nicholauspatnaude

Ice Flue Chapter 22

   “Look all we have to do is travel about 30 or 40 miles of battlefield to reach the Voting Palace. It shouldn’t be THAT hard.” Heiferwaith wiped a grimy film from his pink forehead.

   “As if on cue, the thunderous battle behind Heiferwaith slowed to standstill. A number of fearsome Dracun Lizards removed their heads to reveal visages of Ice Princesses underneath.

   “This isn’t a real war. We’re only playing,” said one Ice Princess engaged in ripping out and chewing the intestines from the smashed ribcage of a fallen Dracun Lizard, inadvertently knocking off its mask to reveal the face of another Ice Princess. “But just because it’s a simulation doesn’t mean there won’t be casualties. It adds to realism of event and, trust me, World War 4 is hardly a cheap event to stage!” She continued to chew the intestines as though it were as natural as snacking on dried fruit. The Ice Princess’s movements were robotic. “By the way: you’ll never make it to the voting palace. You won’t even make it past me. My breath is a blended Blood Lust Ice Flue. Your glass baby gave us the juice.” A horrible storm erupted from her bloody mouth, painting the sky with royal blue and purple mouths of hurricanes.   

Tags: ice flue, Nicholaus Patnaude, psychedelic horror

Ice Flue Chapter 21

   Heiferwaith received 99 lashings from the police officer. His soft pink back had been slashed in a nightmarish series of criss-crossings, a hellish map. Just before his 100th lashing, Heiferwaith did squeal.     

   It wasn’t a loud squeal—in fact, one could barely hear it beneath the blitzkrieg the Dracun Lizards had begun against the other Dracun Lizards (both sides wearing the same uniform), yet the squeal was somehow ear-piercing all the same. The squeal was insistently shrill; it could not be ignored even though one had to strain to hear it.

   Heiferwaith began a monologue which could not be heard since his scream continued to deafen like a looped echo.

   Diamonds from the police officers whip were scattered about encrusted in Heiferwaith’s blood. The police officer backed away , frozen animal tongues scantily covering her pubis and breasts.

   A Dracun Lizard cook emerged from the underground with a bubbling steel pot from which rosy-red lobsters, icy blue eels, and banana yellow barracudas leapt. He slipped on a pair of Dracun Lizard eyeballs and spilled the boiling water onto the nearly naked police officer.

   As the police officer’s fair skin melted and burned, Heifewaith crawled away, returning beside Stan, Elizabeth, and Arnie.

   “We have to vote to end World War 4 or we’ll be slaughtered,” Stan reasoned, batting away a flaming dragonfly.

   “I think we should stand our guard and fight. That would be a true rebellion, in the radical sense.” Arnie unrolled and engaged a Sliminator Hypercharge Sprayer from a fallen Dracun Lizard. “Who’s with me?”

   Crickets and spiders crawled through Elizabeth’s fiery red hair. “But let’s just stay and watch our children infest the world, Stan. Your flue and my blood: they made the glass baby. He’s ten times more beautiful than Godzilla. Isn’t he just perfect?” She held Stan’s hand delicately, but Heiferwaith ran between them, breaking the link.

   Heiferwaith sweat and gasped for breath. “Yes, it turns out we’re fully embroiled in World War 4. We all saw it coming, but the Dracun Lizards have finally risen up against the Dracun Lizards. It’s going to be a hellish journey across a hellish battlefield. Impossible probably. But I, for one, am going to risk it to vote to end this war. Who’s with me?”

   Nobody raised a hand.   
 

Tags: ice flue, Nicholaus Patnaude, psychedelic horror

Ice Flue Chapter 20
   After they face-planted onto the battlefield, they sank deep within the muddy soil, only a few feet away from the trenches. Rockets exploded into multicolored lights surrounded by jaguar screams. The moon was set aflame by a rogue torch ripple. Cracked from a split bayonet, the sun leaked molten lava. Tanks manned by stoic androids whipped by as The Elfin Brethren shot arrows filled with Ice Flue.

   Stan gazed in amazement as his invention turned the victims’ bones brittle; their legs cracked, their skin graying then dispersing into the red soil.

   On the other side, purple Blood Lust bubbles floated lazily from toy guns; the moment they popped against their opponents, the Blood Rage went into full effect. 

   “Do you want to make love rather than war?” The police officer, flat on her chest upon a massage table, batted her butterfly wing eye leashes. Sheltered by a five star African safari tent with a full kitchen, wine bar, and a psychedelic jug band performing ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ her pampered air was reinforced by the way she casually plucked the frozen animal tongues from her expensive dress like a girl daydreaming in a field of flowers. 

