8
Jerry The Steampunk Elf
If the state of Alabama were a stripper, Brookwood Mall would be tucked away in the green cleft of her bosom like a five dollar bill she didn't consider worth the effort to remove. The sun shone softly down upon the lattes and shopping bags of bustling consumerism as people meandered from shop to shop trading worthless currency for even more worthless status symbols. Here a homophobic alpha male could exchange a week's salary for an ugly shirt with the name of a homosexual on the breast or taunt a cluster of goth kids as they smoked their daily quota of clove cigarettes. One such group loitered next to the ramp for lavender level parking, harassing the less morose customers in between bouts of being harassed themselves, when they suddenly found themselves more than usually swathed in the crepuscular habiliments of night.
Far above them, Jerry the steampunk elf squinted into the sun and coughed. “Goddamn sun,” he said steering his mighty brigantine forty-five degrees to the right. He stared around the white dot that had been seared into the center of his vision and admired his handiwork. It was as fine an airship as ever he’d seen and he’d built every inch of her himself. The bleached bones of his past lovers had proven to be a fine choice for building materials. They were light, free, and surprisingly easy to fit together in imaginative ways.
He looked over the rail at the goth kids below and allowed a generous glob of snuff juice to dribble out onto their heads. He was very proud of his aim. In all the land of Birmingham there were none so accurate as he from three thousand feet in the air. He sniggered as he watched them try to clean the stinking brown fluid off of their ridiculous accessories.
“Well, time to get back to work. Those cabinets aren’t going to build themselves.”
Steam hissed out from around the large metal wheels as the door of his playroom rolled open. A new Rasputina track began to play on the surround sound giving his entrance a deliciously dramatic twang. He couldn’t have timed his entrance better if he’d tried. Everything was working out so beautifully today, he was beginning to think that he should have gone to Vegas instead.
He was sure that Darla was impressed, but it was impossible to tell as she had cultivated a look of permanent boredom over the years. She had even looked bored when he was kidnapping her from the parking deck at the mall. Even tied to a thick wooden table on an airship made of bones, her hair, her clothes, her demeanor; it was all so perfect, so practiced that she might have been posing for the cover of a Bizarre Magazine. It was so fucking sexy the way she lay there relaxed in her rubber nurse outfit even as the ropes turned her hands the color of her eyes. It was a terrible waste to kill her, but he had to do what he had to do. He shifted uncomfortably in his piecemeal Sergeant Pepper outfit, feeling like a member of a shabby garage band caught in the electric gaze of a professional.
“Untie me now and I promise to kill you quickly,” she offered, tossing her bangs in defiance.
He stared at the slightly melting snow cream of her breasts, which he’d had the foresight to flop out while she was still unconscious, and smiled. He’d done everything that he could to set the scene for her demise. He’d wanted to put her in her place, but it appeared that he would have to try a little harder than he’d thought. It was truly a wonderful day in his neighborhood.
He forced his eyes to meet hers and advanced with a crazy half grin. “I love a girl with a good sense of humor,” he said, sounding much less confident than he had hoped. The grin felt stilted and lame and he made a mental note to practice leering in front of a mirror for an hour or so each night until he got it right.
She laid her head back on the table and asked, “What the hell do you want anyway?”
“I thought that would be rather obvious. I’m going to fuck you, kill you, take your job and use your bones to build a nice little cabinet for my kitchen.”
She laughed scornfully and then focused her piercing gaze on him in a way that made his ears tingle all the way to their pointy tips, “I told you it’s nothing personal. We just aren’t hiring right now. You can’t seriously be doing all of this because I won’t give you a job.”
“Don’t be silly. Of course I do. See, ever since I was a boy I’ve dreamed of being the coolest elf who’s ever lived and the only way that I can achieve my goal is to work at Hot Topic. Your products are expensive and I’ll never be able to buy enough of them to achieve my goal without an employee discount. If you won’t hire me, I’m sure the next person will. They do have a job opening up. If they hire somebody else I’ll just have to make another opening. It’s only a matter of time before I have a small army of adoring emo kids who worship me as a god.
“So, you see, it’s nothing personal. Your death is just the first step of my plan,” he said sarcastically as he snatched a meat cleaver from a nearby table and brought it down quickly, severing her right foot.
