• "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
    -=Nothing But a Whisper=-
    ep. one


    He was a mad dog in that moment.
    All that remained to be seen was how mad.
    The sounds of shattered wood and the pulverizing force of buck shot sought to test him,
    and as chairs and stools were toppled and the emergency exits into
    the stark light of the afternoon grew congested with tripping bodies under trampling feet
    he knew exactly how mad he was.

    He turned his sweat slicked and sallow face towards the deafening percussion
    of the sudden metropolitan massacre roaring beside him
    -an act spurned by twisted curiosities, not indiscriminate malice.
    Then the first sound of thunder bled into six more;
    and the first cry of alarm was crushed by a sea of screams;
    the first fleck of blood threatened to drown them all;
    the mad dog became readily aware of just how mad he really was.

    There was a reverberating sensation of bass through his hands as the bar
    counter exploded into shards of second grade oak and black vinyl.
    A sliver of it trimmed the hairs standing up on his nape,
    while glistening glass bottles burst upon contact,
    spewing vice across the growing debris and misting the air with a slight whiskey stink.
    It was just enough to overtake the stink of seared gunpowder and the mad dog's scent.

    He couldn't hear anymore.
    The endless howls of people turned prey strained against his eardrums,
    and their desperate fingers threatened to puncture its membrane.
    As his body lurched forward off the stool and his hands collected shattered glass,
    he was dimly reminded of a scene from Independence Day.
    A city swept away by fires from another world.
    Those who once had it all figured out screamed until the inferno gnashed them apart,
    hurling trucks and buildings and people like motes of dust traveling in the vacuum of space.
    Insignificant.

    He was capable,
    the man thought idly to himself as the situation around him began to collapse.
    The panicked screams now mingled with the wails of the dying.
    The gunmen would continue killing them until the mad dog bared its fangs.

    The barrel of one -one, for He knew that there were more-
    gun locked back as it sang a final anthem,
    unseaming a fleeing woman's jugular from her neck.
    She became a brilliant font of life escaping life as her brand new corpse slipped under
    the writhing labyrinth of hysteria. Her blood lingered in the air like smoke,
    the only difference being that it painted those around her.
    It marked them forever.

    Out, damned spot.

    The lingering burn of a muzzle flash showed him where the shooter was
    -the artist who made the fountain-
    revealing polished steel and a glint of brass as the final casing spat out the side of the pistol.
    It was then that the mad dog felt every thread in the fabric of that reality unravel.
    As the metal clip slid from the gun, his world changed hue.
    Silver.
    It wasn't truly a color but a state of being,
    shimmering like mercury cascading slowly across all of the facets of everything.
    The bullet riddled bar,
    the growing body count,
    the humid blood-sweat-booze soaked air,
    and the eyes that he knew were looking for him all wore a veil of light reflecting in water.
    A lack of substance.
    The absence of structure.

    In that plane of endless motion, where all things swayed with the ebb of unknown forces,
    the mad dog watched as his fingers rippled the air as if it were fluid molten glass,
    something that resisted his passing entirely but found no possible way to deny him.
    His thoughts kept him afloat on top of what used to be the floor of the club,
    a surface that seemed identical except for the ecstatic undulations that raced from him like waves of heat,
    distorting every contour without truly violating it.

    The fear blinded creatures racing for their lives now fled at a rate of near stillness.
    Their flexed, burning muscles and wild eyes twisted in this world of super slow motion.
    The shooters -seven of them, as the mad dog took this elongation of time to count-
    moved with the same unbreakable sloth.
    The artist's clip hung three quarters free from his pistol
    as though gravity and physics were foreign things.

    The mad dog moved effortlessly, uninhibited by the laws which bound all others to their own indomitable inertia.
    His body bled tracers of quicksilver as he passed through many figures,
    and wherever he touched them they gave way likes banks of fog,
    smearing out of themselves and painting the shimmering air with a slow dancing destruction of shape.
    In this world without substance, he was the only anchor.

    An anchor that swung through a world made of ether.

    The mad dog's calloused, yellowed fingers pushed down into
    the floor as he reached the marksman artist.
    The shooter was oblivious to all things,
    still helplessly trapped in a single gesture he expected to take a single second.
    His clip still hadn't escaped the gun.
    Dog took in the details of that killer's face -short brown hair, sunglasses,
    single piercing in the left ear, a light dusting of stubble across his cheeks-
    before tearing his hands from the floor, sweeping them into his assailant's form
    with painter-like grace.
    By the time the mad dog had finished his own work of art,
    a tapestry of spatial paradox,
    the artist's body was an unrecognizable horror of space mutilating space;
    violating each other in ways that were not conceivable.
    Dagger shivs of warped floor flowed up through the man's torso,
    splitting out of his neck and eyes.
    His face tore and melted as if he was nothing but plastic,
    and in that gossamer realm of surreality the faintest bubbles of crimson began
    to surge from the his body.

    The artist became a fountain all his own.

    Everywhere the mad dog walked,
    the ghosts of his parallel world succumbed to the weight of his touch.
    The second gunner's face frayed open as the mad dog's fingertips drifted down his visage.
    The third's chest became a swirl of flesh,
    entirely distinct yet absolutely undefinable.
    All the while, the mad dog whispered into this silent and spectral plane.
    His words -breath- lashed apart the back of the fourth shooter's neck as
    he came up behind him, following the sights of the assailant's gun to
    a man falling forever as the bullet separated his calf from his thigh.

    "You are nothing but brittle atoms. You are nothing but dust and fog."

    The man's head peeled apart like smooth water amidst a gale,
    turning him into a ghastly spectacle of dispersion as the mad dog charged through the crowd,
    casting shapes aside without resistance as he sluiced two adjacent agents into one another
    and skewered them with long strokes of the wall.

    "They made me a passing breeze."

    He reaches the seventh shooter.
    There is a skip and a subtle change in hue.
    The screaming returns - has magnified and contorted into sounds beyond understanding.
    Blood soaks the floor, for the world becomes as the mad dog made it.
    Flesh has unraveled, twisted and torn.
    As some continue to flee with greater desperation, others twitch,
    prostrate,
    as the impossibilities of their own malignments manifest within their flesh and bone,
    assaulting their minds with the grotesque.

    The seventh shooter finds himself looking at his stomach's inside,
    as his own digestive fluids rush into his mouth and nose.
    The twisted remnant of his head has been stretched from his neck and set through his navel.
    He is the last to die, and does so in terrible pain.

    The mad dog doesn't move to flee like the others.
    Not yet.
    He looks to each of the seven, the sweeping strokes gouged out of the floor.
    The matter he had shaped and unraveled with little more than a breath.
    Then he speaks once more.

    "They made me a whisper within a shapeless world."

    He falls in step with the others who flee,
    escaping down the sun lit streets to a place without consequence.
    There was never any consequence.
    He was nothing but a whisper.