wrecker was the furious older brother. Those games were gifts bought when the family were posted in Singapore, mum and dad both being in the Army. Donkey Kong I and II, Pinball, all kinds of cool games.

They were in perfect working order but of course Two couldn't put them back together. Even the LCD screens had their films separated. When Wrecker, twelve at the time, had demanded to know why Two had done it. Two had simply clammed up and said nothing, staring back blankly.

Two wasn't much for talking when he was younger. He preferred to scream if anyone attempted to interact with him or his miniature transport vehicles. As soon as he was left alone he'd resume his play as if he was never upset. He played well alone.

When he was eighteen he wanted to know how a combustion engine really worked, so he took his Dark Angel motorbike engine apart and put it back together and said of it, "...then I knew how it worked." Asking Two then about that time when he was seven having taken those hand held video games apart, Two replied that, "I just wanted to know how they worked." Two's obsession was with machines and metallurgy. Mmmm. Metallurgy.

He was also an uncanny mimic and could whistle birdsong after only one listen. He made music in his spare time, when he wasn't fashioning steel into sculpture. He'd sold one song to some Country label in Tennessee. It was terrible, his worst. The others were a kind of dub jazz, melodic lounge funk. They were great.

Honey had always been fastidious. Everything has its place. Everything must be clean and orderly, squared away just so. On the other hand she actually wanted to become the Little Mermaid, she wished she was a cartoon. But even with regard to visual media Honey was known as the movie Nazi.

You couldn't watch movies with her unless you were utterly silent during the entire length of the film from the introduction of the studios until the credits cued the film was actually finished. She was reasonable about noise once the credits had started, unless it was a Marvel film in which case you had to be pretty quiet in anticipation of the extra scene after the hundreds of names and music credits had signalled the veritable end of the movie, even if the film was a cartoon or rather especially if it was a cartoon.

Animation bypassed all the limitations of the carnal world for Honey. They were the truest expression, or they could be, and all her favourites most likely were humanistic in quality, like Miyazaki anime.

Wrecker agreed with his sister on that score. His favourite movie in the whole world is an anime called 'Flight of Dragons' based on the book by Peter Dickens. For him it is the articulation of the eternal human conundrum. To quote the green wizard, played by Harry Morgan from M.A.S.H, "Mankind is facing an epic choice, a world of magic or a world of logic, which will it be?" John Ritter played the hero Sir Peter, a 20th Century man of science transported to the magical kingdom eerily identical to the board game of his own device.

And, drum roll please, Mr James Earl Jones, Darth Vadar himself, plays the Red Wizard, intent on turning brother against brother, usurping man's science in order to give them the ultimate answer, atomic annihilation.

Crissy is obsessed with cuteness. Her and Honey share this typically girlie neuroplastic transference from babies to non-babies, like teddy bears, cats, cartoonish imagery and pristine horror films. That's the twist. The morbid consequence of neotenic predilections is a fascination with gore. This explains so well why she's a haematologist.

It was the early hours of the morning, still night when they arrived at Mum and Dads'. Their folks lived on the edge of Aunty and Uncle's farm way out in the wops without any phone reception. The laughter had long since been exhausted replaced by quiet certitude that simply being right was enough. Since they wanted to win free of the pall of depression that seemed to cloak the whole world in its cloying doom-filled prophecies of environmental and spiritual devastation, they irrationally asserted that such an outcome would, with just a lift of the chin, win out.

Their wonderland reasserted its frosty realism as they stepped forth from their little Time machine with their vaporous exhalations testing the frigid country clime for any hint whatsoever that the world in which they found themselves ashore was not in fact a dream. So unlikely had been their journey, they felt the joyous highs not unlike those manifested after having ingested psilocybin or lysergic acid diathylamide.

The cottage menaced their imaginations, its black panes staring blankly and the copse of pine silhouettes swaying windlessly behind the abused lichen thatched roof.

What if those things, those filthy bloody shadows were in there now, if we disturbed their repast would it only disrupt Mum and Dad's lives forever? They weren't young anymore. Would it be more prudent to let sleeping dogs lie with their oversized parasites?

The cushioned oomph of the closing car doors banished imagined ghosts, satisfying their capacity for reason. Lights eventually came on deep inside the tiny bare wood interior homestead, into the kitchen, then lounge, and after a small while Dad dawdled as if stricken with age before the French doors, peering out then smiling sheepishly.

We were all smiling. Mum gradually trundled into view. She came up behind Dad in her nightshirt, one eye scrunched shut against the brightness, while Dad began unlocking the bolts. She realized her kids had come home, grinned away tears, and then her grin scarily erased itself.

The four of them spun around in rapid circles penetrating the night with their boosted senses, breathing in through the augmented labs in their noses for a single mote that would evince alarm worthy of reprisals. But the overall minty flavour of the wet fields and clinging night air breathed beneficent tranquillity.

Was it Mum and Dad themselves who were awry? The shock of such implications all but staggered them. They sensed in each other their shared fears. Their sensitivities enabled a form of mental communion.

Two spoke up, concern in his voice and eyes, "Mum's afraid of us. She can tell we've changed."

"It's okay, Mum," Honey meekly implored through the French doors. "We had bad dreams and now they're over, but we wanted to talk to you about it." She moved slowly up onto the veranda, and as she did so it sickeningly dawned on them all that it was still too fast.

By the look on Mum's face it must have been terrifying. The children of her heart had come in the middle of the night to gladden her world, but these things weren't her children, they were doppelgangers, lurching out of folklore.

She was stopping Dad from unlocking the bottom bolt and screaming that they weren't their kids, her horror was agonizingly slow to which they could do little but bare witness. The eerie speed they had inherited could do nothing to allay mum's living nightmare. It wrenched their hearts into spasmodic pangs palpitating the four deeper into the anatomy of seconds, the microsurgery of time, and Mum was reaching up to slide back the top bolt, screaming something, "TAAEEPOOR!"

Dad looked annoyed as well as surprised, staring at Mum saying, "Carrmmdowwnn!"

Why hadn't they been too fast with the cops? Had the cops been hastened too?

What was mum saying? Wrecker appeared behind mum and dad and touched their shoulders and suddenly the time discrepancy was corrected. Wrecker was placating mum, "It's okay, mum. It's okay. It's us. We had bad dreams so we needed to come and talk to you." As Wrecker's hands fell to his sides the four perceived a curious trace follow mum and dad's movements from his hands, and finally their parents were mollified.

"God, Wrecker, I nearly shit myself." Mum's pent up breath performed a minor explosion dissipating her alien stress. "I thought I was bloody dreaming, having a nightmare or something, God!"

"Bloody hell, woman! You trying to give me a bloody heart attack! Christ almighty!" Dad blew out a gust of fraught tension dispersing abnormal elevations of adrenalin. "Didn't realize we left the side door unlocked. Not that anybody would burglarize us out in the sticks." He snorted at that and raised his eyes, amusement now suffused with manly satisfaction. He didn't know what had bloody well spooked her out, what could possibly have gotten into her, the silly bloody woman. He was smacking his lips and snorting microbursts of amusement while shaking his head slightly in superior disbelief.

To dad superstition had always been the province of suckers deserving only to be scoffed at. But he took it all in good humour and let in the "kids," abruptly bursting with his patented percussive barks of laughter fully shaking his head now with the corners of his eyes smug as he thumbed back at his better half, "Your bloody mother's the one who's having a bad dream all right, not you, fellas." Then, only with his eyes, he grinned back into mum's feigned scowl.

"All right, Champion, all right." mocked mum.

The imperceptible wisp connecting their time frames held but the higher frequency of energy drained mum and dad, steadily inducing them to sleep once more.

Their spirits were still truncated by what Wrecker perceived to be a kind of crystallization of the inhibitory post-synaptic potentials effectively hobbling their nervous systems and ensuring their inhibitor muscle system acted as a governor, manacling the feats of potent capacity human beings were meant to detonate at will.

Instead, to our inescapable, ineffable dismay, people were only rarely performing feats of strength in extreme emergencies, like lifting tons of rubble to save a loved one trapped in the earthquake; or in dangerous extremities, like when an arm wrestler has an anaesthesiologist inject a local sedative directly into the streamlined, well-placed, inhibitor muscles in his arm, totally knocking out the only safeguard against breaking his own arm with his native strength.

It's incredibly risky, foolhardy really, idiotic more like. As is more often the case, such misguided cheaters maim themselves, tearing ligaments or shattering their own bones just to get some prize money. Like all forms of competition, there are few winners. Life is reduced to nothing more than a lottery.

These shadows screwed us real good.

Time was fleeting and they needed answers, but they needed to tread carefully, keep things reasonably sane. "Mum, Dad, have a seat. We had some real bad dreams and we needed to talk. It's worse than when Honey was young and use to come in to your room and you'd call up Nana and Grampa. It's worse than that time I woke you up when I was in my late twenties. Honey, could you make us a cuppa, please?" Wrecker knew she'd hear everything and needed the distraction of normalcy to blunt the full brunt of the truth they were about to dance around.

"Yeah, everyone keen on tea?" Honey kindly asked.

"Yes, please." Everyone but Dad chimed in.

"No, thanks, Hon', too sleepy. Think I'm gonna go back to bed and let you fellas talk. I'm gonna keep my nose out o' this spooky Maori shit." Dad chuckled the last bit and when he'd ambled around the corner he kissed Honey goodnight and disappeared off to bed singin' out, "Night you fellas."

"Night, Dad." Everyone chimed.

Mum took a seat on the sofa and when Dad had fallen instantly to sleep, she perked up just a little as if there was suddenly more energy to spare if Dad wasn't taxing her, energy enough to look at them all with a suddenly calculating grind to her features. She had her cunning face on and even Crissy became wary, knowing their Mum could employ her high powered perception with confrontational efficacy bordering on mental abuse.

Mum's helpfulness was indeed helpful as much as it was well and truly hurtful, though thankfully one ordinarily outlived the other. However being dragged up by Mum once was reminder enough, when one eye looked smaller than the other, pay careful attention to everything she was gonna say and how that altered everyone or even everything, in the room.

"So kidlets," Mum chortled a little and smiled unconvincingly, a little affect the kids intuitively realized a long time ago that Mum employed advertently with some kind of short range plan to subtly frighten a person into fortifying mental defences in all the wrong places, while her long range plan was to disarm your heart.

"What you guys yabbering about?" she smirked a little scarily to pretend she was still tough as old boots. All of us put our chins up a little smirking back, light in our eyes. Two put his chin up just a little too high and squinted as much then his lips parted slightly to increase his theatricality to the comical limit. His whole body joked and everyone but Mum grinned hard.

"God, boy." She chuckled a little. "You never change, do you? You little bastard." We all cracked up then.

Honey came in giggling. They waited for the kettle to boil and Honey took a seat next to Mum, cuddling up like a cat.

Two had his eye cocked ridiculously and started slightly nodding his head side to side making an utter farce of natural rhythm, "Well, Mum, you see, what happened was, well, the doymons attacked us in our sleep and bloody Wrecker came in and BOOM!" He theatrically transformed into a big bastard and overhead hammered some imaginary demons with both fists while he made an awesome Sly-face. "And we were pissing ourselves in our beds!" Then Two just burst out laughing in his big hushed way, never raucous with decibels, just impact. The rest of them were already laughing loudly, including Mum!

Ray had disarmed her instead, as per usual these days.

"Mum, what do you call the shadows that grab people in their sleep?" Wrecker knew Mum would tire shortly. She couldn't keep it up.

"Yeah, Mum?" Honey hugged Mum a little tighter, concern limned her voice.

"It's just a kehua, a ghost." Mum assured them there was nothing to fear.

"Yeah, but why did Grampa say that time you made me call him after a bad dream, 'It's okay, the old lady and I just had a fight, but it'll be okay now,' what does that mean? Him and Nana had a fight and so a shadow grabbed me in my dreams? Something got through 'cause they were supposed to be protecting their descendants somehow?! I mean, Jung called them supernumenaries, the shadows I mean, like an extra tooth growing behind your front teeth, or the extra rainbows inside the main rainbow, except his supernumenaries referred to ancestors, kind of like genetic memory or something more.

"When Grampa said that, I got this image that we, all of us, humans, are individually unique sets, like in math, Venn diagrams and such, but we also overlap with each other, we share identities, we are in some way identical, affecting each other, or rather the effects are shared." Wrecker seemed to surface from his thoughts to inquire with the focus of his attention.

"Bloody hell, boy, I don't know," Mum laughed, a simple sound, almost innocent. "All I know is Grampa thought that their fights were a kind of possession, like something got a hold of them and made them fight, and sometimes that meant that that something got a hold of us too. It's pretty much what you were thinking. But why'd you have to drive all the way down here tonight and not last night, you're here too soon to have gone to bed, had a nightmare, and driven down here. So it must've happened last night or another night. What's so urgent about a bad dream? I talked to Grampa before I went to bed and he was fine." Nana had died a few years ago now. Mum's dark eyes glinted with inquisitiveness while she screwed them up in quizzical folds, just like Nan's use to. The glint was somehow dehumanizing, making her gaze heartless even though there was no malice in her imperious questions.

Mum never acted like her kids always told the truth, she never acted like anyone ever always told the truth, or at least it was certain that few told the whole truth at any one time, and people almost always told truths to obfuscate other truths never intended for mentioning. She knew something had shocked her to her core tonight and her kids were hiding something from her, something she hardened her heart against. She was no stranger to terror.

Wrecker decided to simplify things and ignore certain questions. Let her think whatever. The heart of the matter was logically equivalent. He knew what mum was like and what she'd been brought up with. Hell, they had to go through a fraction of it themselves, Mum and him had to wash Nanny Ma together, his great grandmother, when Nanny was possessed!

