Fate Deals The Cards

Fifty-two Pickup part 1: The Lovers

Ch: 2 Dead Man’s Hand

I watched it all in slow motion, the bright lights, broken from their mounts and flopping along as the truck crashed through the flimsy barrier and mulched the soggy oleander bushes. The night was dark and the roads wet; there was nothing to be done, especially since I was in the back seat, half asleep and stuffed full of primo carne asada tacos.

Everything moved in slow motion, the breaking glass, the screams, whatever it was that hammered into my face and crushed my left side to paste… it all landed on me at a terrible, glacial speed.

Mom, Dad and Grandpa never even knew what hit us, I suppose… My seat and a good chunk of the car around me got sheared off and thrown across the highway, or so they told me, I blacked out after about a thousand years of agony, fear, horror and blood.

I woke up with bright lights blinding me and the awful beeping of medical monitors in my ears. The next six months were an endless, hazy and pain wracked parade of surgeries, procedures, sleepless, agonized nights and endless harrowing days.

I was constantly on display, poked, prodded, exposed, examined. Every doctor, his buddies from out of town, all of their students, the nurses and everyone else had a good long look and poke at the miracle of my survival… While I felt dead inside.

The ‘miracle’ they enjoyed so much was just the beginning of my miserable, shitty, very bad next few years.

We lived in a quiet town on the north coast of California, not a big town, just big enough to feel anonymous. Dad ran the musical instrument store in town; selling all the usual suspects and doing… not very well. Grandpa had his workshop in a big old barn out back, with an apartment in the loft that he’d built himself; Issac Ward, master luthier, lived a quiet and very private life there.

The Ward Instrument Company made hand-built guitars, mandolins and violins, instruments that dad never sold in the shop, they went out by courier usually…

Though, occasionally someone famous would pop by for tea; to collect their commissioned instrument from the old man’s weathered, iron hard hands. Not many people knew our name, but most of them had heard my grandpa’s instruments, and that was what really mattered.

Dad was a journeyman luthier too, trained by Grandpa, but he never pursued the craft farther, once he met my mom…

Mom, her voice was sweet and clear, when she wasn’t hammering down her microphone with her crushingly powerful contralto.

Mom had it all, beauty, brains, and Talent with a big ‘ol capital T. She could grab anything in the shop with keys or strings and make it beg her to keep playing, like it was a living thing that wanted more. She kept the family afloat, singing and playing sessions with every big name who passed through the region.

They were long gone, the pain of it freshened by the dream’s faux reality. I should have died and the doctors said I did die, several times, long after they had given up on resuscitating me, I just kept starting back up.

“It’s a miracle…” Nurse Della insisted, shoving her damned bible at his bandage swathed hands. “You flatlined at least a dozen times after they gave up on you… but each time, your heart started again, all by itself… God’s plan for you is so important…”

My jaw was wired shut, my head, clamped into some weird torture device and my whole left side looked like it was put together with an erector set… but the jesus freaks only ever saw miracles in my misery.

My eyes shouted ‘Fuck Off Bitch!’ so loud the cruddy windows should have rung from the noise, but the mindless cultist jabbered on and on. Probably because she couldn’t stand to look at what was left of me. She would avert her eyes from my face at any cost, even when she brought in a fucking mirror, to try and get me to look at my own busted, mangled mug. She kept bringing it too, shoving it in my face, while looking away. There’s nothing quite as cruel as a certain kind of ‘christian love’.

She had tons more to say about ‘God’s Plan’, while all I could think of was how good it would feel to get my hands around her god’s neck and squeeze the living shit out of his old, wrinkled ass.

When I could speak again, I made that point crystal clear.

The day they unwired my jaw at last, was my last day in the actual hospital. She was there beaming with pride, when they hauled me away.

“Bitch, fuck you, fuck your god and to hell with every verse in your shitty book of spells that don’t fucking work.” I croaked as I rolled by.

