Jet Pack

Hey. You. That’s right. You there with the coffee. This is the first three chapters of Shadowstories: The Infi-Net Revolution, an experimental back-and-forth online novel written by Chuck Wendig and Martin C. Henley. Each writes a 1500-word episode, and neither author consults with the other when doing so. What happens is… well, you’ll see. It’s sci-fantasy ultra-violent mythic idiot satire. New story posts every Wednesday over at The Storyverse.

1. The Pirate Ship

The pounding, drumming pulse-beat of battle.

Grebok’s knuckles – raw, red, swollen – throbbed. Blood matted his locks.

The once shiny luster of Lord Chuckles’ blade was bedimmed by gore and bits of hair.

Violence for these two men – nay, these two heroes – was a thing of purity, a gleaming, crystalline moment in time. A thrown elbow shattered a jawbone. A broken chair leg became a skull-cracker, a teeth-breaker, a sternum-smasher. The two moved in tandem as they always did, one a desert sirocco from the south, the other a biting mistral from the north; whenever and wherever they met, death ensued, enemies fell, justice prevailed. The Storyverse would once more be protected against those who would undo its magic.

Today was no different. The pair of heroes crossed a sea of green. They boarded the pirate vessel. They defeated the captain’s guards. They left broken wreckage in their wake, a scene of righteous carnage sung to sleep by the gurgling moans of the defeated.

Together, the two stood at the door to the pirate captain’s quarters.

Lord Chuckles: blonde, close-cropped hair; steely gaze; blade held fast in tight grip.

Grebok: dark, tangled dreadlocks; eyes painted in iron filings; fists dripping red.

They shared a look. Grebok winked a black eye. Chuckles tightened his square jaw.

Together, they booted down the door. Wood splintered. Hinges hit the ground with a clatter.

Then–

Pop music. Bright walls. A poster of a slinky, scantily-clad 16-year-old girl riding a white leopard.

A scrawny kid with a mop-top of red hair and limbs like a tangle of broomsticks sat at a small computer. He yelped as they kicked open the door, and the keyboard in his lap spun to the floor.

Grebok, rarely one to examine his immediate surroundings, marched over to the teen and socked him in the jaw.

The gawky teen cried out.

“Suck fist, pirate captain!” Grebok said, then turned to Chuckles and gave the thumbs-up.

Chuckles, the smart one by only a scant few micrometers of smartness, paused. He tapped his pinky finger against the pommel of his sword.

“I’m confused,” Chuckles said.

Grebok narrowed his gaze. “Not me, brother. What’s to be confused about? We found the pirate ship. We beat the pirate’s crew into a bloody pudding. Now, pirate captain plus justice equals a day’s work.”

“Does that kid look like a pirate captain?”

“Sure?” Grebok lied.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m lying,” Grebok said, not lying.

“Who are you guys?” the teen croaked, rubbing his jaw. “What’s going on out there? Is that blood? Where are my parents? What about my sister?” He called out: “Sis! Mom! Dad!”

Grebok slapped him. “Stop yelling. I’m like, right next to you. I have sensitive ears. Now, stop your whimpering. We’re heroes. Retained by cosmic forces to make sure all is right with the natural order. You’re a pirate. You take a crap on the natural order.”

The teen whimpered.

“Hold up. I’m going to try to feel this out,” Chuckles explained, holding up a finger. “Okay. I got this. The pirates were keeping your family hostage. And the pirate captain put you here as a proxy – a dupe – so that we’d come in and slaughter an innocent, and he’d be all laughing and grog-bellied, and he’d say something like, Oh, you should see your faces, you shitheaded… hero… jerkfaces…“

“Don’t forget the Arr, matey,” Grebok added. “Or something about I cornholed me parrot for a bucket of rum. Pirates say shit like that all the time.”

“Right, what Grebok said. Have I nailed it? Speak up, kid, we ain’t got all day.”

The teen sobbed. “Puh-please don’t hurt me. Did you kill my fuh-fuh-family?”

“Does he mean those people outside?” Grebok asked as an aside. “The captain’s guard?”

Chuckles shrugged. “Who’s your family again, kid?”