She was an ancient lady with folds of soft skin, shaking and complaining that she'd already had a wash, but mum knew she hadn't. She hadn't left that one-seater all day long.

Her voice always seemed to roar demonically whenever she was forced to have that shower. "You leave my grandmother alone!" Mum would fiercely give the demon a growling, and it would have to go, then they were giving their grandmother a wash. Wrecker's eye brows were halfway up his bloody forehead.

It appalled Wrecker, not just 'cause he was washing an old person, but also because the possession irked his sensibilities, made him angry at his great grandmother. Was she faking it? It certainly didn't sound or look like it. It made him angry to feel afraid and embarrassed, and he couldn't allow himself to believe in a world with demons. He preferred not to believe. He didn't know about Carl Gustav Jung at that time, he was too young for long dead obsolete psychoanalysts and the superabundant wealth of anamneses extensively documenting such cases of possession.

Remembering his poor old tupuna in the waning days of her spring, Wrecker felt shame. He had been mean-spirited to his elder. She was infirm and past her use by date, and she deserved respect but he had been too immature to have appreciated that she was virtually Mum's mother.

Nanny Ma had raised a heap of those kids from that generation. She was a saint in her time, kindly and beneficent to all her mokopuna, her grandchildren, blue prints for the spring. All the first born children were to be given to the grand parents to be raised. It was the Maori way. According to mum the parents were eager to give more than just the first kid, her brother and sisters lived there too, but Nanny Ma and Old Pa were just awesome.

"I killed my shadow, Mum." Wrecker stared at Mum, searching her face for some overt sign that there was more to this than what they already knew. There were so many gaps in the overall picture and they all needed to fill it in before everything became all too real and terrifying.

"What d'you mean, you killed your shadow?" She too wanted to see the big picture.

"I had planned for a long time to face that thing that kept grabbing me in my sleep all those times. I struck at my ex-girlfriend's one once years ago, she woke with a fright and I spun and struck out at something dark looming over the bed. I was so fast, but it was gone. It was scary, but because of her my protective instincts reacted so quickly, but not quickly enough, or determined enough, or true enough, in my heart or something. But when it grabbed me recently I must have been ready for one reason or another. My preparations gave me the edge I needed to turn the tables on these bloody things. I actually stabbed it straight through its chest and suddenly all this energy poured into me. After that moment I felt whole for the first time in my life, and I thought I'd felt that before, but this was true power, preternatural." He must have looked and out of his freakin' mind.

"Son, are your thoughts racing again? Have you been eating and sleeping enough?" Mum looked plain worried now, but they all cracked up laughing again.

"I'm sorry mum." Wrecker grinned from ear to ear. "Yes, I have. I'm not going crazy. I went through my check list and my thoughts aren't racing and I've been eating plenty. I realize I can't show you. I'm glad we all implicitly understand that showing somebody isn't like in the movies. It's not actually cool. It's harrowing, harrowing because it physically disrupts reality as we firmly expect it to be. That's why you were scared of us when we first arrived. We were moving too fast, right? Don't worry, don't worry." She looked pretty worried, but continued to listen. "You got spooked and you were saying something. What was it you were saying then anyway?"

"What the fuck are you bloody mongrels talking about?!" Dad was standing there in his shorts and shirt, nodding like we were idiots, his brows raised in careless inquiry, nonchalant in the manner of an implacable bastard, something was so shockingly familiar about his angry side, but this time they saw it for what it really was.

But Crissy didn't. She stood up, only slightly alarmed.

"It's okay, we're jus..." Dad struck her.

Faster than they expected, supernaturally fast, he had delivered a vicious backhand to her face and she flew backward in sickeningly slow gyres through glass and wood, stabbing panes slid into her skin exposed or not, through clothes, as she continued outside. Two was up and moving, moving into Dad's haymaker. He blocked but the mountain of might shattered his arm and splintered the floor boards beneath his forced genuflection.

Then Dad roared liked a lion and slumped backward into Wrecker, who had managed to get behind Dad and lower him to the ground. His eyes weren't all the way shut and he seemed to be muttering something, "What the..."

Then he spasmed to his feet, eyes wide, like he'd been kicked with a lightning bolt.

"I gave his shadow a good crack and he should be all right now." Crissy was already coming back inside pulling glass out of her abdomen and face like she was made of dough, not flesh. The blood didn't even spill. It simply was too stubbornly viscous and energetic to lose any vital integrity. Two was stunned by the shock but he shook his arm and it must have mended instantaneously after receiving that crushing blow.

Dad looked younger, like a forty year old Gene Hackman, he looked Lutherific! Furtively, he looked around the room at everyone, like he just woke up from a bout of somnambulism then locked his gaze on Mum.

Mum was bolt upright herself, frozen in slow motion again, but before she could lose her mind, or worse, be possessed, Honey whacked mom's back with exorbitant force much as Wrecker must've done.

"I could see something behind her!" Honey's face was rife with fright and a heady hint of excitement. She was giddy with all the new possibilities inadvertently multiplying beyond her current capacity to imagine.

Actually, they were all full of the same wonder. They watched as the yolk of crystalized numen dawned in Mum's heart, like an explosion of cold fusion. Its pale fire burned her body back to life, true life.

Dad shed a tear or two, to see that his wife had been exalted.

She was smiling a smile none of them had ever seen before, and so they all smiled that same smile, and all that such a smile entailed.

Two was already smirking and Mum feigned displeasure as she butted in before Two could get a word in edge wise, "Don't you bloody start, son."

Everyone did their fair share of sighing relief and chuckling, as if this could all be made more rational with stereotypical reactions to averted disaster, even if those events would have threatened the sanity of anyone, if they didn't have each other to rely on, confirming that the supernatural was simply improbable, not impossible, and more real.

*

The great waves were roaming mountains of wondrously flawed black jade roaring at a world of rain. The tiny white ghost trawler climbed up the back of one vast heaving mineral dune, pausing briefly before racing down its streaming face only to ascend another sinuous striation in the preceding range of titans.

Honey watched the brave little longboat from an elevated vantage far distant, could see its stridency crest the lofty shoulders of spume like a pallid flying insect crawling across white insignia, an unexpected lull in the roaring white noise followed the mighty incessant sighing, then she was standing on the decayed pallor of its decks, right on the prow, just like that, staring out at the heart-wrenching vistas of no man's land from the oceanic shoulders of giants.

It was her own breath she had completely spent from her hitherto safe vantage, forsaking rarefied salty oxygen for the biting saline drenching that stung her vision, just as the hopelessly vacant boat seesawed in an isolated moment of timelessness, tilting downward into the waiting maw of inexorable madness. Her lungs hurt for air and her heart drummed through her chest cavity the cadence of violent ending. Her brain screamed to the deaf world - I will be dashed into bone breaking flotsam.

Then the mass of bound taut timbers to which she clung was abruptly sucked into an impossible plunge and the world of rain inhaled the storm around her medusaic head, plummeting maddeningly. Wet black snakes whipped about her terror taut face as her insignificant speck of a craft howled its humming stresses into the frequency of her quantum soul, the insane oscillations strummed ebullient liberation in the chords of her hidden spirit, full hearted laughter righteously sung sonorous from her fearless throat.

Already descending to the waist of the wading malachite leviathan and already flying slower and slower up the next muscular parabola, Honey was on top of the world. There was nowhere else she'd rather be. Lost in an unknown storm wracked sea riding greenish black behemoth crescendos on the expansive equalizer of Kaos itself, her life had become music to die for.

And there it was, on the glistening deck behind her.

Honey turned around to face a woman dressed in white pants and shirt. Long blonde hair obscured her pale features. Alarm rocked Honey with adrenaline and the tempo of the ocean dropped the pace and muted the mindless applause of ocean noise. She knew there would be no talk - she knew this bitch from countless other dreams.

There would be a fight, plain and simple. But the spluttering in her chest was not her fire going out like all the times before. This time her engine was unquenchable, rip roaring with the endless supply of diesel only chaos provides. She wasn't gonna let her heart get flooded with any rank funk. This time she was gonna school this bitch hard! It didn't matter that this evil siren radiated a perturbing field of fast quelling trepidation. In fact, Honey was counting on it.

Her enemy's contention was her vicious fuel, and Honey rejoiced in the all-consuming song of her life, for the logic of the universe sang her victory before the battle was even joined.

All the horrific beatings she had suffered at the hands of this dehumanizing entity, head butts to her face, relentless toothy bites incising her soft flesh, arm breakings, every vivid engram lined up as an instant chain of memories, like reincarnations, a lightning intuition that froze the lambent ship like a spear head thrust to the unforgiving heavens in triumph. A wide sheen slid casually across the wet planes of the deck, a luminous blade of unsheathed moonlight, and when the brilliant sabre lined up on the unwelcome visitor, Honey cleared the distance between her and it all but instantaneously.

The hollow entity creaked with ancient heartless power, straining against the otherworldly granite of its limits to respond in time to the astonishing resurgence that blanked its view into the shores of its slave world.

But it was fruitless. Honey caught these alien insights just before driving herself like a knife's edge straight into the obsidian wall latent in the alabaster mannequin.

The arcane energies released were catastrophic.

Panes of thunder obliterated the timber of her dreams. Pure puissant kinetic force atomized tons of sea water in a sphere of incredible whiteness, splitting the crest, and spitting Honey out, hurtled surfing at break neck speed down the striating cliffs of squeezed water, ululating one long whoop of jittery exuberance before the disintegrating fragment she rode disappeared and she was thrown face first down the rolling curvature of millions of tons of saline solution, smashing her ecstatic face into the face of a titan.

Laughing down gulps of sea water she looked down from her previous elevated vantage spluttering and coughing up plankton and krill. Her eyes blood red, she hacked away the residues of salt rich moisture from her fierce lungs, too happy to care that she nearly died in that greenstone expanse of colossal wavelengths and troughs.

She figured nearly dying was like nearly winning lotto - it was nothing.

Besides, who can give in to shock when you've beat up your life long bully, blown some stuff up, surfed a tidal wave, teleported, and now you're hovering far above a tsunami, the countless bones broken already knitted back together, stronger than before.

For the first time in her thirty years of life she felt like anything was possible. Her mind had become an infinite plain of canvas and the world she observed was painted into being with her body. Her heart was the artistry behind the strokes and though some malign installation had been perturbing her influence, not only for the length of her own life, but for generations and generations, rendering the grim picture with the viscera of billions of lives over a clutch of millennia, painting the human race into a corner, she was freed.

Her fury could have easily been mistaken for jubilation. She was gonna dance on their graves, whatever the hell these shadows were.

*

Crissy was going to the restaurant. She couldn't remember the name of the guy, only that he used to be her boss at that coffee place. She was meant to check out his new establishment and that's why she was here in the states.

In the states? For some reason that struck her as odd.

She was clip clopping along the pavement when she noticed the cloacal decline of the neighbourhood stores, walls and dwellings.

It had been day time, she was pretty certain, and now it was twilight, and she could hear rabid dogs barking their heads off in the distance.

Faded posters screamed disintegration and a shriek of alarm was noiselessly pulsing in her blood stream, pounding the human skins of the primal drums called her tympanic membranes. She was freaked before she had a right to be, and there it was.

Taking place right before her was a mugging. A young couple had a gun pointed at them and the guy was muttering what she could only guess were obscenities laced with instructions. She thought if it was New Zealand then it would be a couple of guys and they would have just beaten you, maybe kicked you in the head till you were a vegetable, and then taken everything. Muggings were so much more civil here, you pay or you die.

In Auckland too many people were stocked for their shoes and ended up feeling like a burden to their families for the rest of their young lives 'cause they had been made slow due to excessive head trauma. She knew three people personally it had happened to.

The maniac gunman gestured wildly underwater. The sound was deeper, swallowed by the viscosity of liquid amber time. The victims' faces were anguished for all eternity as they desperately reached for their balls and found none.

Normally she would have let the hopelessness wash away her gall and outlined her forty six kilogram disadvantage against a hundred kilogram thug. But instead the gall irked her gut wrenchingly. Bile built up in her mouth like she was champing at the bit, like she was biting a stainless steel combat knife, reigning in her fear, hopelessness was the last thing she felt. She was fed up.

In each subsequent heartbeat she lurched to a location a few meters ahead, the gap was simply edited out of occurrence. The third heartbeat would bring her into contact with the mugger. She could see his somewhat handsome swarthy face marred with malice and the corner of his eye was mid darting to spy her too sudden approach, and Crissy was ecstatic with anticipation, her face drawn taut with a jubilant malice of her own. It felt good to hate Hate.

The next beat of her heart had her left hand hold his gun shoulder. Her right hand clutched a tuft of greasy hair, while she brought her right knee rocketing over his gun arm, into his oh so surprised face. Then it got really interesting.

She didn't expect his face to rupture explosively. She didn't expect her momentum to bring her down on his crumpling body to stomp his chest cavity flat, like a bag of crackers, puncturing his lungs with her stilettos, caving in on all his vital organs, stomping out the malignant cancer that had irrevocably eaten his soul, astonishingly stamping out the taint from his ineffable life source before it pooled with the rest of eternity once more, as if it had ever really been apart.

The lady she'd saved was screaming and screaming. The guy was hugging her to him, beside himself with abject horror as he backed the two of them away. A little blood had splattered their faces, gotten in their mouths. They were being mugged a moment ago and all of a sudden they were bearing witness to the brutal slaying of their mugger, and on some deep level, they had been exposed to, what they could not help perceive as, the most heinous experience they could never have imagined in a million years.