The look in her eyes as they wheeled my busted ass out of that crucifix draped pest hole of a hospital was priceless, but she got the last laugh. Della had a home, a career and probably a rabid cult follower waiting at home for her every night.

I was fourteen, homeless, destitute, an orphan, crippled and destined for a ‘convalescent hospital’ which is a nice way to describe the waiting room for the morgue.

Unlike the morgue, convalescent hospitals cost money… I hadn’t been in the hospital two weeks before the lawyers started showing up, slick greasy bastards with shiny suits and papers, so many papers.

I had a court appointed social worker and guardian, I met her all of three times in my life. I never remembered her name, and she never remembered mine.

Like Della, she wanted to fulfil her obligations and get away from the twisted mess I’d become, feeling good about herself for ‘helping the unfortunate’. Like Della, the sight of me disgusted her, I saw it in her eyes, on the rare occasions when I caught her staring.

When they shoved me out of the convalescent hospital on a shiny new pair of aluminum crutches, dressed in sweatpants from Walmart and a promotional t-shirt from a boner pill company, urging me to ‘Take Back My Power’... presumably by railing some middle aged bimbo, with m chemically enhanced dingdong... I was beyond destitute.

Jesus healed the sick and walked on, but his cult believed in supply side jesus, the god of getting paid, no matter what. My family home was gone, so were all the tools, instruments, even my own guitar, my apprentice piece, made with my own two hands… gone forever, sold off for loose change to pay the medical bills. Bills that they happily presented me, as they shoved me out into the foster care system.

The dead don’t usually have to put up with that kind of shit, but I was only half dead, so it was a free for all, on ‘ol Gary Ward.

My first foster family knew my folks were ‘in the sinful music business’, so they set me up in a basement bedroom with a sink and a camp toilet when they locked me in on that first day.

They had church… and heaven forfend a sinner like me contaminate the sacred observances. Deacon Barbaden assured me that I would be ‘cleansed of my demons’ and be ‘fit to take sacrament with christians’ after an exhaustive exorcism and blessing.

The Barbadens were probably still on their first hymn, when I hobbled up the stairs, after taking the door hinges apart. The deacon’s little jesus jail wasn’t gonna hold me. I busted all the taps and toilet tanks in the house with a handy sledge hammer I found in the garage. I like to think of it as baptizing their house.

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After that, I bounced around in group homes and the occasional foster family, but it never lasted. I was not going to be winning any beauty contests and I admit, I might have had a slightly bad attitude… but I was a kid, in pain, physically, emotionally… and, I recognized it in hindsight, in pain spiritually.

Eventually, I wound up in medium security juvie, after wrapping my crutch around another kid’s head. I don’t even remember what he did, I only remember the disgust in the faces of my peers, whenever they had to see my twisted face.

When the pandemic came around, I took a chance and slipped away tucked into a laundry bag, in the classic style. Nobody thought a cripple would pull a runner, so I was long gone before the word got out.

The masks were my ticket out. Everyone was supposed to wear them… assholes didn’t, of course, but for me, they were a lifesaver. Just a couple strings and a scrap of cloth and suddenly, I was just a kid with a limp.

Better yet, no one questioned that I never took it off, even better, I didn’t have to see my own face reflected in windows, or in those cursed mirrored elevators. Seriously, fuck you, mirrored elevator guy!

After two years in hospitals, foster and juvie, slipping out of that laundry bag and vanishing into the streets felt like heaven… For the first few hours.

Being homeless sucks, being homeless, crippled, under age and on the run super blows ass. I slept in an abandoned car that night, all the windows were broken, but I put cardboard scraps up and shivered all night long.

Not gonna lie, I stole laundry from coin op joints to clothe myself, I learned the fine art of dumpster diving, skulked around vacant industrial lots, worked as a migrant laborer and generally managed to get by. After a while I made a few connections… I got friendly with the local sex workers, scrounged, scavenged, I even teched for starving local bands, whatever I could to keep body and soul together.

