Meat City (II) (A Summer Breeze… uh… short) (713 hits)
Category: NoneLabels: Summer_Breeze
Rating: 1.8 on 22 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Jack McCallum (View user info) at 2007-01-22 17:13:29 EST
Summer Breeze http://www.ubersite.com/m/94211
Winds of Change http://www.ubersite.com/m/94407
Meat City (I) http://www.ubersite.com/m/97054
A light spring rain began to fall. It pattered down on the canvas of a hundred different tents, each of them set over a stall hawking goods or services. The earth was turning to mud in some places. The rain smelled of meat. Fires rose from a hundred points in the marketplace. Most of the fires were for cooking meat, and a good amount of that meat was human.
When cooked right, people meat doesn't smell bad at all.
Gray clouds were scudding across the sky, and when the sun broke through I saw a glint of metal ahead, a glint five feet off the ground. I pushed through the milling crowd and saw a flathead in a tin hat.
I caught up with the flathead and put a hand on his shoulder. He was wearing ragged old pants and a t-shirt with a picture of the Madonna, the modern one with the blonde hair and big teats, not the old one with the halo. Both were the mother of Jesus Christ, if you believed that sort of thing. The flathead seemed shorter than me, but that was probably an illusion since his head appeared sheared off just above the eyebrows. The tin hat was as flat as his head, with a shiny little strut sticking up into the air.
The flathead turned and looked me in the eye. He had the gaze of a stray dog, part curiosity, and part fear.
"Wajawan, min?"
"Mexgirl, stole," I said. You could talk to flatheads if you kept it simple. Most people just barked orders at them.
"Dunno nut, min," the flathead replied. He looked afraid. At least he was trained well enough to be respectful, speaking politely and calling me 'man.' Some flatheads literally shit themselves and ran away if you approached them.
I tapped the tin hat. "Mexgirl mine. Flathead stole. Shiny hat."
Since flatheads only have a half inch of forehead, they can't really raise their eyebrows to express shock or surprise. Instead, flatheads show surprise by pursing their lips. The flathead looked like he wanted a kiss.
"Nodink no stole, min."
I tapped his tin hat again. "Me see shiny hat stealing!"
The flathead reached up and tapped his own head. "More'n one," he said. "More'n Nodink."
"Whats' nodink?"
The flathead grinned. He grabbed his ragged pants and shifted them so I could see his crotch.
There weren't any man parts down there, just a badly-healed pink scar and a little hole to piss out of.
"Nodink bin fixed, min. Nodink no stole girl. Don need girl for nut."
"Fuck," I said.
"No more," the flathead replied proudly.
"Where more shiny hats?"
"Maker," the flathead said, raising an arm and pointing over the crowd. "See blue, min?"
I looked and saw the roof of a large blue tent.
"Yeah," I said. "Done good. Getoutta."
The flathead scurried away.
I shook my head clear of that winding pink scar, hoping the poor stupid flathead was too dim to know what he had lost and trying not to imagine the pain he must have endured.
Like dogs, flatheads could be good or bad. It depended on their training.
I went to the blue tent, and when I was close enough I saw a banner.
FlatHeads! Buy-Sell-Trade! All races/sexes/ages! Modifications! Accessories!
Standing on either side of the canvas flap doorway were two big flatheads holding wooden clubs that had been duct-taped to their hands. These flatheads looked mean, and both were wearing tin hats. Whoever owned this business was well-to-do. Duct tape came at a very high price. No one was making it anymore, and it could fix just about anything.
I went through the flap into low light and the smell of unwashed bodies. Alcohol jelly lamps hung from the roof on long steel hooks, the jelly softly sputtering under the dancing tongues of flame.
The interior of the tent was filled with clutter. Bins overflowed with mechanical parts alongside cages holding flatheads. The flatheads looked through the bars at me with big, sad eyes. Most of them had pissed and shit on the floor and the smell was very strong.
A raw voice called out, "Wajawan?"
I saw a figure in black standing near what looked like an upright table.
"Information," I said.
The figure turned, eyes wide. It was an old woman. She looked like a storybook witch.
"Fuckya," she crowed.
"I'm trying to find—"
"Buy in or blow out," she said, pointing at the door.
