The Fifteenth Delusion

Free short story: Origins of a Motorpsycho

Earlier this week myself, my wife, and my son traveled to Atlanta, Georgia to see Mercyful Fate at the Tabernackle. It was a great show! The band was great and King Diamond still has some serious pipes! They played almost all of their Melissa album, a lot from Don’t Break the Oath, and even “Corpse Without a Soul” from Nuns Have No Fun. They also played a new song that has me eager to hear the two new tracks that have been teased recently. Kreator and Midnight opened. Kreator was awesome. There was a very old school metal feel to their performance. Midnight kinda sucked. Mostly because they were too loud. I’d always said Motorhead was the loudest band I’d seen, but not anymore. Midnight was so loud it hurt. Maybe they thought they were cool. I thought it was irritating. Maybe I sound like an old 41-year-old rocker, but it really was annoying. All in all, the show was great, and the venue was really cool too. The Tabernackle is a theater built in 1910 that now hosts music performances. It had neat architecture and a cool setup. There really wasn’t a bad seat in the house.

Welcome to this episode of Confusions, Delusions, and Formidable Impressions. This one will be a bit different than the last 14 newsletters. I’m traveling tomorrow, so I have a lot to do in preparation, therefor I’m going to post a short story. This story ties into my new book Monsters Come Out. When I originally wrote the book six or seven years ago, I had written two origins stories for creatures featured in the book. One of those stories ended up becoming the prologue in the book, and this story is the other. If you choose to read the story (it’s not too long), please read the afterward.

Origins of a Motorpsycho

Sal “Bearclaw” Winslow was an outlaw biker. Naw, he was an outlaw’s outlaw biker. He ate rusty nails for breakfast, dusted his nose with crystal meth for lunch, slapped around an old man and stole his KFC for dinner, and finished his night off swapping STDs with a burnt out biker whore before staying awake till dawn and doing it all over again the next day.

He liked his life. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sometimes, when Bearclaw was extra restless, he would beat a guy just for the hell of it. Not a slap-around (that was strictly reserved for pilfering food and goods), but a full on beatdown. Bloody nose, fractured skull, couple of broken ribs. No reason. Just liked to fuck shit up every once in a while. Get a little aggression out, what his old man called “fixin’ someone up hockey style.”

One in the morning on a cool night, he was fixin’ someone up like Gretskey or Lamieux in their heyday. Guy was an obnoxious prick who thought it would be funny to rib Bearclaw about his colors.

Let’s get one thing straight fucking straight right from the fucking beginning. You don’t mess around with a biker’s colors. That’s their belonging, their identity. Colors are the patches on their vest or jacket, and they have a lot of meaning. The back will be emblazoned with the name of the club they made an oath to, right along with the city the club resides in. The MC patch indicates that they do indeed belong to a motorcycle club, and the 1% patch tells every motherfucker that they’re an outlaw biker. They say that only one percent of bikers are outlaws. Bearclaw is a one percenter, and proud of it.

So one night while wetting his whistle at a bar a bit out of his hood, some asshole had imbibed too much beer and started talking shit. Bearclaw comes from a family of assholes who came from a family of assholes, so he knows his breed like he knows how to rip the cap from a bottle of brew with his teeth. Thing is, if you’re not his kind of asshole you better watch the fuck out.

“One percent!” the guy said. “What’s that? You mean all that that protest shit several years ago? That where that comes from? Hey, you’re in a biker gang, right? Where’s your gang, man? Looks like you’re alone. You big ‘n’ tough when you’re alone?”

This guy, he was red in the face like he spent a lot of time in this particular dive. He was clean cut. Could have been the character Jack Nicholson played in Easy Rider, though not nearly as couth. This guy was tossed and showing his true colors, so to speak.

Bearclaw slammed his mug on the bar. “You best shut the fuck up before I shut you up.”

The drunk man stumbled back and raised his eyebrows like he was surprised. “Me? You gonna shut me up? Seriously? Me?”

Bearclaw, who had been sitting at the bar minding his own goddamned business, stood up, hovering over the diminutive little shit. Bearclaw was in no mood for a fight, and usually this particular stance would shut anyone’s yap.

Not this guy.

Dude stood his ground. “Ffffffffuck you.”

Brearclaw opened his eyes wide like Manson. “Fuck me?”

Mr. Drunk wavered and smirked. “Yep. Fuck you and the horse, or should I say, hog you rode in on. We don’t like yer kind in this bar.”

In a flash of lightning, Bearclaw grabbed the man’s shirt and dragged him through the bar and out the front door. The crowd was booing and cheering and hollering, but they obediently separated like this burly biker was some kind of road warrior royalty or something.

Outside, the beating commenced, and it felt good. Bearclaw hadn’t gone into the bar looking for a fight, but it was just what he needed after getting the news that his mother was dying. Even burly bikers have soft spots for their mothers. She was all the way back east where Bearclaw grew up. He’d been quietly sipping a beer, contemplating the road trip back home when this prick came up and instigated him.

About five powerhouse punches into tearing this poor sod down, Bearclaw realized that he was surrounded. People spilled out of the bar, but he’d been too involved in serving this guy a smackdown to have noticed.

