Metal Deep: Damsels in Distress Read online

  METAL DEEP

  a digital novelette series

  GX KNIGHT

  Copyright 2012 Kindle Edition

  (So if you see this anywhere else in the near future… It’s a fake!)

  All rights reserved.

  (I have no idea what this means except that I think you can’t steal it.)

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used whatsoever without the express permission of the author except for brief quotation necessary for review.

  (If you want to write in my world, with my people, or my places, ask… and then pay… simple.)

  All characters in this publication, other than those of public domain, are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  (I made it all up. Except for a few cases of popular reference. There are no evil characters based on Aunt Ruth or my former jackass boss, though there should be.)

  Further updates and information can be found at:

  www.gxknight.com

  Story and Concepts: Matthew Simpson

  Edits and Critiques: Aaron Salt and Emily Hale

  Art, Website, and Cover Format: Aaron Salt

  Inspirational Writing Tunes: Drew Hale

  Author’s Note

  This is the first edition of the Metal Deep series. I have tried my best to create something that everyone can enjoy, while offering the most professional experience this amateur can muster. With that I ask: Please be patient with the formatting. I and my friends have scoured each and every piece to make sure the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling have been observed to the best of our limited ability. We will no doubt miss something, probably a lot of somethings. We all work full-time jobs and my help has graciously volunteered hours of their free time to make this a reality for me and for you. Your patience and understanding is appreciated. Should you find glaring faults, please feel free to visit www.gxknight.com and leave me a message. I would be happy to make necessary applicable changes for future updated editions.

  Now that’s out of the way… I hope you enjoy the adventure!!!

  THANK YOU

  Matthew Simpson

  AKA

  G.X. Knight

  PS - If you really like what you read, please help spread the word. If you don’t… Ummm… How about we just keep that between us, okay?

  METAL DEEP

  EPISODE 1: DAMSELS IN DISTRESS

  “REAL” LIFE

  The Aussies call it a walkabout. I called it getting away from my boring life. I had to have a change, and waiting for change to find me was a fool’s dream. So it was on a rainy evening after finishing a shift slinging steaks to ungrateful rednecks at the local steakhouse when I decided it was time to grab life by its testicular fortitude, and rip myself a new beginning… That was until I got home and realized it had been about a month and a half since I cleaned. I then spent the rest of my night and wee morning hours sipping on coffee as I did dishes, sorted laundry, and mucked up something that appeared to have come alive from that small dark corner often gone unnoticed between the commode and bathtub.

  Who was I kidding? This was my life: Server Boy. Six nights a week you would find me at Steerhouse Steakhouse where I catered to John Q. Public’s veracious need for meat. It was pretty much terrible. What people don’t realize about the outstanding citizens in my line of work is that most of us don’t get regular paychecks. The company gives us a barely-enough hourly stipend to cover what Uncle Sam demands. So if I am going to eat, fix my little brown beater of a car, or keep the lights on at home, then it’s going to come from that all important gratuity. I bust my overworked-bum to see it hit around twenty percent of a check total. I’m lucky if I get fifteen.

  For my little tips I smile when I’d rather tell someone to piss off. I run around like a suddenly headless chicken as five different tables all need ten different things at the exact same time. Every table can be filled to capacity, the waiting area at front will be overflowing, and in fact, there will be children literally hanging from windows sills as people wait up to two hours to come have me bring them some kind of magical meat that one apparently cannot find in their local grocery stop. The only catch, they want theirs as quickly as possible, everyone else in the restaurant be damned.

  It’s a glamorous life. Let me tell you. Everything you own starts to reek of restaurant. And it’s not like that romantic woodsy smell after grilling some steaks on the barby. It’s an offensive odor likened to sludge. This post-work funk separates you from the rest of the civilized world, who after using you, forgets about you as they have long gone to sleep as you wind down underneath a high moon looking for something besides waffles or beer after a hard night’s work.

  People treat you as if you’re some kind of drop out, assuming you spend your days cooking meth and living off welfare when you’re not expecting “charity” (AKA the tip) after lavishing a luxury service on to those who have chosen to partake of it instead of cooking at home themselves. Not that there aren’t a great many servers who do abuse drugs, stay drunk, and treat each baby as a new tax or child support check. I’m just glad I’m not one of them. Dad raised me right.

  Granted it’s not all bad. Serving tables is a lot like a game. Every new guest that sits down is a challenge and a roll of the dice. I have come across just as many good patrons as I have bad ones, and there are still some generous people out there, but sometimes it’s them that really makes what I do so hard.

  I’m always broke. I would like nothing better than to sit down somewhere and make some single, hard-working mom’s night, by dropping a couple of Bills (Bill is server speak for a hundred dollars) as payment for her hard work, but if serving tables paid that well, everybody would be doing it.

