The following manuscript arrived via pineal gland:
Budd Kaiser sipped tea while sitting on his front porch. The evening colours were in the sky and he had a couple of days off. His cell phone was on the porch rail and a clove cigarette was in his mouth. All was well, all was good. In his jacket pocket was a .22 handgun loaded with a six round clip, he never left the inside of his house without it, what's the point? Some whiskey was in his freezer and he had rented a couple of action movies earlier from the video rental outfit down the street. As he flicked his butt of his smoke into his yard he wondered what the others were up to tonight down at the lodge.
"You don't get fifteen minutes any more, you only get four and a half," he said. "Four times a day."
Ferocious, teeth like blinding. W sahil Hamu Bara/unliso Lunsisno Peroxide Lungerfish. Wererabbits. You need a picture? Frame. Fream Refam Feram. Armfe. A few moments later. The gun exploded. Mirrors. His mind idled, thoughts never fully forming to create a connection.
In response to these idle thoughts, his cellphone rang.
It cut a coherency out of the mental babble. Budd flipped open the cell and stared at the name. "Oh, this can't be good." He spoke, before pressing 'talk.' It was the Lodge. They'd probably have orders.
"Budd." He's staring out into the Seneca Highlands, seeing a wisp of smoke condense and drift north from a camp fire deep in the woods. "Man, I've got drinking to do and the back history of Kurt Russell's career to watch. Why you calling me in on this gig?"
"Sorry Budd," The voice said. "You've got three days." It paused. "You were the second we called you know. The first is.. well.. she's lost inside her unconscious mind. Retrieval is your secondary objective." The voice cut off in a frenzy of static.
Should have never signed up for the coast guard in the first place=Budd thought to a squirrel. Nuts. What smells? Nuts. MANMANMAN=Squirrel intentioned. Chittering, the squirrel bounded off through the overgrown lawn. Budd reached into his jacket and drew out the .22, placed it on the porch rail. This gun was a gift from his uncle Bernie Chuks. Chuks had fought in the psychic wars and had been left with a permanent migraine that this very gun had finally cured. Bernie had attached his suicide post note to the gun before firing it. The most important part of the postnote was leaving Budd the pistol. Part of Budd hated the system of Control he was sworn to protect, and this little family heirloom was his way of getting out of the system forever perhaps, at least for this life. Budd probably didn't have the mental energy it would take to pull the trigger on himself, people don't realize how much brain tissue must be pushed through for such an act, hell otherwise, we would all be dead by now....
Some people have spiritual beliefs, Budd has physical beliefs. He believes that their is a intelligent force, somewhat anyone behind everything. He calls it the Great Alarm. Meanwhile she rests in her catatonic slumber. Her brainwaves in low delta, only occasionally rising up to a dream filled theta state, as signalled by her spastically twitching eyelids. She has known inner eons of the dreamlife. She rests like sleeping beauty, every wrinkle in her life smoothed out, every muscle relaxed to a degree that a housecat would envy. She has escaped the great alarm, at least for now. The universe surely will not allow it for too much longer...Budd believes that you hear the great alarm soul splinteringly loud when you die, as a reminder that it still owns you. Connie Sativa lay on her green satin couch in a motionless dance. A peace so deep, so thick, it could be perceived by waking observers as a softening of the ambient light around her.
The squirrel climbed the side of Budd's house to escape its current victimizers, four kids with handfuls of rocks. A couple dusty grey stones thumped off the wall near the squirrel as he deftly made his way to the tile roof and across to the other side, one final rock whizzed by and thumped off a car parked on the other side, setting off the car alarm. The two men that had been getting out of the astro van parked along side the road got back in quickly and drove away. The man driving was bald and pug nosed. He lit up a herbal cigarette silently while the passenger fumed in frustration. "We almost had him, man, fucking kids." This passenger had a three piece suit going on, and a backwards baseball cap that read "Oil for the Loyal." He held a crossbow in his lap, loaded with a syringe. "That's the shakes of it, we will get him next time," the driver told the man beside him as he pulled into traffic and faded into the visual distance. The squirrel watched them go with beady glinting eyes. "Yeah, Chuck, that indeed is the shakes of it," the passenger agreed, putting the cross bow back into it's case. "But those psychics have pineal glands just dripping with booty". They kept driving, and the squirrel sprinted down a tree and sniffed the spring air. The boys that had been tormenting the squirrel where now chasing a stray cat with desperate rocks flings.
