Swagazine #2

     Hoover P. Brooklow stared at his bed, noticing the clean white shorts that were neatly folded, lying on the comforter. He sighed, and turned to walk outside. He closed the front door behind him, locked it, and then twisted the handle to make sure it was locked. It was. He did not know how time was going to be warped that day.

     He walked in a funny way down the street. He had a slight limp from his battle with gout only years before. He sighed. "A rotating ceiling fan." He thought to himself. "Yes, that would be the perfect solution." He passed an automobile with a small pink flower sitting on the dashboard. He didn't notice. High in the sky a jet passed overhead. The stewardesses were just preparing the noontime meal on the flight to Alabama. The state of Alabama was very important to Hoover P. Brooklow.

     Once, many years ago, a man was shot and killed two blocks west of where the corner grocery store now stands. No one really realized this until the strange letters started to appear. None of this was really important to Hoover P. Brooklow, because he lived 35 miles away from that specific store. He picked up a book and began to read. "What for is this strange manner in which I continue to live. That I be forever twisted and contorted in the strange catastrophic world." Sylvester Lorguhm replaced the book and walked out of the bookstore. He was strolling down the sidewalk when he bumped into a smallish man with glasses and a derby hat.

     "Oh terribly sorry." Sylvester said, and moved to let the man pass. The man moved to the side. Sylvester continued to walk. He finally came to a small circle drawn on the ground. There were five children playing with marbles in the circle. He looked at them for a while, and then thought of one word.

     "Hammer"

     Having thought of this word Cindy Mulligan began to cook a pot of rice for dinner. She poured the water into the pot, spilling some on her hand as she did. She didn't bother to dry it. It wasn't boiling. The rice soon simmered, and Cindy Mulligan took it, put the rest of her dinner on the plate, and sat down at the table. She ate in silence. The clock on the wall showed eight o' clock. While her watch showed just 6:45. Silently, she adjusted the dial until the hands pointed to the correct numbers. She got up and spun in a slow circle. She shuffled her feet, spinning in a circle on a square of floor two feet on a side. Suddenly, she jumped high in the air. He landed on the carpet in his office with a thump. He looked up and saw shattered glass in the small hole above him.

     "Blast!" he thought. He slowly picked himself up from the floor. Becky Durant, his secretary, stuck her head in the door.

     "Is everything all right, Mr. Jandus?"

     "Fine, Becky. I just fell off the ladder trying to get that light bulb fixed." He said, looking at her ruby red lips, fascinated.

     "All right then." She said, knowing that his office was his most prized possession, and that he never allowed anyone to touch anything in it. He had even done the carpeting himself.

     "There it is folks." Gary Gorman said. My masterpiece. The family looked at the modest bi-level house. Gary had created it from virtually dust. He had bought the land, the materials, hired the construction crews, and had built the house. Now the family was ready to move in. He handed them the keys, and they entered the house that was to be their home for the next 63 years. The laser beam hit the patio shattering the wood that Gary Gorman had so painstakingly laid. The soldier lifted his foot, and his Sensoarmor suit did the same. he stomped at an imaginary target, and the armor laid waste to what was left of the wooden deck. He turned, and moved his arm suddenly. The armor pivoted on it's torso, and smashed its arm, backhand, into the wall. The family was screaming. Begging him to stop. The youngest of the children, Dirane Readlum, ran up to the suit of sensoarmor, and began pounding on it's metal foot. Noticing what her daughter was doing, Janium Readlum ran to get her child. The soldier looked down at the girl who was hardly seven years old. For a moment a tear formed in his eye, as he remembered his own daughter. He felt a sharp pain in his head, and the prime order flashed in front of his retina.

     "Prime Order: Destroy All Of The Enemy."

     His face turned stone hard, and with a grimace he kicked his right foot. Janium Readlum caught the kick in her stomach and flew backwards. She hit the wall with a tremendous crack. Her head slumped, and a drop of blood began it's descent from her lips. She stopped breathing. Dirane Readlum, had not been shaken from the Sensoarmor foot, and the soldier kept kicking, trying to get her off. He finally turned, frustrated, and kicked the house with his right foot. Dirane Readlum was killed instantly.

     The war had been going on for five months now. The second civil war. This time it was to be the last war the United States would ever fight in. For at that moment the remaining nuclear fusion bombs were racing towards that area of the continent. The soldier turned and looked up at the sky. His cyber enhanced eyes zoomed in on the small metal sphere that was racing towards the ground. He screamed an obscene word. There was a brilliant flash. The man lowered his welders goggles. Perfect. He took the sheet from it's holder, and placed it in the "Completed" bin. He took another two pieces of metal, and placed them into the holder. He raised his goggles, and lit his torch again. The flame glowed white hot, and he touched it to the metal. Sparks flew, and the two pieces began to melt together. When he was about halfway done, the flame sputtered and went out. The man grumbled to himself, and hooked the acetylene torch to a fresh fuel supply. The flame returned as he sparked the nozzle. He held the flame to the metal, and continued his work. He didn't notice that sky outside the factory windows was turning dark and stormy. He didn't like to get wet. At the end of his workday the man stepped outside into a full rainstorm. He cursed his luck and hailed a taxi. The taxi pulled over, and the man got in.

     "Where too, buddy?" the driver asked.

     "63, West Chidden Street." The man said.

     "Sure thing, buddy." the driver said, and he stepped on the gas pedal. The taxi pulled out into the city traffic. The driver turned right onto the residential street. "Here you go, pal" the driver said. "That'll be nine dollars."