  All that complaining to say: I want to get out. No, I have to get out. I believe that I was created for more than just making sure some hick’s steak has just the right amount of red in the center while I kept his tea glass full.

  I grew up hearing some crazy stories. Tales about a world that was so much bigger than most would ever take the time to see. It was said to contain all that our dreams and imaginations could derive as an actual reality. I never really knew what that meant, but the longer I lived this life of the work-to-home-to-work merry-go-round, I knew that my dreams were anything but living. It would help if I knew what my dreams were. At least I could pay proper respects as I pass their dusting corpses on my way out to that dead end job. I laid them to the side long ago, and every time I came close to picking one back up, Life pimp slapped it right out of my hands.

  But isn’t that Life’s job? Everyone needs an adversary, and while most of us don’t have arch rivals like all the cool heroes do in the comic books, each of us has that nagging whore called Life who keeps taking far more than she puts out, and she is always ready to thwart the latest and greatest plan we have for success. Damn wench.

  Once when I was young my father, as the credits rolled after an awesome movie (that was of course our favorite type, science fiction, with fantasy a close second), told me that what we had just watched was something of a true story. I, being too young to realize that my dad was incapable of telling the truth ever when a joke could be made at my expense, laughed but shuttered when I imagined those super model space traveling vampires standing outside our door asking for permission to come in or they’d use their spaceships to vaporize the walls so there would be no magical barrier of a threshold to keep them out. Having been lost in his thought, almost regretful he had told me that, he returned to the present with a long gulp of diet cola before bursting into uncontrollable light hearted guffaws, pointing at my face, screaming “Gotcha!”

  And that was what we did. Growin
g up it was just the two of us. There was the occasional family member around to help every now and then as my father worked, but he always made sure that we had time together, and I loved him for it. We would go to traveling museum exhibits and he would show me an old Viking helmet that he claimed could make the wearer invisible, or a diamond that was supposedly a unicorn dropping. We would look at maps and he would point to the North Pole and say, “Fire Elves kicked out Santa centuries ago, and instead of toys, they now develop weapons for the military.” At the time I thought it was cool, but in retrospect I ask myself: Who tells their kid that?

  With that there were more than a half dozen other sites with just as many fantastic claims involving werewolves, robotic people, warring pirates and ninjas, and my favorite, the ever elusive nomadic aliens. There were so many, I could never remember them all. Every time we went somewhere it was always something: Tree bark that could be magically turned into metal, hidden bases on the moon, actual superpower-creating properties of moonlight. Maybe that’s why I liked working at night? I hated daytime. He did too. Most of all staring at the moon reminded me of him and all the fun times we had during late night dreaming sessions over hot chocolate and marshmallows to questions like: “If you could be a superhero, what powers would you have?”

  He made up fantastic stories all the time, and I always wanted to believe him, and there was part of me that felt like he wanted me to as well, but it was always the same outcome. There would be a few seconds we’d share in the moment, and then he would either claim it was a joke or he would simply change the subject to something more practical. It was left to me to assume the prank had lived and died, and it was time to return to reality.

  I’m about two years out of high school. The nice part is Dad and I still lived together. The sad part is we hardly ever talk anymore. I went through an angry phase that started about midway through my teen years. He says I’m still in it. When he says that it does make me mad, and then I argue that I’m not, which then starts an epic “chicken or the egg” discussion about when and why my anger arrived. Frustration continues to abound.

  Angry or not, I did stop listening to the stories. They only made me long for what could never be. When you hear about greater things, beyond the proverbial reality of death and taxes, it makes you hope, and when you’re a wide-eyed hormone-raging teenager who longs to stand on top of the world as throngs of girls squeal to touch your buffness, the cold reality of small Christmases, crappy second hand clothes, and decade old “new” electronics, brings you down into the pains of “what is” pretty quickly. And “what is” was that we were nobody, and my janitor father and I were always going to be that way. Since then it’s been something I’ve wrestled to accept every single day of my life, and I hate feeling that way, but it’s there.

  Do I believe his stories? Not a chance. Do they make me want to get outside this little Alabama town and see for myself? You bet it does. Not to go looking for gryphon feathers or living computers, but to see what the world looks like through eyes that aren’t always constantly making up some line of fantastical bullbutter to entertain children. As the man said, “I want the truth.”

  But sometimes I hear Life sniggering behind me aptly replying, “You can’t handle it.”

  STUPID ME

  The night was mine. I was off from work, and I was in the mood to do something. I had finished the modest cleaning and put everything away. Dad and I had two polar opposite schedules, so when I worked he slept and the other way around. While Dad and I didn’t hang like we used to, we still loved and cared for each other, but his fantastic version of every single event made anything but the most surface of conversations possible. I liked to do the cleaning since that’s what he did all day at his job, and he respected the fact that I was around food all night, so he handled most of the cooking. For breakfast I shoveled down the last of some lasagna that had reached a pre-fuzz state, and then started in on a monster BBQ meatloaf that made you want to fornicate it tasted so good.

