Reality Testing - Confetti

Confetti falling, on a cool autumn afternoon. Standing on the podium with my grey suit, I felt that life was a hellish prison that I would never escape from. A feeling of fear was in the air, and you could feel it as intensely as you would a hand on a hot frying pan. It was certainly tense.
I thanked them as they handed me the trophy. I waved and smiled, with the trophy in one hand, and the other hand waving back and forth at the crowd, even still, a part of me knew something bad was about to happen. I stepped off the podium, after giving my speech, which I don't remember at this time, and I looked at the statue they built of me which was in the lawn off to the side of the crowd.
The statue was gold, a huge replica of myself, erected on the bay of the city. Just beyond the statue, in front of us, was grass, a walkway going through the park, and a line of trees just before the fence that guarded pedestrians from falling to their death, 40 feet down to the deadly water of the bay, far below.
On this beach though, besides the lavish presentation of an award ceremony, for such a forgettable hero like myself... I only saved several dozen children from being raped, stopped a bunch of car chases, killed some drug dealers... I was a great cop, but somehow getting an award like this was just not enough. And I had a drug addiction, which was not only a contradiction, it was expensive.
All I could think about was doing drugs, while I watched the family play on the swing set in the sand nearby. Overlooking bay, the sunset had a thickness and an energy that was almost like the spectrum of a rainbow. Color was saturating everything; giving it a feeling like what music would be if you could see it like color and light.
People were just color.
Everyone started wandering away after the award ceremony. Cars hit some, some made it home safe. Others just didn't care and disappeared.
Well, mostly scattered all over the beach were bums. Homeless people. They were everywhere with the most disgusting appearances. Arms hanging off the limbs, and limbs hanging from their decaying bodies. Blood pouring out of the wounds that were sliced all over their bodies. They looked more like zombies than homeless people, and in fact they were. The homeless are so terrible and dangerous that they eat normal, working, rich, good people - alive. The homeless just wander around that park and eat people like zombies. It happens much more often than it should.
"How long are you going to stay here?" he asked me.
I looked at him, the chief of police.
"Just long enough to get myself together. It's just hard, you know... going away after so long, after all of that work I did, as a police officer of the law."
He looked away in an understanding way.
"Well I'm going away now. Good luck."
He disappeared, but the interesting thing is that I pulled out my pistol and began shooting some of the homeless people in the head. Bam.
Bam! Bam!
I killed so many of those zombies. They were eating little babies even! And their moms, and even the guy selling ice cream at his ice cream stand. I shot a bunch of zombies on my way over to the ice cream stand and he was dead.
The ice cream vendor was lying there in a pool of blood. I shot the zombie that was eating him in the head.
"Haha," I said.
I took some ice cream and said, "Don't mind if I do! Hahaha."
I licked my ice cream as I walked down the street, with my trophy in my hand, and decided that I liked ice cream better than my trophy, so my trophy disappeared. I forgot about it.
I saw one bum, but he wasn't a zombie. I put my gun up against his temple while I licked my strawberry ice cream. I was leaned over him, licking my ice cream.
When I asked him, "Do you know anything? I'm a police man and you're supposed to tell me everything because you're bad, and I'm good."
I could tell he was obviously mentally disabled. He had brown splotches all over him and long blonde hair. He looked like he was half dead and his arms were like a manikin’s. He looked totally fake. Plus he just looked confused and drugged out.
He was obviously on drugs. I hate bums.
I cocked the trigger on my gun.
"Tell me a mystery! Tell me now or you die!"
He looked even more confused and cowered in fear as he made that sound that old guys make when they cower in fear.
It sounds like, "Huugwwwaaauuuuhhh...""
"There's some sort of girl. She's lost."
"How do you know this?" I demanded.
I pointed my pistol in the air and shot it four times. That took the rest of my bullets away so I reloaded them while I listened to him speak. I was doing that, while the camera looked at both of us while he talked.
"If you go home, I'm sure you'll get attacked for knowing something about her disappearance, now that I told you. The bum community has a way of leaking everything to everyone."
"But you're the only person that knows that I know that little girl is missing!"
"Right, but this is a dream."
"Right..." I said, as I lit a cigarette and shot my ice cream cone so that it flew 29 feet and broke against a brick wall, splattering everywhere.
We were in this underground place. Sort of I think, I guess.
"Anyway, I think I'm gonna go home. I'm hungry. Plus, you're boring."
"Ok. I hate you," the bum said.
