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Outrun Stories #46

My Favourite Disaster

By Outrun StoriesPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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She always had something about her, if you asked me. I couldn’t ever tell you what it was exactly, but god damn, there was just that special little glimmer in her eye, the sheen of her skin, the tone of her voice. Liberty Falls, that was her name, and she held all the cards.

“I want you to stick your fingers in my brain,” she said to me one day. I shit you not, she just turns to me and goes, "stick your fingers in my brain." I mean, what the hell is a man to do with a proposition like that? Just how are you supposed to react? She’s opening up her cranium panel before I’ve even been able to blink, and she’s just stood there with those big, "deer caught in the headlights" eyes that sparkle and suck you in with ease but hold some deep-rooted fear that you can’t shake.

“Give me a break, Liberty,” I said after I managed to get a little composure. She’s still stood there, those big eyes, the metal plate on her skull wide open, pink flesh of her brain exposed. Funny smell, the brain. You wouldn’t think that it would smell of anything in particular, fleshy maybe? But what the hell is fleshy anyway? No, it kinda just smells like bacon gone bad.

“Come on, Johnny, stick your fingers in my brain.” Fawning and pining, skinny arms draped around me.

“Liberty, close that thing back up. Pull yourself together. You’re a god damn mess,” I said back to her and she knew that she was, but she still knew she held all the cards. I managed to push her back that time, I managed to resist one of her insane requests that once, but she was still sure she had me under her thumb and I knew it.

I held out a few times, managed to take her claws out of me, that perfect disaster, my favourite disaster, Liberty Falls. In the end, though, there wasn’t anything that I could do for her that was going to save her. There wasn’t anything that she could get me to do that would help her. All she ever asked for was terror anyway, and when I tried to pull myself up, pull myself back and out and take a moment that might actually do some good for her, for us both, she’d pull something new on me and I’d be straight back to where I was.

She had all the hooks and all the lines, and probably a dozen other Jons just like me that would do anything for her, but she was her own worst enemy, as they say. She got in too dark, too deep with the X-Tribes and those bangers don’t fuck around. She thought she had a few of them wrapped around her little finger as well, and probably did for a while, but those guys have got the implants and the scars to resist even against dames like her.

So, yeah, she winds up on the garbage heap, her body harvested for whatever it was worth, and a lifetime of manipulation is gone and I’m left there, free as a bird, wondering what exactly to do with myself… Free of her grasp, I couldn’t tell you what I did that day, or the next or for the few months after that I was so blacked out on NUKE. But when I finally did wake up from the stupor and managed to sober up enough to look at myself in the mirror, I thought I’d give things another shot. She had some juice that girl, my favourite disaster, but she wasn’t everything.

science fiction
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About the Creator

Outrun Stories

Short sci-fi stories in 500 words or less deriving from the Outrun, tech-noir and NewWave aesthetic.

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