Beyonc�lien

Story about shat happens when you discover the wrong pop star's secret... [10pgs(printed) | 8.793 words | 1st person | female prot.] genre(s): Sci-Fi | Comedy | Action | Horror

            "I know your secret," I whispered as I glided past the lady and her retinue, holding my champagne glass high in the air so as not to spill it. Stepping nimbly in front of her, ignoring the frosty, be-Botoxed glare her mother, Tina, shot at me, I continued across the room. I took a quick peek behind me as I did, and was pleased to see that I was being tracked by the lady herself. She stood, shocked, fury stretching her already overlarge eyes, her mouth slightly open, giving her an amusing resemblance to her always slack-jawed beau. I shot her a wink, and pursed my lips, a smile curling the outer edges like a vaude-villain's moustache. She narrowed her eyes at me, and the game was on.

            Finn was at the bar, rolling his eyes, drinking that evening's specialty cocktail - a frozen vodka Mojito. I set down my champagne flute, grabbed his fresh drink, gulped it down, slammed the glass on the bar, and lit a cigarette. Finn cut his eyes at me as he waved the smoke away. I took another drag and blew it out as though I were in a French melodrama, drinking in the room through the huge mirror behind the bar. Hollywood's A-list dotted the expanse of what was beginning to feel like a playing field, twenty or thirty in all, with the rest of the crowd being filled out by the various hangers-on; my A-list was far shorter. I pinned down the bartender with a glance and allowed my fingers to speak over the distance, using a bit of ASL (Alcohol Sign-Language) to order another Mojito neat. This was accomplished by first raising my index finger, then, without changing the orientation of my palm, dipping it down to the glass, and finally, bending all my fingers at a ninety degree angle to my palm and sharply moving my hand laterally as though I was an orchestral conductor cutting off a section of my ensemble or I was feeling for something over a high shelf. She nodded pertly, and as I was returning her nod Finn elbowed me sharply.

"Oh s**t, Courtney, here she comes," he said, and ducked away, slipping backwards along the bar. 

The lady's heavy-footed strut was nothing if not a striking example of verve in motion. I recognized the physicality from her music videos where she would cross the camera's path, eyes locked on the lens, giving so much attitude you'd swear it was for a celebrity-sponsored charity sass drive. 

            Her hair, a mass of expertly highlighted wheat-colored curls, was stacked precariously atop her head, wispy bangs just hiding her sketched-on eyebrows. A skilled artisan could have used her cartoonishly full fake eyelashes to make emo-kid wigs for at least four despairing cancer patients. She was a vision in turquoise and gold; her halter top was burdened with several completely unnecessary straps, and her gold lamé tear-away miniskirt drew an almost unfavorable attention to the booty she had popped and grinded all the way to the top.

"What di'jou say to me, l'il girrl?" Beyoncé asked, laughing throatily in a poor attempt to mask her rage. 

She tossed her head and glared at her entourage and they immediately began chuckling with a fearful obedience. Scanning the faces I could see two of them looking at me, their eyes big and pleading and their smiles sloppily stapled to their faces. One of them looked seriously malnourished, and she kept shaking her head minutely, as if to warn me to back off; though she was smiling, I could see large tears building behind her badly applied CoverGirl LashExact mascara. My heart went out to her and I knew that I couldn't turn back now, even if it were only for this one poor girl who at some point in the not-too-distant past, found herself in one of those pseudocliché wrong place, wrong time' situations.

The other, misread Beyoncé's glare and laughed a bit harder and longer than everyone else, obviously overshooting the mark, until a bored looking girl in the group placed a hand on her forearm. And though she stopped immediately, her overreaching attempt to appease disgusted everyone in earshot. The 'Yonce turned her head to the left (still a good ninety degrees from being able to make direct eye-contact with the poor girl) and pursed her lips slightly, tightening the right side of her mouth the way she did whenever one of her studio's arch-suburban hundred fifty-watt corporate executives attempted an ebonic compliment. When everyone's attention was focused on me again, the one who initially appeared bored looked me directly in the eye and mouthed HELP before flawlessly resuming her bored posture and side-cast glance. The lip that I initially thought was being chewed in ennui revealed a set of bloody teeth when she signaled me. The exchange took less than half a second and if I didn't know the truth about everyone's favorite booty-popping, chart-topping, pseudoactress, I wouldn't have been sure that my eyes weren't playing a trick on me. The tension in the room seemed to double the gravity and make time viscous at best. Through the thumping of the awful club mix that pumped out of the speaker behind me, I could hear my bartendress place my fresh Mojito on the bar by my hand. I purposefully looked away from her to grab my drink, then took my time looking back, knowing that it would stoke her ire to see that I didn't regard her as a threat.

"I said," -and here I took a short but thorough pull from the Mojito, "I know your secret. Soon everyone's gonna know what you are," I said rather matter-of-factly, my voice tinted with the condescending sureness of a brilliant young scientist who is convinced he lives in a world of idiots.