Didn't they know she had saved them? Didn't they know the guy intended to do worse than just take their money and jewellery? He intended to take her too, any and every way he wanted, and take their lives torturously, the van was idling right behind him, he already had power over their lives and they had given it to him.

There was blood in her own mouth too, metallic, hepatitis B, adrenaline and testosterone. Wait!

She could discern the genetic material, the eldritch sophistry of its super astronomically complex genetic code! This was too much detail to be a dream! It was real. She had actually just slaughtered some real mongrel with her tiny knees, in the real world. She was covered in a real man's blood, tasting it.

And she didn't care. She felt free of any ill feeling. Her head up, scanning the looming buildings in the burgeoning night, her universe soared with latent power.

She had just taken out the trash, that's all.

*

Two wandered through one of the largest steel foundries in the southern hemisphere. It used more power than the entire city of Wellington, our capital. In fact it gorged on a quarter of the entire country's energy production.

He knew this was real, but he knew it was a dream at the same time. He didn't know how, he just knew that the thrumming pulse of the place was genuine. The emanations of incredible heat and the industrious hum of human activity behind the scenes were real. The foundry never slept. But he was sure that he was sleeping, that he had nodded off in the car.

At that moment he became dimly aware of being in two places at once. He could see his sleeping body and his dreaming sister. Their eyes were darting beneath their eyelids. Their dreams were entombed behind those hermetic seals. Mum was driving the car, he guessed Dad was driving Crissy's car with Wrecker. But that was neither here nor there.

Back in the living, breathing foundry, he wondered why he was there.

"Two." Wrecker was striding towards him. At least, it looked like Wrecker, but his stature was somehow more powerful. His eyes seemed to buzz with vibrancy and his bearing conveyed careless might. It made Two beam, raising low range chuckling from his guts.

"What's up, bro?" Two was feeling pretty mighty himself, not that he ever really had problems feeling good about himself, that was usually his big brother's department. He was pretty sure Wrecker used to manage that department into the ground, until he strangely started to get into the groove with all his hard luck and enjoy the lessons of his own personal loserdom and its marginalized love hotels of heart break.

"Don't know ay. This is my first time coming here. You told me about it and I followed you when you came here. I thought you might have seen the white rabbit, so to speak." Wrecker started to grin, his eyes glinted with mischief and Two's eyes glinted back.

"Well, bro. In that case why don't I give you the grand tour since I've been here twice before? I love this place man. Our Aunty's husband's brother runs this place, I told you 'bout that. They have the largest steel benders in the world here. They can bend I-beams, though after one or two uses it has to be calibrated again..."

They walked along the steel walkways through the convoluted steel innards of the recumbent leviathan talking shop. When the heat increased exorbitantly, they came across a smelting vat radiating a mesmerizing crimson gold energy and they both ceased their talk to gaze upon the liquid hot bath of molten metal.

"Two, I vaguely remember receiving something in a dream. I'd forgotten about it until now but I think I can show it to you." Two had that quizzical set to his scrunched brows, accentuating the crow's feet, expectant.

Wrecker raised his right hand, palm up, and impossibly, iridescent silvery metal slowly, inch by inch, grew out of his hand. As he changed his perspective the metal seemed to occupy a radical new location. It was like a hologram, but it was obviously solid metal, his full sense appraised the dimensions of this fey sculpture, this metal branch from the tree of life. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life and he was overjoyed. This celestial boon, this mineral windfall, was the stuff of dreams, no doubt.

"It's inexplicably fused to me, to my being, but it is too powerful and too brittle to wield. Maybe I can break a piece off and you can forge an amalgam," Two was already nodding with a smug look livening his dial, "alloying this dream metal to some real metal, and then if it works you will have a weapon and then you can maybe do something to anneal the fragility of this steel lightning. What do you think?" Wrecker grinning, fully aware that Two, savvy steel sculptor and skilled steel worker, was way ahead of him.

"Hell yeah! We can do that right now. I had the insight in the first instant I laid my eyes on it. It's alive, you know?"

"Yeah, I know," Wrecker answered dumbly, recalling the living shock of knowing too much imponderable malevolence shunted directly into his mortal circuitry, pinned like a butterfly with an electric needle, except that the invasive electrode was linked to a vast mind whose megaton regard threatened to crush his speck of spirit into transient insignificance.

But that overkill had reduced him to the instransigent atom of his existence. He remembered everything now. A mental flood blipped the memories into his overall command. That atom was his David to Goliath, his diminishing Planck length to the expanding universe, there was a proportionate relationship, smaller was more powerful, more fleet, more deadly, and more beautiful, if used in just such a way, his attitude had been forged in lightning fire into the fulcrum able to lever his whole world.

And he intended to use it for just that purpose. His mental caginess had then reasserted itself, like camouflage, a defensive mechanism he intuited as being necessary before stowing away his empowerment back into potential.

Wrecker could see that Two had already begun to muster his new transeunt abilities. What he was able to perceive was part of him in a peculiar way. Wielding passion and perception, the transilient forces of nature were his to manipulate. A glowing mote had come to form between them. He was translocating molten titanium from the gloriously glowing vat, atoms at a time, to concatenate with translocated atoms of holographic metal, and before their eyes, growing like a crystal, an iridescent metal star was born, its heat was sucked away into some void implicit in the translucent implications of the substance.

While the star reached its full glory, the shimmering metal bolt was diminished in comparison. Two reached for the complex star now, and the most insane thing happened when he gripped it - the fey metal slid like heavy water into a perfect circlet, not the kind worn on the head, like the kind thrown.

It had remade itself into a foot and a half disc ring of metal that raced with crystalline colours and scattered dazzling refractions and mad sparkles. It was truly glorious and our stomachs were a knot of barely contained excitement. We hadn't breathed at all.

We burst out laughing, beside ourselves with the vague promise of illimitable powers. Then Wrecker banished his joy and set about his fey metallurgy alloying titanium to neural dream metal. He was employing the crystal disc as a conduit focussing and magnifying his workmanship, just like the progress of all technology, the first hammer allows the blacksmith to forge a more powerful hammer, or even a blade, only his vaunted being made leaps from one state of progress to another in telescopic bounds beyond the capacity to foresee.

The future had never been more emergent with mystery and glorious hope than it was right then. The present was a crucible shining with the hued light flares of alchemy, transubstantiating spirit into technique. A great spangle gyred from within the sharp colours of its million illumined diamonds, painlessly blinding the visual spectrum.

A dim recognition was spreading in the background noise of the vast industrious hangar. The brilliant illumination had also rang out with a single indestructible crystal chime, imperceptibly calling out to the diligent night workers to pause, seized by the unfathomable knell, emotion keening unexpectedly from the perfect image of their beings, like resonating champagne glasses, their crystal souls ranneth over with an incomprehensible glory as they all peered toward the font of gentle lambency issuing triumphantly above the labyrinth of machinery. They were afraid it was the precursor to some cataclysmic detonation, but their fear was borne out with gratitude and faith in their families safely asleep in their beds at home.

And suddenly the work was done. And it was good.

It was a bar of luminescent metal glass. Its edges were bevelled but not sharp, like the disc its edges were soft, perfectly blunted in their fashioning. Indistinct images seemed to flash and race beneath its diamond like surface. The tip was square and as evenly regular as its length. Its simplicity shone complexity in every subtle flash of vision, and in every sparkle that winked in every facet bevelled into the elongated jewel. For it was a jewel, not a sword, too sumptuously precious to withstand even modest forces, surely?! It was like a smooth crystal ruler.

"Its strong, bro." Seeming to read Wrecker's mind. "They're both strong, though yours looks more fragile, and in a way it is, though it is in fact stronger, as much as it is weaker. You'll get what I mean." Holding it like a samurai sword, it swayed slightly, subtly into the same backswept shape of a classic samurai sword, sharper than a diamond razor, simply at will.

Taking a chance to test its mettle, Wrecker flicked it lightly at the steel guard rail, and it bit through the steel with a chinking sound as clipped as the clean cut, revealing the grainy cross section of the cooling rail.

"Yesss," crooned Wrecker, laughing a little before resuming his austere appreciation for the marvel his brother had worked with dream and reality. Two had always been the more mechanical, the more physical of the two of them. He looked at his brother whose eyes were dancing between the two artifacts he had wrought, pleased as punch with himself. Wrecker knew that feeling. He got it from writing certain gems into existence, like they were spells of emotion, crystalized psyche.

But this was a million-fold more wondrous and unlikely.

In that moment both of them sensed a change in the giant crucible of molten titanium. They saw with their whole being as people see with their eyes that an improbable matrix of heat distribution was aligning in the three and a half thousand degrees Celsius red hot metal, a kind of cat's cradle of forces.

Something was coming through into the real world, and its mana was anathema to their capacity to perceive it, stunning them instantly with unexpected concussive brutality. Percussive waves upon waves of invisible forces made themselves known by the sheer strength of its deafeningly silent heartbeat, pounding them backward and down onto the steel grill, commanding obeisance, backed up against the steel safety rails, bending the form of their backs into the protective metal liquorice.

Before their will had been completely subdued they simultaneously reached out and stole the maddening heat of the smelted metal, syphoning three and a half thousand degree energies from 10 tons of molten titanium directly into the crystal vessels of their malleable glaives, the tectonic force of which winked them back into their suddenly waking bodies in their respective cars, giddy with the sudden glee of being freed from the assailing presence of a great enemy.

Honey and Crissy happened to wake at the same time as if their frights were shared.

*

Back at the foundry certain engineers had spread alarm worried that someone truly large had fallen into a smelting vat. A great titanium hand was reaching out of the recently solidified metal. It was easily twenty inches wide, frozen in the act of clutching at thin air.

Alarmed crew couldn't account for their terror at beholding the straining metal metacarpus. Grief they could understand, but it was simply too large, maybe it was a prank, a statue thrown in, but how had it solidified when it was still powered. Regardless, everyone who saw it was shaken unaccountably, as if the portentous phalanges grasped at their hurting hearts.

None could bear to stand before it for longer than a few painful heart beats, and the last guy to stand in front of it had suffered a heart attack and had to be carted away. No one wanted to admit they thought this hand of doom had harmed the engineer. They were rational men for Christ sakes. Though, like frightened animals, they intuitively stood at a distance and to the far side of the cursed extension.

The foundry workers were dumbfounded. Drawn to that spot by keening inimitable wonder shining effulgently upon their labours in the toiling night, only to find at its heart this monstrous insult all but gesticulating imprecations against humanity.

Later a Geiger counter had been brought to bear on the surreal mystery. It was deemed unsafe. The area was cordoned off and men in environmental suits came. Two more suited men had to be carted away. And everyone heard how the engineer never made it to the hospital.

### Chapter 7: The Grand Master

From the pale blue shadows of his cleft in the freezing aridity, Ajax watched in cool collected fascination the predawn scenario barking clipped gunfire and smoking puffs of varied inane detonations, as veritable dead men were made to perform complex manoeuvers across a rock strewn jumble that was in actuality little more than a geological chess board.

White moved first.

From his desiccated vantage in the scarred cliff face he spied the insidious strategy before it had been played out by the Machiavellian grandmaster playing himself. Cold logic illuminated the sanctified killing floor. Both sides had God on their sides.

Ajax seriously considered Wrecker's insane fancy that it was all some sick parody of Monster's Inc, or rather Monster's Inc was the perfect hyperreal example. In that animated movie kids were entertained by the imaginative concept explaining how monsters terrified kids in order to syphon their screams thereby effectively powering some monster city with human fear.

The belief that fantasy exists engenders hyperreality. We are told that Disneyland is not real so that USA, by comparison, is real, but every civilized country is, it turns out, hyperreal. That is to say no one can discern what is truly valuable and viable and therefore veritable anymore, because we cannot bear to look upon the misapprehended duality of our nature, festering perversion versus saccharine gallantry.

Ajax, like a bird of prey, espied one of the white slain who appeared to be fleeter than the others, his speed whispered like a shadow through the minted chill that would later be parched by relentless sunshine. That cool quiet spell hid his surreptitious approach as if the desert people were waiting for sunrise to save them from their unexpected need to retreat.

Glory raised its golden blade above the horizon heralding their birdlike irrational hope that song alone was prayer enough in their hearts to withstand this white soulless enemy making claims on their ancestral land.

That was when the slain struck. Three dead by single bullets. Then four by single grenade.

Ajax could tell his lost brother down there loved the kill. His black brothers lying in their own entrails were just momentary thrills satisfying a ravening hunger. The slain were mobile conduits for suffering. The families affected and their desperately aligned villages, their men, women, and children would now wail for their insoluble losses.

But they had not truly begun to lose this battle. There was still so much more to lose yet.

This shadow empire had divided our minds over time, but we were meant to be individual, meaning we were not supposed to be divided, that's the meaning of individual, unable to be divided. Historically speaking, atom also meant indivisible.

Distanced from the natural processes of survival by the vastly stratified division of labour the visceral acts of killing for food or self-defence, foraging in the feral wilderness in tune with the orientation of stars and electromagnetism, ingesting psychotropic sacraments to commune with the heights and depths of nature defining consciousness, and making love without shame or inhibitions to a veritable goddess, the personal, intimate Heiros Gamos sharing in the creation of salubrious life: so distanced, people had come either to fear or pervert the source of their mana and thus had entered into the decline made all the more perverse by its insidious, illusory conviction that it was a slippery slope from which not even the light of dreams could escape.

Perversion plus gallantry equals human, natural, loving.