   Stan, Elizabeth, Arnie, and Heiferwaith, meanwhile, remained face-planted in the mud wearing standard issue World War III fatigues, which was odd since that war had ended more than a hundred years ago.

   “The risotto is a bit oily. The pumpkin spice gelato is simply passable. God, it’s all so depressing having to watch you all be heroes and fight for your lives and whatnot.” The police officer continued to pluck frozen animal tongues from her dress. “Where the HELL is my masseuse? She was SUPPOSED to be here five minutes ago. Is ANYBODY working this shift? CAN SOMEONE AT LEAST BRING ME SOME CUCUMBER SLICES? My crow’s feet need that manna like a baby needs milk. HELLLLO?!?!?” 

   A Dracun Lizard burst from an ant-hill with a pointy skeleton helmet and stabbed Heiferwaith through the throat. Blood spurted onto his boat fangs and trickled down his armored chest. “Don’t forget about the guests. We must perform the Animal Cracker Parade FOR THE GUESTS. Are you ready?” He coughed blood and wobbled.

   Stan crawled to Heiferwaith as rockets exploded in the air, painting the sky like a cake for a devil. “Heiferwaith?” Stan checked his pulse. “Can somebody help?”

   Heiferwaith removed a glass bowl filled with cucumber slices from his chest. “It’s my fault. I stole this from our guest.” Falling blood droplets coated the cucumber slices as Heiferwaith, undeterred, offered them forth. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” He stumbled under the safari tent, nosediving beneath the police officer’s wooden massage table. Heiferwaith’s snout trembled, blood rising in his nostrils. He trembled as he raised the bowl with his last bit of strength.

   The police officer knocked over the bowl dismissively; it smashed on the silk of the safari tent floor. “These aren’t FRESH. And…OH MY GOD. Would you look at that? A HAIR! WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO, BLIND ME?” 

   The sky tinted orange. Rolling waves of purple and blue undulates in the sky. It was like being inside a lava lamp.

   Stan and Elizabeth’s glass baby floated by, its skin like stained glass. Blood Lust and Ice Flue bombs exploded around him as his eyes shifted to beams of silver. He zapped retreating Dracun Lizards indiscriminately. His voice boomed across the battlefield. “If you want this war to end, you’ll have to vote for it.” He flew higher and higher, rushing like a shooting star to illuminate a palace upon green hills above which a crinkled sign read “Voting Palace.” 

   Heiferwaith scrambled across the silk floor of the tent but was soon smacked in the head by an iron urn. “Stop. Please, let me go. I’m going to exercise my right to vote.”

   “Your right to vote?” The police officer towered above Heiferwaith, swinging a whip embedded with hundreds of diamonds. “But you haven’t even earned your right to squeal.”  

Tags: ice flue, Nicholaus Patnaude, psychedelic horror

Chapter 19

   At a long table, Stan, the police officer, and Dracun Lizards were strapped to wooden highchairs. 

   Heiferwaith, wearing a floral print moo moo, carried a steaming silver pot with her hooves. She poured a meager helping in the car dishes in front of all the new recruits. 

