Cuppy woke with a start.
"I need to pee."
It was windy outside, almost violently so, and the distant crackle of thunder still carried its echoes to this isolated complex. Somewhere, Cuppy could hear metal shutters rattling. It was the atmosphere of a distant sea storm growing closer, like the one the seagulls over the art park had foreseen. Cuppy pictured the kind of churning tidal waters that could rip a floating wooden dock clear of its anchors and carry it out to sea to sink. That sense of pressure in the air was down deep in Cuppy's gut too, pushing on his bladder. Two two-litres of root beer before bed hadn't been his greatest idea.
Cuppy sat up, blond curls sweaty and plastered to his forehead, throwing back the covers of his bedroll to find that Freyja was not there. Her spot at the feet of Cuppy's bed was vacant, leaving only the soft circle-mound of indented cover where her canine form had lain curled up. Cuppy pulled himself out of bed, his willy protesting the sharp movements and shaking balefully, sending sharp courses of urinary retention static painfully up Cuppy's loins. He grimaced, eager to get to the bathroom in the hall and relieve himself. Urgently.
The white door was closed and locked, the faint glow of lantern light beneath it telling Cuppy that Freyja had beaten him to the privy. He knocked daintily. "ETA?" he asked Freyja.
He received a low whine.
"Understandable." Cuppy nodded, shrugging.
With the plumbing out, a designated bathroom was really more of a formality. Regardless of what room they kept the chamberpot in, it still wasn't glamorous. Cuppy only had to go #1 anyway, so he stepped off the overcrowded back porch of their apartment and let himself into the cool air of the night. The raining had stopped, but the grass and leaves were still damp. Cuppy had the feeling Richie would have yelled at him if he dropped his pants to relieve himself right there next to the porch, so the boy passed through the broken-open threshold of the damaged fence planks.
The leaves of low-hanging branches licked the back of Cuppy's neck where he had thrown back his hood to avoid catching snags. He came to a decent bush and dropped his pants to unleash a protracted golden shower, allowing a dopey grin of relief to come over his face as he sighed in contentment. As the last drops were shaken off, something set Cuppy's nerves on edge. He heard rustling somewhere in the forest.
Pulling his pants back up, Cuppy scanned the great trees all around him. In the daylight, trees were wondrous things that stoked the fire of awed imagination and wonder. Here, in the dark of the night where Cuppy realized things had been far too quiet, those dark shapes seemed hungry and malevolent, their long grasping branches given the look of snatching at Cuppy by the way they creaked and swayed in the wind. There was something amidst those trees, a dark animism that warned humans that they should not be here, that they had stepped uninvited into a world of great trees, belonging only to great trees. Their messenger was scurrying about somewhere up there, dancing among the upper boughs of the ancient canopy.
Cuppy didn't trust it. He looked up into the rafters of this old forbidden forest. His fingertips tickled, at the edge of sprouting puppet strings if the need came. He trailed a fine string across the forest floor, pulling itself taut between two widely-spaced trees. Instead of just the wind, the tripwire now also detected a low mewling sound, as like that of an animal caught in a trap.
"Hello?" Cuppy called into the darkness.
A row of ferns crowding the bulging dirt and exposed roots at the base of interlocking trees bristled, then parted sharply as a man's form half-burst from them, eyes mad and face gone stark pale. It was Dean, his back half still caught in the tangled overgrowth beyond the ferns, and something else that stalked those woods. The officer, his uniform torn and hanging off in shreds, stretched both arms forward desperately as far as they could go to grab onto something and yank himself free of the brush.
"Help me!" the young man cried out.
Cuppy was at the man's side in a second, his small hands disappearing in Dean's, and he frantically tried to drag the cop out of the ensnaring shrubbery. Something was tugging at Dean's back, adamant at not letting him go. Cuppy could hear straining noises conclude in sickening pops and crunches as the man's joints and ligaments were stretched and pulled out of their sockets in this game of human tug-of-war, like a man being racked. Cuppy's bruising hands were sweat-slicked, his feet digging furrows in the ground as he sank into a low stance to try to hold his position, and strings sprouting from the soles of his feet to dig underground and wrap themselves around sturdier roots.