Someone grabbed Bearclaw’s shoulder and he shrugged the hand off with a turn, ready to serve another knuckle sandwich, only when he turned he was faced with a guy wielding a length of rebar. There wasn’t much that would cause someone like Bearclaw to back down, and he often had at least a few of his biker pals with him when things got out of hand, but staring down a rusty couple feet of rebar was goddamn lethal. This guy could lunge at him, slam the slender rod into his eye or bash his skull in, no problem. It may have been an intimidation technique, but Bearclaw wasn’t one to underestimate the predictability of someone he didn’t know, especially at a bar.

Everyone crowded in and they looked mean, eyes glaring, teeth gritted. “You think this guy can talk shit and he’s not gonna get it?” Bearclaw said. 

“He’s our friend,” Mr. Rebar said. He slapped the rod in his palm.

“I got friends too you know. People you don’t want to fuck with. You can ambush me like a bunch of pussies, but when they find out who did me in they’ll be out here quick as lightning and they’ll clean house. You hear me?”

Mr. Rebar slapped the rod in his hand again. “We ain’t afraid of no biker gang, man. In fact, we don’t like that shit, and we don’t like you.”

Bearclaw’s eyes twitched from one face to the next, seeking out the weak spot. There was always a way out of even the stickiest situations, and he’d been in enough of them. Even had a gun drawn on him once. That was tense and he’d been spun out of his head, which gave him the balls to swat the gun out of the guy’s hand. These fuckers caught him in a moment of weakness, his mind all twisted with emotions he spent most of his life ignoring or avoiding. He’d come here alone, not wanting to talk about the real shit with his pals, not yet at least. He was sure some of them would make the cross-country trip with him, maybe his close friends. He wished they were here now.

The tension drifted through the crowd like a smoky haze. No one wanted to make the first move, but it would happen eventually. There was always a first move.

Bearclaw felt something in his gut and for a second he thought he was going shit his pants right there in this crowd of angry men, but the feeling was different than that one who eats late night burritos is familiar with. The feeling bolted down his legs and his feet went numb. For fear of falling down and being pummeled to death by this angry mob, he lunged after Mr. Rebar and grabbed the metal rod from him. He took the rod and smacked him in the head. The guy screeched and hit the floor. That’s when the crowd closed in.

They took Bearclaw down like he was a storefront mannequin. Fists pelted him in the face, gut, arms, probably his legs too, but he couldn’t feel them. He was kicked and elbowed and spit on and he couldn’t breathe. He punched back, but his efforts were futile. Kicking did no good because he’d lost the use of his legs. Just when he thought it was all over, something happened. The feeling came back to his legs, only they weren’t legs. Someone said something and the crowd changed. Mutters of “what the fuck” and “holy shit” bounced around and then they all backed away as Bearclaw’s legs jumped around like sausages in a frying pan. His jeans became filled to capacity and soon the material ripped. Flesh oozed out like thick fleshy pink shaving cream. The pants turned to denim shreds and through the frothy flesh and bone something metallic shined like polished chrome bones.

People vomited, turned and fled, went back into the bar for something stronger than a beer, and one guy dared get close enough to kick Bearclaw in the ribs. No one knew what to make of it.

Once his legs and lower torso had dissolved, the bits of machinery multiplied and began to connect like some ghostly form was building something straight out of Bearclaw’s torso. He lay there watching in horror at what was happening, though there was no pain to speak of. It could be shock, but he was cognizant enough to recognize that the shining chrome parts that were frantically assembling themselves from his torso were motorcycle parts.

Someone called for Bearclaw’s head. The guy actually suggested getting an axe or a butcher knife and killing the son of a bitch. No one moved much at this point, because it was becoming clear to all of them wheat was happening, though no one could make sense of it.

When the transformation was done, Bearclaw managed to get up off the ground, in part by using his wheels, which turned out to be easier to navigate than he expected, considering he had no previous experience at being half machine.

The biker centaur stood taller than any one of his adversaries by a good foot or two. From the torso up he was the same ol’ Bearclaw, greasy beard, warts and all, but below the waist he was made of gleaming chrome in the form of a custom hog with a thumping motor and slender forks that jutted out in front with a wheel, and two more in the back.

The look of shock surprise on Bearclaw’s face turned to glee. He instinctually knew how to use this new body, and so he revved his motor, burned rubber, and ground any asshole to bits that got in his way.

*The End*

Ok, so here’s the deal. I wrote the motorpsychos before those goddamned Geico or Progressive or whatever insurance commercials came out. You know the ones. With the centaur biker Mo-Taur. When I saw the first commercial, I was pissed. I actually decided I wasn’t going to even try to publish the book. The motorpsychos aren’t a huge part of the book, but I felt like people would think I ripped the idea off of those commercials. But, I figure neither me nor Progressive were the first to use that idea. It was probably some science fiction author in the seventies that did it first. If you know of an earlier example of a man/motorcycle centaur, please let me know in the comments. Also, that story is an unedited draft, so if there are some wonky sentences or grammar mistakes, my apologies.

That’s one example of the many creatures and strange human anomalies that Monsters Come Out is rife with. If you like a good creature feature, this book has got you covered. It’s still just .99 cents for an ebook. The paperback isn’t out yet, but hopefully in a few weeks. And if you do decide to read it, please consider leaving a review. Reviews are so important to the visibility of a book. I’ve made it a point to review every new book I’ve read this year, and I’ve stuck to it. I figure I can’t ask people to review my books if I’m not doing the same.

I hope you enjoyed the story. In two weeks I’ll return with my regular format in which I will tell you about a cool audiobook I listened to this week called As Seen on TV by that cool dude 4 life John Wayne Comunale.

Until next time…