Sheos, part nine.       In Which Our Hero gets shot in the leg, meets General Krogg, and rescues Rabies.

Pronunciation Guide:       Sheos: (SHE aus)       Rabies: (RAB ee us)

      On the landing at the end of the stairs was the message “Raceland Sucks!” in faded yellow chalk. It was signed with three letters: FHS. The rivalry had probably ended, as Raceland High School didn’t seem to be functioning as a school anymore; however, chalk has a nasty habit of disappearing after the first hard rain, so what had happened to Raceland must have happened fast, and it must have happened hard. Spared no expense.

      On top of the school armed guards in military gear paced their watch of the parameter. As if that wasn’t enough, Camera mounts protruded from the corners of the building, swiveling lenses back and forth.

      The answer to this question is hiding in your gas tank. If you want to go somewhere, the most popular way to go is by car, and a car takes gas and blah, blah, blah. I won’t spell it out for you. Simply, as you know, the gas companies are interested in your money. What you may not know is where all that money goes.
      As of 1998, all the gas companies of the world started investing in hospitals, just so they could get their hands on babies. The ultimate goal was to tell new mothers their babies were stillborn, kidnap the babies (still living, of course), and raise them to be supporters of fossil fuels, since enthusiasm, according to their numbers, would drop to zero sometime in 2018. By then, they hope to have brainwashed enough babies to carry them for another four years.
      If people were using sound public transportation to get around, they would lose their prime means of funding.

      Raceland High School, or what had once been Raceland High, was out in the middle of nowhere. Tall trees indicating a forest loomed behind the school, and its front was met with an extensive train yard that was bordered by a flowing river. I had arrived to the spot by hopping a train and riding it out to the school. Seeing no way to sneak up on the place, not even having the comfort of nightfall, I decided to play the straight forward approach and just ring the doorbell, providing that it was the only public high school building in the world to have a doorbell.

      I hadn’t even made it to the landing before the guard on top of the building stopped in his tracks and turned in my direction. The lenses had spotted me, and the message was relayed. I had to give them credit; they were certainly connected.

      The guard shouted something to me in Russian, then in English. It amounted to Stop where you are! I held up my hands but I kept walking toward the front door. He shouted again, this time raising up his gun and aiming its sights in my direction. He waited for three seconds and then pulled the trigger, planting a slug in my right thigh. I stopped. We both waited for something to happen. More guards made their way toward our position. All of them kept their guns fixed at my chest.

      I reached down to my thigh and dug out the bullet with my fingers. Its splattered flat form I shaped into a small ball with my palms, holding it out for the guards to see. A readjustment of their standing stance was audible as they witnessed this, like they had to shake the surprise out of their system to deal with what had just happened.

Jess,
      It’s quite impractical that your friend was sucked under the waters of a lake by a strong undercurrent. It’s a lake; they don’t have currents. Obviously, you have a lake monster, who happens to be playing with your friend, much as a child would play with a rag doll. [Editor's note: Sheos has never actually seen a lake. He is not an expert on lakes. If you go swimming in a lake, and drown because of an undercurrent, you can't blame him for saying it's a monster. --Rev. Brian Worley]
      Don’t fret. When this lake monster is finished, your friend will be spat out of the water and back onto the shore. Whether he or she will be living is a questionable matter, but regardless, you will be able to have an open casket funeral for this person in time, as lake monsters rarely go for the face. They tend to be ankle biters more often than not.

      The front doors opened, and a man wearing a beret walked to me.

      “I’m here for Krogg,” I said before he could open his mouth.

      “I know,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

      “What’s with the trigger happy guard?”

      “We had to make sure,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many homeless people come off from the trains and make their way toward us.”

      “You shoot them all in the leg, too?”

      “Yes,” he said, unabashedly. “And when they go down, we shot them in the head.”

      He cracked a little smile after saying this last part and turned to walk back to the school. I took this as a hint to follow. Just before passing through the front doors, I underhand tossed the lead bullet to the nearest guard, who caught it and dropped it in almost the same movement. He glanced around to the other guards like I had just marked him to be sent into space without the comfort of a helmet, or a shuttle.

Dan + n,
      It’s rarely known in the world, but clouds weren’t always in the skies as they are today. Clouds were actually put into existence at the whim of an overachieving sorcerer named Phineas sometime in the BC era.
      Phineas’s plan was to show the battles of old, much the way they are shown to us today through TV. So, he made clouds and put them into the skies. He could mold them and make them enact any scene he chose, and when they clashed together, a great rumbling occurred.
Townspeople ate this shit up, so more sorcerers tried to make Cloud Theaters to profit off Phineas’s idea, but they just couldn’t get the hang of it. Instead, all that remained was a lot of troubled would-be magicians and cloudy skies. The latter would leave you to inherit thunderstorms and rain and generally bad weather for centuries to come.

      We moved briskly down the classroom-lined halls. Inside each classroom was a group of guards. Most of the rooms had been converted to bunkhouses. Some were still classrooms, but what they were teaching was far from basic science or mathematics. Draped over chalkboards were detailed maps of the surrounding countryside, geometrically marked with coordinates, and Plan of Action instructions. All the men in these rooms sat up straight and listened.

      “Planning a parade?” I asked the man in the beret. He didn’t answer.

      Suddenly, a singing chorus swelled from the gymnasium.

All hail General Krogg!
Krogg is so good!
All hail General Krogg!
Krogg brings us food!