Beyoncé looked around to make sure no one could hear. She came closer, getting right into my face, so close I could see the precise and uniform placement of her pores. They were so evenly spaced that at this distance her skin resembled like a very tightly woven screen. I knew as she moved in for the kill that I had to be quick; "Girl," Beyoncé hissed through clenched teeth, "You're done."

I took a step back, lowering the drink to my side, never taking my eyes off Beyoncé. I could feel the leather padding on the edge of the bar press into my back. S**t. If I let her gain the upper hand, she would kill me for sure. She started to take another step and I used a desperation gambit. My eyes darted to just over her right shoulder. 

            "Get her!", I shouted to no one in particular. 

Beyoncé's head snapped right as she swiveled and dropped into a highly defensive crouch: arms spread, fingers splayed, her expensive fake nails refracting the light like cut glass. I could hear a sound coming from her now, like two cicadas duking it out over whose chitter is loudest.  I saw a flicker of movement and before I knew it, the bored girl had come up from behind and was grabbing Beyoncé’s poodle-do by the top, lip forgotten for the time being. Beyoncé wobbled on one of her spiky heels for half a second before unceremoniously crashing to the ground. Everything was still for a moment as everyone involved looked around; from me to the suddenly un-bored girl breathing heavily and holding onto what looked like a healthy-sized portion of the pop diva's scalp, blonde weave tracks curling and wilting from it like the time-lapse death of a chrysanthemum as the scalp shriveled and turned white; and, of course, down to Beyoncé, whose eyes were locked on the piece of scalp in utter disbelief which was quickly becoming abject rage. Then the scalp was moving, and it took me a second to piece together that it was falling ...because girl dropped it and broke for the door. It hit Beyoncé in the face and the scalp, having been reduced to ash, crumbled. Time rushed up to meet us and it was only then that I realized that the world slipped into half-time for a moment (when time caught up with us I dually realized that I had begun a subtle slide down the bar). Beyoncé turned over to get up, and in doing so revealed what lay beneath her now crumbled scalp. A shiny, slick looking mottled blue-brown dermis was revealed by the new window in her head, a far cry from the bloodstreaked beige of a human skull. The edges of the wound were wilting in the same way that the scalp had, turning white and rolling back on itself, opening the hole in her scalp and revealing more of her inhuman underskin. Surprisingly enough, we had attracted almost no extra attention to our little circle of extraterrestrial discovery.  Everyone else at the party was too wrapped up in themselves or their sycophantic aspirations; all so busy chatting, laughing, and agreeing the night away. 

It was now that the emaciated girl decided to also make a run for it, but Jay-Z caught her arm and held her fast. She spoke up, "B? Girl, what's wrong?" her voice wavering a bit at the end. Beyoncé raised her head as nictitating membranes slid down behind her heavily shadowed eyelids, turning her exaggerated doe-eyes into pulsing pools that bounced opalescent shimmer like an oil slick or a slice of roast beef. The girls began to scream. I looked to the door, hoping that Ennuigirl would have made it out before the impending stampede, but Beyoncé's mother, Tina had stopped her and was leading her back over toward us. Ennuigirl was grimacing and, looking closer I could see that Tina's fingers were buried in the poor girl's shoulder to the second knuckle, and there was a gout of blood running down her arm.       Everyone was now looking towards the cluster at the bar, silent. Someone at the far end of the room began cheering, thinking that this was a continuation of the release party entertainment. The clapping and whistling was picked up by a few more people who couldn't see what was actually going on; those who were closer and could see were rooted where they stood by the twined sensation of sheer horror and a deadly sharp intrigue, the tanginess of which dried their throats and wet their tongues until they were practically drooling on themselves. The cheering from the back of the house stopped when the alien formerly known as Beyoncé stood up, revealing her almost skinless head, the cicada sound rising to an almost improbable volume. I looked toward Tina and Ennuigirl and saw that Tina was almost squatting, face to the sky, chittering back to beat the band. The two together sounded like a charging fleet of bicycles that had a playing card clipped to every spoke. Their noise was immense. Beyoncé grabbed the emaciated girl from Jay-Z, gripped her forearms and quick as a tick bucked the girl toward her as she thrust her own arms forward, bending the girl’s elbow joints well beyond their one-eighty, bringing bone through skin. At the same time, I heard screaming to my left and ducked as Ennuigirl’s right arm came flying over our heads toward the back of the room, misting the gawking moonfaces below it with warm blood. Before the girl’s shocked body could hit the floor, Tina swung her arm in an arc connecting with the girl’s neck to produce the muffled crunch of a fat man hopping on a pillow under which he had concealed a large bag of kettle chips. Everyone in the room moved at once (with the exception of a few unlucky tramplees) as the Beyoncélien dealt a similar swipe to the now screaming emaciated girl. The swipe landed hard, and because the girl was jerking in Jay-Z’s stock-still grasp, it not only broke her neck, but also dislodged her jaw, sending it flying behind the bar with enough velocity to end the life of the venerated picture mirror, who, sadly, after a long career assisting L.A. sharks in picking out the next f**k, fight, or a*s to be kissed, would never aid another celebutot, superstar, or hanger-on in surveying the room at their back.

