Chapter 7 Rivals

Tommy and Victor stood within a couple of feet of one another. No one had budged in the last several minutes after the laughter subsided. A feeling of wonder hung in the air but it felt like wonder that had been poured upon and was hungry and confused. Leer and Blue had begun to understand that they were some pretty important men, or rather Victor and Tommy were, and the sense that everyone was watching to see what their next move was going to be was palpable. Actually, Blue and Leer didn't even know their own names at this point to say nothing of the fact that they had no understanding of how the men, whose bodies they now stood in, died. Leer had jumped a couple of times before but never by goozlesnorp and never into someone else's body, and Blue was still half expecting Glurp to show up.

Instead, a woman walked toward them from the front line of the crowd which was still fanned out, motionless around them, satisfied to spectate as she walked with determination toward the risen pair. As soon as she drew near enough to be seen clearly, both men instantly recognized her. Blue turned to look at Leer who returned the gaze with an expression which told Blue that she was, in fact, the spitting image of Mona Damino, or Catherine Kent. Now was clearly not going to be the right time to clear up that little mystery.

"Well, I am going to have to have this thing checked out, the woman said as she played with her firearm, surveying it then eyeing up Tommy's gut. She looked a little too much like Siouxsie Sioux for either Blue or Leer to handle without a slight bit of laughter, only she thought they were laughing at her joke about the piece. She was cocky, forceful and outrageously sexy, if not intimidating, particularly to Blue as she stepped in close and in a single motion nuzzled the barrel of her firearm up under his chin while pulling Victor in close, grabbing his shirt and clenching it into her fist. "Did you guys forget you hate each other?" She eased her grip on Victor as if checking herself. It didn't take long for Leer to sense the situation. He knew that he, Victor, was one of the two men in charge, leaving Blue, or Tommy, to be the other and for the moment at least, hot little Siouxsie was on his side. Leer took a chance on his read and putting one hand on her shoulder stepped in to gently but firmly push her gun hand down, away from Blue's chin. "Hey now, easy does it, nobody should have to die more than once a day, even him." Leer safely suggested. He was as much saving Blue as he was trying to leave the conversation open, for information seeking purposes. It worked. " I just can't believe you don't want me to plug Tommy again for you, Victor, and we even have the stiff shuttle handy to cart his ass away", the woman added with a distainful look at Blue.

She was still trying to sort out her feelings about what had just happened by doing the thing that came easiest to her, swinging her gun around and threatening somebody. Everyone in the crowd had just watched as Tommy Levito and Victor Alonzo fought hand to hand for three hours-Actually Tommy mercilously beat Victor to a pulp because Tommy was that much better a fighter yet Victor refused to go down. Max, the hot Siouxsie look-alike couldn't bear it any longer, so she blasted a hole in Tommy's stomach, the size of a grapefruit. Tommy hit the pavement just as Victor keeled over. Both men were dead. Everyone was stunned. At that moment, everything changed. Nothing is certain. The cops didn't know what to do because half of them got regular dough from one of the stiffs on the ground, if not both. The crowd volleyed stares across to one another trying to guage their next move. The cronie volleyball tournamment ended before it began however as neither side could figure out who would serve. The captains were gone. The bosses were dead. Both stiffs were in the ambulances before anyone knew what hit them As the crowd began to realize that Tommy and Victor were dead the faintest breath of hope seemed to sigh its way through the crowd of cops and cronies. For a moment, Max thought about running. She could just go. She could live in a small town, no more Victor, no more guns-Freedom.
But now, here she was again, ready to blast another hole, ready to do whatever Victor wanted.

Chapter 7 Perp U Pop Quiz: Technically Can it be called Resurrection if you wake up in someone else's corpse?

"Hey Bmphf,  grrmp, gmmn, mmnnn, ahh,HEY, Bobby!" Mike Masterson finally bellowed past the triple-decker submarine he was forcibly sinking with both hands somewhere off the coast of gluttony, his large but lagging maw unable to keep pace with his insatiable zeal for cold cuts slathered in ultra-sauce, thousand island dressing supercharged with high-fructose corn syrup and some unspellable chemical that, while legal, left nicotine back in kindergarten at addiction school. "Bobby, we're on the news!" Officer Masterson loved to sit in his squad car with the radio tuned to the local news, hoping to "catch himself" on the sight of the latest breaking story. Lieutenant Bobby Hurst rarely got in on the act but he jumped into the passenger seat of the squad car because today's crime scene was different.

Masterson could barely reach the knob past his lunch bag, pinned between his belly and the steering wheel. He turned up the volume, "...and now, apparently, both men are dead. The initial report attributes the deaths to gangland violence. Police and fire vehicles surround the ambulances, now hearses at the sight of this grizzly double homicide. The paramedics worked as though their very lives depended upon saving the two slain gang bosses, and that may not be very far from the truth. Tommy Levito and Victor Alonzo controlled nearly every illegal operation in the city and owned, controlled or persuaded more than half of the city's legal enterprises. Medical crews pronounced the rivals dead only moments ago and have just closed the doors on the lives of both men for whom the only certain future is a five minute trip to the city morgue."

"By Farb", both officers reverently added as they bowed their heads, "Course I doubt he'll have much use for them," Masterson chuckled as both men eyed the ambulances as if even their futures were inextricably linked the the lifeless cargo inside. Masterson turns off the radio, one hand on the knob, the other on his sub.

Suddenly the rear doors on both ambulances burst open from inside. Tommy Levito and Victor Alonso jump down from the back of the vehicles and survey the the crowd of police and fireman, gangsters, pimps, hookers, junkies, skateboarders and librarians all assembled for the spectacle, nearly every single one of them breathless and all of them stunned.