It was in vain though, and Dean lost his grip, slipping away as an arm stretched overhead from the darkness at his back, draping four long claws over the officer's face. Cuppy had been flung back on his tailbone from the sudden release, and squinted out of one teary eye as those claws raked evenly-spaced slashes up Dean's face, flooding his features over in an oozing sheet of dark blood. The cop screamed as he was suddenly yanked back into the darkness, ripped away from the ground by an immense invisible force.
Cuppy shot strings from each of his fingertips into the crowded woods after Dean, and felt them grab the struggling, wounded man.
"Just hang on!" Cuppy grunted, face turning red with his efforts.
His muscles were burning as he leaned back, trying to deadweight against the titanic pull, and the tips of his fingers began bleeding a bit from the overtasking demands placed on their thin strings.
It was all for naught, as the strings were cleanly severed in one unseen stroke of those claws, and Cuppy was thrown backward again, the rooting threads at his feet coming undone too and leading him to fly backward into the hard concrete lip of the back porch. The unforgiving edge dug its purple mark into the small of Cuppy's back, and he let out a hiss of pain filtered through his gritted teeth. The instant he could move again, Cuppy shook out the aches and jogged into the forest, brushing through the overgrown crowded ferns into a circle of clearing beyond. A sunken, rotted log groaned underfoot, and a branch broke off the side, spilling Cuppy’s feet into cold, sloshing mud. The sounds of knocking and crashing were all around him, and Cuppy frantically panned his gaze all around the surrounding treetops. He could hear the choked echoes of a struggle somewhere among them, shifting its epicenter constantly across the wilderness.
There were guttural sounds, and then something like a whistling death rattle as the victim was caught in some deadly embrace. Cuppy riffled through his satchel bag of tricks for weapons to defend himself with, and rescue the man at the mercy of whatever was attached to those claws if possible. He very quickly felt turned around and confused within the dark shadows of the predatory trees, and the ricocheting rainfall of wounded cries and gleeful laughter floating down with the falling leaves. Back pressed against a bare trunk, Cuppy shrank back and turned to see that the tree he had stumbled into had had a huge patch of bark torn off its trunk, which bore four long slashes in the shape of those claws. A thick, glistening exposed grub hugged the fibrous wood underneath, pulsating.
“Did you see where they went, little guy?” Cuppy asked the grub.
It gave no answer.
The next moment, however, more snapping tree branches sounded from directly above Cuppy. He jerked his head up to see a form crashing through the boughs and spinning in a freefall behind them from the top of the tree that jutted high into the darkened sky like an obsidian spire. Cuppy jumped backward out of the way as the limp, half-dead body of Forest, dealt a mortal blow, unfurled itself down like a spool wound with yarn that had begun to rapidly come undone. His belly was slit open and his intestines separated from one end. The severed end of his intestinal tract had been wrapped around a high branch so that as Forest fell, his body jerked and spun with the sway of his tract unraveling itself till they were all out of his body. His writhing form slightly decelerated as it drew near the forest floor, lowered on the flexible meat bungee of his own disemboweled innards. The cushioning was insufficient to block another mortal blow, this time the one that put Forest out of his misery when his back struck a jagged upturned rock and snapped his spine. The sickening crunch reminded Cuppy of the sound his cinnamon cereal made when he crunched a spoonful between his teeth early in the morning. A glazed, terrified look was strung about Forest’s face, frozen in death. His bungee intestines were still tangled about the tree limbs like fleshy gauze. Cuppy's analytical eyes saw that both shoulders had been impaled clear through from beneath, indicating the killer had actually lifted the man overhead with his claws stabbed through either armpit at some point. Those stabs would have struck vital arteries, and bled the man to death in and of themselves, never mind the savagery that had come after. Additionally, Forest had been scalped, his slick, glistening skull staring its top nakedly to the forest. On a branch somewhere, the taken scalp with Forest's luscious hair still flowing from it was hung to swing in the wind like a sick ornament.
Forest still had a few breaths left in his chest, as meaningless as the jitters of a decapitated chicken, but as the man's fingers twitched, Cuppy grasped his hand all the same.