      The song was post-apocalyptic at best, sounding like something the Holy Zombie would have blasting during his return to Earth. Anything with that kind of taste in music shouldn’t be trusted, especially when that music is directed toward announcing them personally.

      The singing stopped and there was a pause. Then Krogg spoke up: “I like where you’re going with it, but keep working. I need at least another couple of stanzas.”

      I walked into the gym just as the chorus was exiting from the other side of the building. A big drapery covered the wall at the far end of the room. Krogg looked up to me with obvious pleasure.

      “Sheos!” he exclaimed. “Finally, you’ve arrived.”

      He got up to shake my hand. Beret man stood next to the wall, his mission accomplished.

      “So, you’ve come to accept my offer.” Krogg said, no doubt at all in his words.

      “Have I?”

      This struck him with surprise, but he only let it show for a moment.

      “Obviously, you have a lot of things on your mind,” he said.

      “What’s that to a big lug like yourself?”

      He shook off the cynicism. “So I don’t expect you to walk into things blindly. You are a fugitive, after all, and a fugitive needs to be mindful of his surroundings.”

      “I’m no more a fugitive than you are a general, General.” That got him red. “Where’s Rabies?”

      “You mean, you don’t know yet?”

      He smiled, the same hint of a grin that the man in the beret let slip back when I had a reformed bullet in my hand.

      “Maybe Rabies gone,” Krogg said.

      I laughed. “Come on, you’ve got to be smarter than that. Rabies didn’t take a powder, Krogg. I can still sense him. He’s close.”

      “Yes,” said Krogg. The self-satisfaction clung to his words like tar. “Close. Very, very close.” He turned to the large drapery that held the school’s emblem. At first glance, I thought that maybe the thing just covered a blank wall, but when Krogg yelled out “Reveal him!” I got the idea that it was hiding a whole lot more.

      When the curtain dropped, I saw that a stage had been behind it all along. This would be the spot where you’d be called up at the graduation ceremony; this would be the place where the live band would play during the school prom. Only in my screwed-up reality would it be the place where a god would be chained up and dangling above a tank filled with a liquid that appeared to be water. But it couldn’t be water. It had to be more sinister than that.

      “What’s in the tank?” I asked.

      Krogg released a menacing laugh, and answered, “Water.”

      I dropped my head and let out a sigh of contempt.

Em,
      Because you people are ridiculous and will follow anything that gains public appeal. Now leave me alone, I have to deal with your intellectual equal right now.

      I turned to Rabies, who honestly looked scared out of his mind.

      “What the hell are you doing?”

      “Sheos!” he yelled. “You’ve got to help me!”

      “Excuse me?” I asked. “Help you from what? The giant tub of water beneath you?”

      “Yes!” Rabies cried. “He found my only weakness!”

      “Water?” I asked.

      “Water!” Rabies yelled.

      I wanted to pull my hair out. Instead, I walked over to the tank.

      “Rabies,” I said. “Remember that time we ended up on that boat with those beatniks and drove out to the middle of the ocean because they were paranoid that the government was after them for smoking so much marijuana? Little over fifty years ago. Remember?”

      It took him a while, but he finally said he remembered.

      “And it turned out that the particular area we stumbled upon just so happened to be where they were testing out new nuclear bombs, and we just so happened to get a front row viewing of the blast. In fact, we were right at ground zero for the blast.”

      “Oh yeah!” He brightened. “Those bopheads were vaporized right in front of us. That was awesome.”

      “And what happened just after that?”

      “Well,” he thought for a moment, “the blast pretty much did away with everything around us.”

      “Including the water,” I coached.

      “Including the water,” he confirmed. “And we were suddenly surrounded by a wall of water. Yeah, and I remember just beyond that wall, you could see dead whales and fish and octopi and—”

      “And then what happened?”

      “Gravity,” Rabies said, and laughed. “The whole wall of water crashed down on us, and we had to walk the bottom of the sea back to the shore.”

      “And what does that mean?”

      Again with the thinking. “That water isn’t my only weakness.”

      “So, I repeat, what the hell are you doing?”

      “I dunno.”

      I turned back to Krogg. “Who told you that water was his only weakness?”

      “He did,” Krogg said. “We came looking for you, and he said he’d never tell, even if we used water against him, because it was his only weakness.” He cleared his throat. “You’re not going to help me and my army, are you?”

      “’Fraid not.”

      “You are going to rue this decision, Sheos,” he said. “Someday, I will find a way, and you will fear the name Krogg!”

      “Drop me a note when that day’s coming,” I said. “I’ll dress up for it.”

Death,
      Yeah, right. Fuck you.

      “You know what I’m wondering, now?” Rabies asked. We were walking away from Raceland High School, away from General Krogg and his followers. I asked Rabies what he was wondering now. “I’m wondering if we were bombed that day because the government was after those beatniks for smoking too much weed.”

      “You know what I’m wondering?” I asked Rabies. “What made you think you were vulnerable to water?”

      He said he didn’t know. He said he’d had a movie on when Krogg showed up with his men, and suddenly he thought he was defenseless to the liquid.

      “You were watching Unbreakable, weren’t you?”

      “No,” he stated, then thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. “I was.”

      “Dude,” I said contemptuously, but stopped there. Finishing the thought would have been pointless.

____________________________________________

      Sheos is a delusional inmate of an institution for persons who are unable to function in normal society and represent a danger to oneself or others. His age and background are unclear, and we cannot disclose his present location. He cannot accept visitors, but you can pray to him at sheos@susurrusmagazine.com

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