I looked for the fastest route to the door and saw that it was no use. Destiny’s other children, -Michelle and Kelly, were blocking the east and west doors, respectively, and cutting down anyone who got close with what looked like their necklaces, now aglow with an electric blue light. A man with what was presumably his wife in tow broke through the rim of people by the west door and Kelly brought her laser-whip necklace around and down in an arcing swing that sliced the man neat as a razor through giftwrap from his left shoulder to his right hip. Though I couldn’t hear over the din, it looked like the woman-in-tow screamed and fainted as she was being dragged down by the better half of her (presumed) better-half.

 

            I had sidled a good fifteen feet from the thing the world called Beyoncé when something caught my eye to my right. I looked up to see a body launch from the balcony on the east side of the room. It was a black man in a tuxedo, but something was horribly wrong with the configuration of his limbs. He wasn’t flailing as though he was falling, but seemingly flying, arms held out in front of him, as though he was holding an invisible ball, but his fingers, told a different story. His hands were contorted into claws, fingers spread, ready to grab onto something, then it hit me -- his knees were bending in the wrong direction. With the speed and grace of a jumping spider he landed on a girl who fainted near Beyoncé, crushing her ribcage and rearranging her internal organs so that at least one (although it’s unclear which) was now poking from her mouth. The man stood up, shifting his hips forward to accommodate his reconfigured knees, and I could see it was management impresario Matthew Knowles. He quickly went back to back with his daughter who stood straight up from her crouch and allowed her knees to bend out behind her. He chittered something at Jay-Z who immediately yanked a large silver chain from his neck. 

At this I vaulted over the bar and joined the bartenders crouching on the other side. In a hanging shard of the former Venerated Mirror I watched Jay-Z crack the necklace at his side, as one would a whip, making it glow the same fierce blue as Kelly and Michelle’s. He swung the necklace in a circle around his head, and though he was a good fifteen feet away, the necklace stretched out to lick the wall above the bar where old VM hung, cutting a line clear into the top shelf of the bar. Bottles of Dewars and Beefeater and The Brothers Glen (-livet and –fiddich) exploded on contact with the whip. It was sad to see some of my best drinking buddies go like that, but it gave me an idea. I reached across the narrow aisle, shifting my back against the ice sink, to explore the shelves of unopened bottles down here, and as luck would have it, I was hiding right next door to the Bacardi 151. There were about eleven bottles which I started rolling to the bartenders on either side of me, and they were probably the only two who weren't too shell-shocked to cry or dissent when I told them to toss the bottles over on the three-count. I counted.

            "One."

There were screams coming from all directions on the other side of the bar. Then there was a sudden rise in the chittering as the sound arced high from left to right behind me, terminating in a muffled wet sound like someone dropping a jello mold onto concrete.

            “Two.”

            A body on the floor near the end of the bar began moving and when it raised its head I could see it was Finn. He scrambled toward the nearest bottle, attempting to join us, but the word was already on my lips.

            “Three!”

            About five feet away from one another, crouching on our knees, we three launched six bottles over the bar in the general direction of the freakshow and ducked again. There were tiny explosions as Jay-Z, caught the attack bottles midair with this whip. 

            The sound of a speeding train coming to an emergency stop is a lullaby when compared to the choppy screech that rose. We all clapped our hands to our ears and rolled onto our sides, flinching at the sound, which was compounded by the addition of two other squeals. It was clear we had gotten a hit, and that was confirmed by the sound of the other two bounding in from the opposite end of the room. They landed with twin thumps that reverberated through the floor. I signaled my two accomplices and Finn to scatter now, and as we scurried away on our hands and knees, the laser whip came slicing through the bar and the ice sink in the vicinity of where I had been crouched. It sliced again through another section of the bar, this time directly in front of me, stopping me short. There was a pregnant pause, then the bar was groaning beside me. I shot forward to join the five that made it to the other end right before the chunk of bar that was separated was yanked out with an explosive crash. The screeching had halted and I could feel everyone looking at me, eyes wide with pants-pissing panic. Someone to my right vomited, but I couldn’t spare a glance because though we had a moment of calm, I had to find something to use as a weapon, and fast. 

            Tina came through the brand new gap in the bar, sneering, inhumanly long tongue slathering in and out of her maw, head whipping back and forth, searching. A middle-aged black woman whose designer dress was ripped in more places than it was not, wig askew, walking on backward-bent knees with an arch-predatory posture, hands held out in front of her, fingers somehow elongated (tipped with her deadly fake nails that, in terms of technology, were light years beyond acrylic), and splayed, ready to reach into my insides even more easily than they sank into the bone of Ennuigirl’s shoulder. 