     "Here." The man paid him, and quickly ran inside the house. The driver looked at the bill the man had given him, and then stared at it. The man had paid with a 20. At that moment, a flower was plucked by a girl in Switzerland. The driver pulled away from the curb, and drove back to the downtown area. Stopping outside a fancy nightclub he opened the door for a beautiful woman, dressed in an expensive evening gown, who climbed in the back seat.

     "Where too?" he asked, not adding the suffix of "Buddy" or "Pal" he was too busy looking at her long shapely legs.

     "Anywhere." She said with a sniffle. Then she thought. "The hill overlooking the town."

     "What's the matter?" he asked. "Have a fight with your boyfriend?" She paused.

     "Yes. I never want to see him again. I just need to be alone."

     "You sure, I could stay with you if you like."

     "No thank you. I used to go up to that hill when I was younger." They never arrived. As they were racing along the freeway, the woman pulled a knife from her purse, and with a malicious look in her eye, stabbed the driver in the side of the head. The taxi flew from the road, and landed upside down on the side of the road. It's roof crushed in on the two passengers inside. The last thing that Kyle Mulven saw before he was scheduled to go into surgery for a broken foot, was the nurse putting the mask over his nose and mouth. "Now breath deeply" she said, turning on the valve. Kyle Mulven breathed the funny smelling gas into his lungs. He began to smile, and then laughed, as the nitrous oxide began to affect his brain. He closed his eyes, and fell asleep. The man in black stepped from behind the curtain.

     "Function." He said. Uttering the word that he had programmed into her brain through multiple hypnotic sessions. As she heard the word, her hands dropped to her side, and she closed her eyes. "You are under my power." he said to her back.

     "Yes... master." She said in a toneless voice.

     It had not been easy. First he had burglarized her house, and placed programs into her personal computer. Programs that caused it to flash subliminal messages on the monitor at a speed just a little bit too fast for the human eye to decipher. After weeks of such training, he had her in his clutches. He began meeting her after work, and putting her into deeper and deeper trances. Now his plans were about to blossom.

     "I order you, Selena Garrod, to kill Kyle Mulven." he said thinking of his client who was paying him 15 million dollars for his services. He had never killed the same way twice. He was a master hitman who had done literally hundreds of jobs. He congratulated himself on thinking of such a creative (and hard to trace) way to kill another human. "When I say the other word, you will awaken, and not remember anything concerning me, or all the time we've spent together. All you will know, is that you killed Kyle Mulven, and that you are ready to confess."

     "I will obey, master." She said, her eyes still shut. She took the gun with the silencer that he handed her, and put it to the sleeping Kyle Mulven's head. She pulled the trigger. Blood spurted from the newly made wound in Kyle Mulven's head. The man in black walked to the door.

     "Colossus." He said. She awoke, shook her head, and got out of bed.

     "Hey Cynthia, hurry up. Classes start in a half hour." Cynthia Barret was a student at the University of Nebraska. She was in the dorms about to be late for class.

     "Geeze!" She moaned, and got dressed, and ate a quick breakfast. She ran out the door, and almost ran into a man carrying a bucket of whitewash. She ran down the hall, ignoring the knights fighting on the lawn, and into her first period class. Trigonometry. The teacher was explaining about the relative sines and cosines, and how they interacted with one another. Buddy Japsom didn't hear a word of it. After class was over, he got into his car, and drove home. It was his last class of the day. He drove to his small house on the coast of the Pacific ocean. He got out, and went inside. He flipped on his computer, and began to play Textgambit. A fast paced new game, he had downloaded from an on-line service. This was all that mattered to him. He manipulated the cursor with the keyboard, and pressed the "F" key to shoot a crimson bolt from the front of his ship. He sat there for a long time. Hours in fact. Never noticing that there was a parade almost outside his door. He played Textgambit for about five minutes then got bored, and switched it off. He got up, cooked his dinner, and went to his room. Textgambit wasn't very important to Earnest McJaggert. All he really loved was his books. Not some program that had been recommended to him by a friend who played it constantly. He opened his Trig book, and finished the homework without having to read too much. He looked out his window, and saw the last rays of sunlight fade into darkness.

     "Heh, Buddy's still in school over there." For it was three hours later in New York City, than on the west coast.

     Then time began to move in a strange manner. Self-destructing. At that moment a man carrying a basketfull of eggs, slipped on a banana peel, and tripped. Eggs flew everywhere. The hen house was in chaos. The fox slowly made his way to the nearest chicken that was not moving, and bit its throat. The animal reeled as a sharp pain shot through it's neck. The bear tried to run and kill the hunter, but he was loosing too much blood too fast. He collapsed. The man roared in triumph. He had single-handedly defeated the world champion of wrestling in a three minute match.

     "A three minute match? What's that?" Jenkin Groogleman asked.

     "It's a match that takes three minutes to burn from one end to the other. Pretty bright too." his friend replied.

     "So bright in fact, that to attain the brightness of our sun, you would need the brightness of over 1,000,000 candles in a single square inch." said the tour guide. The tour continued on through the mountains of Brazil.

     "Now Brazil is noted for being the largest country entirely south of the equator." The teacher said.

     "But why is the equator so important?" She asked, as she entered the strange machine.

     "Because that is the area where the magnetic pull of the moon is the greatest." He said as he pushed the button to start the factory engines.

     "Magnets!" They all yelled simultaneously, and threw down their cards.

     Time, hopelessly lost now, began to expand and contract. As more and more similarities began to happen at once. Time exploded. There was a burst of light, then darkness.