"Some flatheads in tin hats stole my woman," I said. If Peli had been there she would have swung at foot at my mansack at the suggestion that she was 'my woman.'
"Don't need a piss-pot if you piss in the street," she said.
I took that for a colloquial form of, 'I don't care.' I'd heard variations of such in my travels. Up in New Hampshire territory they would say, "You brung shit to the table."
She raised and arm and whispered into a thing that looked like an old days wristwatch.
Daylight flared and one of the big flatheads came into the tent, raising his wooden club.
I reached up and took down two of the alcohol lamps.
"Think you can set your dog on me before I toss these at you? He may beat me down, but you'll still burn."
She spat on the floor. "Plug my old hole and fuckya!"
"Goodbye, then," I said, raising one lamp.
"Wait!" Her cry was like the screech of a bird. She gestured to the flathead. "Go-way. Out. Wait."
The flathead turned and went back to his post.
"Wajawan, cocksmith?" She leered at me. "Wanna ravage my she-flesh?"
I shook my head. "I'd sooner go outside and fuck the mud. It's fresher... and likely firmer too."
The old woman snarled. I counted four teeth.
I hung the lamps on their hooks and took a step closer. "I just have a few questions. Then I'll be gone."
"Well I'm working, so hurry-hurry."
The old woman stepped around the upright table and I followed. On the other side I saw a flathead strapped down.
The flathead was a young male. His eyes were closed. Fresh sutures held fast an angry red gash in his groin. A steel tube jutted from that wound, and a few drops of bloody urine dribbled onto the floor.
The old woman reached behind her and pawed at a low table holding blades and bowls and jars of colored liquids. In one of the bowls lay the flathead's amputated genitals. The woman took up a pair of scissors and a rusted, pitted clamp. She tied off the sutures and snipped the loose ends.
"I'm looking for flatheads that stole a girl from me," I said. "I think they came this way. They were wearing tin hats."
The old woman grinned. "My craftwork. The caps are leashes, powered by the electrical current in the brain and able to receive and relay commands. But I only install the devices. I do not perform any foul deeds with them."
She took a curved wooden block and slid it behind the flathead's neck. Then she reached up and removed the part of the upright table, leaving her full access to the flathead's skull.
"And where would I find someone who would do such things?"
I watched her take up a scalpel, pour a little alcohol on it, and then cut into the flathead's flesh above one ear.
"I would not normally betray the confidences of a paying customer," she said, tracing the circumference of the flathead's skull with the blade. "Yet you were kind enough not to immolate me, so..."
She took hold of the flathead's scalp with both hands and pulled. It came free with a wet tearing sound, a handful of grass being torn out of the ground. Blood trickled down across the flathead's face and he opened his eyes.
The old woman ran a buzzing device that looked like a flashlight along the edges of the cut flesh and the bleeding stopped.
She took up another handheld tube that hummed. She ran it around the top of the flathead's flat skull, raising white powder into the air, and a moment later was lifting away a flat plate of bone.
"Hurtin," the flathead said when he saw me. "Hurtin' min."
I focused on the old woman as she picked up a tray holding dozens of small metallic forms, trying to ignore the flathead's big sad eyes.
"Most of the mods I've done are for flatheads that work in fields and such, or make deliveries. Helps the owner call them in when needed. But there's one fellow, Gunter Shaef, who seems inclined to use these two-legged cattle for nastier work."
Her yellowed fingers plucked a piece of metal from the tray. It looked somewhat like a tooth, the topside flattened and showing a few holes, three long, curving serrated legs below. She studied the flathead's exposed brain for a moment, and then pushed the object into the meat of the flathead's brain.
The flathead tried to speak. "Ga-guh-guu-gugaa—"
The old woman ignored it, and set six more metal teeth into the poor thing's brain, pushing them down with the end of her thumb.
"Gunter Shaef," I said.
The old thing nodded. "He likes the fights, and there's one starting up right about now. Look for him. Big man, rope of yellow hair hanging off his head. Steel jaws."
I had to ask, sure I had misheard. "Steel jaws?"
She nodded, took a tin hat from her work table and snapped it onto the flathead's skull. Little root-like lengths of metal locked into the holes in the metal teeth in the flathead's brain. "He had his jaw ripped off by a grappler. I rebuilt it for him."