"I'm sorry, whoever you are. I have to leave you here now." Cuppy stood again and moved amidst the trees again, scanning warily for the killer, and the other victim if he was still counted among the living.
Cuppy flicked his wrist, sending a wave of nearly-invisible lines sailing off into the trees, spreading like the threaded shrapnel and forming an intricate network of sensors. They caught motion to the northeast of Cuppy’s position, and he sprinted there, finding the jester standing with slumped shoulders, head inclined down toward one of Cuppy’s anchored strings. The masked killer plucked at that string as though fingering a guitar.
“So you can detect my vibrations can you? Well, that’s quite inconvenient for me. Aren’t you the little moppet tagging along with the vulgar urchin? Tell me, how is your surly roommate, the one with the dragon runes? He hasn’t forgotten my gracious invitation, now has he?” the jester said.
“Sorry, Richie can’t play right now.” Cuppy said, plunging a hand into his satchel.
“What a disappointment. I guess it might be fun to see the look on his face when he comes back home to find his little friend ripped apart though.” the jester said.
Cuppy trained his slingshot, an explosive pellet loaded, on the jester. “Get out of our turf!”
He fired the pellet, and it soared, whistling, straight and true at the jester. The masked man’s left flank and shoulder were obscured by a thick tree in the foreground, and from behind its bulk the jester withdrew the dazed and bleeding Dean, eyes clouded and lost. He sagged there in the jester’s grip, propped up only by a single blade hooking through the fabric of his collar, ever so lightly pressing against the fragile skin of his neck. With a giggle, the Jester retracted his claws into his gauntlets, leaving his hands bare, and roughly grabbed the young officer by the back of his shirt, hoisting him up and into the path of the oncoming explosive.
A human shield.
“Oh heck!” Cuppy squeaked.
The pellet broke on Dean’s chest, and a massive crackle rang out as the forest shadows were banished for a few seconds in the blinding light of the silver flash. When the light cleared, Dean was a bleeding mess with burned scuff marks about his shredded clothes and skin, still releasing streamers of dark smoke that smelled equal parts of gunpowder and cooked flesh. A sheet of flesh stretching the distance from Dean’s sternum to his clavicle had split and slid right off, exposing angry pink flesh with raw, screaming nerves. Cuppy noticed with a barely-stifled inappropriate giggle born of discomfort that Dean’s nipples had been blasted right off, leaving only ragged holes in his pecks weeping long streams of blood. A few teeth had been knocked out by the blast, and Dean was lucky to have twin black eyes and not have lost his eyeballs altogether.
For a given definition of luck.
“Gosh dang it to heck, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to do that!” Cuppy cried out to the burned Dean.
The jester peaked his plaster-covered face out from behind the singed wall of meat and bone he had hidden behind, one branch of his conical hat inclining and jingling its bell of mockery.
“What wonderful toys you have, quite impressive.” the jester offered his compliments to the chef.
Dean was coughing and hacking uncontrollably, and Cuppy suspected he may have collapsed a lung just now. Blood began to ooze down from the wounded cop’s nostrils in sticky, clodded rivulets.
“Why don’t you take another shot at me? Give it your best go, let’s see what you can do, boy.” the jester cooed across the cold distance to Cuppy.
Cuppy hesitated, knowing that anything else he shot at the jester would only hit the mutilated bystander held as insurance in that jerk’s clutch. The jester took notice.
“If you’re worried about this deadbeat throwing off your aim, then breathe a sigh of relief.” the jester pressed the upturned knuckles of his retracted right arm into Dean’s back, between the ridges of his spine just under the shoulder blades.
Dean lifted up a single, feeble hand from which tatters of scuffed flesh hung like mistletoe from a tree.
“Help m-”
Dean never got to finish his request. The gauntlet at his back clicked, and those four curved, gleaming blades erupted from his chest, hooks turned upward toward the sky to glint in the moonlight. The blood splattered a good ways from the point of impact, and a few drops flecked Cuppy’s shoes. A long tongue slithered out from between the gap of the jester’s Comedy mask, and sensually licked the mortally wounded man’s cheek, lapping up a single tear. Then he roughly threw his arm backward with such force that Dean’s impaled body was dislodged and thrown free of the blades, landing unceremoniously in the grass to bleed out.
