Born Hard Again: Book Three of the Future Remembered Chronicles (12 page)

"Goodmas season, already?" I thought to myself as I threw open the doors to the store and was greeted by holiday melodies.  Christmas had been outlawed ages ago, when the Good Man banished religion to the outer colonies.  The global economy had become dependent on the commerce bound to the religious-rooted holiday, so Obama came to the rescue with
Goodmas:
the patriotic, consumption-focused winter holiday period observed over three months every year.

"Bluhhh!  Bluhhh!" Junior was excitedly waving a flabby arm in the direction of the festive lights decorating the interior of the commercial site.

"Yea' son, I'mma buy you lil somethin', no doubt!" said dead Koochy as he petted his boy on the head, while I shook mine.

"First, doh," he continued.  "Gotssa get muh mu'fuckin' hair on scraight, ya know wha' I'm sayin'?"

Koochy led us into the store, which was quite a bit smaller on the inside than it had appeared from the outside.  It was filled with long aisles, which were stuffed with items of a colorful variety.  Shoppers, heavily bundled in winter-wear, were thickly clustered and hustling about.  It was going to be hard to blend in, I realized as I looked from side to side at my companions.

A shriek arose from a nearby customer.  Heads snapped in our direction and I saw many pairs of widening eyes thrown upon us.

"Le'ss book," Koochy said quietly and began to move forward quickly towards the crowd that had backed away from us.

That turned out to be a bad move. 

Chaos broke out.  The mob of shoppers panicked at the sight of the zombie black man charging them and erupted with sound and movement.  Screaming store patrons fled in every direction, stumbling over each other in a mad scramble to escape the horrific Koochy.

"Ay, naw, it ain't like dat," Koochy tried to explain, but the compute-pad could not be heard over the cacophony of the riot.  He shrugged.  "Come on, den, y'all," he waved us forward after him.

Despite the madness of the surging shopping horde, they stayed fairly clear of us as we beat a path to the back of the store.  Once there, Koochy began ripping at a small metal box that was affixed to the wall.

"What is that?" I inquired.

"Sat-lite hub, sucka!" Koochy explained.  "Goan hook up ta dis bitch and get tha DL on my whole se'f, ya' hear' me?  Keep dis set on lock while I be doin' dis deed, a'ight?"

I nodded and turned my attention behind him.  The once crowded aisles were now vacant.  Food and other goods had spilled out from the shelves where they had been perfectly placed, and now lay strewn or smashed on the ground.  The front door lay lazily open, letting frigid air stream in freely.

"Oh yeah, my ass is
in!
" Koochy exclaimed happily behind me.

I saw bright, white lights appear outside of the glass door of the store.

"Good!  Now fuckin' hurry!" I called back over my shoulder to him.  "We're about to have some company."

"Say what?" Koochy asked.

"Bluhhh!" Junior announced, pointing at the armed guards that rushed into the store.  They had been dispatched to deal with the menace that was us, I was fairly confident.  There were three of them; they were wearing armored winter camouflage and carrying sleek-looking assault rifles.

"Looks like the Good Man's found us again," I grumbled.  While I was eager to face the President Julio Dominguez 消防公鸡 Obama himself
eventually
, I was not quite ready for that at the present moment.  It would be nice if, at a minimum, Koochy was not still dead when I did face him.

I needed a plan, and quick. 

"Yvonne," I found the first, most expendable thing I could.  "Hurry, get Junior out of the way.  Move your scooter thing over here," I pointed to a spot that would place Koochy in the safety of her shadow.

Mindless, she had no choice but to comply.  Yvonne mutely maneuvered her disability cart the few feet to where I had suggested.  I deftly leapt behind her enormous bulk.  Alphonso, as dim as he was, managed to understand what I was doing and also sneaked behind her. 

"Citizens!" a harsh voice asserted from the entrance.  "Get off of your vehicles and down on the ground!"

"Um, excuuuuuuse me!" snarked Yvonne in return.  "My son and I are disabled!  How dare you talk to us like that!"