  Gorged on food I spent most of the afternoon sitting in defeat and listening to the rain. I was depressed for yet again not following through with my nightly vow to hop in my shite colored hatchback and take off to see the world. I took solace in the comfort of my steaming black cup of coffee. I usually stop counting the cups somewhere around the second pot. I was a machine. Caffeine had long quit working on me. It was nothing to drown myself in a couple cans of kidney destroying Sugar Bomb energy soda before bed. I think I actually slept better when I did. The chagrining question I asked and the crux of why I had to stay: How could I leave my coffee pot? I couldn’t. Besides a single photograph of my mom and dad which had been taken some years before I was born, the coffee pot was my favorite possession. I could never leave Flip. Don’t ask me why we call it that, it’s just the random name we gave the coffee pot because of the little flip water door. For all our differences my Dad and I still take an odd pleasure in naming everything.

  Dad came home as I finished getting dressed. Tonight was the normal, jeans and a black button down with the sleeves rolled up. By normal I mean I had one pair of “going out jeans” and two shirts: the black button down, and a navy polo. My hair was a shaggy brown, a little more dull and plain than I would have liked, but when Bubba from Slap Out was your target audience at work, you didn’t want to scare him away with piercings, gelled spikes, and hair bleach. I thought I looked a little too ordinary. Dad said I looked “Snazzy” when I gave him a love tap on the back as I passed him while he sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper for his ritual post work reading and coffee. To this day I don’t know what , and I air quote, “Snazzy,” means; but hearing him use it so much put in my head, and I’ve been known to absently let it slip out on occasion, worse, I did so in front of a girl. Never tell a date her dress looks snazzy. Well, not if you want a second date.

  Tired. I think that’s how I would best describe Dad slurping a grateful satisfied burble from his coffee mug. In a lot ways we were mostly identical save the years difference that showed via the wrinkles in the corners of his steel blue eyes, and along the deepening hallows of his cheeks. When I was a kid, friends of Dad’s would affectionately call me, “The Clone.” We’ve always favored in appearance. The older I get the more I see it. Which is fine, because even with the little extra salt and pepper in his darkening hair and beard, and despite the age lines creeping across his face, my Dad does looks pretty “Snazzy” himself. There are worse people to become.

  He worked hard and stayed tired, but I could tell as he dropped all the pages of the paper except the one he was reading that he had found yet another article to spin some crazy exhaustive faux fact about. Maybe the old man should have become a writer? He’s not that old, he still could. Then maybe something constructive could come from our dysfunction.

  It hurt that we did not hang out like we once had. I know boys grow to men, and fathers and sons tend to go their own ways, but we used to be best friends. He has done a lot for me, and I don’t want to be ungrateful for all that he’s sacrificed so he could raise me. But I just can’t keep listening to the stories. They’re not good for me. The problem was, somewhere deep in my soul I want to believe him even though he’s always saying they’re just jokes and dumb facts to keep the tedium of our uninteresting lives more interesting. Life is all about pain and boredom. There are no heroic lands of myth and fable. There is only our sparse, two-bedroom apartment, my crappy job, and my broke little skid-mark of a hatchback.

  “I’m headed out.” I told him. I was trying to avert his attention from the article. Sometimes the “distraction tactic” worked on him just as well as it did me. “Shiny” things captured our attention as it would with small woodland animals, and we would forget all about what we had been obsessed with only seconds before.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t work as Dad’s eyes stayed uncharacteristically glued to the single front page article. “Probably not a good idea,” he tried to fake a smile, but it was still aimed down at the paper
while he scrutinized every word and every inch of a small blurry photo. I knew him will enough to tell the difference between a genuine smile and a fake one. That was one of the first things I learned back when I was old enough to start asking questions about Mom. Whenever he talked about her, that fake grin would crop up, and I knew only one true thing regarding her: whatever had happened, things did not end well between them, and my father lived his life trying to hide the pain he really felt.

  “We should spend some quality time hanging out. We haven’t played cards in forever.” He looked up from the paper, but his face was pale, and the smile was the worst mask of deception I had seen in years. The blue eyes we genetically shared were pleading, “Come on. We’ll order pizza, grab a movie from the vending machine. The works!”

  I don’t claim to be totally in control of my emotions. Okay, so my emotions swing from one extreme to the next like wrecking balls crashing through green houses, but his reaction, and I think it may have been the blatant paranoia, ignited something inside me that I could only describe as volcanic. The thing with volcanoes, they don’t blow right away. Intense pressure starts building over a period of time, and only when the pressure reaches a critical state does the volcano blow. Vesuvius was my middle name as I felt molten rock begin to churn in my gut, from years of built pressure that came from his over active imagination. Steam rose from my fiery innards and lofted heavily toward my reddening ears.