But half of these soldiers were the slain, those whom having killed others had killed themselves in the process, driven a cruel spike through their nature, separating their united identity, the one thing that allowed them to identify with others.

Wrecker had called it motuhake. Maori warriors could separate and reintegrate at will, identify with potential allies, or alienate potential enemies.

Apparently, when the British had attempted to take the land from Maori, legends had spread about Maori fighting prowess. It was said that they had no thrown weapons, no spears or arrows, just four or five foot sticks called taiaha, heavier at one paddled end, and also the short flat edged clubs called patu, shaped of bone, wood, or stone. Though soldiers armed with muskets would outnumber Maori, only a few would return from battles. Those few claimed that Maori were not just savages, but demons, coming out of nowhere to despatch their fellow men.

Maori had already mastered both jungle warfare and trench warfare long before the coming of the British. They also created fake Pa, or dummy forts, lulling British into thinking they had won battles, only to find they were about to lose everything.

At one point during the land wars a gunship had bombarded a Pa from a safe distance up the river. When the troops stormed the devastated fortification, thankfully spared the bitter experience of hand to hand combat amongst well placed palisades and trenches, they had entered the savages' makeshift compound finding the primitive defence deserted.

In that precise moment of confusion, the savages had leapt out of the ground annihilating the superior numbers.

There were no women or children, the smoke of fires and the sedentary British mind-set had misled the officers to take the fort at all costs.

Later, a German, name of Von Tempsky, trained in jungle warfare learned from tribesman of another country, was employed to train British troops and direct military strategy in order to truncate the already protracted war and eventually the Treaty of Waitangi had to be signed if Maori chiefs countenanced survival for the people.

Maori were thought to be the luckiest of the indigenous peoples the British made contact with, saying much about British arrogance during their mass possession by the grandmaster itself.

Maori still retained a great deal of mana, having been fleeing the insidious bane they had perceived before leaving Asia by waka, huge wooden canoe, from old Taiwan well over a thousand years ago.

Even during the Second World War the 28th Maori Battalion were legendary in the African skirmishes. One tale serves well to illustrate the retention of old world powers: a British soldier had voiced the claim that the bayonet was the greatest hand to hand combat weapon. One Maori soldier had countered the claim asserting that taiaha was the penultimate melee weapon.

No sooner had the challenge begun the British soldier was dead, killed by wrists made supple with consummate poi skills honed from childhood, and the impeccably hard training received in Maori martial arts, enabling the warrior to mete out wicked arcs exploiting the conservation of angular momentum to optimally devastating effect, simply by bobbing the weight of the body up and down in precise tempo with a flicking of the weighted end of the staff behind the warrior from zenith to nadir to opponent and back in perfect recoil.

Ajax reflected on Wrecker's laughter ignoring the loss of life on both sides of the body strewn sun gilded chess board. Wrecker had said that every white person had always felt that having ties to a tribe and cultural heritage made him lucky, but Wrecker would always say something like, "Aren't you Irish?" or "Aren't you Scottish?" "Aren't you Danish or German? Weren't your ancestors from clans? Weren't your forbears Highlanders or Druids, or Vikings, or warriors or something?"

Laughing, Wrecker was mad keen on the idea that he shared in that mixed heritage, descended from warriors that could navigate by stars without instrumentation and recite thousands of years of oral tradition from memory. He knew we were all descended from the Gods simply because it felt right.

Wrecker had asked, "Ever wondered why cartoons tend to be so syrupy? It's because they demean valour by claiming that virtue is only for children, but one day you must grow up, grow out of this belief that the world is peaceful, or can possibly achieve tranquil conclusions. Heroism is for stories not reality. Heroic is the act of crucifying oneself to no avail. Heroes cannot save this world, just delay the inevitable. The childish belief will be a toy broken by the boot heel of history." He laughed, because he didn't want to cry. He loved cartoons.

Thousands of years of myth making milked the human race into narrower and narrower margins of subsistence, eluding detection by subtle, imponderable alterations to the values and customs that the painstakingly sundered peoples came to identify with, set up over the ages to play against each other by virtue of the rules of a lethal game key figures had come to take for granted. Those dictates were no longer questionable. Those dictators were irredeemable.

They were the Kings, Queens, Bishops, Knights, Governments, and Pawns who no longer belonged to the human race. They were merely moved by a solitary player in a game ceaselessly evading check mate.

Ajax was morbidly transfixed by the blood saturated senselessness of the internecine carnage this petty gun battle represented. Even he was dismayed by the superior position of the true enemy looming safely beyond harm.

According to its unobservable machination, the senselessness was precisely the desired product, the screams of rent loss powering a monstrous city. The consistently maintained instability was the resource. Human fear yielded energies, while human goodwill conserved energy.

Competition was like fission, extravagantly wasteful and destructive, only a couple percentiles of the energy created was used for human industry, the other 98% prodigiously wasted, steam was flagrantly thrown overhead into the atmosphere.

Co-operation was like cold fusion, demonstrating symbiotic feedback loops conducive to viable long range sustainability. The nucleic powerhouses that had taken residence in every living cell on Earth demonstrated such super-astronomical efficiency.

The water cycle was another fine example, woven like Celtic bracelets interpenetrating the sensuous surface of the breathing planet. It demonstrated the awesome power of the sun, able to lift megatons of water into the atmosphere every day and distribute it throughout the ecosystem, demonstrating a humble balance of unavoidable thermodynamic ratios.

There are still aboriginal peoples that live off the grid. They hunt and forage twenty hours a week along the isolated coasts of Australia, chilling out and laughing at each other. Surely the civilized world could emulate this timeless largesse, the Aborigines talk of the dream time long ago. They are the only people without a migration story. They are still in accord with the changlessness of Eternal truths.

Even the primordial cell from the dawn of life on Earth, able only to divide, unite, or die, has essentially transcended death. The primordial cell is still alive in every living thing on Earth. It has either multiplied by cellular division or united in the Heiros Gamos, the divine marriage of genetic union and the subsequent propagation of high fidelity heredity, and it has done so over three and a half billion years.

In some sense the body we have has never died for those billions of years. The eternal soul is really the undying genetic story recited in the field of action since the cooling of the amniotic oceans.

Ajax was gonna be damned if some foreign interloper was gonna come bowling on in here in the last thirty odd thousand years and just walk all over life on this teeming world, staggering every level on the food chain with its capitalist model based on infinite resources.

He was gonna put a sabot right up this guy's proverbial backside. We weren't gonna be the ones left holding the gun in the end. Eventually we were gonna show the world that it was them that plucked out our eyes and then reproached us for our blindness, not our strong, they were coerced to blind our vulnerable seers branding them insane.

But he knew he couldn't do anything quite yet.

It was appalling to turn aside from the sadomasochistic massacre, but to ensure victory he required just a little bit more time and preparation, and an inordinate knack for luck.

He wasn't sure exactly if he'd seen what Wrecker had wanted him to see, but he had seen enough.

Thinking of four friends he loved he simultaneously translocated to Korea, England, Australia, and New Zealand.

"Bro! What are you doing here, man?!" They all languidly chorused at him, his consciousness was like a four way call.

He smiled his deadly charm right in their faces, unnerving them with his sudden mighty presence. Doing his best not to show that he wanted to crack up laughing he mused how what he was about to do was gonna terrify the Hell out of them, literally!

There was gonna be enough time, he was unjustifiably certain of it!

### Chapter 8: The Fall

Wrecker didn't have enough time to feel sorry for himself. Maybe the fact that his ordinary life before all this madness, steadily downgrading for years anyway, had immured him to despair.

They were in Gisborne heading to Nanny C's place. She stayed with her daughter's family. It was still the early hours of the morning and the sun was a few hours away yet. The hush of the tires on the road was as pacific as the ocean, dim and peace filled.

Dad was still buzzing with quiet self-satisfaction while he canalized the car through the easy lights bathing the street in clinical favour.

Wrecker renewed his stocktaking reverie.

Just when his company had nailed that deal with Rebel his supplier had sold the rights. Then not long after he had got that sweet gig working as the trainer, personal assistant, body guard, English instructor for that billionaire construction mogul, he hated it and quit after two months. Just when he had written most of a book so that he could get a book contract, so he could go live in the states with his girlfriend, he gets involved in some kind of reality dysfunction.

Just typical.

He thought it was romantically impossible trying to write fantasy in order to get the girl, but now he had to redeem man unkind in order to get the girl.

Their life back in Korea had been idyllic, playing scrabble, doing jigsaw puzzles, out drinking and dancing with friends, making love in their bed or on that lush couch, making promises of the heart, making late dinners and making fun of each other.

He was determined to be what he was meant to be for the first time in his life. He would be a writer, a paid one, then he could enter the states on a tourist visa and her parents would accept him because he could make a living and provide for her and they'd recant that he wasn't a crazy loser after all.

He knew her parents' were putting pressure on her. She never said it, but sometimes he could tell that she was bothered by something, and he knew her. She was lovely, but of course her parents would be against her marrying some drop kick older man with a history of mental illness. He didn't blame them. But he had no choice, best foot forward and all that.

Besides, it was too late to care about the obstacles. When they'd first met she was impressed. That jet setting job working for that Korean billionaire told her that if he had the cunning and the moves to charm all those powerful and dangerous men then he was special. "The Chairman" knew that he was special somehow. He wasn't just a classically handsome beau. He was an incorrigible nerd as well.

When he quit that job everyone looked at him sideways thinking he was out of his gourd to quit. But she supported his choice assuring herself he was a man of principle. The temptations of the job held no sway over him. He just simply disliked the climate of certain uncomfortable scenarios. It wasn't his scene. Corrupt businessman world was too perverse for him.

Though he ended up instructing at The National University of Education and the Centre for Culture and Education, and life was set for a year. It was smooth.

Of course, then he had quit those jobs too, having to flee the country. The boss at CCE was impossible. When he was forced to change positions in the sixth month their understaffing problem in the preschool department became apparent and as he was told by the previous Head Teacher he was to replace, "Wrecker, I just saw the new schedule for next week and it's impossible." She was sick with worry. "I don't know what to do, I've fought Michael, but he just won't listen. I couldn't even do that schedule and I'm qualified to do it!"

Wrecker had said not to worry, but in the following weeks he had nearly lost his mind. His co-workers were physically sick with stress too, but the Korean mentality never questioned authority and the boss didn't care what any foreign woman said. He had lived in NZ 40 years, but you wouldn't think so, he hadn't learnt a damn thing as far as all the NZ and Korean staff thought.

Even if he had hired this education expert to do the job, he wasn't gonna let her do what she was trained to do, which is to say that she was hired to know better than an old fashioned con man, how to care for the children in their little community.

This bloody clown was meant to be their leader. They trusted the fool to take care of them so that they could do the best for their children. The arrogant bastard didn't care. His ego wouldn't allow him to listen to a woman. It still had the power to make Wrecker so irate. He had yelled his head off at the bastard when he saw that more work had been given to his Korean co-worker and she was already overloaded.

She was beside herself with stress. Her lips were chapped to bits. Her eyes were dark pits. Her energy level was as decimated as his by the depressing toll their work load was taking on them. There just wasn't enough time to prepare everything and they were meant to do that and take care of children they loved.

When he realized she had been ordered to do the work he couldn't when she was unable to carry her own workload as it was, Wrecker had snapped.

He had bowled on in to that ignorant salesman's office and railed at him, "WHAT THE BLOODY HELL'S GOING ON HERE, MATE! DON'T YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT YOUR PEOPLE! WE TRUSTED YOU TO TAKE CARE OF US! WE'RE BLOODY SICK, MATE!" The little man's eyes poking out of his immaculate suit were wide with dumb surprise.

"Please, Wrecker, let's sit down and talk about this."

"I DON'T WANNA TALK TO YOU! YOU DON'T EVEN LISTEN! IF YOU NEVER LISTENED TO SENIOR MEMBERS OF STAFF WHO'VE ALREADY TOLD YOU EVERYTHING, TOLD YOU WE CAN'T BLOODY WELL DO OUR JOBS THEN WHAT'S THE BLOODY POINT! I'M AT THE BLOODY BOTTOM! WHY DID I BLOODY WELL HAVE TO COME IN HERE? WHY DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW! YOU WERE TOLD EIGHT BLOODY MONTHS AGO TO GET A QUALIFIED REPLACEMENT!" Wrecker, a bespectacled bourgeois man boy, had virtually done a haka in his Korean boss' face.

Wrecker had written a letter when he had safely arrived back in NZ apologizing to everyone for running away, but he couldn't trust his boss to care if he got sick in a foreign country. They probably had cage beds for all he knew.

It had been eleven years since he'd been over the edge and in a sense he was nowhere near a psychotic break this time. But he had been truly burned out, as broken as a fire cracker, used up and useless, unable to concentrate on the simplest details without protracted delays.

He haunted his classes, nearly cried in parent teacher interviews, he felt pathetic, and being unable to follow his Russian American beauty, his sassy dance partner, his intellectual darling, his adoring lover, he knew that it wasn't worth the risk sticking around in a country that had come to pale, broken down midst a dearth of possibilities.

He had faced her harsh logic stoically, happy for her to have interviews at World Minerals and GM. When she had left on the shuttle for the airport, he had smiled as fearlessly as he could while she had cried pitifully, waving through the tinted glass like a forlorn phantom being whisked away too soon. He had imbued in his smile all the courage she deserved.

Somehow he was going to make it possible to enter that veritable fortress, the United States of America.

But something was bugging him, something he couldn't quite remember. Something had happened yesterday and he had completely buried it in the backyard of his abnormally susceptible mental privation. Just before he'd got into bed and had that dream in the marae with his ancestors when he knew that shadow was gonna be syphoning his energy. It had been a bad thing he'd forgotten. He had simply swept it under the conscious carpet.

Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. After all, he'd simply crawled up into bed as contented as a child.

Wait. That's what irked him for some irrational reason, his contentedness, swaddled in his thick duvet, wearing his white tiger pajamas, had somehow been too saccharine, too infantile, far too perversely regressive.

Something traumatic had stunned him into fatalistic reversion, like that night he had said goodnight to his wife, ex-wife, in the minimum security ward. He had said goodnight to her from the hospital bed with only the light from the hallway, in that sombre darkness he had been in all respects deluded, assuming that he was dying, believing he could read his wife's mind, her tears and concern breaking her heart, he'd said goodnight smiling beatifically, convinced he was descending into the realm of the heavy ones, into the leaden compass of Pluton.

She was backlit as she wept, having to turn and leave him as visiting hours were over, leave him to make that desolate walk back through mirthless streets, to their voiceless, unilluminable rooms.

He had spoken to Cmex...

Oh no, he remembered. As Dad drove into the driveway, the lights glared off the black windows.

"Son, what's wrong?" He cut the engine and Wrecker could feel his father's concerned gaze.

Hollowly he forced himself to reply, "It's okay, I just need a moment in the car. Put on the kettle. Tell Nan I'll be in soon," he allowed genuine warmth to flow into his washed up smile, warmth he summoned out of that black hat inside us all, our capacity for magic, our faith in the trick that saves the day.

"Okay, son. Don't be too long eh." He smiled back just so, as if he knew what Wrecker was thinking. Compassion from that old bastard would have undone him if it hadn't been alloyed with his Dad's hard won immutable faith.

The car door huffed closed, vacuum sealing his reality in dumb silence. He remembered, and it was like he had never in truth forgotten. As if he had ignored so effectively a black angel in the rear view mirror of his shit bomb destiny, its empty sockets glared with sucking hatred.

She had left him. That day. Skype. She was bathed in summer, he frozen in winter. He was upbeat and determined, she was distracted and downtrodden despite looking gloriously done up. She'd mentioned a wedding that afternoon, but looked sick with depression. Finally he had noticed, while she hadn't forgotten, why she calling.

"What's wrong, babe," Somehow... impossibly...he suddenly knew.

"We have to face reality, Rec." Her voice was breaking.

This wasn't meant to be happening, not for a couple more months, he'd prepared to victoriously forestall her, proudly imploring her there was no need to give up, he'd be published and not a moment too soon, but this was far too agonizingly soon, he just needed a couple more months to finish the book, and it was gonna get published he was certain. There were moments that shone! It would draw the desolate through its achingly familiar thorns searching for themselves, and finding sure fire.

"What d'you mean?!" His soul squirmed, trapped in his chest, excruciatingly bound to this hopeless outcome. Why did he have to feel too much? Why did he have to be his stupid self, always too sensitive, too neurotic, too vulnerable to the norm? "Too kind hearted," mum had always said, "but you'll never change."

"There's no way you can get a work visa and you can't afford to come over, I'll be moved into Christine's then, and it would be too hard for you to just come for a visit, even if you could, I've just started my new job and it's too hard to do this." She was set in her terrible course, it had poured out with the concise elision of disheartened reiterated preponderance.

She was defeated. It had only been a couple months apart, but he could hear that she was deaf to hope, despite that he had to say something, he had to put his best foot forward, knew that it was all he had become, a single unadorned flame of sheer will, devoid of way or reason, all that he had been whittled down to by the cutting edge of material failure after material failure, was the improbable blasted survivor of too many heartbreaks in one lifetime.

He was a person who had been too weak to be a New Zealander, openly despised by his mother for the decade since he was five because he was embarrassingly averse to the ubiquitous pastimes of a fanatically sporty nation, painfully shy throughout the irrational gauntlet of his guilt ridden school days, marked with the physical pain of apocalyptic visions and predetermined weakness of spirit.

Only books and movies had offered a way out of himself. Only books and movies had offered friendship that would outlast another duration when the Army had them stationed elsewhere. Only the logic and beauty of poet artisans or scientists far distant lost to time or simply beyond his interred reality, had the sense of wonder enough to suspend his belief that doom was all he had in store.

This was the woman who had talked about how beautiful and smart their children would be, and how happy. This was the woman who could never imagine another lover. This was the woman who'd said she could never be disappointed in him.

Cmex.

She had brought up marriage, talked about a green card if all else was too hard. They had been blessed with the statistically improbable windfall of compatibility. Two sophisticated hearts that overlapped their subtle tumblers just right, unlocking each other, liberating their drive for modern day synergy.

They made a great team, almost always disgustingly smitten, rarely fighting, but ardour followed their fleeting passion swiftly, never going to bed angry, pretty much perfect. There for each other.

And it was slipping away. They were on the very edge of their overlap, and the chasm that would open up between them would turn their world to black. It would drive the light from the whole world as they knew it. That abyss would travel back in time, like the vast shadow of an invisible cloud, robbing all fondness from their cherished memories, and its pall would be cast swiftly upon the future as well, stealing their beautiful babies from their cribs, from their yearning arms.

Their Eden was about to be erased and the tree of knowing too much love, would never have been.

But he couldn't force her to decide to still love him, and he was a charity case now.

"Honey, I just need a couple more months, it's all I ask, that you trust me, there's no other way, a student visa means seven more months, and a work visa is a sham, no employer will offer jobs six months ahead of time when the only jobs hiring need exceptionally skilled workers that the states can't already provide, I know it sounds impossible, and I can't ask you to have me with you when you're flatting and I'm unable to find work," we could get married, but your parents won't stand for it, "but it would be too much of a burden for you to shoulder the costs while I searched for a slim chance of work," though I would totally bring you here to NZ in an instant and cherish you, if only I could show you the way I've always been, generous to a fault, I would have you at home in a heartbeat while I paid for everything happily if you didn't want to find engineering work, "but just give me a couple months and there's a chance..."

"It's a longshot, Wrecker." She didn't have the heart to tell him what her tone already had. He was dreaming, there was no chance he was gonna be published in two months, let alone finished writing a fantasy novel of any certain measure worthy of reading.

"Ssmehh. Darling. Please." He was classically desperate, typically skipping on his broken record. History was repeating, but it was supposed to be different this time!

"We have to face the facts, Rec." She had become sadly resolute.

Then he snapped.

He didn't raise his voice, but when he had been about to split right down the middle of his metaphysical body and wail down Olympus, the internal bereavement of rains had erupted into a perfectly contained body of flames, roiling, barely contained beneath his mundane appearance. His voice near breaking with defiance in the face of abject loss, he spoke aloud the tears and the logic of love that he would not allow in his eyes.

"Either there's someone else, or anyone else, or me. Which is it?" Like an animal in an alley that didn't want to hurt anyone, but was scared to let anyone near its hurts, he bit off his question. "Well? Either there's someone else, or just anyone, or me?"

He could see how stunning she would be that Michigan afternoon at the wedding, even with those cried out eyes. Her marathon training had further revealed her exquisite shoulders. The pain of her forlorn beauty stuck his heart with every painful beat, but he would not fall. Holding his determination in check he forged on, "Everyday... I hAve to keep it together,... stay Optimal,.. in order to do... Anything. I hAve to...I can't do anything if I fall apart."

Calmly now, impeccably, "You deserve the best, Cmex, I know that. I keep my mind optimal, so I can write optimally, live optimally, despite my fucked up situation, so I can be happy for you, supportive for you, and so I can write this book and be with you standing on my own two feet, holding you in my arms again. I'm being what I should be, finally! A writer! You know you inspired me to do this. I told you that. Life has conspired, uncannily to..."

"Rec, it's just too hard. I'm moving in with friends and there's just no room for..." She wasn't listening.

"Darling, I told you! If I get this writing contract I'll be able to..."

"But where would you live...?" She was as exasperated as he, breathless with desperation. And he felt that she was essentially saying the same thing over and over again without actually having the balls to say them out loud, so, angrily, he just said it:

"Well, are we together?! Yes... or No?!... Well? Yes or No?!" He dared her to say what he forced her to admit.

Softly, almost without any real emotion behind it she answered like a half-hearted high pitched sigh, managing to convey in that tone some sense of it being a matter of course even as it was made in admission.

"No."

"Well...

then

I wish you

all the best

darling

I wish you

every happiness.

I'll always

love you."

Looking up furtively from his now cowed posture. Perched on his computer chair frowning. Forcing the last steps of his love before he fell down inside that chasm, he continued inexorably to tear open the heart of his life.

"Goodbye, honey," and he smiled a broken smile, head nodding with burgeoning stereotypy symptoms, "I don't blame you, I'm a charity case, you deserve the best." He couldn't hear what she was saying anymore, if she was saying anything.

He cut the connection as he saw her eyes and their shared heart breaking in their wide eyed teary reflections.

He couldn't hear because he was falling.

Falling slowly through the house.

Smiling dumbly already.

Able now to tell himself he was happy she was free of all the shit he would have likely put her through. Free himself of the responsibility of having an impossible dream.

He was falling into his cosy room, light and happy.

Falling into the white tiger.

Falling into bed, into dreams, into that marae with his unknown ancestors.

He remembered as if it had just happened. Like it really had just happened, as if the moment was edited into this future. Time had looped so that one moment occurred at two different times, just like a boson, the theoretical particle, counterpart to a fermion.

The boson was to the fermion as energy was to matter, in fact bosons were energy and fermions were matter. And while a fermion could not occupy two spaces at the same time nor two fermions occupy the same space at the same time, a boson could be in two spaces at the same time and there seemed to be no limit to the amount of bosons that could occupy the same space at the same time, such are the differences between energy and matter, or according to Spinoza, thought and extention.

Logic and beauty were indeed the anodyne he had needed to withstand his existing in the spirit of his age.

He got out of the car, at long last aware of the warm hue from lights grinning in the old worn cottage. He could hear the goose-like honking laughter indicative of this side of the family.

Then he sensed alarm as if the house could manage a more profound stillness.

Nan wasn't in bed. She wasn't in the house.

### Chapter 9: The End

"Fuckin' Wrecker." At least that's what he thought he heard his Nan say when he approached her out on the promontory as the sun was about to burgeon. She rolled the 'r' as if it was a Maori word. Impossibly she wasn't even in Gisborne proper, though he imagined this headland still shared the earliest time in the world. Gisborne was known to be the first city in the world to be touched by the sun before all other cities in the world every single day.

He'd shut his eyes and spread himself out over the tiny scintillant city, over the dim quilted pastures in all directions, and up the gnarly ghosted coast, nearly a hundred bloody kilometres away, nearly thirty kilometres from any kind of sleepy settlement barely worth mentioning, except for the strong hearts rousing from the fast approaching dawn, or the tough bastards already been up for a while moving cattle on horseback whistling their dogs where they wanted 'em, except for the land and its undaunted demands.

Nan. His real Nan's younger sister, was staring out across the wind whipped water. It was freezing and she had only a brown paisley shawl and a big Rastafarai coloured woollen beanie, holding all that iron hair inside it. She had heard him step from the front of her house in Gisborne onto the desolate point jutting its stratified chin out from the knot of brazen gorse.

"Your Nan and I were just talking about you, boy," Nana had been dead for a few years now. He hadn't come back to the funeral because he couldn't afford the plane ticket from Korea. Being the eldest grandchild had been his privilege and therefore, by Maori esteem, his responsibility to speak on the Marae, honouring his late grandmother. He couldn't even speak Maori, but he knew he could speak enough to observe the protocols. Only he couldn't even do that 'cause he had still been almost destitute a couple months before.

He had swallowed his dishonour and tasted his own tears. His mother had told him, "That's alright, boy, you just write the eulogy okay, in English. His father had got up in front of all those Maoris and read it aloud. People had talked about that Eulogy for years saying that it had been awesome, it had been honest, making people laugh instead of grumble, since so many had called his Nan 'Hitler' behind her back, to her face would have been a big mistake. Uncle was a hundred and fifty kilograms and tough, but all the cuzzies had still said that his Nana was still the scariest. But he had loved his Nana and she had always spoiled him.

Wrecker strode to stand next to his respected elder, she looked just like a brown skinned witch, no kidding, really, everyone thought it but the idea never stuck in their heads, who knows why, maybe because her eyes shone with a sharpness intent on wonders, limning her calcined face with calculating intensity. She had never spoken with anything less than a snappy tempo, belying the stereotypically mundane considerations of the aged.

However, if it wasn't for the fact that they were a hundred kilometres away from where she should be, knowing she didn't drive and that she must be like a million years old, he would've thought she'd finally gone mental.

His Nan had died miserably three and a half years ago and he hadn't gone to stay with her all those years ago, like he'd promised, like she'd told everyone he was gonna do. Like she'd said right up till the time she had passed away, "My moko's gonna come and stay with me, my Wrecker," she had also rolled the 'r', so proud of him she was, even though he had barely seen her for years and years, there were too many demands placed on him by his ambitions and his current loves.

The times he had seen her it was of course at a big funeral with all the hundreds of rellies preparing food for the hangi, all cooked in the ground by the red hot river stones steaming the moist muslin, or welcoming more rellies to the tangi with the wailing, prayer chants, speeches, and songs. He had sat in the car with her saying nothing. He would talk to her a little, but he had mostly just sat with her. She didn't want to go sit with anyone. He had just kept her company. He could see everyone. He knew what they were saying.

Nanny C didn't say anything, so neither did he. Maori were often staunch like that, silent. The horizon was starting to lighten and they continued to observe the implications of silent solemnity.