“They were in the kuh-kitchen. Mom was making cookies. Dad was—“

“—smoking a pipe?” Lord Chuckles interrupted, wincing.

“My sister was doing her homework.”

“Sister,” Chuckles said, letting the word roll around his mouth. “Boy, this is really going south.”

“Are they okay?” the teen blubbered.

“They’re… not dead,” Chuckles said. It was true.

Grebok shook his head, chortling. “Though I sure wouldn’t call them ‘okay.’ Unless you consider comas and sucking chest wounds—“

Chuckles gave him a panicked shake of the head.

“I mean,” Grebok corrected himself, “they’re totally great. This stuff in my hair is just… jelly. Blood-flavored jelly.” He swirled a finger in his gory dreads, and popped the tip in his mouth. He almost threw up, but managed an awkward smile.

The teen howled, a wounded, pimply banshee.

“Yawn,” Grebok said instead of actually yawning, and then pulled a revolver whose fat cylinder sat pregnant with hot photon rounds. He pressed the gun’s gaping, deadly mouth against the teen’s temple. “Let’s finish this and go get a smoothie.”

“Whoa, whoa, Bucky the Bronco,” Lord Chuckles said, hurrying over and steadying his heroic pal. He eased the gun away from the boy’s head. “Relax for a minute. Our victory over smoothies will have its hour. Okay, kid. Forget your parents for a minute and stop with the cry-making. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was duh-duh-downloading music off the Infi-Net.”

Grebok whispered to Chuckles: “I don’t know what that means.”

Lord Chuckles whispered back: “I have no idea. Some kind of voodoo spell, so be wary.”

Volume back to normal, Chuckles continued: “Right, sure, you were, ahhh, loading clown music off the infinity tubes, fine, fine. That sounds pretty above board to me. Right? Totally legit. Nothing illicit about clowns, or the loading of clowns. Or even their music, which I imagine is a sort of creepy, jaunty pipe organ thing.” He paused, staring off at nothing. “Man, clowns are really terrifying. You just know that one would try to kiss you, and you’d turn away, but he’d still get his face makeup all over your cheek or chin, and somewhere you’d hear this distant sound: a clown-nose just honking in the night.”

Grebok took a step away from Chuckles. “If you say so.”

“Sorry. Right. Yeah. Okay, kid, you got your clown music—“

“It’s not clown muh-muh-music,” the gawky teen corrected. He stared up at the poster of the nubile girl on the slinking leopard. His mouth slackened. His face alighted with awe. “It’s from the yet-to-be-released Kendra Shields album. She’s a goddess. A pop goddess who probably smells of appletinis and angel tears.”

“I give a shit,” Grebok announced. “Can we hurry this up? Smoothies. Smoothies.”

Chuckles rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yes. Whatever, kid. You bought your music fair and square, we must have the wrong pirate ship or something.”

“It’s not a ship,” the kid said, “it’s a house in the suburbs.”

Grebok mumbled, “Tom-ay­­-toe, tom-ah­-toe, nerd.”

“And I didn’t buy the music. The album isn’t out yet. It drops next week. I downloaded it early.”

“Stop jabbering at me and speak plain!” Chuckles barked.

“I found a site on the Infi-Net, and I—“

The teen’s lips moved to form the word, and the realization only dawned on him as the word squeezed from his lips like a squirming space-slug.

“—pirated it.”

“Wait,” Chuckles said, chewing on his lip. “So you are a pirate?”

The kid’s eyes went wide. “No?”

“That’s a really boring form of piracy. I mean, no grog. No buckled swashes. It’s just… it’s just weird to me.”

Grebok pointed the revolver once more at the teen’s head. But then he noticed something.

“No, what’s weird is what’s on the kid’s hand.”

Chuckles followed Grebok’s finger as he pointed.

A small black spot had formed between the boy’s thumb and forefinger. A little suppurating flesh pit, a slowly whirling black pool of skin that seemed to be… turning to puckered sludge. Like hot road tar, wrinkled and bubbling.

“Space AIDS, maybe?” Grebok winced. “Or the Star-Clap. Have you been making love to Nebula Ponies? Because, I assure you, that will earn you the Star-Clap. But bad.”