Cuppy glared at the jester. “Now you gotta get a spankin’.”
He loaded his slingshot with triple pellets, and let them fly. The jester caught all three, one each between the blades on his offhand claw. Casually, the jester pitched them back at Cuppy.
“Oh.” Cuppy gulped.
He swung his cloak loose from his frame and used it like a matador’s mantle to catch and redirect the trajectory of the explosives before they could all detonate at his feet. At least one struck a low branch, and the succession of booms set Cuppy’s ears ringing as he tumbled head over heel, skidding through the mud and grass. His hand moved at his back to grab a hidden implement till now concealed beneath his loose-fitting and fabricy cloak. His fingers closed around an oval plastic rim that ended in a squared-off edge from which a two foot single-edged blade sprouted. The silver caught the moonlight as had the jester’s claws.
Cuppy still had a concealed wire wrapped around his pinky on the same hand that clutched the handle of his unearthed sword, and it detected the soft tapping of the jester’s catlike feet sprinting across the way at him where Cuppy’s firework-deafened ears failed to hear it.
Cuppy followed the signal of that vibration, and stabbed up to meet the killer, steel against steel. The jester’s claws clashed against what could plainly be seen was a giant scissor blade, the plastic handle a cheap, gaudy-looking hot pink. It looked as though a giant pair of sheers that had more in common with kindergarten paper cutout art projects than hedge trimming or wire cutting had been taken apart, and Cuppy now wielded the half whose handle would fit a giant thumb as though it were a sword. At the very least, rather than the rounded end at the tip owing to safety for the children meant to use the scaled-down version of such scissors, the point of Cuppy’s scissor blade was a thin razor edge that looked mean and clinical.
Using his left hand only, his right concealed behind his waist, Cuppy held the scissor blade up against the jester, finding that his sword was caught between the two pairs of curved talons on the jester’s gauntlet. The edge of the quadruple blades where the bracer began to wrap the jester’s hand and act as a handguard had stopped Cuppy’s meager swing dead in its tracks, and the jester’s own upward lunging stab had forced the caught scissor blade up and away, far off target.
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That was ok though. The jester had missed Cuppy too, those talons a good foot and a half above his own head of soft blond curls. They were stuck in what professional fencers and historical swordsmen would call ‘the bind’, both weapons lodged against each other, a critical blow a split second or half inch away at the slightest provocation or impulse.
“You’re a swordsman?” the jester asked Cuppy.
“No. I’m an artist.” Cuppy smiled vacantly.
“Me too.” the jester laughed, unveiling his other arm, which was completely unencumbered, claws raised over Cuppy to strike him down. “I have two arms, fool!”
The jester brought the claws down, only to find them bounced out of the way by the surprise rebound of Cuppy’s weighted fishing rod float ball. The hand at his back had concealed his fishing pole in its folded form, and he un-collapsed it as he swung with that offhand, flinging the red and white 40 pound weight like a flail-head at the jester. The clash flung the jester’s arm up and over, bending backward beyond his shoulder.
“So do I.” Cuppy smiled again.
The jester moved to kick the boy, but found that Cuppy had somehow found the time to use his threads as makeshift sutures to sew the jester by his clogs to the ground, binding him to the spot. Annoyed at being forced nearly to losing his composure, the jester merely engaged his overpowering brute strength, giving his claw still stuck in the bind the old elbow grease, and wrenching to the side, pulling Cuppy’s scissor blade to the side with it, and by extension yanking Cuppy off his feet. Without wasting a drop of momentum, the jester flung his arm sidelong as far as it could go, as if giving the mother of all backhanded slaps. Cuppy’s scissor slid free of the blades, thrown from them with such force that the scraping metal kicked off a flying line of sparks, and Cuppy went sailing into a tree trunk.