He loved his late grandmother so much and had felt hopeless in regard to everything Maori. He was a half-cast and he didn't feel like he fit anywhere. He didn't have the heart to learn Maori. He had been to that violent Catholic Maori Boarding school she had enrolled him in when he was born apparently. At least that's what Mum had said to him. He had Maori language studies every day, church, singing, and kapahaka everyday.

Being so tall so young, six foot three since he was thirteen, he could squat in a war stance as low as the shortest guys, like he was ordered to by senior students, but it was torture maintaining that ninety degree angle in his knees, that straight backed proud chest, for as long as them, yelling your head off and slapping your chest, arms or thighs as hard as you could.

After thirty minutes of culture practice he would inevitably receive te rakau, the stick, because it was harder for him being the tallest. Te rakau had the words 'te rakau' lovingly encausted into its remarkably rectangular length. No one got the stick across his arse more than him. After a couple hours of culture practice everyone would be red skinned and quivering from smashing themselves or being smashed for not smashing themselves hard enough. They could barely walk back to the dorm.

There were too many varieties of humiliations earned there.

"So what brings you here, boy?" she asked distantly, eyes reflecting the almost gleam of true daybreak.

"Had a dream, Nan." He had lapsed into the aloof vernacular implicit to Maori speech.

"Was it a wet dream, boy?" In that startled instant the Sun cracked the horizon with huge honking spangles of golden laughter, cachinnating rose hued light flares blared in their teary eyes as they doubled over looking at each other through eyes almost smeared shut with tears too long hoarded in caches of shame. They laughed and laughed, stomach muscles imploding with hilarious agony, Rek was dying for air when he saw that Nan was still grinning, but had ceased cracking up, her eyes were pretty much black as night, except for the sheen of humour there.

Nan leaned away bringing her hand up to cup her mouth, as if conspiring to whisper to someone beside her, "their family never talked about things like that," she stage whispered as ridiculously as only she could. Wrecker imagined his late Nana was there sitting on her own fold out walking stick chair, nodding her head with her plump smile and half-moon eyes, a chuckle still shaking her body.

Nanny C had managed to dissolve the bitter glass of resentment he hadn't even noticed calcified to the bones of his soul. He felt more fluid, forgiven somehow for so many things at once. He couldn't have even imagined such a feat was plausible, let alone possible, as light as he felt then, like a breeze happy to eddy where ever, alight with humour.

She knew him, x-rayed his spirit with that sheen flash from her black eyes, and just knew he had been a prude when he was younger, as much a prude as he was an ordinary perverse young man with a guilty imagination. Perhaps she even knew that he had sought all manner of drugs and alcohol in his personal quest to ruin his pathetic life with the forbidden tastes of ecstasy.

He despised his weaknesses, too shy to get a girl growing up. He had seemed to fall in love every day, six times a day. He had been ashamed of his sexual propensity and believed only true love would transcend carnal desire. But Nan had wiped all that nonsense away with true transcendence. Her jocular insight included his late grandmother in the joke, his predecessor, thereby spiritualizing his nature: what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Well, maybe not wiped away, but subsumed or superseded, embraced and gone beyond.

And if it was alright by his respected elders, who was he to argue?

Of all the things he had in his life, and perhaps it was best said that he had a vacuum of material worth, besides the irascible love of family worth dying for and the unfolding love of friends that let you be yourself, he was most proud that he had lost most of his baggage shedding all that crippling shyness. Experience was his most cherished possession, the experiences of feeling like you were about to die, but you didn't. He had sickeningly felt compelled toward terrifying and exhilarating self-destructive torments seeing no alternative to the Hell of growing up to be a coward all his life, ruined by shyness of all things as sluggish and insulting as cancer. Maori called shyness 'whakama', pronounced 'fakama', which 'means to be white.'

Then it struck him, the realization of a lifetime, well, the hunch of a lifetime really, or maybe something in between, a glimmer promising more than it could justify of illuminations liberating subterranean potentials from unconsciousness, a glimmer flashing intermittently the briefest of instants across the quartz landscape inside his geode skull brilliance for memory, the acute star bursts of twinkling visual spectrum intimating vivacious imagery.

A certain glimmer resplendent amongst his recollections constellated tokens of destiny. His eccentric Nan conveyed the distinct impression that she shared his excitement howbeit in furtherance of any indistinct reason. There was no mistaking that she knew the purpose, furthermore she evoked the realization, of this too, he was most certain. Her eyes were full of mischief yet!

More so she was at the height of mischief, as mischievous as a miscreant child, and as equally full of life affirmation as a font of effulgent waters. Her eyes held the secret of tears even as they reflected pure sunlight, holding nothing back of joy and laughter. She shared the truth without need of mere utterance.

"What does my name mean in Maori, Nan?" His voice nearly broke with the sheer weight of significance as he saw the countless eyes of memory flashing hazardously when his relatives had looked askance at him at just the apex between moments when they had seemed to imply something beyond speech, something menacing, confrontational, damning even.

He had run away from that savage school in his second year, he had thrown away his effortless status as the number two student in his year, and he had turned his back on his grandmother's dream that he would learn all about his heritage. The all too numerous uncles and aunties and nannies and koros, they had all confronted him with their eyes since he was just a moppet and the challenge had always defeated him. He wasn't equal to their taciturn expectations.

"Reka means sweet, boy," and she cracked up laughing again, and her cackle struck tiny lightning through the nexus of nerves in his chest. He chuckled a little at his own disappointed embarrassment. It was fitting after all, if somewhat shy of monumentality. Nan's daughter, Aunt D had once said to his face with consummate nonchalance, "Well, boy, the whole world doesn't revolve around you." She had said it after he'd simply made a joke, about himself no less, and he'd been about to gift her a framed photo of him with his hard attained bachelor's degree. She was one of the few people he had wanted to show off his proud achievement to, and he lost the courage to give it to her that day, too ashamed that it was only proof of her sagacity, electing to give it to her little brother whom he had also always looked up to. They were an incisive side of the family and he had always fallen shy of their ungentle estimation. But he still wondered something, grateful his diminished self-importance was not as proud since those strident days.

"What did you say when I first arrived, Nan?"

"I said your name boy." She was still looking out to sea, enjoying herself.

"Whakama means to be white, right?" Many cultures have a white pallor as much as a swarthy pallor, often a distinguishing feature of classes. Paler complexions tended to be significant of higher stations, whiteness declared dignity. Ruling classes inscribed their compass from the shade, while the people of the sun, the fields and the quarries, were blackened by the relentless sun racing timelessly overhead. The sun god had been relegated to the position of overseer and bully boy. The living Earth and all its bountiful emanations were hidden in plain sight by the exigencies of a toiling class that lacked any self-determination of their own. They were fearfully devoid of tenacity.

Even in Korea the girls wanted white skin, their sunscreen had whitener in it for Christ sakes. Girls were wearing frilly yellow dresses out in the blinding sun with parasols, like some surreal apparition, covering their mouths while they giggled churlishly. Korea was a country more obscenely hobbled with shyness than he had ever imagined, but in NZ culture he was that moral cripple.

It had been a miracle to him that he had transcended the most baleful effects of his shyness. Maori culture had been an unforgiving gauntlet, mentally brutalizing to such an abject backwardness as his. He was forced by his mother to observe all Maori protocol, not to be forward and polite was unconscionable. Kiss all the women and hongi all the men, touch noses and pump fists. It was an anxiety attack every time, and there was no name for it then, but it was his reality.

"Yes, boy, that's right." She nodded her head slowly, emphasizing her response with each nod as if in coaxing the logic of his deliberations she declared that his singular intent had always been obvious to any formless observer. His monumental handicap had been as pronounced as an ignorant plaint. His truncated courage was as glaring as it was mute.

"So does Whakareka have a different meaning than 'To be sweet?' I thought you had sworn my name when I first got here." 'Fucker Reka' was grinning now, the implications were honestly quite hilarious, if somewhat cute.

"Both, boy, both, at the very least." Nan clearly operated from such an integrated mind set, she could dispense with crippling vagaries, eliding gaggles of connotations in singular geodesy. She confused him, yet the gravity of its import still doubled.

"I said your real name Whakareka as if I swore it," to be friendly, boy, "and your name could mean to be sweetened, or to taste sweet, or to be like sweetness, but the other meaning is 'To heal.'

"You are the oldest grandchild of the oldest grandchild, Whakareka," already he could feel the unfathomably deep sadness being drawn out of his deep well, the inexplicability of his birth right was his capacity for weakness. His natural vulnerability to identification with pain and evil negated the righteous discrimination of his upbringing, shaming every erg of his will into quiescent impotence.

"Your mother was like you, she wasn't born the oldest, her elder sister died, and she ran away from everything too."

"Mum said that. She said if things were bad at one house she would run away to another relative's house." Thrumming with wistful austerity, his face a solemn mask, the mass of their considerations was weighed.

"She didn't want to face her responsibilities, who would?" Now gratitude ignited the cheerless coolant deep within, drawing upon his potential, his being sang of halcyon love for his mother, who had shouldered her responsibilities, and borne the consequences of choices she had had to discover for herself in a world without precedence.

"Your mother was meant to give you up, like the first catch of the day, give you away, to your grandparents, so you could be raised a leader for our people, a leader born of both worlds. But your mother thought to hell with that and they told her to give you a particular name, a Maori name they had prepared, but to hell with that too.

"Your mother wanted to call you Hamish, but it was your father who said..."

"To hell with that!" Reka finished for her, laughing. He could just imagine his father with his big moustache and his army beret looking like the Brigadier from Dr Who, cursing a Scottish name. He chuckled deep in his throat, air snuffing from his nose, picturing his severity.

"Your Dad only just made it in time to your birth, in a pique they angrily agreed on the name you have. In the end your mother chose the name and hid the meaning. The nurse was a Maori lady too. She understood what your Mum was doing and wrote the English spelling happily. I was there with your Nana and Grampa. We approved, but your mother was still angry that she had assented, afraid that she had made your life harder, like your mother's life had been harder with her name. She feared and hoped in the same heartbeat. She feared that you would experience prejudice from Maori and Pakeha alike. Her name was like yours.

She was hated by Maori for the meaning of her name and judged by pakeha because her name was difficult to pronounce and it was the name of a savage." Nan cracked up laughing then, like an evil lady, but her laughter was contagious and they laughed at the image of Mum as a savage. She could be as much a lady as any anglophone, but just as savage as any. She was human, as proud as she was humble.

"For the longest time, Whakareka, our people had been fleeing the encroachment on our minds, we were not a people to run from a fight we thought we could win, we fled because we could see that we didn't have the edge we needed to win. The aborigines called it the dream time, and various religions speak of a tower where the people of the world had one language and lived in harmony."

"Like the tower of Babel, thought to have been Babylon."

"You said it, boy, thought to have been. There are so many different stories about it, with different names for the main characters, and different towers attributed to different ziggurats in different places. Mount Olympus when men ate at the table of the gods. Or the Tower of Babel when men were in harmony, but the idea is that man made mistakes and God cast them out or sundered the languages, dream times, or Edens, but some things stay the same. God cast us out because man made a mistake or women made a mistake or men made a mistake and women were the punishment, or man made woman. The bottom line is that woman was no longer seen as an equal to man, even though women are the trunk of the tree of life.

"Before history began, prehistory if you will, some new gods came to the Earth and went, but while they were here they warred with the people of the Earth and we were scattered, during that time they enslaved the song bodies of many us, and since that time those of us that could resist the enslavement fled as far as we possibly could, but a single god lingered and continued to take our young in their dreams and we were too late to realize that fear had driven many of us to war upon each other. The people were no longer united against a common foe. We had become our worst enemies.

"We fled because we didn't want to win if it meant killing ourselves. The world had changed forever.

"Yet some of us still hoped it only felt like forever. I am from that line and so are you. You must go to Morianuku and fight the shadows of our own people. The more shadows you set free the more allies we'll have, but the more shadows will be alerted to your position in the dream world, so you must be swift. This is the third day since you've managed to escape the big sleep. No one has survived the third day, boy. No one."

"What is Morianuku, Nan?"

"It is the land of death and shadows. In the real world it is just a big red rock mostly buried beneath the surface of the desert, visited by Tourists. Anyone who had taken some of that harmless rock home had been cursed, only some have attributed their misfortune to the stolen fragment."

"Ayers Rock." It was hard to believe her, but it made sense that everything their enemy did, it did surreptitiously. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. It was as if the myths and legends were an image that like a mirage had migrated to other places and the source of that image had been lost. But now he could see Morianuku!

It was the chthonic realm, denser than this realm, deeper. Just as the stratosphere was more rarefied than the surface of the Earth's crust, the surface reality we enjoyed was merely a cloud line to the denizens far below. They enjoyed tectonic pressure, the strata itself was as translucent and intangible as bright air.

"There will be a tower in the very lowest place and that tower ascends to the highest realm. That dark god is there in the tower and the shadows at his command are his only connection to this world, like marionette strings, only if you can cut enough of them it will lose its moorings to Morianuku and be lost into the void."

"How many shadows will have to be severed?"

"As you know there are few people who have been able to free themselves from sleep and dreams, so almost every song body has been made shadow, but only one percent of humanity has been utterly enslaved and made irredeemable. They are even now being mustered like never before in the history of the world."

"Wait a minute. There are seven billion people on the planet. You're talking about seventy million shadows that rule over the rest."

"They don't completely rule, many good people still contest with that dark influence else the world would be in complete ruins, but yes, essentially the world is ruled by the few and the complacent others that enjoy a civilized, cushy existence, like me"

"Me too, Nan, me too."

