Born Hard Again: Book Three of the Future Remembered Chronicles Read online

"Oh yeah bro," he shook his head and continued pointing, "Don't break the surgipod connections in there, they're all that's keeping you alive after that spider-plastic-surgery thing kicked your head off, and remember what your other bodyguards sacrificed to get you fixed up. Don't let 'em die for nuthin'."

  "A few days?!" Limbozer exclaimed. "We've been here for fucking weeks! They fucking killed Jeff! And this god damn fucking suit just got hot as hell for no reason, it's burning the shit out of me! The god damn screen won't go into power saver mode! God dammit Broman, the battery in it isn't going to last for even a few hours!"

  "My Lord!" interjected the cheerleader-leader. She gave him a pointed look. "Your disciples do not want you taking your name in vain. They. Do. Not."

  "God dammit!" said Limbozer. "I'm not your fucking pet, Makayla, I signed that photograph, you got a god damn limited edition limbo laser, what else do --" Limbozer's complaint was cut off as the suit extended a sheath of metal over his mouth. His beautiful bright blue eyes were still dreamy, even as they twitched in panic.

  "Yes Lord, you're right, silence is purity and purity is salvation," Makayla said, poking at a compute-pad. Broman looked at Limbozer nervously and took a protective stance but stayed silent.

  At the sight of the compute-pad I thought of how Marcus could probably hack it just by blinking at it, if he were in my position. Oh Marcus... I would have choked back a sob if the air weren't leaking out of my sucking chest wounds. I was at least able to move my eye and saw his body next to mine, his frozen fingers locked at odd angles in a permanent gang sign.

  Oh TK... my somber thoughts continued. Wait, where were TK and Sienna? I knew they'd been brought down into the warm pit with us but I didn't see them get carried under the limbo gate. Not that I could see much. I wondered if one of my eyes had gotten popped like a tiny wet balloon.

  "SISTERS!" Makayla announced. "We have done His bidding. We have brought the false prophet. Let us spread the word far and wide that there is only one true God and He is Limbozer, Kalimbo Jesus! Gimme an L!"

  "L!" came the rallying cry.

  "Gimme an I!"

  "I!" the girls responded as one.

  "Gimme an M!"

  The shrill cries were giving me a really bad headache. Or maybe my head was just hurting because my skull was fractured and the numbness from the cold had worn off. I tried to block out the feminine squeals.

  "Liiiimbozer! He's our man, if he can't do it, no one can! Yay!" Makayla concluded, kicking up into the air and clapping and thrusting her fists out high. "Okay so, like, we're going to spread the holy word with a bake sale. Priscilla, you make the cookies. Adrienne you can handle the mini-cheesecakes. Broman, what are you going to bake to spread the word of Limbozer?"

  Broman clenched his jaw and made eye contact with the mute Limbozer, then shook his head. "I don't bake," he said, puffing out his heavily-muscled chest.

  "Aww, come on! Everybody needs to chip in, and you've known Limbozer the longest!" one of the girls implored.

  "I'll give you a protein shake instead," Broman muttered.

  "Hmmm, that gives me an idea," Makayla said slyly. "Frosh pledges, at-ten-SHUN!"

  Five girls snapped to attention and saluted.

  "Pledges, do you swear to always follow the will of Limbozer?" the elder cheerleader asked.

  "We solemnly swear, on our lives and our pom-poms and our lip gloss," the five pledges intoned in unison. "We are only basic bitches but travel the path of Limbozer to become bad bitches."

  "And like, let's just say, if there were to be a bad bitch contest, who would be in first place?" Makayla queried with a smile.

  "You, oh great one!" they answered.

  "That's right. Pledge Betty!" said Makayla. "Step forward." The large-breasted dancer took a step away from the other pledges, wincing as she rubbed parts that were still sensitive from her electric shock at the gate.

  "Yes, oh great one?" Betty asked warily.