Leer was entirely drenched in blood from the nose down and Blue had a hole in his gut the size of a grapefruit. The two men looked at one another and smiled. Tommy's hole closed itself instantly and only Victor's clothes revealed any sign of injury. Both men turned toward the crowd which remained silently in a state of shock. Blue began to snicker, then Leer quietly laughed to himself. The laughter of Tommy and Victor grew until both men were nearly in tears. Within a minute the entire population on the scene was laughing along, whether out of nervousness, relief or sheer infectious joy.

Chapter 7 Some Parallel Universes May Be Perpendicular

White. We have already established the whiteness of Leer's hair. But let's take a moment to examine the whiteness of Leer's face. and Blue's for that matter. First, we must take a step backward. Or, rather, sidewards, which is exactly what Leer did at precisely the right moment because that is exactly what Blue did, making it absolutely essential that Leer did the same. Leer performed the action with a grace that can only be described as thoroughly graceful. If he had done it any other way he would have ended up dead.

"You look positively dead!", Blue laughed,"white as a ghost".

"So do you," replied Leer as both men disembarked the star cruiser, gracefully, nonchalantly sidestepping their way off the ship and onto the "deck" which was still the remnant of Blue's house, as the the cruiser continued its journey at the speed of light without so much as slowing down even just a little to let them off."Happens every time", continued Leer unfazed by the abrupt exit. "The color will come back in no time. Seen enough?"

"No", Blue quietly responded,"just enough for now." As he said this he reached up his hand. Blue was quickly ripped off the platform by a goozlesnorp, a surprisingly majestic birdfishlady, whose body was part woman, part fish, and, yes, part bird. As she pulled him from the platform, Blue reached down with his other hand and snatched Leer by the back of his shirt, at once lifting him from the platform and swinging him up onto the back of the goozlesnorp which flew synchronously to the will of Blue who was catapulted by the combined motion of Leer and the flight path of the goozlesnorp directly onto her back. The birdfishlady, Leer and Blue relaxed into one being, gliding upon the air high amongst the clouds.

Neither Blue nor Leer could tell you precisely how long it took to lose all sense of time, motion, thought, physical existence or feeling. What they could tell you is that time seemed endless. Well, endless aside from one fact. It was over within the blink of an eye.

When asked about this very moment at a moment some considerable time later, or perhaps before, during the third TOIS (Tribunal of Intergalactic Shit), both men testified in exactly the same manner "I closed my eyes, no, actually, I blinked, yes, I blinked, and when I opened my eyes..."

Chapter 6 Across the Universe Leer's Hair

Chapter 6 Across the Universe Where ARE We GoingToo

Blue arched backward, his feet and lower legs entwined with the skin of the serpent as he stretched fully backward, then snapped forward instantly like the spark from a match bursting into flame. His head flared forward as his arms, now glowing, swung forward bringing with them pure energy that rolledd from his joints, through his limbs and out the tips of his fingers, seering liquid laser light. Blue and Leer spun upward, a relentless, twirling rocket of light, slicing through miles of underwater shafts, presumably leading upward while becoming increasingly redundant. Another attack from three sides, then four, then five. "Why not thirty?" Blue thought, he could just as easily slice through a hundred gummy attacks. "This has to end", Blue thought to himself again but felt that Leer agreed, unspoken, still strongly entwined, swimming forcefully onward. Blue thought for all of one moment. Differently. Blue thought radically differently from the thinking it took to remain doing what he was doing. He thought radically differently from the way he ever would have thought before and stepped off. Without thinking as radically differently as Blue was thinking, it would be impossible to understand what stepping off meant at that exact point in time. Fortunately, Leer knew exactly what it meant to think radically differently and was not the least bit surprized that Blue had decided to do so now. He was no more surprized at Blue's decision than he was by the fact that he, himself was wildly popular in Australia. Leer wasn't particularly surprized to be wildly popular anywhere due to the fact that he could speak nearly every language known to man, and a few unknown to man, had the uncanny ability to define precisely the last hue you had envisioned or might envision if asked and his hair was pure white. Absolutely white. Sometimes these things don't come across too well in comic books, but his hair was brilliant white. So white that you would have to add white to the white paper to make it white enough if you were trying to draw a picture of Leer for a friend.

Chapter 6 Across the Universe Where ARE We Going?

With the blackness looming above them, Blue relaxes his grip on the serpent and they float serenely in the center of the great opening within the maze. Blue's whole being bristled with energy as he suddenly re-engaged his grip on the whiskers. The serpent, which was really more like a dragon the more Blue thought about it, responded instantly, bolting immediately upward, directly perpendicular to the only thing that looked anything like ground below them, which didn't really look anything like ground at all. Actually it looked an awful lot like the inside of a waffle iron except that the bumpy bits looked more like thorns. Thorns made of spikes made from pyramids, hundreds of feet tall, as if you just grabbed the tip of the pyramid and kept pulling up on it and the whole thing stretched to the height you made it stretch to, which in this case was a few hundred feet. So the waffle iron was really more like a bed of nails. Blue looked below him and watched as they rocketed upward away from the bottom and even though they were rocketing, the bottom never really seemed to be getting any further away. Just then, three gelatinous tubes with teeth, jawbones, fangs, monstrous, mammoth mandibles burst forth from the three surrounding tunnels striking the spot where Blue and the dragon,Leer had been serenly floating only seconds earlier. they were now, however, hurtling forward, upward into the infinite blackness. Well, blackness that appeared to be infinite until three more rabid gummy worms darted at them from all sides.

Some people put stock in religion, others in education and innovation,"Science Gentlemen, Science will answer everything!" but sometines it's a simple matter of instinct, if not just dumn luck. Blue did not ordinarily consider himself to be lucky so it was instinct that inspired his next move. Blue moved with the grace and confidence of a master. He let go.

Time seemed to stop.

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