            I snaked my arm under the bar and began to dislodge what I hoped would be my salvation. Tina turned toward our end of the bar and studied us. Someone behind me was crying loudly, he had a very deep voice, which, when paired with the intensity of his sobbing, made it sound like he was mocking someone else’s fear as opposed to yielding to his own. Someone else had the back of my shirt bunched tightly in their hand as though they were hanging over a very deep open chasm and this was the last thing to grasp besides air and eternal sleep. Tina began to approach us slowly, and, being the closest, I began to draw my legs in toward me, prolonging the seemingly inevitable. There was an enormous crash and a bolt of excruciating pain lanced through the arm I had secreted under the bar. I looked up to see that Beyoncé, now almost entirely without her human skin (save for a few patches trapped underneath her nylons), had bounded up onto the bar and was looking down at the small group huddled there, head cocked to the side like a curious dog. Out of nowhere (and it is for this next that I quickly and silently promised to go to church and pray to the patron saint of self sacrifice and lost causes –Jesus, I think), someone from the other end of the bar lobbed a bottle, striking Tina on the back of her neck. Tina and Beyoncé turned on the other end of the bar like gunslingers on the tenth pace and quickly bounded onto the small group of refugees there. I couldn’t watch so I focused all my attention on the work of my now bleeding (and surely fractured arm) under the bar, aiding it with my good arm while the threat was temporarily not so much neutralized as distracted. 

            The canister came free and I gingerly pulled out a minitank of CO₂. I tried to disconnect the hose, but I couldn’t reach the other end of it from my position, and I couldn’t remove the tank from my end of the hose because the lack of a safety valve would render my new weapon little more than a cylindrical paperweight. Despair sucked the breath out of me until I spotted a small serrated knife next to most of a quartered lime in a tray under the bar. I grabbed it and began sawing through the thick rubber hose that stood between me and salvation. I added another name to my “If I Survive…” thank you list.

 

            Steven, who insisted on being called ‘Ven, was the IT guy at Lerner & Rowe, a medium-sized insurance company where I worked as an actuary. He occupied the cubicle across from me, and since the openings faced each other I was, by default, his buddy. Steven was such an IT cliché I won’t even bother describing him. Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice enough guy, but by one o’clock in the afternoon his cry of “Hey Court, check your e-mail,” was like watching a fat, hairy spider spinning down and landing on my neck while I was bound, supine. I hated being his neighbor so much I used to pray for a binary plague or company-wide server crash so I could have some peace. I never let on though, because I, like everyone else there, felt bad for him (which was probably why he spent more time at his desk than before; no one wanted to bother him too much, opting instead to MacGyver their own computer solutions). About ten months back, Ven walked away from a car crash that killed his fiancée, who was perfect for him. I actually got a little leaky when I heard because I remembered her from the company Christmas party the year before. Not only was Ven less annoying when she was around, but I could tell that she would still love the hell out of him if he weren’t, and he treated her like an Elvish princess (or whatever other geektacular creature he liked to imagine she was). 

            Anyway, last summer when the office had a mysterious ant infestation, one of the neater things he showed me was that if you spray a can of air duster upside down, it discharges a super cold liquid that freezes on whatever surface it touches. Ven was using his little trick to keep the ants at bay around his cubicle and it was amusing until he started arranging them into bible-based ant tableaus which he photographed and put on his blog. There was The Sermon on the Mount, which he made with an overturned Dixie cup topped with a frozen ant and surrounded by his kinsmen; there was The Last Supper, which was thirteen ants arranged around a piece of Laffy-Taffy; and finally, Jesus Heals the Lepers, which was a whole ant receiving a line of frozen ants in various states of mutilation, most just missing limbs, some bisected at the thorax, one or two, just heads. Ven had too much time, but I thanked him silently for his twisted inspiration as the minitank finally came free in my hand.

 

            Before I stood I flipped the tank upside-down and untwisted the valve a bit, just to be sure I wasn’t about to walk into a short but painful death. The short, ragged length of hose let out a weak jet of freezing air. I closed the valve and peeked over the bar, knowing I would have to cross the gap, exposing myself to Jay-Z and his laser whip, and what I saw gave me even more hope. 

            The people on the east side of the room had staged a small coup and had taken down Michelle with the aid of a fire extinguisher. Michelle was covered in white foam, and though her feet were planted, her torso was spinning on its axis at the waist, like a G.I. Joe action figure. That was when they went for her legs. Two young men dressed in baggy RocaWear dove in like defensive tackles, each taking a leg, and all three were clearly airborne for a moment before they came thudding to the ground. The only reason that I was able to watch this without being beheaded (or worse) was that Jay-Z was marching in that direction to quash the uprising. 

            Once the two men tackled Michelle, the woman with the fire extinguisher rushed in and began repeatedly driving it into her head. Each impact produced a dull clank and nothing more; no blood, no skull cracking, not even cries of pain. By the time the woman caught-wise, Jay-Z was in proximity and he brought his whip up and around his body in a crossing arc that first took out the woman with the extinguisher, then skidded through the two heroes, and finally, slicing Michelle in half at the chest and sending up a cloud of dark, acrid smoke and shower of sparks. I also saw the source of the screech I heard earlier. The thing formerly known as Matthew Knowles was twitching on the ground, filled with chunks of glass and burnt about the face and chest from the 151 explosion. Not dead, not even close enough to take a chance though I could see that one of its eyes was punctured and an opalescent fluid was leaking from it.  He would have to wait.