"A grappler?"
The old woman cawed laughter, and used a drill to drive in screws where tin hat overlapped the bones of the flathead's skull. "Go to the fights, cocksmith. You'll see."
I left the old woman's tent and sucked in a deep breath of rain-freshened air. I followed the noise of the crowd and quickly arrived at a raised ring.
The canvas laid down over the wooden platform was black with old blood.
A man was lying in the ring. He had been split at the crotch, his body torn as far as his sternum, and from the right angle I could see his heart. He had a somewhat shocked look frozen on his face.
Standing over the man was a tall and muscular dark-skinned creature with two sets of arms. Beside that monstrosity was a man with a rope of blonde hair and a blue steel smile. The man was gesturing at the four-armed beast and at a cage being lowered over a fire near the ring.
"And now," the man announced, "My winning beast shall eat!"
The crowd roared approval.
Inside the cage was Peli.
(to be continued...)
User Reviews
Submitted by horse87 (user info) at 2007-01-25 13:16:25 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Pretty good, but I gotta agree with St_Jimmy.
Kind of a quick shift of verbal gears there, from a SK Gunslinger kinda slang patois to almost perfect english.
WTF?
The Old Crow kicking in again?
Oh..and the 4-armed guy?
Made me think of Mortal Kombat....Either Goro or Kintaro..
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2007-01-23 21:57:15 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Nancy Pelosi is coming unglued.
Literally.
It looks like her facelifts are shifting off their moorings.
She keeps pulling all these tard faces.
Freaky.
Submitted by Jack_McCallum (user info) at 2007-01-23 21:56:24 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Anyone watching the State of the Union Address right now?
Submitted by Bubba2341 (user info) at 2007-01-23 21:12:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Meat City, here we come...
Submitted by drgoatcabin (user info) at 2007-01-23 13:41:35 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
This whole suspense thing is worse than the commercials every 3rd play during the Super Bowl.
Submitted by homer42 (user info) at 2007-01-23 13:13:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
you're a sick, sick man.
Submitted by sicosemen (user info) at 2007-01-23 09:01:26 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2007-01-22 23:45:26 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
fuck
no more!
Submitted by Crystle (user info) at 2007-01-22 22:25:59 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
GREAT HONK, Jack!!
*shakes fist*
Submitted by swimmingbirdblue (user info) at 2007-01-22 21:10:03 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
I don't wanto tojust arbitrarily give you a +2 just because your series is good. As a whole, it's a +2 so far, although each segment must be rated as parts of the sum. The suspense is killing me. Keep up the great work.
Submitted by TheUniter (user info) at 2007-01-22 21:09:48 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Submitted by Shlongy (user info) at 2007-01-22 20:22:45 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I've been working on my next post...a short story called "Meat City".
What's your thoughts?
Submitted by St_Jimmy (user info) at 2007-01-22 20:14:54 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Excellent short and excellent series. However, and I could be missing something here, the old lady who was modifying flatheads is giving short, monosyllabic answers then all of a sudden she busts out with:
"My craftwork. The caps are leashes, powered by the electrical current in the brain and able to receive and relay commands. But I only install the devices. I do not perform any foul deeds with them."
Just seemed kind of abrupt to me.
Submitted by BLITZKREIG_BOB (user info) at 2007-01-22 19:59:31 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Is this your first draft of an ubermadness submission that you deemed not good enough for the competition, but not bad enough to delete?
Submitted by Cyrus (user info) at 2007-01-22 18:40:58 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Great series.
Submitted by lungfish (user info) at 2007-01-22 18:02:48 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Seems to me that Uber's just fine.
Submitted by Ballare (user info) at 2007-01-22 18:02:35 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by DCWoody (user info) at 2007-01-22 18:00:22 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by EatMeCompletely (user info) at 2007-01-22 17:56:07 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
When's the next installment? Every time you make me wait it saddens me.
Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2007-01-22 17:55:25 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by JonnyX (user info) at 2007-01-22 17:36:28 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
i forgot about these
Submitted by ih8u2man (user info) at 2007-01-22 17:23:20 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Yikes.