The black spot started to spread. The ooze enveloped the boy’s thumb.

“It’s cold,” the boy said, a tremor in his voice. He shook his hand like a dog’s head with an ear infection. “Get it off. Get it off!”

The black bubbling tar started to spread up his arm, toward the shoulder. In the shadowy ooze, the two heroes saw a winking, twinkling infinity of stars – a thousand fireflies, a million eyes.

It began to grow tendrils.

“Shit,” Grebok said.

“Double-shit,” Chuckles added.

The tendrils reached for them. Fast, like lashing whips!

2. The Celestial Chorus

Welcome to the Storyverse.

It is a vast expanse of raw potential where all stories happen, have happened or are yet to happen. You could say it’s a… happening place. (See what I did there…? Wow. Tough crowd, moving on.) Any story, myth, fable, embellishment, lie or interpretive dance you’ve ever read, heard or seen has made its home here within the ever-expanding spiral arms of millions and billions of narrative universes.

Looking at the ginormous hugeosity of it all, you find yourself asking: “Who runs this place?” Certainly the Storyverse had gods–in fact, it had too many. Enough that it was impossible for them to be effective beyond whatever small sphere of influence they’d scratched out for themselves. Better to be the undisputed God of Used Matchsticks than throw your hat into the God of the Sea arena. For instance, no less than 204,349,768 entities claimed to be the One True God. They contented themselves by ignoring the other 204,349,767.

“Still, someone had to be in charge!” you scream. “Arbiters? Accountants? Someone balancing the books?”

It’s true, agencies were in place to keep track of the goings-on within this infinitude of fatiloquence (and we ask you to please not scream in here). Several such individuals charged themselves with watching over the place of stories, actually.

They are the Celestial Chorus.

Were you to cast your gaze in a certain direction at a certain time (quickly, over here!), you might’ve born witness to a rare meeting of their membership on the star-speckled shores of the Galax Sea.

The most prominent of them was the Bastard Sun (baritone), primary light source of the Storyverse and mysterious benefactor to the chosen few who called themselves Shadowstories. (No really, he was a giant sun with a face. If you would’ve looked when I told you, you couldn’t have missed him.) He didn’t much care for his brothers and sisters or meetings in which he was expected to pay attention. Unfortunately, he ran out of excuses to push off this portentous confab.

Also present was his sister and opposite number, Honey Moon (alto), her pitted and shadowy moon-face studying him uncomfortably. She was in gibbous which probably meant she was going to be a total bitch about this whole thing. Beyond her was the sparkling yet unemotive Soul Sis-Star (mezzo-soprano), the flaming chunk of ice identified as Meteor Ike (tenor), the crocodilian constellation called Navi-Gator (bass) complete with small plover bird made of a tiny star on its nose, and lastly the roiling void who had no name for himself. They called him The Singularity, or The Darkness, or simply The Void, plus another dozen or so names which did nothing to put anyone at ease when he showed up for functions. He—or it—didn’t speak or sing. Rather, it’s possible he did and no one knew it. No sound escaped his dark gravities. Regardless, he gave them the shivering shits and they were all too happy to pretend he wasn’t there.

Oh, yeah, Sub-orbital Object Stan (soprano emeritus) was here but he’d been recently demoted and no one was all that keen to talk to him either. Bastard Sun found himself hoping Stan would be consumed by The Void and be done with it. At the least, it would break up the monotony of these little meetings.

“You are not troubled by these events?” Honey Moon probed, bringing this meeting back to task after a lengthy third-person introduction.

It took the Bastard Sun a second to realize she was talking to him. “What? No. It’s fine. It’s all fine.” He returned to his grim imaginings of Stan being unceremoniously sucked—shrilly screaming—into the yawning maw of his black hole brother.

“Isn’t it true your heroes have gone missing?” Soul Sis-Star tried again.

His fiery lips lowered themselves from grimace to frown. Strange. They never expressed any interest in the Shadowstories, he thought.

They preferred to sit ignorant on the sidelines, handing out orange wedges and punch as he did all the heavy lifting to keep the Storyverse safe. Now that some new gewgaw or doodad came along, everyone was a Nosey Nelly.