            I looked down to the other end of the bar, and much to my surprise, though Tina was still there, gorging on the last of the cater-waiters, Beyoncé had disappeared. A scan of the room found her clinging to the art-nouveau chandelier about twenty feet above the dance floor, gearing up to pounce into the group of erstwhile revelers that had pressed themselves to the far wall. The gods were smiling on me, as taking on two of these things would most likely have resulted in my being wishboned. 

            Staying crouched, I crept past the new opening in the bar, catching spatters of blood as Tina flung away the inedible bits (which were few and far between), dividing my attention between her and Matthew until I was about five feet away from her. I took a quick, deep breath and turned the valve on the tank so quickly I sprained my wrist, causing the compressed liquid carbon dioxide to spray out with an almost uncontrollable force. I managed to steady it only because if I dropped the tank, my card was punched. Tina spun on me and I stepped back, thrusting the inverted tank forward toward her face. She opened her mouth and suddenly all I could hear was my own thoughts. 

            The room was in turmoil, and thought I could vaguely hear my rushed heartbeat and shallow breathing, but I also couldn’t tell the difference between what I felt and what I heard. Then I felt something warm running down the left side of my jaw. I didn’t need to touch it to know it was blood. That f*****g b***h had burst my eardrum, and as this thought occurred to me so did the pain; branching through my brain with wire filament fingers, causing the world to pulse to white with the rhythm of my heartbeat. 

            I lost control and didn’t know what I was doing until after I raised the tank over my head (luckily, it was so close to empty I didn’t run the risk of injuring myself with the spray) and was bringing it down in a two-handed stab, breaking through the frozen flesh of Tina’s face as though it were late winter ice on a pond and depositing the copper nozzle in her brain. Her limbs came to a halt with a mechanical stiffness and she dropped to the floor in a heap. I spun around, just in case Matthew was on the move, but he was still twitching like a dreaming dog. The world was coming back to me now thanks to my overstimulated adrenal gland, and my right ear, though ringing, was beginning to pick up the mayhem around me again. 

 

            The first (though probably least important) thing I noticed was that the song Dirt Off Your Shoulder from Jay-Z’s Black Album was playing. I looked up to the long-since vacated DJ booth and almost got smacked in the face by a swinging microphone hanging down by its cord. It struck me as funny that the music was still going from whatever playlist the DJ had set up, and in the middle of this nightmare, I had to spare a second to laugh. As soon as the laugh escaped my lips, a rapidly dampening alarm went off in my mind because the laugh just wanted to grow and grow, expanding until it pushed me off of the precipice and down, down, down into insanity. I pounded my fractured arm on the bar and though I instantly regretted widening the hairline split in the bone, I drank the pain deeply because it was the elixir that brought me away from that slick edge. I dropped to a crouch to cradle my arm and plan my next move and just as I was about to peek over the bar again, something exploded and I fell backward onto my a*s, wincing at the rapid-fire thudding of metal shrapnel striking the bar.

            I later found out that it was another ambitious pair on the east side of the room (it seemed that the west side was lousy with cowards) who recovered the fire extinguisher that helped to put Michelle out of commission and found another (this room, unlike so many others in LA, was actually up to code) and, in a move that I like to think was inspired by my rum launch, tossed them at Jay-Z from opposite sides. The two tossers were only injured by the blast as they knew what to expect and hit the deck immediately after tossing the extinguishers (I see Jeff and Don, those are their names, at almost every survivors group meeting. Don is expected to walk again in a few months as physical therapy, combined with an already strong will and a nazi of a coach, is helping to buck his surgeon’s prognosis of terminal paraplegia. As for Jeff, he got some awful scars on his back, arms and torso that, strangely enough, draw women like a dropped ice cream cone would draw ants).

 

            Seconds later, once I was sure the shrapnel stopped, I peeked over the bar and saw Jay-Z, dusted with white powder and flat on his back starting to get up, twitching, then laying back down in some sort of short circuit loop. The top part of his face was seared (or sheared) off, exposing a good bit of a dingy metal skull. I thought that if they saw it, the producers of the Terminator films would try to sue this moment for some sort of intellectual property theft. Jay-Z was beginning to recover, each loop bringing him closer to righting himself, so I picked up the microphone from the floor, its cord having been neatly truncated by the rocketing shards of metal, and tossed it at the android, shouting, “Hov! You’re on!”

            His arm shot into the air and plucked the soaring mic as easily as one would pluck an apple from a tree branch. It was Hollywood-perfect timing as he brought the mic to his lips at the top of the second verse. He began to do his show like a wind-up toy. Paying no positronic mind to his horizontal orientation, his feet pistoned and arms swayed as though he was in front of a crowd of thousands. Someone just walking onto the scene would have thought he was demonstrating how to make snow angels in the middle if the dance floor –and that he was mentally challenged.

 

            I crept back across the bar to the group of five that remained huddled there.

            “We’re going to-”

            “-be alright.” Finn finished. I nodded sharply and turned to one of the bartenders who assisted in the 151 assault. 

            “What do you have back here that can be used as a weapon?”

He stared blankly at me for a moment, then shook his head to clear the cobwebs.