   Leather straps were tied firmly around their chests; they could not reach their steaming helpings of stew which smelled of creamy lobster bisque. Since the bounds were all intricately woven together, whenever one person, or Dracun Lizard, lunged forward the bounds of all the new recruits were pulled tighter. 
   Dayglo Arnie and Elizabeth Dracula emerged from elevator doors. 
   Elizabeth wore a short, shoulder-less dress made of frozen bison and human tongues. An enormous gold ring circled around her waist like a belt, a green sparkling emerald covering her groin.
   Dayglo Arnie, still wearing pancaked clown makeup, also wore a tuxedo and a pair of ruby red rabbit ears. Every finger glittered with diamond rings and his boots were made from the faces of two live crocodiles.
   Arnie and Elizabeth theatrically joined hands and hopped on the table, Arnie sweeping her off her feet and kissing as deeply as a vampire. 
   Stan fought against his bounds until all the new recruits were choking. 
   The gasping aroused Arnie’s attention who dropped Elizabeth onto the bowls of lobster bisque. The bowls splashed and rolled and broke against the new recruits as if in slow motion; they lapped up what soaring dribbles they could.
   “Rebellion. Ever heard of it? A lot of you have begun the process, but what’s troubling is that you don’t understand that a rebellion HAS RULES.” Arnie stalked around his captive audience, growling and barring Elizabeth-bloody (from their savage kiss) fangs and overturning the remaining soup bowls into their delighted faces. “Today represents a great union between our country’s only two political parties. You’ve toiled long and hard for this opportunity TO REBEL CORRECTLY. Even when you’re hungry, you must learn to rebel against your own body. Even as you live, you must rebel against your own heartbeat. Even as you die, you must rebel against your own death. Why? To prove your loyalty, of course. To who? THAT IS NOT A QUESTION THAT SHOULD EVER SPEW FROM YOUR PUTRID LIPS! To prove MY loyalty, I will be acting as a display case. I offer you ME!” He seethed, sweat pouring down his cheeks from his enraged monologue. “Elizabeth, can you do the honors?” 
   Elizabeth pulled a rope underneath the table; this removed the bounds of the new recruits.
   Stan finally caught his breath. His hand grazed the black velvet table cloth. All the bowls and utensils had been removed. 
   Dayglo Arnie lay naked on the table, his shelved inner ribcage containing the contents of a well-stocked fridge. 
   It had been days since they’d eaten. The sense of hunger in the room was almost palpable. Stomachs growled like a chorus of desperate amphibians. 
   “Resist. Rebel. I know I can trust you. I know you would never eat the contents of your master comrade. We must die starving together to prove our point. This revolution WILL be televised. I will offer you my blood and body as nourishment but YOU WILL REFUSE. Elizabeth, are the feeds still spoiling to the digital galaxy brain?” 
   “Yes, comrade co-emperor.” Elizabeth’s snake tongue tickled Stan’s chin as cobra heads swam within the emerald on her groin.
   But the revolution was not to be. It was hard to say who did it first–obviously, later, the Dracun Lizards would be blamed, although Stan was almost certain Heiferwaith had removed the first steel box of cold cuts–but the contents of Arnie’s fridge chest were soon being devoured with glee. 
   “No. what are you doing?” Arnie struggled to resist but his fridge body, as if superglued, could not be separated from the black velvet table cloth. “Communists! Fascists! Capitalists! Socialists! Libertarians! Didn’t you listen to any of my 984 recorded gospel lectures which we embedded to your brains at birth? Elizabeth, I’m sad to say the time has come to unleash them from the umbrella of our rebellion.” 
   Elizabeth pressed a button beneath the table, raising the roof of the spaceship room to reveal a canopy of stars. 
   Arnie wept. “You’ve failed me, new recruits. You couldn’t even manage to revolt against the wretched needs of your bodies for a single meal. And so now,” Dayglo Arnie continued spreading his arms like a hawk as he separated from the table cloth with a ripping sound and the new recruits floated high above the spaceship before slowing and feeling an intense painful pull downward, “the time has come for us to go to war.”

Tags: ice flue, Nicholaus Patnaude, psychedelic horror

Ice Flue Chapter 18

   The ironic thing was that Stan had ordered a rope ladder just last week.

   As they watched the condo burn, Stan laced an arm through Elizabeth Dracula’s violet silk shawl, failing to find flesh or even skeletal limbs. 

   Cheryl Chillingworth screamed while burning alive, still trapped inside the condo, her horrified visage pressed against the living room window as flaming clouds burst from her ears.

   Their glass baby hovered above the condo as the purple fluid of Cheryl’s Blood Lust serum and the blue fluid of Stan’s Ice Flue throughout his limbs, crossing but never intermingling as if confined to tubes. 

   “There wasn’t time,” Stan explained. “And I’d ordered a rope ladder just last week. Only I hadn’t any time to install it.”

   Elizabeth Dracula pulled up on the motorcycle, her head atop a seemingly empty purple silk sheet. “You don’t need to explain anything to me.” She revved off down the highway, passing billboards.

   As she rode more recklessly, her silk purple cape flew off, revealing her ghostly body to be covered in icy spiderwebs and frozen animal tongues. 

   At the next billboard, Dayglo Arnie and the police officer lunged out, sweeping Elizabeth and Stan into a vast alien spaceship, on the floor of which 20 Dracun Lizards clutched their broken kneecaps, howling in pain.

   “Welcome back, new recruits. You’ve been rebelling well,” Dayglo Arnie said, mashed up crickets dripping from his fangs. He offered a live one to police officer from a red popcorn bag. 

   “Can’t they both be my bunk mates?” The police officer opened its iron jaw, chomping on the remaining live crickets. 

Tags: ice flue, Nicholaus Patnaude, psychedelic horror