“Only some of them. They’re fine. I have other heroes. They’re on it,” he totally lied. He did have other heroes, none as good per se nor were any of them currently speaking to him… or each other. But he technically knew where they were and that was a good start. He’d gather them up and dispatch them to look for Grebok, Chuckles and R.T. when he was damn good and ready.

“This Infi-Net is a larger problem than any have foreseen,” Meteor Ike said, the dire words emitting from his frozen lips. “Information has become increasingly free. It’ll be anarchy, mark my words.” Meteor Ike was certain the Storyverse was a stone’s skip from anarchy any day of the week. He watched too many news programs.

Honey Moon pursed her lips. “Our economy is crashing down around us. The Storyverse has stopped expanding. No one is creating new stories. Instead they co-opt existing ones, mashing them together or telling some variety of story where the so-called creators are the main characters, splitting off slimmer and slimmer shards of the same idea.”

“With considerably more boy-kissing!” The plover atop Navi-Gator hopped back and forth restlessly. The gator itself simply groaned like the sounds mountains make when they awaken. The rest of the group nodded at this: a marked increase in quasi-fictional boy-kissing abounded.

Soul Sis-Star nodded as best an anthropomorphic star can and added, “What new ideas do come about are torn to shreds by a mad cacophony of circling harpies and knee-jerk critics before those beautiful, glimmering angels can take their maiden’s flight. It is the harshest, coldest arena I have ever seen. It makes me tinkle a little every time.”

The Bastard Sun waved an accusatory phalange of fire around the assembly. “You all said the same thing about syndicated television and comic books. Seriously, every time a new medium comes along Meteor Ike calls it anarchy and the bird accuses it of leading to more boy-kissing. Just stop it. This Infi-Net is no more or less the enemy than they were.” His gaze swept over his fellows and they suddenly found other things to look at with varying levels of embarrassment. Except The Void. The Void’s yawning darkness met his gaze. The Sun felt himself being drawn in as if at any moment he could be sucked into that abyss from where no light escaped and find cold, eternal comfort. He blinked twice and shook it off. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have nothing more important to do.”

With that, the Bastard Sun was no longer there on the far shores of the Galax Sea.

(They could do that sort of thing. You’re just going to have to take that on board.)

The remaining members of their sidereal fraternity frowned at each other.

The plover bird broke their silence. “It’s seriously a lot of boy-kissing this time.”

They nodded, and one by one they then dispersed. First Honey Moon, then Meteor Ike excused himself, then Sub-orbital Stan and Navi-Gator. Lastly, Soul Sis-Star gave one last nervous look to her dark brother before willing herself away.

The Void floated alone.

•••

The Bastard Sun returned to his own private corner of the Storyverse aflurry with an array of special new curses he was inventing by the second. Those other nincompoops were a reactionary sort; anything new meant the end of the world by their estimation. Still, his best heroes had gone missing.  The Storyverse had stopped expanding. A lot of boy-kissing was arising in otherwise boy-kissingless settings. They weren’t wrong.

He had other problems. Problems with his band of heroes who patrol the borders between stories, the Shadowstories.

First R.T.P., their starcraft, went off the grid.

Subsequently, while he was sorting out that mystery, the heroes somehow ended up getting separated.

Now Lord Chuckles and Grebok had gone missing. Their last transmission involved boarding some kind of… grass-faring Pirate vessel.

He was too invested in this batch to let them go so easily. It was time to make some phone calls.  He needed to get the others into the game. The Weasel. The Geek. Even the Weirdo with all the lemmings. All the stops had to be pulled out.

Would they be enough? Could he even find his prized Shadowstories?

Only time would tell.

3. The Weasel and the Geek

“I made a push-pin pig,” Gunther P.Washington said. He wasn’t lying. A wide pink eraser with five judiciously placed thumbtacks (four legs, one snout!) created something akin to a pig. He marched the pig around the desk, intimating little snorting noises. Mysteriously, he had the pig then climb the faint gray fuzz of the cubicle wall. “He’s got a sticky substance on his feet. Like a gecko.”

The sticky substance was actually fruit punch Gunther spilled earlier from his juice box. (But don’t tell him that. He thought he still had juice left.)