"Yes!" I accidentally whispered audibly.  My plan was working!  Yvonne's overall absurdity would likely buy us a few precious minutes.  Enough, ideally, so that Koochy could complete his download and come up with a better plan.

BRRADDDDADDDAADDDAPPP!!

I heard the staccato of automatic gunfire and my jaw dropped.  Yvonne did not cry out, but I saw her heavy form sag forward as numerous crimson stains blossomed and grew quickly to cover her back.

"Bluhhhh!" Junior called out with finality as he expired.  His death rattle ensued, but sounded as if it were smothered under a wet pillow due to being crushed within his fat throat.

"Shit, man, wha' tha fuck?!" Koochy barked at me.  "Thought you was takin' care-a shit, P!"

"You're fine, Marcus!" I waved him off.  "Hurry up.  Stay focused!  How much longer do you need?"

"Ay, I'm almost dere, playa," he informed me.  "Jes make sho you takin' care-a my son, lil' Kooch-Kooch!  Bllllunnnnghhh!"

I bit my lower lip and grimaced.  He was not going to be happy when he discovered that his recently  rediscovered family had been just been massacred.  I wondered if Alphonso was smart enough to realize that I had been the cause of their deaths.  His blistered and expressionless face was directly to my left as he also sat crouched behind the mortally wounded whale that was Koochy's ex-girlfriend.

Even though I could no longer see our foes from my position of cowardice, I was fairly certain they were still approaching.  They were probably very close to the front side of Yvonne's body by now.

"Hurry, Koochy!" I hissed.  Looking around frantically, I could see nothing of use within reach.  I so badly wished I still had the teledestructo. 

Carefully, I peered underneath Yvonne's heavy thighs and managed to catch a glimpse of our assailants.  They were not nearly as close as I had feared and were foolishly approaching in a single file line, down the aisle directly in front of us.  I realized Yvonne was roughly the width of the aisle and, in that moment, a new plan was hatched!

Without a word, I reached forward, disabled the emergency brake on her cart, pushed it into
Forward Gear (Sport mode TREXXX),
and pushed the dead-weight of her heavy foot onto the power pedal.  I moved much faster and with more precision than I had expected, yet even so, a hail of bullets nearly found me.  Instead they sunk into Yvonne's dense flesh with sickening
TWHHWT
sounds.

Once her foot fully engaged the pedal, the disability scooter lurched forward with a high pitched whir.  The rear rubber wheels squealed on the slick vinyl tile and it careened forward, crashing down the aisle from side to side like a floppy bowling-ball/bean-bag combination.

The soldier-looking guys cried out in surprise as Yvonne's corpse bore down on them.  I couldn't see what they were doing, but I heard more gunfire and cursing.

"Wha' tha fuck man, what tha fuck?!" Koochy was yelling.  "Okay, I got it!  I got it!  Le'ss go!  Let's go!  Let's go!"

I flipped around so I could see exactly where we were going.  I noticed Koochy didn't turn back to look for Yvonne and Junior.  I took this to be a good thing, as I did not want to suffer the delay of his many-worded reaction to their demise.

Alphonso followed me and I followed Koochy as we darted through a nearby door into what looked like a maintenance and electronics closet of some sort.  There was barely enough room for the three of us in this space.

"Close the damn door, Alphonso!" I snapped at him.

"Oh, right!" he cheerfully obliged.

We pressed further into each other in order to shut the door behind us. 

"We won't have long," I muttered into Koochy's stinky and decaying ear.

"Bitch, we got long e-nuff!" Koochy ripped out a handful of wires from a nearby connection point and jammed them into the side of my suit.  "Now, son... hol' on."

Despite his warning, I was in no way prepared for what happened next.  I tasted copper in my mouth a moment before my entire consciousness was flooded with white light.  There was no feeling in my body, just shock.  I lost all sense of time and my surroundings.  A penultimate awareness washed over me.  Every molecule of my being felt super-charged now.  Strength surged through me and I felt impervious.  I was also aware of a new, and distinctly alien sensation in the vicinity of my torso.