That on again, off again gig, working on musical instruments and gear in the back of a smelly old club for cold pizza and tacos turned my life around…

One morning I was behind a local instrument shop in Sacramento, scrounging for parts to fix Rodney’s bass… again. An old man came ambling out, I guess I’d made too much noise. His hands were crabbed and clawed by arthritis, but he seemed amiable. He waved and smiled when I popped up like a raccoon in his trash, holding a smashed acoustic guitar like I’d just found a sack of gold…

“Take what you want, kid, just don’t make a mess.” He sang, he had one of those voices, he always seemed to be singing something, just like my Grandpa… and Mom.

When I choked up and sobbed a little, caught up in memories, he just sorta grabbed my shoulder and hauled me inside, still clutching that poor wrecked dreadnought.

He had tea and a slice of zucchini bread in front of me before I knew what was going on, cozy as you please in the workshop behind his store.

“What are you gonna do with that poor thing, kid? Need firewood?” He knew homeless when he saw it, Mister Halls was nobody’s fool.

“I was going to fix it…” I whispered.

“Sure kid, sure. Do you play?” He asked, handing me a cute little parlor guitar from above his workbench,

That was when I fell apart completely.

I never got the chance to thank Rodney, the bass player for Rocketboy, for smashing his fucking instrument agin. They were a local band that was probably not going to make the big time, but they were having the time of their lives.

If Rodney hadn’t ripped the output jack out of his ax, I wouldn’t have been in that dumpster and I wouldn’t have had my last taste of real human kindness, before I died again.

That old coot believed none of my story, that I was secretly sneaking away from my Jehova’s Witness family to play ‘devil music with sinners’, but he gave me a job. Off the books, behind the scenes… in his workshop. The next few months were the closest to happiness I’d found since that rainy night.

I was still living in a tent on an abandoned industrial yard, wanted by the law and living a secret life; but I had music back in my life, if only for a while.

The end was anticlimactic… I was riding my busted ass bike back home to my tent in a thicket of berry vines and fig trees, when the world went away in a smell of strawberry jam and toast.

When I woke, I was a tiny octopus, floating alone in a shallow, sunny lagoon. A day or two later, the whole brood hatched and suddenly, I had a slippery, boneless family, of a sort.

When my brain judderd to a halt and the dream ended, I was half blind, battered, torn, bleeding and missing a fair portion of my long dorsal fin…

‘Dorsal fin?’ I asked myself… as I slowly realized I was still inside big, mean and slippery. I was cruising along in the body of the moray eel.

A wall of shiny, golden text appeared in front of my good eye, blasting me in the face with:

Congratulations, you have leveled up!

By defeating a D rank monster in combat and consuming its life force, you have earned a unique title: Body Snatcher

Additional titles gained: Necromancer, Mind Devourer, Stranger In A Strange Land, Survivalist, Isekai Soul, Druid Of The Deeps(locked).

Congratulations, You are *null* And have unlocked the hidden *null* area of the *null* Allowing you to *error*

Unique Title Gained: The Lovers.

I shook my… Moray’s head to clear the strange screens from my eye and looked around for whatever was causing the issue…

I was in a coral reef, just offshore of an unnamed and uninhabited island… The Indian Ocean, maybe? But I’d seen no ships, no aircraft, no flotsam of human society, not even any water bottles or flip flops floating in the sea.

It was almost like I was on another world… with eyeball screens, ‘titles’ and ‘level ups’. The idea spun my head around… I’d spent a lot of time lost in books, anime, manga and web novels, while trapped in the hospital and convo hell.

Once I hit the streets, I spent a lot of the daylight hours in the library, out of the rain, heat and cold, reading everything. That’s the trick to being homeless in the library, just keep reading. Even the most hard bitten library hag won’t usually roust a kid who’s reading, even if he is obviously homeless.

I recognized that my mind was skipping tracks and spinning way too fast, so I stopped, sank to the bottom and took stock. The eel I was driving around wasn’t me.