The man with whom Gunther shared a cubicle for the last week ignored him, as he had every day.

“Anyway,” Gunther continued, rarely comfortable with more than ten seconds of unworded silence, “as I was saying: once, we fought these lizard people. They smelled like salmonella, but I don’t know what salmonella smells like, not really, but I figure it smells like pee and eggs. They hooked us up to these machines that drained some kind of magical energy out of us. That was cool. Yeah. And then one time! One time, I learned this ancient martial art from this eternal master named Wily Cheung, and I think I was a wandering monk, and that was really fun, but don’t ask me to do any of my crazy moves, because I’m pretty sure I forget them.”

Above their heads, fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered. It gave the impression they’d been imprisoned in a giant, bleak bug zapper. Gunther loved it. Corporate life fit him snugly, as snug as his short-sleeve, perfect-white button-down, or his smooth and featureless khakis.

His officemate—whose name was Dan, maybe, or Don—mumbled “shut up,” and hunched closer to his computer, his trembling hand hovering above a grungy mouse on a grungier mouse pad.

“What are you doin’?” Gunther asked.

“I’m watching a video on the Infi-Net,” Dan-Don said without ripping his gaze from the monitor. Gunther couldn’t see what was on-screen, because Dan-Don’s head filled the space. “I love this. I don’t know how we got anything done before. I feel so… productive.”

“Can you move so I can see the video, too?” Gunther asked.

Dan-Don shot Gunther a feral stare—a sickly lion warding away awkward hyenas. Dan-Don didn’t look so hot. Gray goo between bared teeth. Eyes so tired they looked bruised. A crusty, dried spitfoam on lips. But then, some semblance of humanity snapped back into Dan-Don’s bleary pink eyes, and he grunted, waving Gunther over.

“Sure, sure, come check this out, kid. It’s the sequel to Pillow Cat. You ever see Pillow Cat?”

Gunther shook his head. “No, but I sure want to!”

He wheeled himself over on his office chair, waddling as the chair casters squeaked.

Dan-Don—or was it Don-Dan?—closed some windows and opened some new ones, making mouse-clickies and keyboard-tappies so fast, Gunther almost passed out trying to follow the intense action.

“This is Pillow Cat,” Dan-Don muttered.

A grainy video opened upon the CRT monitor. In the small window, a yellow tabby darted into a pillowcase, freaked out because he couldn’t get out of the pillowcase, and then tumbled down the steps while still imprisoned within the pillowcase. Dan-Don replayed it three times.

“Man,” Dan-Don said, “that’s just so fantastic. It’s got a great story. It’s freakin’ epic.”

Gunther sat, horrified as the epileptic pussy-pillow toppled down the stairs again and again and again.

“Does the kitty… die?” Gunther asked, his voice barely above a terrified whisper.

“No, I guess not,” Dan-Don murmured, licking his dry lips. “Because they made the sequel, which is even better than Pillow Cat. Here, check this out. It’s like, Shakespearean.”

Gunther didn’t know what Shakespearean meant, but he nodded like he got it, even gave a little thumbs-up just to verify.

Dan-Don performed more clicky-tap-typey-clicks.

Pillow Cat closed.

A new video opened: Urinal Cat.

In this video, Gunther never actually saw the cat, exactly. He only saw a writhing, hissing, mrowling pillow thrashing around in a wet urinal. The deodorizing piss-cake hopped out of the urinal like an errant hockey puck, and went careening off-camera. Aaaaand… that was it.

Dan-Don replayed this one a half-dozen times.

“It just, it just says a lot about the human condition. You know? It’s like, asking us about our place in the cosmos. The third act is the freakin’ best. I can’t get enough of it.”

“I feel queasy,” Gunther explained.

“Me, too, man, me too.” Dan-Don itched at a black sore on his elbow. “Queasy with freakin’ delight. I’m getting so much work done over here. The Infi-Net has opened my eyes. I’m a real multi-tasker now. Shit, I can multi-task the Urinal Cat video, and I can write a blog post about Urinal Cat—“

“Blog? Did you just belch? Are you okay? Do you need an antacid?” Gunther was genuinely concerned, but Dan-Don kept on mumbling and babbling.

