gunfight at the ko laundry ranch

by Patrick Johnston

And the Lions of Ismael burst into the small socco and see soldiers posted outside of the building.

Full Nazis not Schiller Youth. Blitzkrieg Warpigs. Shiny boots. Pin-eyed Erma Werkes. Methed Gotterdammerung webbing. Wagnerian Scheißvögel.

The trouble is, for them, they are not expecting trouble. They are too confident in their demeanour and their capacity to deter. And anyway, how come they are not stationed up on the roof looking down on things…?

Trouble is, for them, that the Lions are here looking for trouble. To be sure, they expected to be inside the building and up past the ground floor laundry ranch before they encountered any serious resistance. But it is what it is…

And what it is, is they are prepared and come out shooting, whilst the Nazis are stood around looking mean and smoking cigarettes and wondering what the hell they are doing out the front. And what it means is that the Nazis barely have time to register appropriate surprise and loose off a few desultory rounds of the submachineguns before they are shot and slashed and hacked and dying and dead…

And the Lions rampage through the laundry, killing as they go… Lions like whirlwinds. Lions executing dervish katas. Complex flowing forms of harmony and destruction. Every motion the graceful cohesion of will and action. Red and violet choreography. Violent calligraphy as an exquisite brutal poem.

Blood on the floor. Blood in the wash tubs. Bloody bubbles among the soap suds. Blood on the sheets. Sanguis in linteamina. The union is consummated.

And on and up…

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For Jack, this is as good as a full complement of Shite-Hawks… all Schiller’s henchmen are heading downwards towards whatever the hell is happening on the lower floors. Jack would dearly love to know what is going on down there… but he is here for business not pleasure.

He waits in the shadows as a bunch of goons hurry past, having come out of a room at the end of the hall, and hurry down the stairs guns in hands. The sound of gunfire and screaming in the stairwell.

Jack enters the room gun first… Schiller looks up… Schiller looks like he has been caught wanking… circumcised Nazi prick… and Jack has Adolf Schiller cornered in his lair.

They face off.

Jack has Schiller in his sights, but Schiller has gotten hold of a rather nasty algorithm, curtesy of Munro Lahar. The algorithm has a Deadman’s Switch[1]. In his fist an Infinite Monkey Bomb[2], so the minute he releases the handle it will go-off and proliferate infinite story variants. There goes the logosphere. There goes the ideosphere. The whole show will be swamped with trivial multiplicities. All the stories will be there.  But there will be so many versions of each of them as to render them all meaningless.

Even contemplating a core theme, let alone a definitive version will be out of scope. They all bleed into each other. Brave New World splices with The Thousand and One Nights. The Heart of Darkness segues into On the Road mashed up with War and Peace. Horror. The horror. Atlas Shrugged assimilates Gravity’s Rainbow. The entire Bahavagad Gita is inserted as a footnote to the third chapter. It takes a while.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly fuses with My Beautiful Laundrette. Omar and Johnny’s dreams go up in smoke as their enterprise is shot to pieces in No-name, Angel-Eyes and Tuco’s final showdown. The chapattis are hidden in one of the dryers. Angel-Eyes bleeds out on the laminate. The copper floral smell of blood and soap suds. Blood and soap suds, iridescent. Ephemeral. Tuco is left balancing on juddering washing machine with a noose around his neck… his balance precarious… his face contorted… will he die? Will he live? Will Blondie make the shot?

William S. Burroughs’ works find their own little corner and cross-fertilise. He never repeats himself. Never repeats himself. Never repeats. They metastasise and cohere with the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan grows bored of the Sub-Sahara, he shrugs off his white-man’s burden and lumbers off from the jungle. He falls in with some Tuareg and crosses the sand. Participates in strange Sufi rites at some lost oasis. He lands in Tangiers. He takes a bath and discovers cologne. He smokes hashish and opium. He dons a Fez to add local colour. He hangs out in the Petite Souk with decadent European emigres drinking mint tea and buggering young Moroccan boys. It sure as hell beats that jungle living. Shit, it’s more like being part of the English aristocracy that he came from. That’s the way old chaps.

Jane sulks and huffs and points to the pre-nup. ‘And to think that I thought he was such a real man…’. She heads off to Kenya, or maybe the Red Sea, puts on a disposable face, changes her name to Lola ‘La Chata’, and ends up working at the Pharm with the Countess de Vile.