I raised my pistol and shot the bum in the forehead, and as his blood splattered, I walked away towards my apartment.
I got in my car, and I realized that it was a ten fourteen.
I picked up the radio in the cop car.
"Hello? Base?"
"Yes! This is base!"
"Is there a ten fourteen?"
"What's that?"
"Something bad going on."
"Yes! And we need you, specifically!"
"Awesome, when should I come over?"
"How about, soonish?"
"Great. I'll be over there after I go get high."
"Ok, bye."
"Bye."
I lit a bowl, and got high. I love smoking drugs, even though I'm a cop. That's so contradictory. How hilarious.
I walked into my apartment. I was really stoned, so I wasn’t alert enough. The attacker waiting for me had a long knife, and he was around a corner that was hard to see from my front door. I walked in, and rested against a wall near the entry door, which meant that I didn’t see the guy waiting for me.
The bums had already let all the crime lords and bad people in the city know that I knew the girl was missing, and now I was part of the action story plot. I was thirsty after my journey to my apartment, so I went to get some orange juice. That’s when the attacker lunged around the corner and put the knife to my throat.
His face slowly emerged from the shadow of the hallway. The blade of his knife was already in contact with the skin cells on my throat. A little blood was already beading along the edge of the blade.
Slowly, slowly, the light made his nose, and then his lips and upper brow appear in the semi light.
His flesh hung off his face, dead and decaying with blood dripping off... like ketchup off a hamburger. His face smelled good enough to puke up.
“If you go after the girl, you die.”
“This is my home!” I said, looking down at the knife around my throat.
“It’s my home now. I have a knife around your throat.”
“Oh ya?
“Ya.”
“Well I have legs, and I can kick you in the crotch with them.”
Then he kicked the man in the crotch, kicked the knife, and it flipped in the air. He caught it and killed the bad guy.
He grabbed the bad guy, who was screaming for his life, he grabbed this worthless assassin and threw him through a window, and a big jagged shard of glass lodged through his whole torso and he fell to the street.
The first thing to impact was the glass so it shattered into even more pieces, which cut his body into chunks. Some of the chunks flew at people on the sidewalk, but one thing was for sure, the assassin was dead.
“Sucks to be him,” he whispered to no one in particular out the windswept air. The breeze was blowing by, warm and reassuring. Warm air flowing from the zombie infested beach by the bay.
So many innocent babies having their skulls bitten by zombies every second.
But our hero cop. The man who just retired and had a trophy, now had to finish one more assignment before he could put his mind at ease. He knew he had to find the girl.
But what is our hero’s name?
“Bruce.”
Bruce was our hero’s name.
But the leak got out in the bum world about the murder he’d committed, and soon Bruce was walking down the sunrise-lit avenue the next day, thinking about his next move.
He knew his main clues were that a girl was missing, and that he’d killed a bum. He took his chances, and guessed that finding the girl was more important than anything having to do with bums.
He decided this mostly because girls are cool, and bums are gross.
He went to up-town. He drove in his police cruiser, and parked a few blocks away.
He walked to the mafia base. Gems were everywhere. Asians were standing around. They all had tattoos and looked like they’d kill him any second.
“Hi my name’s Bruce,” he said, with a smile as he extended his hand to one of them.
“What brings you here? You don’t belong here, pig.”
“I killed a bum cause he wouldn’t give me any info.”
“Really? You know who did this?”
Everyone in the run down shack, up the hill from the luxurious, rich downtown areas, in this ghetto war zone, Bruce was alone. Bruce was a lone cop with over 20 guys pointing dangerous weapons at him.
“I killed him.”
The Asian guy thought for a second.
“You get one chance right now to tell me why you killed him. He was one of our gang. Speak right now, and if I don’t like what you say by the end of your throat making sounds, I’ll order all these soldiers to fill you with metal.”
The Asian guy sat down in a chair and started eating some yummy munchies.
“Can I have some of those?” Bruce asked, jokingly.
The gangster took offense.
“...After you answer the question.”
“He said I’d die if he leaked the info to the rest of the gangs in the community. I’m an underground cop. I’m always susceptible to this stuff.”
The gangster leaned back, stroking his black beard with his dirty hand, as his soldiers stood around the locker room, with their AK-47’s looking tense as Bruce.
“So you killed him in self defense?”
“Yes?”
“Why? You retired today. I read it in the newspaper. Why seek this girl?”
“She’s special to me.”
“Why?”
“She’s my last case.”