She hardly seemed to notice as it rolled off the table and came to rest in the shag with a soft thump. Rather than screaming or begging as his victims had in the past Darla stared deep into his eyes with a silent wolfish smile. Jerry was astounded by her demeanor, but not so astounded as he was when the stump began to pulsate and twitch, eventually swelling into a whole new foot. He stared stupefied as she wiggled her brand new toes at him and laughed.
Joy slowly carved itself across his face as he jumped up and down squealing like a happy piglet. “Fuck yeah, screw the cabinets I’m gonna build a whole new wing out of you. That was awesome. Do it again?” he demanded as he severed her foot a second time.
Darla seemed to be enjoying herself even more than her captor. At first Jerry thought that he had finally bagged himself a real live masochist, but he began to worry when the ropes fell away and she began to rise like a large busty penis slowly becoming engorged with blood. Finally, she opened her mouth and hissed through long pointy incisors which he could swear hadn’t been there before.
“Whoa, you’re a vampire?! That is so hot!!”
It was obvious that she was not in a forgiving mood, so he fought the urge to lick her and instead ran into the conveniently located panic room which he had originally intended as a pantry. As he watched the large metal door slowly hiss shut, he began to wonder if it wouldn’t have been more practical to go with the electric model.
His sense of aesthetics would surely have been his undoing had Darla not been equally addicted to melodrama. Instead of moving at the speed of light or even running she chose to build the tension by floating slowly and confidently towards him. They both knew that it wouldn’t take her long to find a way in to a room that was made out of bones and Elmer’s Glue.
Inside the room, Jerry was hurriedly lighting candles and putting the finishing touches on his altar. Paranoiac that he was, Jerry kept a special room prepped for the invocation of Satan for just this very occasion. You never know when you’re going to need to call up a demon and Jerry’s Elf Scout training had not fallen on deaf ears.
He dragged the spare virgin out of his cage and cut out his heart while chanting a passage from the Necronomicon. Soon the zeppelin began to shake and a set of curly black horns began to rise from the center of the pentagram. His grandma would have been proud to know that he had made such good use of the Books-A-Million gift card which she had given him for Christmas.
“Who dares disturb the slumber of the dark god?” asked the devil in a cheesy synthesized growl.
To the right of the big metal door a section of the wall tumbled inward and Darla floated in slowly, arms at her sides and looking bored as ever. Satan stood in the center of the room tapping his hoof impatiently, waiting for a response. Upon seeing him, she paused and cocked her head to the side as if to ask what the hell he was doing hanging out with a dork like Jerry.
Jerry smiled confidently and pointed at her. “Hi, my name’s Jerry. Sorry to bother you, but I need you to get rid of her for me. She’s a vampire.”
“You don’t say,” Satan said sardonically. “You called me here for this? I’m Satan, king of hell. You could have gotten one of hell’s janitors for this. What were you thinking?”
“Sorry, I didn’t really have time to think about who would be best suited for the job. I had a fucking vampire on my heels. You got your virgin. What more do you want?”
“I want to not be bothered by every pissant with a Books-A-Million gift card. Screw this, I’m going home. And I’m taking you with me, jackass.” Satan said as he scooped Jerry up in his giant fist. He winked lustfully at Darla but seeing that she was unimpressed by his magnificent goathood disappeared back through the portal.
Darla shook her head in disgust, “Sometimes I really hate my job. Shit, I have to do inventory today. I should have just let him kill me.”
There was a loud crunching noise as the ship broke in half. Plummeting through the calcium confetti, she could see that the teeth of a skyscraper had torn into the belly of the ship like a large block of shredded wheat. The dread of inventory continued to loom overhead as she fell, but she felt slightly better when she saw that she was going to land on an unsuspecting group of skaters. She hated skaters. They were all so damned cliché.
S.T. Gulik may have died along with James K. Polk in 1849 while trying to save the world from an invasion of extra-dimensional, racist cauliflower, but that didn’t stop him from going on to write several novels and screenplays including but not limited to “Muffy: or a Transmigration of Selves,” “For Fear of Poking One’s Own Eyes,” and “Chakra Kong part 1: The Exquisite Sound of One Hand Falling Off a Turnip Truck.”