"hostiles, wicked hostiles," thought the cat. "Want to bite, want to rake."
The cat ran under a parked car and alongside a tulip patch to avoid the off chance that one of those rocks might hit him. Around a house and across a empty cigarette pack strewn back alley and the scarred up yellow tom cat with the human name of Tantra was safe in the shadows, licking himself a bit to show that it was no thing.
So there is Connie Sativa, still resting, drawing mana from the dreamplanes for food, her eyes flicker spastically. The beauty of those storming eyelids is enough to make one believe in various brightly painted pagan gods. A post-post modern sleeping beauty chasing the wish of her subconsciousness.
Beside her, a comic book lies open, its pages flipping past, the hyperglyphics of each page a new reality one shift in a frame of reference away. In her dream's eyes she saw Budd Kaiser driving down the road singing along to soulless guitar rock, and the comic book page flips and Budd is driving still but now he is wearing a pink fuzzy jacket, and he is listening to a self improvement audiobook. Another page flips and he is still driving, singing along with soulless guitar rock, but now he was talking on his cell phone and a pretty girl in a flashy sports car was passing him doing fifty in a forty zone and talking to someone on her own cellphone , and the pages kept on flipping... Budd now is driving and listening to conservative talk radio, a suitcase in the front seat beside him carries secret documents. Budd as passenger of a hippy van, he has long curly hair and clear lipstick. Budd driving along nervously, visibly twitching every time he steps on the gas pedal. Budd amusing himself by sticking his flat hand out the window and making airplane noises, then smashing it into a large building (his antenna). Budd bicycling with any other squirrels watching him and chattering as he pedals on by. Budd sitting in his car that isn't even cranked and pushing pedals and turning the wheel while making appropriate sound effects with his mouth.
Connie's rest is disturbed by sound of a butterfly's wings on the breeze. It sounds unnatural to her and she gives it the evil eye as only she can. She thinks to disarm it to save herself some trouble later, after it has had a few drinks. As she starts to move, her equilibrium goes haywire and she falls to the ceiling. She writhes in pain as all of her nerve synapses fire at once and then goes limp, banging her shin on a wall sconce on the way by. Her eyes roll back into her head as she goes into a dreaming wake. Budd sitting at a round table playing cards with several suits and ties, no people, just the suits and ties. A squirrel grasping one blade of grass in its little paws. Two men climbing the flagpole in front of the Oil for the Loyal headquarters. Budd grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her with soybean hands. A ghostly giant face speaking in tongues. An elderly ape with lower back pain and an enlarged prostate. A biscuit floats in the river like it has something to say, but is too shy. Savage flowers from another planet. The lost chord. The mind of time.
Budd pulled up to the lodge. He stared at the ominous grey building and asked himself the question, "Why me?" He killed the headlights and locked up. It was a long walk down that sidewalk to the lodge, and the sunlight blared so bright.
The lodge was a squat building. Fifteen feet from the edge of the driveway, the door was open. A man wearing a funny looking apron was waiting, holding a sword. It was an old, rusted sword, and had seen combat.
"Hey, Tyler," Budd says, feeling skittish. "What's all the fuss about?"
"Don't rightly know. I just got a call and he said to watch my back and then he hung up. I'm not sure what to look for but I wanted to be ready so I started working on my blade".
"Whatever. I just need to come in for a few minutes and chill out some. I feel weird".
"Go into the fourth office, they are waiting for you". Budd just nodded slightly as he pushed open the red door, he had already been auto-identified by the retina scan for three blocks away. As soon as Budd was out of sight, Tyler went back humming to himself and scratching his sack. Tyler produced a small baggie of coarse brown Kanna plant material. He spilled out a small pile onto the back of his hand and he railed it up his nose. Tyler gasped with pleasure as the happy centers of his brain where tickled. Tyler repeated this a couple more times with a roguish look of ecstasy. The stuff acts quick. Budd walked down the long hall. Doors lined each side. One of the doors ahead opened and a tall redneck with styled beard stepped halfway out and gawked at Budd, quickly disappearing back inside the door. Budd realized he was carrying his sawed off shotgun from the car.