The gangster looked down as he thought about what to say next.
“The underground bums are the true power behind the underground of this city. Connecting to this base is an underground network of tunnels. The girl that’s been kidnapped has been so for reasons I’m unaware of. All I do know is that she is in these tunnels. And I also know that you’ll die trying to get her back.”
Bruce thought about this.
“I’m going in. Can you provide me with firepower?”
“No. You find that on your own. From now on you’ve got nothing to do with me. You killed a friend of mine, and I forgive you because it was self-defense. But beyond that, I owe you nothing. Go do whatever the hell you want, just never cross paths with me again. Or you’ll pay the price.”
Bruce gathered himself for a bit, and left the jewel decorated palace, with the automatic rifles laying all over lush Indian pillows made from fine purple and gold linens and silks.
A hallway led out of the back of the grotto of the Asian gangsters. In this part of the city, there was apparently a tunnel that led to the truly evil side of society.
Bruce imagined the waterfront where he’d been earlier, and then visualized how far across town he was, going down a tunnel he never knew existed, just for a lost girl.
He thought about that lost girl, probably lost and lonely.
“I’ll save her,” he thought to himself.
Long corridors and stairs led lower and lower below the sewer facilities of the city. Soon Bruce had to pull out his flashlight. He had his pistol ready too, and soon homeless started showing up faster than he knew what to do with.
Some lay sick on the edges of the underground walkways, but others meandered slowly towards him making nonsense sounds. Their arms stretched, and slime dripping from their skin, they terrified him so much that he pulled the trigger without even thinking.
Corridor after corridor, turn after turn, Bruce encountered these infected, sick bums lying everywhere. The zombies kept coming.
Blow a head off.
Blow an arm off.
Blow another head off.
It seemed to go forever, until Bruce saw light. The bloody corpses lying around him, he heard the trickling sound of water, and the glint of far away light.
He began jogging, and at the end of the tunnel arrived at a sort of wooden spiral staircase.
The staircase was huge, like big Ben. It resembled a seashell the way the stairs went up the sides of the shell shaped structure.
From behind Bruce one bum snuck up on him, and sliced him on the cheek.
Bruce whipped around and tried to fire, but his gun was out of ammo. He pulled out his knife, and with greater agility, lunged forward and stabbed the zombie hard in the gut.
The zombie seemed unfazed for a second and Bruce had trouble making his escape after the attack. But the zombie fell, dead, and Bruce felt the cut dripping blood down his cheek.
He picked up his knife, and the zombie’s, and noticed the zombie’s knife had dry blood on it.
“What if this dry blood is a zombies and I get infected too?” he worried to himself.
For an instant, Bruce realized that he might be dying no matter how this turn of events unfolded. If the blood on the zombie’s knife had the zombie’s blood on it, Bruce had a matter of time before he became of one them. He knew he had to hurry to save the girl.
He thought about the bum he’d killed and regretted not getting more information from him sooner.
Then, as he was sitting on the grimy stairs of the spiral staircase, a cool wind filled the air.
He sensed someone behind him.
“Hello!” she said. She was a cute young teenager, with reddish-orange hair and yellow and green eyes. Everything about her screamed abnormal.
“What the hell are you doing here, and can you help me find this girl?” Bruce asked, frustrated. His face was sitting in his grimy hands as the remnants of the zombie survivors slowly clawed their way along the bloody floor towards them from hundreds of feet away.
Seres turned and fired her pistol, hitting one directly in the head further away than Bruce could see.
He took in the reality of her shot for a second.
“That was amazing.”
“And so’s this. I’m gonna tell you exactly where your little kidnapped princess is. How does that sound?”
Bruce looked skeptical.
“At what price?”
Seres smiled.
Bruce studied her cute face for a moment. Her eyes and mouth were squished into an irresistible face that nobody could resist.
“Ok, where is she?” he asked.
Seres turned her back and started walking down the staircase.
“She’s at your mother’s apartment. They’ve got her hostage, too now.”
“My mo-...” Bruce said, as Seres caught him off guard again.
Pointing a huge rifle at Bruce she commanded, “Do not go into your mother’s house. You arrive in front, in you police car, in 30 minutes. You are senior officer on the investigation, so you’ll take control of the scene that will be there.”
“Is that all you’re going to tell me?” Bruce asked, as he impatiently paced back and forth along the top of the spiral stairs.
“No. There’s one other thing. If anyone tells you that you’re dreaming, they’re lying.”