I was still an octopus, curled up in the monster’s snug braincase, working the controls with my tentacles and with some strange sense of… Ookieness that allowed me to see, hear, feel and taste the world, from inside my meaty mech.

‘I’ll call you Unagi Don, king of the reef.’ I thought to myself, inordinately pleased with the super lame pun.

That got me thinking, the eel was in pretty rough shape, and didn’t seem to be improving any…

Not much of a surprise, since I’d poisoned him with my flesh, envenomed him several times, eaten almost all of his brain matter and used him in a fight to the death with half the scavengers and mid level predators on the reef.

If I was a ‘body snatcher’ that meant I could do it again… maybe even trade up to something that could explore the waters around here without fear… With an upgrade in mind, I started cruising the waters, looking for a victim.

I liked being a black tipped reef shark… at eight feet long, I had few worries in the local area. There were some behemoths out there.

Munching on the poor dummy’s little nugget of a brain revealed his memories of great whites and something larger and more ominous by far, glimpsed in the distance.

I stopped paying attention to the level up screens, when I jumped from a venomous stonefish, to the shark… I had already lost count and the information had no context or any detailed information… so it was mostly just an annoyance.

Congratulations! Blah, blah, blah!

Miss me with that. I decided to forget all about them, until I could find some more info.

I stuck with the shark for a couple weeks, following the chain of islands and exploring… I still found no sign of humans or any intelligent life at all. Just a tropical sea, teeming with life and possibility.

I settled around the biggest island in the archipelago, setting up in a pleasant lagoon that a small river emptied into. The water got really shallow and silty there, with plenty of places to hide.

The tide pools and brackish water regions were warm, pleasant and had a whole new menu of seafood to try… That meant I needed to ditch the shark and go back to skinny dipping.

I watched Sashimi the zombie shark swim off into the abyss, following my last instruction to: ‘Just Keep Swimming’ until it vanished in the distance, cruising mindlessly. Something would eat it, out there, I had my mind on mudskippers, langoustine and crayfish.

I floated in a tide pool, soaking up the sun and digesting… the locals were as delicious as I’d hoped… The faint taste of the earth and forest excited me, it made me think about land dwelling creatures…

The local coconut crabs roamed freely and were unassailable on land, as far as I could tell, but they would be tough to sting and tougher to get into. While I was pondering that, one of the other locals decided to try me…

I’d picked the lagoon for the seafood, and because the monkey creatures frequented the place to drink and swim. On getting a closer look, I’d decided to skip the monkeys, they were awful. Thick limbed and clumsy in the trees, they were kinda slow on the ground too. They only excelled at the actual climbing part, no swinging from vines or brachiating through the forest for these guys. They had huge, square teeth for chomping through nut shells and horns that grew above their eyes… creepy.

The peanut and corn topping on that shit sundae; they were infested with parasites of all descriptions, scabrous, sickly and bitten all over by the local mosquitos… which were a special kind of horrible all their own.

I was not in the market for a monkey, hard pass, but one of the monkey beasts had its own ideas about our relative positions on the food chain. He hopped down from his tree with admirable stealth, crept over and reached in to grab me from the water, planning to prove his point by eating me whole.

Monkey brains are freaking delicious. He had so much more upstairs that I almost wept…

The little shit had no actual smarts, just a mean and hungry streak a mile wide and a narrow ass that couldn’t back it up. But it had a depth of experience in the air breathing world that was invaluable.

It knew which fruits and leaves were poisonous, which bugs and serpents were dangerous or delicious… There was a lot of overlap there.

I gleaned so much info, that I felt bad for the beast. I splashed him into the tide pool and climbed out onto my new ride and groomed the poor schmuck ‘til he shone.

I polished his horns, cleaned the clumps of shit from around his butthole and generally made him livable, if still itchy and sickly. Together, we ambled out into the woods to see what there was to see.

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