Meantime the Wild Boys find themselves deep in the Belgian Congo. This isn’t the war they wanted, but it is the war they are ready for. They pit their wits against pith helmeted slavers, ivory merchants, and tomb raiders. They ride into battle on zebras, wildebeests and impalas wearing only their silver jockstraps. Their nipples and ray-guns aglow fiery blue. They fight hordes of semi-naked white jungle henchmen with leopard-skin helmets and loin cloths. Cheeta-Mike runs triage for the wounded.  Doctor Benway patches them up and sends them back out into the fray. Just mechanics for bodies. Tarzan’s old tree den is a makeshift field hospital. Snake venom is the only sedative. A bush machete his only instrument. Bug powder for dusting the wounds. It’s all in a day’s work.

The whole wide word is unleashed. Running wild. Set free. Books, poems, scripts even... Now this might sound like plenty fun times, but believe me, the crap you gotta dredge through to get to the good stuff is insufferable. So much dross for a flash in the pan. So much shoddy and mungo for every decent thread...

An endless stream of tat and verbiage. Huxley’s vison made real. They’re drowning us in trivia, trivial and vacuous. No bounds, no censorship. Just angry pockets of fashiondary cancellation.

Jokes even…

Father, I’ve lost my faithful dog. – You’ve lost your faithful Dog you say? Lost your Dog? Then we must help you find him… Father Michael grabs the man by his head…

Spewing forth words… Rafts of generica floating on an ocean of meaninglessness.  Same-same but different. Porn even…

So very much porn. More porn than you could shake a stick at. It’s the opiate of the masturbators. It’s the religion of the masses. Driving force of technology. Now it’s all porning-by-numbers. Different-different but same. Six of one and three-quarter dozen of the other. Undress. Bodies, smooth, defined. Hairless. Tattoos. Lick-lick-lick. Suck-suck-suck. Fuck-fuck-fuck. Cowgirl. Oh-baby, that feels so good. Doggy. Oh-baby, that feels so good. Reverse Cowgirl. Oh-baby, that feels so good. White eyes rolling back. That feels so good. Back to the suck-suck-sucking. Money shot. Spurt-spurt-spurt. Soylent jizz all over their faces.  Soylent jizz dripping down their chins, green bioluminescence under a decaying rotten moon. For more variety you’ve got cosplay. Naughty nurses. Naughty housemaids. Naughty schoolgirls. Naughty Nazis. Naughty nuns. Naughty Nasty Nazi nuns. Naughty kitty-kats, black pointy ears and soylent cream dripping from their soylent whiskers…

Files, reports, and indices. All the while dublin’ their mumper. Dewey decimal goes duodecimal, then doubles and doubles and doubles. Filing cabinets erupt at their rivets. Middle managers run the gauntlet… Mehrkanoons to the left of them… Mehrkanoons to the right of them. Drowning in paperwork. The bottom draw grows exponentially sucking in documents like a black hole…

Music and lyrics. Songs and symphonies. Anywhere there is meaningful structure that can be varied and transcribed. Code even… algorithmic and genetic. First you write it, then you transcribe it. Fall if you will but rise you must. Repetition, repetition. Repetition. And may the road rise with you…

It subtly alters gene-expression enhancing regressive traits. Use it for treatment. More expensive treatments are available that blend the users DNA with other genetic materials. These products range from celebrity endorsed glamour treatments, to pirate-ware, to random pot-luck cocktails of genetic material of dubious origin. Has-been rock-stars and actors eke out a living on royalties from their own genetic material. Pristine pop-virgins jealously guard the ownership of their DNA, obsessively accounting for every spilled eyelash, every nail clipping. They spend their days in isolation-unit apartments where the wastewater is processed before release into the general system. The air is recycled through polyphasic biotronic filtration systems. Nanotech cleansing agents act like leukocytes, identifying and deconstructing genetic material. When they venture out, which they only do for choreographed publicity events, they habitually apply a second skin of molecule-thin flexi-polymer to prevent gene-loss through the shedding of dead skin. The result – a slightly plastic finish.