"Frankly, boy, it's a miracle after all this time that anything like this could happen. You must go soon, alone, and face this."

"Alone? What about..."

"The truth is that only you alone can succeed so any help is simply a waste of life. You can face them all, alone, and win."

"So even if only a quarter of the world was dreaming there would still be almost twenty million shadows that might assail me and you think I can still win?" Wrecker had felt titanic power awaken inside him but he was daunted by the absurd scale of the adversity he was meant to face, the hordes of hatred had already tasted his blood.

"You have to, boy."

Suddenly the glory of the first sunrise in the world had become his last.

Turning his back on the sun, he looked northwest, then turned to Nan and kissed her on the cheek goodbye.

He would have to summon all his emotion and fly since he didn't know where exactly he was going and couldn't just will himself there.

"Enoho ra e Whaea." He bid his great aunt goodbye, honouring her with her respected title as an elder mother.

"Haere ra, Whakareka. Kia kaha! Tinoarohanui!" She wished her grandnephew goodbye and told him to be strong, with all her love.

He separated his entire being from the outside world and attached it to the inside world of dreams, and the land fell away as if plunging into an abyss. The glorious sunlight abruptly bled infernal vermillion. Vast obsidian waves in a primordial ocean strode miles beneath his puissant corpus fastened to the phantom sky.

He looked back at the blood red sun hypnotizing the Earth, then forward again to the familiar light smothering cumulus flashing in the northwest-most edges of horizon.

As the last remnants of his mortality faded from memory his face shifted from humane dimensions into a mask made hideous by enraged self-betrayal. He did not so much as lose all the beauty of his love for friends, family, and Cmex, as he did turn himself inside out, putting his love into potential, into unconsciousness, as he reified his hate, manifesting consciously his unfathomably grievous hostility toward a guest that had outstayed its welcome.

Then a dark joy erupted from his personified anima, every super-dense iota of his arrogant being reached for the clouds and the obscene horizon streaked toward him as if Reka did not move. He defied all sense, demanding that the mountain come to him, the ocean no more than undulant tarmac flying beneath his impeccable stance.

If he could defeat enough of these vampires he would see a new world rise out of the cairn of their corpses, the dead would come back to life and light. Almost instantly, the world of doom in its closing decades would become a world of infinite promise only just beginning.

Billows of stygian cloud charged impetuously through the tunnel of his vision, and the light at the end of that tunnel hid menacingly. When least expected it burst forth from the bilious fume in blinding flails. Sickly afterimages like viridian veins struck his retina with the violence of neural lightning strikes, stinging his burning brain with shocking visions of inquisition.

But this would induce him to roar his mind clean and clear, hot with insolence. As the world got darker with the sun falling back behind the horizon, unmaking the day, Reka sneered and ducked under the cloud just as an expansive desolate crag launched out of the edge of the world and eclipsed the ocean in a heartbeat, and the entire world was no more than sterile scoria and cruel cloud, barely illuminated by the unruly storm bursts.

Then he saw something gaining definition as if from the blasted air itself, a darkening vertical line, thickening from the atmosphere, like ebon liquid was pouring from the cloud.

It was the tower! A black tower of epic proportion manifesting from the obscuring dimness, an obsidian monolith uniting earth and sky, an arcane skyscraper, sheer, glassy granite gradually revealing hoary signs of deterioration though it hid nothing of its indomitable architecture. The foreboding structure was more mountain than edifice, unyielding and everlasting.

Dropping from the sky like a reckless iron star, Reka smashed into the rock strewn lip of the stupendously immense crater where the tower was centred, and lay back in the rubble, like a king in his mighty thrown, surveying the wasteland that was his new domain, and the tower of heaven and hell he intended to storm alone.

Far below he noticed that some of the boulders were moving, or at least their shadows were.

Then he realized the shadowy flame-like movements were the horde, fanning out toward the lip, like vicious insects they would swarm over any prey and consume it in mere moments. He had no way of guessing their numbers. He was no savant, but even right now he could count more than ten thousand moiling just below. At a rough estimate maybe only three times that number, no more than four times that number, loitered like bums around the shattered perimeter.

Only that many, he laughed to himself.

He was unsure if the thunderous sky had masked his tactless approach. Maybe it had. Pity.

Well, the night wasn't getting any shorter and maybe in an hour or two real time dawn would have caught up, not that any of that blood stained sunlight was likely to pierce this cursed cloud cover. He had better go commit suicide now, the fun way.

Then he decided he was lucky the dopey victims were too busy daydreaming, because he had an idea, a fiendishly amazing idea.

Staring down into the crater he spied his first eight victims. He could only follow eight white faced ghouls at a time so he figured that was his limit.

They burst into phosphors and nothing was left. Then eight more erupted like magnesium flares just a hundred feet away and disappeared. Suddenly, groups of panic stricken carnival freaks were bursting apart all over the place, and a maelstrom of swirling lights eddied in every direction. Shadows were startled but would become distracted by the rich glistening energy whirling overhead, and would chase them, driven mindless with feeding frenzy.

None of the thousands aware of the sudden deaths could figure out that they were under attack. The notion that any harm could befall them without the presence of the Slain, or the Torturers, was beyond their feeble comprehension. The only thing that was abundantly clear to them was that some of them were sacrificed to this whirlpool of numen whipping around just within their feral grasp.

It was something they understood, they were the victimized, and they had agreed a long time ago that they deserved to be victimized, and so do the rest of humanity.

Hypnotized by the pure innocence blinding them to their doom, they fed on the luminous virginity as eight by eight Reka translated from one ruptured location to the obliterated next. He was blinded by each concussion as he perforated thorax after thorax. There was no shortage of victims, like enraptured junkies, their hurting souls sung to his questing celerity, and he liberated them from themselves, imbibing fleeting portions of the spiritual yolk, ardent with excess mana as it was, he feared only losing consciousness, so swiftly would he become drunk with power.

Recognizing that fear, and indeed the real danger it signified, he intensified his extravagant feats, intending through sheer madness to exhaust more mana than he consumed. In the first minute nearly two thousand of the Victims had perished.

Like a colossal detonation each avatar of himself yelled destruction as they translated, eight at a time, crisscrossing through the radiant miasma, as more and more leaping ghouls swarmed the beneficent boon. Each yell shattered the adjacent victims, almost doubling the casualty rate.

But it couldn't last for much longer.

There were too many.

In the next minute or two he would be overwhelmed by a valiant combination of exertion, inebriation, and overwhelming numbers. Exertion: because though only two minutes had passed, Reka felt as if he had been sprinting for a duration more like eight minutes. Inebriation: because the rush of unadulterated life energies threatened his resolve with gyres of incalculable joy whilst he rent pitiful lives asunder. And overwhelming numbers: not just because of the thirty five thousand malicious shades slavering toward their destruction, but also because the entire sleeping world felt the disruption to their dreaming patterns, and the harvester of sorrows as well, extending its reach it recalled far greater numbers still, and among that daunting number were his most fell parasites, and even A Machine.

The following minute saw nearly four thousand more perish into the lambent soup. From above the luminous cocoon it looked like a flattened ovoid of randomly pulsing light, singular and awe-inspiring.

At least Ajax thought so.

Fastened to the sky, cloaked in his own shadow he hyperventilated with anticipation. This was the bit about the plan that excited him the most. Wrecker had alluded to its nature, but he had only laughed when needled for more information, "You'll see," was all he'd say. He'd always been a sneaky bastard.

His diaphanous shadow blended in with the interplay of light and dark squirming within the interior of the spume of clouds. Waiting thus for the next wave to take the bait.

There they were. Charging from the base of the black tower, issuing from no discernible exit, the Slain had joined the fray.

There too. The cocoon was shrinking. Gone. So suddenly taken away.

An ephemeral glint winked where the centre might have been then vanished.

The entire domain fell into sudden craggy darkness, torn shadows hiding hazards.

The Slain bolted onto the scene, massive blurring voids, their ungainly mass and inertia pulverizing stones into shrapnel, intimidating bewildered Victims that cowed and stepped aside with supernatural alacrity, stung by the ballistic flinders of the pulverizing entrance.

But the ten thousand Slain halted in a mammoth arc, uncertain of their target for the briefest of split seconds, training the gigantic black muzzles of their ravenous weaponry on every silhouette too slow to scram, and opened fire.

Each vociferating barrel magnetically pulsed irradiated metal at a rate of 660 shells a minute. The metal barrage annihilated the landscape, taking out another seven thousand Victims.

Ajax observed that the grandmaster wouldn't give a damn about the liberation of those weak minded fools, the poor bastards were a dime a dozen, contributing little to his hold on our reality. Many of them were probably not likely to die in their sleep either. They'd just wake up from a bad dream, feel great for a day, fall into their old routine of selling out their fellow man, woman, and child, then get picked up again in their nightmares.

But if those slain were slain, he'd feel it alright. They won't be waking up in the morning. If they died here, they'd die for real, almost a hundred per cent guaranteed. A whole lot less assholes swaggering around the planet with their hands on it, talking shit about how god damn awesome they were at killing innocent people.

They are still firing those blasted guns, into a dust storm with...

There. That glint again, at the farthest end of that arc of the ten thousand Slain.

Contact.

The entire arc incinerated in one keening flash of agonizing light. Shielding his face from the titanic blaze and working his jaw as the profound knell gradually returned his hearing, Ajax beamed at the fell devastation.

He so wanted to play too, but the plan was just too good to spoil, and the prospect of exponentially mounting mayhem sung through his body the music of delayed gratification.

Still. Why did Wrecker always have all the fun? The lucky son of a bitch! Ajax was gonna ear punch him real good when they were both right in the thick of it. Yes! To hell with it! It'll be too much fun to see him threatening him back with that big goofy grin all over his ugly mug.

Wait! That was the humdinger! It's all coming now. This place is gonna be swamped with the entire ugly side of humanity in a couple of minutes. Yes!!

There he is, exhausted already, he can barely breathe. Typical eh. Though he does look pretty awesome still. Nice sword! It's a beauty alright! Glowing white like that. Ah it's all that energy he absorbed from the Victims and the Slain. Good one!

Oh Shit! It's that Machine and a bunch of torturers. Damn! They're pretty fast, but that Machine...it's a behemoth! The sum bureaucracy of a government! I hope its Australia and not New Zealand, otherwise we're in big trouble if Australia's still coming and we haven't even had to deal with the superpowers yet!

This is gonna be awesome!

Wrecker's turning to face them. I better get ready for phase two.

Shadows bled from the flat planes of the implacable edifice, their proliferation sprawling around the ancient basin, Wrecker wondered if it was an impact crater or a crash site or what?

Catching his breath he hefted the mercurial dream steel in his hand, feeling the immense weight of all those superimposed energies sharing the peculiar infinitude of its dimensions. He knew that the fey implement moved as much by his singular will as it did with the clout of his body entire.

As much as.

Sometime during his extravagant rampage, he had forgotten the difference. Mind and body were ridiculous distinctions.

Steeling himself, he exited his panting breath, breathing the seared dust coolly, and calmly, for a transitory instant he observed the silhouettes of the hulking Slain blasted onto the granite floor then collected his scant attention into his autonomic animal whole, training it on the streaks of alien calligraphy rhythmically interweaving an advancing wall, threatening to enclose his position.

As the wall got closer he realized that the wreathing satin deadliness was higher than he thought, maybe four or five stories high.

Its outer edges were definitely threatening to close off his retreat. If he stayed here he would be committed.

The dome of fleet torturers was shutting out all light and sound, and in the instant of sensory adjustment, they would fall on him in eurythmic sequence, perfecting his death with exquisite precision. They were cold calculating masters, executing the commands of a grandmaster of torture.

But there was no need to adjust his senses, since he only had one sense, his intent.

It was enough to catch the first wave that fell in complete black out darkness, on the steel lightning of his will. Striking again and again like a tremendous Tesla coil, iridescent steel impaled 256 torturers every split second. After the first second they retreated and that's when Wrecker was caught off guard.

Connect.

The Machine, like a giant rook, castled Wrecker right in the face, whereupon every bone in his face was shattered into smithereens, the traumatic impact instantaneously knocked the bioluminescent quantum matrix of his cerebellum right out, leaving his brain blank, inert, dead.

The light left his body, like someone casually leaving a room, but the door closes forever.

From somewhere up in the heavens denial fell from the sky like a meteor roaring cataclysm.

Right on top of the triumphantly, seething Behemoth.

The basin was rocked by the impact. The concussion wave slammed everything that wasn't behind the obstinate tower, indeed it struck at the obstinacy of the tower as well, though for all its might, in childish futility.

Wreathed in nightmarish power as blinding as the sun, Ajax flared in syncopated bursts, his face a drawn rictus, exalted beyond the compass of human understanding, nevertheless, he exuded bereavement as scorching as rage, vitrifying the granite plane where he stood, deep in the glazed cavity of his meteoric denial.

Wrecker cannot be dead. He is not.

Connect.

Ajax rocked sideways, his ear stinging.

Twisting around he saw, standing contrapposto on the edge of his glassy crater, Wrecker, rubbing his nose and raising his brows like the statue of a head shaven Greek god come back to life.

"Are you quite finished throwing your toys, man, 'cause you nearly got me killed just now." Reka couldn't keep from grinning as he stifled his laughter, "I mean, when that thing hit me, I would've died if I hadn't split, but you really toasted my ass, man.

"But hey! What're you even doing here, man?" Happy as hell, he stretched out his arm and the holographic steel slid from his palm. He syphoned excess energy from Ajax' overloaded corpus.