The jester smirked with satisfaction when he heard the boy’s back hit the trunk hard. Smug certainty turned to another surprised gasp when the boy yanked his fishing rod back in the same motion, and the bounced weight ball was whiplashed in a zigzag-like pattern about the jester’s other claw. The line wound in between and across the blades, and when Cuppy yanked his fishing rod up after this, the float ball was redirected to wrap around and through the loop the wire had created around the blades. A knot was pulled tight, and the jester’s bound claw was under Cuppy’s control.
The boy sewed his pole to his hand, then flung a thicker filament of thread, nearly resembling a woven rope, from his other palm, straight up into the trees. It wrapped around a thick tree limb, and Cuppy yanked on it. The cord retracted with such speed that it was like Cuppy was being bungee jumped back up to a base from which he had free dove. He landed on the limb and crouched there, took the pole in his hands, and jumped off the branch, swinging by the fishing line in several loops around the limb before sticking another perfect landing.
The wire was digging into the tree limb with great friction, creating enough heat to give off angry ribbons of black smoke, not quite on the edge of ignition into a full blown fire.
Cuppy rappelled down back to the forest floor, using his fishing pole as a handle, and landed safely, planting the pole’s bottom in the ground at his side, then looked at the jester with a protracted whistle.
The jester’s arm was now strung up and pulled taut, bound to a tree limb in a kind of ad-libbed crank and pulley system that deprived its snared prey of any kind of leverage to yank themself free. The jester’s feet were also sutured to the ground, leaving only one limb free out of four, the rest all bound, and the Jester rendered static. The jester looked up at his restrained arm and gave a grunt of approval.
“Clever.” the jester conceded. “But not good enough.” he raised his free arm and struck at the wound fishing line with his unencumbered set of four claws.
The blades only made scraping noises on the taut metallic line that was woven through the rings of Cuppy’s collapsible fishing pole, failing to break it whatsoever.
“My line is tougher than it looks.” Cuppy explained to the perplexed jester.
“So it would seem. But are your tricky little threads?” he asked, pointing his claws toward the ground where his feet were sewn to the dirt.
“Nope, they’re relatively fragile.” Cuppy shrugged.
“Good to know.” the jester reared back his claws to strike them into the ground and free his legs.
He was intercepted by Cuppy, who sprinted at him with both hands gripping the handle of the scissor blade tightly, swinging it at the jester like a colorful zweihander. The scissor caught the jester’s claws, and deflected them. Not skipping a beat, Cuppy lunged to strike the jester’s exposed chest, and Cuppy’s bound captive tutted in aggravation as he blocked the strike with his claws. They were locked in this static dance, Cuppy lunging and slashing at the jester everytime the latter tried to free himself. With only one arm free to slash with, the jester could either strike the ground, or parry Cuppy - not both at the same time. Sparks flew constantly as the jester’s claws and Cuppy’s scissor struck each other in a lightning-quick series of jousts.
“You can’t get out of my trap.” Cuppy said cooly, his usual offbeat brand of humor and whimsy cast aside. “I’m going to stick you in the chest unless you surrender. Which will it be?”
The jester continued to flail his claws about, just barely brushing Cuppy’s chopping scissor strikes aside at the last split second each time. His conical hat bells were jingling along with the cavalcade of noise. He giggled.
“So you aren’t a total novice at combat. You’re giving me quite a workout here. But you’re no swordsman!” the jester intensified his strikes, his claw hand becoming a blur of streaking silver like an edged hurricane, lashing out at Cuppy and pushing him back.
A few chips were taken out of Cuppy’s blade, and it was quickly grinding down into a dull implement not much better than a glorified butter knife. Cuppy’s palms began to hurt from the shock of each strike rattling through the metal and pounding his hands.
“No.” Cuppy smirked. “But my brother is.”
A dozen yards at the jester’s back, Cuppy’s wooden doppelganger threw off its own cloak, and poised the second half of the giant pair of scissors at the incapacitated foe. The puppet’s limbs made clunky, knocking sounds as its knees pronated inward, its elbow joints sticking out at disturbingly sharp angles that would mean broken or dislocated bones on an actual human being. Instead, on the puppet they merely echoed the impression of the theatre-apt carved golem being a marionette whose strings had snagged on the rafters, leaving him to dangle there. Those hands though clasped the elongated loop of the scissor handle - this half being the one a user’s fingers would go through under ordinary circumstances - and held the point straight out, outer elbow bent at a right angle to the puppet’s shoulder so that the blade was face-high.