I had a new limb.  Was it a third arm?  It felt like it was jointed to my body at my rib cage, but it didn’t feel anything like my other two arms.  And it was constrained within the surgipod suit I was wearing, so I could not see or touch it.

Did I need this healing suit any longer?  It didn't feel like it.  I felt better than I could remember feeling in a long time; In fact, this may have been the best I had ever felt. 

Suddenly, I became extremely disoriented and confused.  The door to our electronics closet was wide open.  I didn't recall it being thrown open, but yet here it was, fully opened.  Not only that, but Alphonso had been shot.  He was doubled over clutching his stomach, his burned face howling in surprise agony.

What the hell is going on?
  I couldn't understand my apparent skip forward in time. 

"Oh wow," I thought on the tail of that last thought. 
Was I seeing the future?

And then it began to happen.  In slow motion, Alphonso uncurled himself and stood up straight.  As he did so, bursts of blood materialized from thin air, came together in reverse-time, slow-motion, and disappeared into his body while bullets backed out of him.  After the bullets returned into the barrels of the guns that had fired them, the armored guards closed the door and the air around us began to shimmer in a familiar way that made my stomach clench.

It was back.

My power was back!  I could remember the future again!  Well, at least the worst possible future.  Which made me wonder why I was seeing Alphonso getting shot in the stomach.  Compared to the rest of my pitiful life, that didn't seem very terrible at all.  Had something reset since I had died and been reborn twice now?

I knew I had only moments before the future I had just remembered came to pass.  It was inevitable, as my former life had taught me time and time again. 

"Unless...." I thought.  There was at least one new twist in the story this time. 

"JESUS CLEVELAND!" I thundered out just as the door was wrenched open.

A thunderclap shook the building to its foundation.  Everyone, except for me, fell to the floor.  My suit, despite having survived the pummeling of countless coeds, was torn asunder by a supernatural force.  I felt a short, sweet pain at my ankles and saw my dicktoes scatter with the remnants of my surgipod.

There I stood, naked and unashamed.  Now that I was no longer covered, I understood the new-limb-feeling I had first had minutes ago.  It was the prehensile penis from Clarabelle69's last stand!  I supposed it must have somehow grafted into my baby Jesus body as a result of being trapped in the surgipod with me throughout the regenerative process.

"No..." I said quietly as I watched the ten feet long phallus unwind itself from around my hairy torso.

The guards were equally thrown off by the sight of my new appendage and remained frozen on the ground.  I capitalized on the current situation by willing my new wang to streak forward and smack the shit out of the three stunned soldiers before they could get back to their feet.  It snaked out with deadly accuracy and within a split-second, all three attackers were laid out cold and sprawling on the floor in front of us.

"Ohhhh shhheeeeeit!" Koochy exclaimed from the compute-pad.  "You got knocked the fuck out!  P!  What tha hell dat shit, mane?!  You trade yo' dick toe fo' a damn dick arm?"

I took a moment of non-response to rub my stubby fingers over my protruding, hairy belly.  Damn, it felt good to be fully healed.  I noticed a large, Caucasian tentacle/cock was rubbing my belly along with my two hands.  This was going to take some getting used to.

"Whoa, Preston.  That's... scary," Alphonso confessed. 

I didn't have a witty response for him. Truthfully, I was little concerned myself.  I looked down at my ankles, where my amputated feet should have been.  My third life was off to a rough start.  It wasn't even the end of day one yet.

"I think my power is back," I told Marcus.

"What?  What power?" Koochy scorned in return.  "Sheit, only powa I see is growin' dicks!  Yo ass do got a lotta dick fo' a lil baby-ass baby, son!"

I rolled my eyes. 

"My power to remember the future, Marcus," I called him by his birth name to irritate him.

"Ay, bitch!  Call me-" he started.

"I know, I know," I held up my palm.  "Look, get on with yourself.  Alphonso and I will go check for more of these clowns."

"A'ight den, P!" Koochy agreed.  "Ay, where my boy Junior?  Where he go?"

"Uh... I think they hid in another closet," I lied.  "I'll...uh... go look for them."