FREAKSHOW Chapter 7

Freakshow was started by

J. Curtis

of Tiny Worlds, because his mind just works that way. And several of us are on board to take up the story. Have fun:

List of FREAKSHOW Chapters (will be updated as they are released):

• Chapter #1: FREAKSHOW - Chapter 1 by J. Curtis

• Chapter #2: by Ann Kimbrough of Tell Me A Mystery

• Chapter #3: FREAKSHOW - Chapter 3 by Keith Long of Loser’s Fiction

• Chapter #4: FREAKSHOW - Chapter 4 by C.S. Mee of The Deep

• Chapter #5: FREAKSHOW - Chapter 5 by Paul R. Pace of Paul Runs His Mouth

• Chapter #6: FREAKSHOW - Chapter 6 by Pablo Baez of Chrome Hearse Express

• Chapter #7 FREAKSHOW - Chapter 7 by Jon T of Ferns of Columbo

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Story score:

Byleth does the math. Fifty calibre bullet from 41 year old goon, Phil's body, sixteen feet away, and ceiling, eleven feet high. Blood pooling around table legs looks like hex 660000 and eighteen people just scrambled out of the Bear vs. Bull.

Turns out escape constant Ω ≈ 285 hz, the Solfeggio quantum healing tone, and the sound now vibrating through the glottis of the demon cat. The hum thickens in the room.

A good thing too, because there's a rip through her left love handle. Not exactly a through and through but more than an errant ballistic graze. She's momentarily distracted by the bloody wound and the psychometric connection breaks.

Taking advantage of her sudden power failure, the flunky empties the rest of his magazine through the insubstantial body of the prowling Byleth and into the hardwood. He stumbles backward dazed and darkened by his futile barrage while the feline slinks underfoot.

Phil twitches in the regenerative sound bath, the bartender's chlamydia clears, and Freakshow presses into her rupture trying to stanch the bleeding until the sonic spell repairs the large calibre kiss. But here's that lightning again. The touch electric, revealing and recalcitrant, needling flashes of buried experience, pointing her probes inward:

Dad playing solitaire by a swimming pool, he snaps the zippo open and closed, it clicks like a metronome. She watches herself watching him from the flutterboard. Tick, click, tick, click. Sutro Lodge, the light bulb studded motel sign angles over the chain link fence. A black band of stormclouds press into the horizon. Crane flies are dropping into the water, sticking in the surface tension, and casting monster shadows in the deep end.

She squirms and shifts, pushing her palm flat on her flank, and the reverie recalibrates:

Dad towers at the 5ft marker. Tick, click. He’s staring at a woman floating in front of him. Her hair bobs like a jellyfish in the water, and her yellow dress fans out like an orchid. Dad flicks his cigarette at the back of her head then walks to the Ford Falcon and drives away.

Byleth does the math. The seven of spades on the eight of diamonds at eighty clicks per minute. Ninety-nine incandescents. The barometer drops to 993 mb. Sixteen insects and three flower petals. And nineteen steps to the get away car.

Two of us, she says under her breath. Mother and child. Life and death. Together and alone.

She pulls her hand away, blinks, and the vision is gone. The skin around the hole in her side has recombined but she doesn't feel whole. She leaps up on the table, shattered and jagged, fires the .44 but misses the thug because she is swooping toward Phil's semi-resuscitated body to grab the envelope before his imminent resurrection.

The henchman is blocked by the still humming hell cat as Freakshow vaults over the table and makes it out the back door and into the alley. She throws the gun in the dumpster and zig zags back out of the Mission District and makes her way west.

The zippo burns through her pocket and stings her thigh at every step.

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Chapter 8 - ???