Cuppy snapped his fingers, and his wooden duplicate lunged for the jester, speeding like a javelin to run the killer through from behind.
The jester hadn’t expected to be pushed this far by a brat with a slingshot and some strings. He worked his jaws, as if chewing a piece of bubble gum, then puckered up his lips and puffed out his cheeks, aiming toward the real Cuppy like a charged human archerfish. Cuppy’s eyes widened as the jester spat one of Cuppy’s explosives back at him.
When did he steal one of those?! Cuppy gasped inwardly, turning the broad side of his scissor blade to face the pellet.
In the chaos of the explosion, the jester struck the ground with his free claws, pulverizing the dirt to flying chunks and dust as the binding threads at his clogs were cut, and used the wind generated by the blast at his front to rise off the ground, twisting by his strewn-up hand, facing the charging doppelganger. His graceful movements were like that of an acrobat twisting on a trapeze fixed to the ceiling of the trees. He brought his free claw full-arc to meet the doppelganger’s scissor blade, like a giant bear paw swipe. Through the cloud of smoke and debris, the dazed Cuppy saw more sparks flying through the curtain as the jester and Cuppy’s brother volleyed strikes, interwoven with unpredictable feints, parries, and ripostes.
Sparing glances over his shoulder during fractional breaks in the swordplay, the jester saw Cuppy crouched low at the base of a tree, looking as though he were typing on an invisible keyboard. Processing the sight in less than a second, the jester realized that Cuppy was miming the puppetry of someone controlling a marionette from above the concealing roof of the miniature stage. In the glinting moonlight, the jester noticed small glimmers flash off of something between himself and the puppet. Recognition clicked in his head again as he realized that the artificial swordsman he was engaging was being remotely piloted by Cuppy by way of thin, almost-invisible strings. It was a marionette in the truest sense of the word. Fighting the puppet felt different from fighting Cuppy head-on. The boy’s ability with his scissor blade felt stilted and sloppy, unable to truly put the jester on the backfoot for very long, even bound and down one claw as he was.
The marionette however was easily keeping pace with the jester, deflecting each and every blow of quadruple swords smoothly and without wasting an iota of momentum, leverage, speed, or precision strength. A lunge with the tip of that scissor blade glanced off of the side of the jester’s mask, nicking it ever so slightly. The jester grunted in surprise, but then smirked and licked his lips, knowing that the puppet’s lunge had just placed it directly within range of the jester’s counterattack. Planting his feet, the jester reared back both arms, bending fully at the elbows, and jabbed all eight claws forward at once, to pierce the doppelganger. Instead, with a bend of Cuppy’s pinky, the puppet went slack and slumped out of the way of the claws, hanging in the air in an angle and way that no person could without falling over. Then, Cuppy clenched his fist, and the puppet folded over at the waist like a human taco. Cuppy yanked his fist back, and the puppet flew backward twenty feet, yanked by the animate strings. His scissor blade furrowed the ground where it stabbed itself to slow the puppet’s backward momentum to a stop. Its head lulled, body making more creaking, rattling noises.
The jester stood up to his full height and crossed his arms so that his blades dangled at his thighs again. He turned his head toward Cuppy, tactically taking cover, back pressed against a tree between them.
“You’re a tricky one. I thought you were all just fun and games, but you can actually put up a decent fight. I’m slightly amused by the fact that your swordplay only truly excels through the medium of a to-scale puppet of yourself.” the jester chuckled.
Then he sprinted at Cuppy - no sense screwing around fighting the brat’s entourage when he could just nip things in the bud. However, when Cuppy curled a bicep upward, his doppelganger flew around the jester and came between them, blocking those deadly claws again and shoving the jester back, rocketing to defend the puppeteer like a wired curveball.