            “Uh, I… we, um,”

            I gave him the slow “go on…” nod and he began to nod with me, still stammering. I picked up the knife I had used to cut the CO₂ hose, put it into his hand and closed his fingers around it.

            “Wea - pons,” I spoke slowly, like unto a retard, “More.”

            I looked around the assembly for help, and everyone was watching me, understandably in shock. I thought that the only reason I was functional was the gallon of adrenaline that was slowly replacing my blood. 

            “Finn.”

            He was glazedly staring at the pile left by Tina, but when I called his name his focus snapped to my eyes. I thrust my chin toward the large crying man and the small, slightly older woman who seemed to be hiding under him, peering out from behind his mass as he sobbed and attempted to form a barrier around her. Finn put his hand on the crying man’s cheek and the man jumped, squeezing the tiny woman so that her eyes bulged slightly. 

            “It’s okay. It’s going to be—we’re getting o-out of here.” 

            At this last, Finn’s voice began to shake and I saw that he had begun crying too, although he was quite a bit more composed. The large man turned toward Finn, and seeing his tears, began to calm. There was a tap on my shoulder.

            “There’s something in the register.”

            It was the bartender who made my last Mojito. She raised her arm, seemingly unaware that there was a pointing finger at the end of it, and in tracing the line from her fingertip I saw that the register

(which was switched off given that the evening was comped by the record company) that once stood against the old Venerated Mirror had at some point taken a tumble to the floor and was now almost as broken as its former colleague. 

            I turned the register over and the bartender handed me the key to the drawer as a fresh volley of screams rose from the other side of the room. I could see that Finn had mobilized the large man and the tiny woman and they were rounding up the fruit slicing knives from this end of the bar. I popped the drawer and saw that it was set up for the beginning of a shift stacked with ones, fives and tens. I turned toward the bartender and shrugged, shaking my head; impatience tinting my voice.

            “F*****g money?”

            She replied by reaching past me and removing the cash tray, then fishing around in the recessed area behind it finally withdrawing a tiny .25 caliber gun.

            “Oh,” I said, taken aback as she began to explain, “This is The Guardian. We do a lot of business here, this register alone could see over five thousand in a night.”

            “Oh.” I repeated, this time lifting my eyebrows and drawing down the corners of my mouth, ever so slightly impressed by the figure. I took the gun and turned back toward the end of the bar where Finn, the male 151 bomber, the large man and the tiny woman were all holding kitchen knives. Finn’s was the meanest looking: about eleven inches long and deeply serrated. The tiny woman was holding a paring knife and, though it seemed appropriate due to her size, I took it out of her hand and tossed it over the bar. She looked crestfallen and relieved at the same time. I opened my mouth to explain and she cut me off.

            “I know.”

            That was all she needed to say. The bartendress who showed me the gun perked up.

            “There’s a bat on the other side,” she said nodding toward the mangled corpses on the far end of the bar. I looked at her with raised eyebrows as if to ask Are you sure?, and she nodded once, sparing me a quick glance before returning her gaze to the pile of slaughtered humanity. 

            “I got it.” She said as she began to move. 

 

            She paused quickly before crossing the gap, took a peek out into the room, and drew back quickly with a shudder. She took a breath and crossed the open space, walking in a tight crouch. As she passed what was left of Tina she did her best to flatten herself to the far side of the bar, lest a not-quite-dead arm snake out and grab her ankle. When she reached the far end, I assumed it was under one of the bar sinks there, but she went straight to the bodies and began tossing the pieces aside with all the speed she could muster. Though I wanted to turn away, I felt compelled to watch her though she took the opposite tack, opting to turn her head away as she burrowed through the bits of her coworkers Tina had left behind. As she recovered the bat, lifting it in her blood-slick hands, I realized that she was turned away, not to avoid seeing the pieces (though that might have been a factor), but to keep an eye on Tina’s body. She, like me, had see entirely too many horror films to make the mistake of completely turning your back on the killer you thought was dead or subdued. 

            She began heading back toward us, but paused by Tina’s body. Without warning she swung the bat and began beating the CO₂ tank deeper into Tina’s head. She got in three swings before the bat slipped from her bloody grip and flew at us, landing about a yard away from me and skidding on a diagonal into Finn’s foot. The tiny woman picked up the bat -a Boston Banger, what I assumed was Mason’s less than adequate answer to Dixon’s Louisville Slugger. 

 

            The bartendress looked at us and pursed her lips, either flushed from the effort or blushing from the obvious loss of control, likely a cocktail of columns A and B. She wiped her hands on her pants and came toward us. She paused, then ran across the gap, and just as she was about to reach cover, she fell onto her side as though a carpet was being pulled out from under her. Surprise was still in the process of stretching her eyes as she was yanked through the gap to the other side of the bar. Her subsequent shriek was interrupted by a nauseating crunch. 

            A moment later Beyoncé stood up and strode through the gap, her chittering rising in pitch and volume. She seemed to tower over us as we crouched, and while we were frozen she lobbed the bartendress’ head, (well, everything above the jaw) at us, hitting the stammering fellow next to Finn in the face and knocking him unconscious. Time slowed down again as she began to move and toward us and, having no time to aim, I raised the gun in her general direction and squeezed the trigger three times. Two of the shots landed, one just below her right knee and the other in the torso, where her stomach would’ve been if she were, well, one of us. 