“—then I’m all sending e-mails to my buddies, and I’m like, LOL, and they’re like, ROTFLMAO—“

“What are you saying? Is this some kind of moon language?”

“—then I go sexting with my hot girlfriend who I met on Sexy-Storyverse-Bride-Finder-dot-com, and I’m like, IWSN, and she texts, FMLTWIA, and together we hunt up some goat pr0n, and—“

Gunther pressed his hands to his temples. “Oh, Heavens to Beantown, your moon language is in my head! Like bees! Like bees building shelter for their bee children!”

Dan-Don itched the scab on his arm. It opened.

Black fluid—inky, like shadow, a deeper dark than night itself—bubbled up, and out.

Dan-Don’s words turned to a slurry of incomprehensible gibbering. He pivoted his jaundiced face toward Gunther, and croaked out a few comprehensible words within the mish-mash of nonsense:

“Are… you… Pillow Cat?”

Dan-Don’s eyes went dead. Black ooze snaked down from crusty nostril, and from corner of eye.

“Are you Urinal Cat?” came another guttural moan, this time not from Dan-Don, but from Betsy, the secretary. She stood in the doorframe of the cubicle, then threw up on herself the way a baby does (no fanfare at all, just open mouth, spew foam—but this foam was black as night, and speckled with glittering stars).

“No!” Gunther yelled. “I’m not a cat! I’m no kind of cat!”

“Are you Binoculars Cat?” another voice—Pete, from accounting—asked. Pete clambered up over the cubicle wall, and crashed down onto the printer table. He got back up again, his head cracked open and spilling dark star-spangled tar.

“Are you Ham Sandwich Cat?” bellowed Cindy-from-marketing—she was just a prodigious upper torso, round and massive but with no legs, and she dragged herself into the small space. Gunther screamed. He was trapped. They continued to lurch toward him, arms outstretched, sores and orifices suppurating with the glittery, wet shadow-fluid.

“For the love of toner cartridges, no!” Gunther shrieked.

His shriek was deafening. Shrill. Like a girl scout being mauled by a Kodiak bear.

But it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the bark of a shotgun blast.

Dan-Don’s head blasted off the shoulder at the neck, and swung down to his chest (still hanging by a thread of yellowed skin). Black goo spattered the office cubicle. His mouth kept working, and gurgled: “Are—you—Coconut—Cat?”

A giant weasel—no, really, we’re talking over six-feet tall, and with hands (albeit fuzzy ones) featuring nimble digits and working opposable thumbs—shouldered his way into the cubicle, smoke exhaling from the twin-barrels of a sawed-off shotgun in his grip.

Truth be told, he wasn’t just a regular ol’ giant weasel.

No such thing existed.

But a Wonder Weasel?

That’s real.

“Sparky!” Gunther cried out in sweet relief. “I’m not a cat!” He insisted.

“What?” Sparky the Wonder Weasel asked, confused. He shook it off. “Never mind. Later, geek.”

He plugged two more shells into the shotgun. Cindy-from-marketing pawed at Sparky’s leg. The Wonder Weasel evaporated her skull with birdshot. Black jelly clotted on the carpet in its wake.

The Weasel reached up and pulled down one of the cubicle walls. It crushed Pete and Betsy.

Gunther hurried over and grabbed a fistful of the Wonder Weasel’s chest fur.

“Moon language!” he cried.

“Would you shut the fuck up?” Sparky said. “What are you even doing here? We’re heroes—well, I mean, you’re sort of accidentally maybe almost a hero. Did you get another office job?”

“I love office jobs.”

“You’re an asshole. Let’s roll. We have to find the other two dick-hats—Chuckles and Grebok went off the grid fighting some kind of suburban pirate crew.”

“Okay.”

Sparky grabbed Gunther by the head, and dragged him out of the cubicle. They headed for the elevator.

“Uh-oh,” Gunther said.

Sparky sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “Shit.”

The elevators were blocked.

By a squirming hallway clot of office zombies.

Each oozing the black ooze.

Each mumbling about that damn cat.

Sparky reloaded.