The jester clucked and intensified a frenzied assault against the marionette, gradually overwhelming it and pushing it back. Cuppy twirled his half of the scissors at his side and split focus between glaring at the jester and looking to the mortally wounded Dean, laying in a spreading pool of his own blood a few yards off in the flattened grass. His string network could still feel a weak heartbeat from the fallen cop.
Cuppy turned to his puppet and nodded. “I’m letting you off your leash for a minute, bro. Get him good!”
Cuppy tossed his scissor blade, spinning like a buzzsaw, to his twin. In the same moment, Cuppy drew his stringed fingers to his other hand and mimed a pair of scissors with his opposite fingers, cutting the threads free from the marionette.
Autopilot - engaged
The puppet’s painted ink dot eyes suddenly glowed bright red, and hissing steam spurted from the gaps and crevices in his joints, as though he were a clockwork construct and not merely wood and paint. Shoving the jester away with one scissor stroke, the puppet stretched out its other arm to catch the other half of the great scissors Cuppy had tossed him. His head twisted on his shoulders 180° to see the whirling blade make its landing, and those spidery segmented wooden fingers clenched tight around the handle, the blade caught perfectly with its point piercing up toward the sky.
The jester reeled back, crossing his claw hands and lowering his head, eyes narrowed and angry. The puppet stretched out both arms their full distance, either scissor blade pointed out straight as well. His owl-like head rapidly rotated around on his neck again and again, spinning 360° countless times quickly enough to become a single blur of color. When the head at last stopped, locking in place like brakes had been slammed to a screeching halt, it leapt toward the jester, and its body began spinning in the opposite direction of how its head had wound, becoming a human spinning top with affixed swords swinging about with the decapitory force of helicopter blades.
Cuppy turned his back on the battle to race to Dean’s side, kneeling there and moving the cop’s hands to get a good look at the quartet of impalement wounds peering clear through the young man’s chest.
“Sorry I destroyed your nipples.” Cuppy said.
Dean coughed up some blood, and looked slowly and with a sense of tranquility at the blood spreading to his side from under his body. Cuppy began drawing threads from his fingertips, but Dean clutched his wrist and pulled the boy closer to his face instead, to whisper into his ear with a voice that was fading and would soon go quiet.
“Don’t bother. I am not the priority here.” Dean said.
“Mister, I can sew you up with my strings, if you’ll just hold on-” Cuppy protested.
Dean gripped him tighter, almost painfully. “I don’t doubt you can, kid, not after the shit I’ve seen tonight, but there isn’t time. That monster can’t leave this place. He won’t stop killing till there’s no one left. I don’t know what the hell you are, but you seem to be able to hold your own. Bring him down, please.”
Cuppy shook his head. “I ain’t the fuzz, I’m just supposed to watch the fort until Richie comes back.”
Dean coughed up more blood. “Richie? That was the name of the suspect we let out of custody a while back.”
“Same guy.” Cuppy nodded.
Dean chuckled, coughing painfully as he did so. In the distance, they could both hear the crashing of huge tree limbs chopped clean from their main bodies by the whirling puppet.
“Looks like… we owe him…” Dean’s breathing was getting slower. “an apology… eh?”
Cuppy tried to put compression on Dean’s chest. “Don’t talk.”
Dean shoved Cuppy’s hands aside. “We don’t… have time to argue. Nail that son of a bitch, please.” the man began tearing up. “He slaughtered my friends one by one, picked them off like flies. Tortured them. Don’t let this… happen… to anyone else!” he coughed up more blood, thick, dark globs mixed with mucus and leaking pulmonary edema fluids.
More blood trickled onto both Dean and Cuppy from above, and the latter looked straight up to a high tree from which the drops fell. Wilcox’s severed head was staked on a jutting branch, his eyes gouged out and the entirety of his mostly intact, flayed skin still attached to it by the face. The empty limbs of the degloved flesh suit swayed in the wind like long shirt and pant sleeves.
“I’m no good at fighting. I’m just a precocious scamp with no memories.” Cuppy said.
“Then make… new ones…” Dean gasped, choking back blood.
He took his badge from his chest and turned Cuppy’s hand over, placing it there. “Here, take this. It will make you strong. Like a grownup.” Dean smiled, blood leaking from either corner of his mouth.