The pipetterazzi hound them slavishly hoping to pick up exclusive material. That one viable nucleotide that will make their name and fortune. The imageneers and gene-splicers of the couture fashion houses concoct ‘in the style of…’ genetic recipes for the gene-starved fans. At the other end of the spectrum, the more grass-roots scene, where basement hackers throw together concoctions of genetic material from disparate sources, often in less than sterile surroundings. Known as Bath-tub-Gene, no two batches are ever the same. Dysmorphic street-people are spliced with pirated pop-goddesses and rare tropical orchids and infected with streptococcal bacteria. This end of the market caters usually only to a close circle of the gene-hacker’s personal friends and acquaintances, but the phenomena is getting good copy in the zines and is sure to soon catch the attention of the big corporate players.

SchillerCorp gets in on the action. The Pharm increases its diversity and yield of crops.

Combine this with the burgeoning food tech market. Vat grown meat. You wanna eat something that has been extinct for a millennia? Woolly mammoth steak? No problemo, just so long as we have enough of the AGC’s to spell out some of the words we can infer the rest. You wanna roast a real turducken? Step this way….

Before you know it, you’ve got ethical cannibalism. Want a bite of your favorite actor? No problem. The royalties keep flowing in, and SchillerCorp’s stock goes through the roof. African Warlords now as paranoid about shedding genes as your pop-virgins. They don’t want no fucker cannibalising on them and taking their power. Stealing their mojo. Stealing their soul. Holy shit – I can’t get my dick up… Panic in his eyes as he remembers opening a door with a gloveless hand… Holy shit! Some motherfucker turn me into hamburger? After that everything goes to shit and his empire crumbles…

Policies? Somehow you need to write and revise the policies, but fifteen minutes is a long time in politics. Time enough for your fame to surge and wane and surge again. There’s plenty folks had to do double-u turns in the space of two tweet cycles. Political micro-termism is the new norm. Nobody actually expects you to come good on your policy promises. I mean who could find the time? Me, I’m tempering my persona as close as you can get to real time. You gotta feed the beast. Lots of pollies burn out within a couple of weeks. They just haven’t absorbed the requisite skill set. Your Influencers leave them in the dust. They implicitly understand that nobody even wants or expects consistency from them. The New! The New! The endless New! In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen seconds. So, nobody is famous at all. The real trick is to fly under the radar for long enough. That’s where true notoriety lies. Where did you spring from? How come we never heard of you? You didn’t feature on any of my feeds... Nobody wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything… they just want to peddle influence on the Dirty Boulevard.

So here we are stuck in the endless now. Without so much as a sustaining tale. Now this might all sound like plenty fun times, but believe me… so much shoddy and mungo for every decent thread. Wefts warp. Nothing to weave a decent tale with.

Have you found him yet?

To be sure Father, I don’t think he’s down there…

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Stand-off. Eye off. Careful now

Eilera b’Ismaeli bursts into the room.

Eilera b’Ismaeli is clad in in gore. Blood golem.

Eilera b’Ismaeli points her gun at Schiller.

Schiller goes for his gun. No. Schiller’s arm coming into firing position… Jack is trying to shout – NO…

… and Eilera b’Ismaeli squeezes her trigger.  Schiller crumples to the ground like an empty sigh. Obverse grip. Fingers opening. Drops his hold on the Deadman’s Switch. A paper-thin slice of time… And…

Tap-tap-tap.

Here Comes Everybody…

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[1] Atypically for this kind of device, it has an obverse grip pattern. This runs contrary to how it is sketched and described in those of Munro Lahar’s notebooks that have survived. Although this feature is unlikely to have had any significant impact on the functionality of the device, the anomaly has been a source of enduring discussion and debate amongst scholars. Claims have been made that the inclusion of the obverse grip pattern may shed doubt upon the provenance of the device. The counterclaim essentially rests upon the lack of evidence of any other parties in the time-period and locale having the technological capacity either in terms of intellectual property or access to exotic materials to produce such an artefact.

[2] ta-ta tap-ta ta-ta-tap-ta ta-ta tap-ta ta-ta tap ta / tap-tap tap-tap-tap tap-ta tap-ta-tap ta tap-ta-tap-tap / tap-ta-ta-ta tap-tap-tap tap-tap tap-ta-ta-ta - it’s all in the fist.

Photo of Patrick Johnson

BIO: Pat Johnston is a Yorkshire-based writer of fiction and poetry whose work often explores themes of memory, estrangement, and fractured identity. His debut novel The Gaps Between the Stories interweaves mythology, trauma, and language into a postmodern exploration of storytelling itself. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in Argyle Literary Magazine, Love and Literature, and Wingless Dreamer. A former academic and cognitive scientist, he now writes full-time from the East Riding.