            She faltered for a moment, favoring her hit leg, but didn’t break her momentum. She hurled herself at us and as I prepared to squeeze off another round she lifted from the ground at an angle,  using her left foot to ricochet off the naked wall that was once the domain of the old V.M. and hurtling up over our heads and out of sight, landing on the other side of the bar. We all found ourselves on our backs for a moment after collectively losing balance while tracking the thing’s trajectory. Frankly it was a miracle that no one was injured on one of the knives that Finn and the large man brandished. We heard Beyoncé scream from the other side of the room, a new sound, that of a raptor about to feed.

 

            We four stood and looked out at the room. There were bodies everywhere and only a handful of the living remained among them. Beyoncé had reached Kelly and as she chittered, they both looked over toward us. Jay-Z was still on his back on the dance floor; the song had changed to The Pussycat Dolls’ Don’t Cha and he was still performing, attempting to do body rolls from a laying position and effeminately touching his face as he cooed into the dead microphone. Beyoncé spit some doughy blue goop onto her wounds and spread it with her three-fingered claw as we emerged through the gap in the bar to face the thing down. 

 

            I lead the group with the gun held straight out in front of me, pointed at Beyoncé and Kelly, the others were flanking me at the rear, holding their weapons up in front of their faces almost like a children’s choir holding candles. The small woman stepped forward and stood parallel at my right, a born Sundance Kid if I ever saw one. 

            “I’m Linda,” she said in a voice meant only for me.

            “Courtney,” I replied in kind, and in the corner of my eye I saw her nod sharply, an old west ‘How’d y’do. Finn and the large man had vacated our flanks, passing Linda and I as they cautiously approached the still twitching Matthew Knowles. Beyoncé screamed in outrage but didn’t move as they plunged their knives into him, Finn digging into his good eye and throat while the large man worked on his gut. When they stood, they were covered in a translucent grey fluid that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but blood despite its color and viscosity. In retaliation Beyoncé grabbed one of the survivors, a teenage boy who looked vaguely familiar, possibly the star of some B-rate Nickelodeon program, and held him in front of herself like a human shield. I was fooled into thinking this was the intention, steeling myself to take the shot at the cost of a human life if I had to, when it clawed him across the belly, spilling his intestines down his trousers. Then she reached around and into him, gripping a side of his ribcage in each hand. She paused for a moment as he looked down at the mess he had become, gawping like the stupidest fish just plucked from a pond, then jerked sharply, flinging half his ribs onto the dance floor and the other half into the western exit doors. The boy fell down like a daffodil with a crushed stem, lead to the ground by his too-heavy head. Beyoncé stomped one of its feet then roared and spread its arms in a gesture that clearly said: Your s**t is weak; then it chittered something to Kelly who turned and began walking toward Jay-Z. 

            I foolishly bought their ruse, training my gun on Kelly and firing a shot which bounced off her shoulder. When I looked back, Beyoncé was leaping into the air and over our heads, landing in the DJ booth and disappearing for a second before sending a turntable flying out at us. Linda and I dove in opposite directions and avoided being crushed while Finn and the large man, operating as an autonomous pair, broke for the east exit doors. From my back I pointed the barrel at the dark window of the booth waiting for movement. A chair flew out of the darkness in a blind toss that traveled so wide that neither Linda or I had to consider ducking or rolling. At almost the same time The ‘Yonce leapt again from the sanctuary of the DJ booth to the safety of the balcony where her father had slaughtered all the minglers, and though I had my gun pointed, I couldn’t find the shot quickly enough; lucky, as the intention seemed to be to waste our ammunition. 

 

            The balcony was not only at an awful angle, being almost directly above me, but it was fenced in by wrought-iron bars that would almost surely catch any of my shots. Beyoncé began using leftover body parts as projectiles, tossing hands and foot-filled shoes, and Linda and I ran for cover under the overhang of the balcony. She and I took in the room as Beyoncé began jumping heavily on the balcony’s overhang, her strange chitter rising and falling. 

 

            I first noted that Finn and the large man had split apart, not trying to escape as I initially thought. Finn had reached the east doors and leapt over the still smoking bottom half of Michelle to crouch by her top end and pry the whip necklace from her hand.   The large man was trying to find injured people and herd them to the far end of the room. He was marshalling the limpers and directing them to help the more seriously injured as Beyoncé attempted to pelt them with pieces of the other partygoers. 

            In the center of the dance floor, Kelly was kneeling by Jay-Z. She turned his head to the side and put one index finger deep into his ear, up to the third knuckle. She put her other index finger into his back between his shoulder blades. Suddenly her head snapped to one side and back to center and the areas where she had her fingers began to glow under the skin. The glow grew for a moment like someone was shining a flashlight from inside him, then it flashed twice and went out. Kelly removed her fingers and he sat up.