Cuppy withdrew the badge from Dean’s hand and looked at it. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away a splatter of blood from the corner, allowing the pin to shine brightly in the moonlight. He shrugged in approval, and deposited the badge in his bag.
“Hey, thank-” Cuppy looked back down at Dean.
He was dead.
Cuppy looked back toward the thick of the battle where his doppelganger and the jester were dancing about each other, all whirring slashes and strokes. He ambled into the clearing and primed his slingshot, tracing the jester’s trajectory as the latter sprung wildly to and from, and across the tree trunks, like a giant compressed coil. His leg strength had to be solidly superhuman, and he showed no signs of exhaustion even accounting for that. Cuppy sensed a pair of footprints at his side that were well sunken into the soft mud, deeply enough to indicate the jester must have made a vertical jump at least forty feet straight up at one point.
Every time Cuppy got a glimpse of the combatants, they were gone again in the same instant. It was like trying to track flies buzzing about each other in the dark. Cuppy’s fingers pulled their grooves into the red rubber band of the slingshot, a volley of explosive ammo still lodged in its embrace and waiting to be set free, but the chance never came. Cuppy couldn’t get a lock onto a target flying around at such intense speeds. The pellets ultimately went wild, exploding at the base of a distant tree as Cuppy was forced to roll out of the way of his own wayward falling scissor blade. It plunged itself deeply into the ground, nearly up to the hilt.
Cuppy’s doppelganger backflipped back across the way, having dismounted one of the swaying boughs once disarmed of one of his blades, but the distance put between him and the jester bought little time. The jester was in the puppet’s bubble again, and this time Cuppy was not set up to pull a convenient quick escape on behalf of his carved friend.
The jester blocked the overhand chop of the puppet’s remaining scissor blade with one claw-hand, then ran the puppet through the stomach with its other. The puppet’s limbs went limp as the jester raised his catch high to admire his handiwork in the moonlight. Upon closer inspection, Cuppy saw that the penetrating claw had been merged into a single blade composed of the four talons sliding into and over each other, like a closing paper fan. After bouncing the puppet playfully up and down on that conjoined blade a bit, the jester triggered his claws to separate into four distinct blades again, and the hole was ripped open wider in the puppet’s stomach as the swords spread out to their preferred shape again.
Cuppy cried out in anger, lashing his fishing pole back to his hands by way of a seeking string tether, and rushed the jester to smack him in the back of his head while he was preoccupied.
The jester tutted again, and whirled on Cuppy, tossing the defeated puppet off of his claws and into Cuppy, hard enough to sail them both into a tree. Cuppy felt the wind knocked out of him, and folded over, laying astride his equally expended marionette double.
“Such spirit. A pity the Backyards haven’t chosen you.” the jester clapped merrily, then scraped his claws rapidly together, kicking off more sparks, like a metallic praying mantis cleaning its serrated catching limbs.
Cuppy clutched his bruised stomach. His warning to Richie about the effects of the come-down from overusing his medical strings applied to himself as well. He was naive to think he could walk away, whistling with a skip in his step after he’d been smashed against a tree by the bunyip’s huge tail just a few days ago.
The jester slowly advanced on Cuppy at a walking pace, dragging his claws along the trunks of every tree in his range as he did so, leaving deep gouges in the wood.
“You’ve never felt pain like you’re about to experience very intimately.” the jester told Cuppy, brandishing his claws.
There was a snapping twig at their backs. The jester looked over his shoulder, bells jingling.
It was Freyja, in her human form, pale and grungy-looking as ever, standing amidst a pile of fallen dead leaves.
“Cuppy?” she asked in a lingering dry tone that belied mounting dread as she pieced the situation together.
Cuppy’s heart sank. “Get out of here, Frey!”
The jester turned full-profile to look at Freyja. “My, aren’t you a pretty one? You’re just my type.” he began walking rhythmically toward the goth girl whose dislocated shoulder was still marked by the arm she wore in a sling.
The jester licked his claws on one hand, savoring the taste of his own blood from where he deliberately nicked his long tongue, worming its way out from the slit of his mask’s rigid smile.