Ajax had heard the question but it was only starting to register on his cooling neurons. His redeemed smile was as quickly banished and puzzlement cascaded in his neural nexus.

"Dude, I was meant to jump in if things got too heavy with the Machine, but it could translate and I didn't expect that so when....

"Wait, what do you mean 'meant to jump in?'" The stillness in the basin was stirring from the aftermath of the shock-wave.

"You know, man, the plan, your plan. You told me..."

"Bro, I haven't seen you since I did a runner from Korea."

They were both stunned for a moment, for a split second.

Then everything came out of the tower. A tide of undulant chaos spewed a mountainous torrent of unctuous shadow. It pooled like oil into the granite basin and the two humans translated to the lip of the ancient crater, mute with comprehension.

Millions had come, too many for them, no matter how you cut it. They would be wiped out utterly, but they still sensed that millions were kept in reserve, just in case too many were lost in another cataclysmic shock wave.

At the base of the obsidian monolith a cadre of behemoths rumbled from the rippling surface of what they had thought immutable stone. Much like the tower they were implacable voids of might so intense, there deafening frequency commanded obeisance. Wrecker and Ajax could feel the demanding oscillations of their machinations. Most of the superpowers were there, but they were indistinguishable, despite their size and mass, they were all still just the same, just conglomerations of rule followers. They were each a state of being, an institution, that had ceased to serve the people, and ensured the people served it instead. They were the perfect exemplar of malignancy. Like cancerous cells, they were the failed immune system of the country, feeding itself at the expense of the people. The system meant to serve the people just expanded its corrupted self instead. It was a runaway machine. Machines do work. And their product was not welfare, but wealth.

Wealth for 1% of the world's population.

Despicable.

Just then a whirring keening sound sped in an overhead arc, glinting with hints of coloured brilliance. Its hyperbolic trajectory nicked the cloud and scarlet lightning stabbed furiously its vermillion agonies, like veins torn from demonic flesh, every being in the basin felt the pain stab through their eyes, jolting their nervous systems with shuddering shunts of torment.

Due to the glitch in every perception, nobody saw the plummet of dream steel cleave through the largest Machine, imploding the sum total of a corrupt bureaucracy's living energy screaming into the lambent disc. But they followed its startling celerity back to the hand of its wielder.

Tu stood beside Reka radiating power, Crissy, radiant beside him then Hani smiling with valiant mana. But before the surprise could particulate questions more relatives arrived. And friends too, many staunch beautiful faces.

Alighting next to Ajax, Jasmine, Browntown, Gi, Deep, Matson, Thomas, Haze, Ru, Tom, Loz, Ali, Jess, West, Amanda, Leah, Karl, Gill, Donna, Matt, Dagma, faces he didn't know and more faces he did, the entire gold mine.

At Tu's incredible sleight of hand, fear had been recalled to the black heart of the wreathing horde, dawning in the black hole that was the dark God's insatiable hunger and fear of starving.

Creeping out of the tower, the full complement of demonic beasts flew, leapt, strode, crawled, and slithered, thirty five million at any one time. The horde shimmered with the evaporation of those awoken by sunlight as it touched the foreheads of their sleeping bodies in the real world, but always those having just succumbed to slumber poured from the looming lodestone, slathering with the hunger of their master, its voice always pretending to be their voice, undermining the voice of their own conscience, corrupting their being with the division of their nature, their mauri transmogrified into the hideous face of butchery and barbarism, they were the totalitarian brutality of all human history incarnate.

But they were still only parasites.

A single human being was godlike.

Without taking his eyes off the swelling numbers, Reka sensed more relatives had arrived too, his rellies! Cuzzies, aunties, uncles, nans, and koros too. They nearly burst his titanic heart with pride for they were terrifying to behold.

This bolstered his friends to no end.

On either side, two communities had come together. It was a sociological fact that a village became a little strange, a little off, when they neared a hundred and fifty people. Only incredible discipline could synchronize a complement of two hundred soldiers. And modern, civilized individuals tended to know well enough around a hundred and fifty people at most.

Here were his hundred and fifty besties, or thereabouts. At least he wouldn't have to best 35 to the power 9 demons all by himself. Only had two hundred something thousand left to take care of by himself. Whose plan was this?

"Bro, whose plan was this again?" Wrecker spoke to the left without taking his eyes of the horde of miserable insects amassing below.

"Don't freak me out, man. This is your plan. You came to Korea and pushed me off my god damn roof." Neither of them could look away from the mesmerizing brood. They were entranced by the anatomy of single seconds, squirming, visceral.

"I what?"

But there was no time to speak anymore. Lionel had stolen the show.

Bursting from their defiant pack, their cousin had bolted headlong down the sheer face of the cliff. His dream body was even more massive and godlike than an entire mountain super impacted into one emanating corpus. He could barely be seen for all the pulverized dust and shrapnel his locomotion kicked into the air.

And boy was he moving for a giant. He was normally 6 foot four, 320 pounds, solid not fat, but he was our juggernaut now. Unstoppable might.

Even still we watched him as if expecting a miracle. The voice of evil nattering in our minds had long since lost its efficacy. We were immune to its doom filled propaganda. We were deaf to despair.

The front line Victims casually gave a wide berth, parting like waves before a tanker of the spirit. Just as their ranks encircled his startling charge, Lionel really stepped it up a gear, taking Victims off guard. Time had almost stopped for Lionel.

As he powered through the viscosity of human limitations in space time, one knee raised after another knee, connect, flash, one elbow raised, connect, flash, after another, the carnival of dismayed masks seemed to mew their despair, unable to avoid imminent obliteration.

Slain too had no time to track and fire upon Lionel's celerity.

For the friends and whanau up on their rocky grandstand, each Slain slew was a concise ball of white light echoing thunderous reverberations inside an ancient stadium.

It was the best rugby ever.

Following in his wake many cuzzies had crisscrossed through the confusion, adding havoc to mayhem, making destructive exponents of themselves, lighting up the hellish arena with spiritual fireworks detonating at ground level, up close and personal.

The forward pack of mindless super-powered gargantua translated to Lionel's expected position, but he was behind them already having translated himself passed their defences, delivering surely the most devastating dropped shoulder in the history of sport, to the Obsidian Tower itself.

Connect.

An impact web of flaws leapt through the first hundred feet at the base, but only for a few hundredths of a second before the flaws healed completely.

Then he and the cuzzies were standing among us again, huffing and catching their breath.

"It's no use." Lionel's deep timbre vibrated the dust cover. "The Tower is powered by all those fuckin zombies. We have to go through them all to get to him, the bloody coward." He put his hands on his knees and breathed through his nose, tucking his bottom lip and creasing his brow.

Then they were set upon.

It was the end of the world. Horror assailed them from every angle, vitriolic hatred shouted from millions of faces, the sucking eye sockets of Victims drank fear from their guts while Slain unleashed death metal, like glowing lengths of chainsaw razor wire precluding escape, Tortured hands ripped from the bedrock clasping limbs like iron manacles, while The Machines dealt deadly blows with every immense ram horned fist, they battered family and friends like translocating freight trains out of control.

Each friend or relative, including Reka himself, had split into eight beings only to be engaged in deadly combat or cut down outright. This engagement had been anticipated and the threat was effectively counteracted. None could translate away, at least not far enough, immediately overpowered by his million-fold swarm.

The custodial consciousness of the Tower lauded over his check mate. In the following orbital period of the Earth the hidden planet of his masters would come for the tithe of numen and his age of exile would end. Another regent would herd the weak through the valley of darkness, milking there suffering, and the suffering of this big cow, the Earth.

But the incredible skirmish was not over, just protracted. In the seeming timelessness of the horrific gory carnage, none of the members of this single small community had managed to get themselves battered to death eight out of eight beings at the same time, since the dream alloyed steel wielded by Reka, Tu, and Hani, was translated inside themselves to each avatar, like holographic batons, imbuing the waning few with numen aplenty.

Reka's increasingly gleaming sword had momentarily and painstakingly cloven another bureaucratic behemoth into the now phosphorescent blade. Only to be riddled irredeemably with glaring razor wire. Before the next heart beat Reka's effulgent sabre retracted whilst extending into the clutch of another self intent on imbuing friends and family with sorely needed life force.

Tu's lambent disc leapt from self to self, cleaving enemies left right and centre, caught backhand, hammer thrown, morphing mid arcing trajectory into timely mirrored shields with deadly deflections and flight paths, snatched without looking, reforming into a sparkling gauntlet destined to meet an oncoming freight train.

Connect.

The behemoth implodes, mostly. The excess blast immolates Tu over the span of a single agonizing heartbeat.

Hani wields Tu's twin disc, but as a taiaha! Twirling like a propeller blade, Victims, Slain, Torturers, and Machines, all swept up into the shining wheel, before the incubi tear her limb from limb.

Crissy systematically ganged up on singular enemies, executing killing logic like it was rhythmic gymnastics. Every painful death she suffered was just another blow to take.

Ajax mowed down clusters of enemies using himselves as defensive forward packs while the backs torpedoed boulders with ballistic fatality.

Impulsively, Reka bawled murder, and following all but instantly, four other Rekas bawled in unison resonating destructively and detonating all Victims close enough to sap their certainly diminishing strength, allowing the other three Rekas to resurrect and join in on the destructive chorus. A tactic answered by their tribe of mixed nations with shrieks, screeches, wails, hollers, and bellows enough to stagger even the castle-like behemoths, queenly succubi and kingly incubi, a randomly resonating clamour oscillating freak peaks of Slain sheering and Torturer cracking might.

From a certain perspective, it was pretty awesome.

At least, Reka thought it was. All four of them thought so. They stood in the sky like fearsome gods, like horsemen of the apocalypse that had eaten their horses for breakfast, nodding eagerly at each other, they were proud of their little brothers, one of the higher order Rekas, a fairer one perhaps, looked upward. More powerful than the Eight, the Four waited for a signal from the Two, just above them.

Being only two it was easy to see the polarity, one more fair than his twin, blindingly radiant, shedding multihued light flares along invisible lines, while the other Reka, absorbed his brother's radiance, his faded silhouette pulsed a sumptuous rainbow corona at periodic intervals. They nodded once at each other and the fairer twin turned his head as if listening. For the Two of course answered to the One.

Above the billowing dome of light bursting storm cloud, every One to every Eight battling for survival below, communed transcendently. Ethereal, they were no more above the cloud than they were below it, whispering in the ears of their being, for they were the sum of being and non-being, released the moment Wrecker had shattered the arcane crystal separating their pure being from their pure non-being. Since that pivotal moment Wrecker had by necessity been kept on a need to know basis.

It had been part of the plan.

Every human present was their own personal pantheon, each avatar of their sovereignty approached eternity at higher tiers, their celerity, their alacrity, transcended more boundaries in space and time. If the one thousand one hundred and ninety two avatars yelling defiance into their swarming unquenchable doom could have looked behind themselves, they would have been struck with awe by the august visitation of the one thousand and forty three human gods arranged now in a parabolic pantheon. But they were currently preoccupied with the limit on the very cusp of defiance and despair.

At precisely the moment reprieve was won with frustrated dissonance, choral resonance took over.

A triumphant note held aloft like a glorious toast chimed from eternal brass, sang clean and clear through all the dream, casting aside nightmare, each chalice resonant with the other, in harmonious array, song parting cloud like curtain, the golden sun rising, its boundless music voicing the ineffable answer.

Its gently approaching crescendo fusing millions of shadows soundlessly to the basin floor, like primitive rock art on an unprecedented scale of size and sophistication, stretched silhouettes burned into the vast granite bowl, depicting epic flight.

Reka's psychological fugue mounted toward unifying symphonic climax, song and music compelling him through the swaying shadows afire, their mute plaints curling on their faces, fatigue like a filter subdued the violence, made shadow play of the phantasmagoria blazing as he neared, he drifted through a vague forest on fire, song and music penetrating everything, his skin singing with blaring light, his heart bursting with ineluctable sorrow, tears blurring the burning forest of people, following his own shadow further into sadness, stepping over his fallen brothers and sisters, burned into stone forever.

His shadow seemed to ascend the story of human flight, as if into the heavens.

Then the eternal note of glorious triumph rose incredibly to an impossible height of joy that was at one and the same time unbearable grief.

Wrecker broke.

Compelled to his limit by human song, standing in fire at the foot of implacable obsidian, crying silent laughter up at the heartless skyscraper piercing the heavens.

Then he smirked, head high, tears on his face.

Translating behind the black tower to a point just below the decimated thunderheads, he dove from the torn sky like a happy suicide, sword point flashing valorous imprecations directly at the dead centre of the tower's sun cast shadow, vermillion lightning abruptly chasing his descent. He fell like a lambent spear, clawing talons snatching him from his descent.

Too late.

Triumphal crescendo, vermillion lightning, and dream steel, struck the true corpus of humankind's only true enemy, simultaneously. Like an Olympian heart attack, two millennia of harvested electrochemistry discharged a cataclysmic hoop of indigo plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun, effacing tower, clouds, and shadow.

The thunderclap shattered the atmosphere.

As soon as the fulgent filament had branded the retina with its monumental "I" spelling the end of our beautiful Earth, it imploded like an indrawn breath.

Picking themselves up from the swept rim of the sanctified crater, blinded with fading vermillion phosphors of "I", the tribe of young gods looked beyond the supernal mural to a vitrified channel of rock made crystalline, sparkling like a star crowning flight with paradise.

In the bottom of the wide channel a jut of crystal rock held aloft, like a clutched fist, valiant and winsome, what could only be described as a dazzling ruler.