            Finn shook the necklace at his side and nothing happened. He jiggled it some more and finally, frustratedly cracked it at his side, stiffening his wrist. It began to glow bright blue. Beyoncé began to screech again, and the two android bodyguards looked toward Finn. Jay-Z stood and recovered his whip which had been blown to the edge of the dance floor. Kelly turned and began advancing on us. 

            Finn wielded the laser whip like a cartoon lion tamer, not cracking it for fear of the recoil, but opting instead to swing it in large, overhand loops, scoring the floor in front of him. Finn was realizing that the harder he swung, the longer the whip would stretch, so he walked toward Jay-Z pinwheeling his arm, determined to strike down the rapping robot. Unfortunately, he was outclassed as a padawan to a Jedi, and as Finn attempted a killing blow, Jay-Z executed a maneuver that hooked the ends of their whips together and yanked Finn’s from his hands, bringing the combined whips around and down behind him like a South-Seas poi dancer. 

            As Kelly advanced, Linda choked up on her bat and began making small circles in the air, reminding me of nothing more than Pete Rose in his prime. Then a miracle happened. As Jay-Z snatched the whip from Finn, bringing it around behind him, Finn’s end of the whip, still glowing bright blue, sliced right through Kelly not once, but twice, cutting her off at the neck and knees.   I threw up my hands sending my gun flying to God-knows-where, and Linda dropped her bat to shield her eyes from the huge shower of sparks. Jay-Z, feet planted, spun his torso to face us and see what had happened, and Beyoncé raised the same ear-splitting shriek that her mother had right before I killed her. Linda and I clapped our hands to our ears, looking at each other and smiling briefly, then our focus was stolen by what was happening over Jay-Z’s shoulder. As the android turned back around to face Finn, he had no time to react as Finn ran at him and jumped, feet first, making his body horizontal in the air and locking his knees, driving both heels into Jay-Z’s chest with all the momentum he had behind him. Finn shrieked, having demolished both of his kneecaps, popping them out of their rightful place and sending them to unwelcoming environs in his thighs. The android fell backward and slid about three feet, and as he was starting to get up again, the large man came running in with one of the blessedly plentiful fire extinguishers and hosed down prone robot, paying special attention to its face so it had to scramble to regain its footing. It managed to get its feet underneath it, and was starting to stand when the large man drove his bar knife into the ear where Kelly stuck her finger, snapping off the handle in his zeal. The knife went in about six inches and stuck and after a moment of stillness, Jay-Z began doing the broken robot twitch, standing and bowing low, again and again like an over-compunctious Chinaman. He was also attempting speech as he jaggedly bounced up and down, mismatched song samples flying from the speaker in his throat, up through his nightcrawler-like lips

            "It's ya’ grrrl, B," I recognized this from Crazy In Love, a duet that he did with the beast on the balcony. 

            "Are you--H to the iz-O.K.? The iz-O -K.? H to--z-O.K…”

            It was like a scene from a surreal production of Romeo and Juliet with androids, and aliens …and black people.

 

            Beyoncé flew down from the balcony then, frogstomping the large man, causing a small fountain of blood to jet from his mouth. He landed on top of the fire extinguisher, smashing down the trigger with his bulk, and then was still. The last of the foam-like white powder sprayed at me and Linda, and as Beyoncé turned toward us, snarling, her alien face contorted in a mask of rage that would be unmistakable in any galaxy, the rising powder made her look like a demon so recently out of hell she was still smoking. She screamed- a confluence of many voices (few of them melodic) and assumed a fighting crouch. Linda ran off and neither of us spared her a glance. I was locked in Beyoncé’s opalescent gaze, wondering what it was behind those juddering membranes that made them seethe like maggot-filled balloons. She took a quick step toward me and slipped in the extinguisher powder, landing on her back. I dove for the only weapon in sight, Linda’s bat, and recovered it as Beyoncé stood, chittering deep and low like a dog growling an intimate warning. 

            “Alright.” I said, choking up on the bat and putting the end behind my head. 

            Beyoncé, snarling, launched herself at me and there was a shot. I didn’t even get in a full swing as the alien drove into me headfirst, it’s weight easily twice what you would assume, just looking at it. I was slammed backward into the concrete wall and I heard my collarbone snap. Since I was so close to the wall, the impact forced my batter’s stance straight up into a rigid, full on military Attention. I remained standing …that is until I collapsed a second later, with the wind knocked out of me, spitefully taking my consciousness on vacation with it. Beyoncé and I fell together in what was almost a lovers’ embrace, and not even the adrenaline from my freshly fractured ribs or broken clavicle could keep me awake. Right before I checked out I saw Linda across the room, running toward me in slow motion, the chrome barrel of The Guardian in her right hand glinting so bright it hurt my eyes.  It was all obscured by the wisps of smoke rising from just above the ear canal of the beast beside me. She was calling my name but it was coming out all wrong, all slow and deep and molassesey like a cartoon lummox, or the sound track on a filmstrip right before it breaks. The world went white and the last thing I heard was another gunshot close to my head. Linda wasn’t leaving anything to chance, ensuring that Beyoncé's final overblown run was in the stocking that sheathed her fake human leg.