  "You failed at the most basic test of our faith. You must follow Limbozer's will to be redeemed," Makayla said. Betty stared rapturously over Makayla's shoulder at Limbozer, still looking wild-eyed behind his steel muzzle. Makayla continued, "And His will is that you must be hazed."

  "Hazed? But I was just tazed!" Betty wailed. "Will it be... will it be a cunt punting?"

  "No," the leader responded. "No, you must do as you did at the frat party last week." She pointed at me meaningfully with a long red fingernail. "But with him, and his tiny diseased dick!"

  "Nooo!" Betty yelped.

  But she obediently kneeled by my wilted, frigid member and started doing her thing before I could even comprehend what was going on. I thought for sure my dick would have fallen off already as a shriveled, blackened, frostbitten nub, but it had partially thawed in the warm air and I was rewarded with an agonizing feeling of pins and needles and teeth.

  "Eww! Like, half of it is like, crunchy!" Betty whined, and then soldiered on.

  I looked around for help with my one working eye. Broman winced as he watched what was going on. I made eye contact with him, pleading.

  "Bro! Gay!" he yelped, looking away.

  Everything is terrible, I thought. I didn't know it was even possible, but this sex act was terrible too. It felt like sandpaper being rubbed on my privates, if the sandpaper was made out of lava and thumbtacks and incisors.

  I was mortified by my body being used as some prop in a sex initiation ritual, but I mostly felt shame that this was happening just a few hours after TK had passed. Oh TK... I thought. I'm sorry for getting head, it means nothing to me, not like when I impregnated your skull!

  "Preston!" came a thought in my head, unbidden. "Preston Chesticles! I almost died out there and you're just getting your dick sucked?!"

  "TK!?" I thought, as loudly as I could think. "You're alive? But how?" My true love's telepathic link was active! She was out there somewhere, and alive!

  "I was frozen solid but then I thawed out I guess. My legs are still frozen. Ow. Yep, frozen. What's going on? Where are we? Who is that tramp giving out blowjobs? Is it Blue?!?" TK thought to me.

  "TK, you're confused, you're not thinking straight. Blue got turned inside-out up there, remember? You killed her!" I replied.

  "Oh, right. Sorry, I think parts of my brain are still frozen or something. So wait, you're not actually cheating on me right now?" TK asked uncertainly.

  I tried to keep my internal thoughts quiet so TK couldn't hear them. "Uhh, yeah that's right babe," I thought to her. "Hey heal up your legs and limbo on in here. Or break them off, maybe the limbo would be easier. But anyway I think getting so cold on those ice sheets might have helped cryo-freeze all of us, me and Marcus too. If you can heal, then maybe we can! There's a surgipod suit thing! C'mon!"

  "And Ralph? Can we save our baby boy too?" TK asked.

  "Uhh, sure? Whatever babe, just hurry up and get here!" We didn't have time for this! I felt like my dick was going to fall off any second now.

  "And Alphonso?" TK continued.

  "Who the fuck is Alphonso? Oh, right. Maybe. You're still topless, right? Can you get an outfit like these other girls have, and act like one of them?"

  "It's so cold, I can't feel my chest," TK responded. "Not sure how quickly I can get in there, Preston. I'm trying! Unnnghh!"

  I wished I could pyrokinetically transfer to her the blazing fire that was my flayed wiener. Never had I so badly wanted to severely injure a beautiful woman touching my privates.

  Makayla put her compute-pad down, smiling as she watched my suffering. A light blinked on it and Limbozer's suit retracted its mask.

  "Oh Dios mío!" Limbozer cried out, exasperated. "I cannot take but a moment more of this... sick subterranean hell pit! I was God on the dance floor. Entire galaxies of women desired the outpourings of my generous loins. And... and... now!" he gasped heavily and a sweat broke out on his contorted brow. "L-look at me! Just look at me! I am a... freak! YOU did this to me!"

  He strained his eyes towards
his chauvinistic companion.

  "Actually, YOU helped them!" he accused the talking trapezius muscle that was Broman.

  "Hey, whoa, slow down, boss," Broman showed his palms and took a step back from Limbozer. "You were dead, bro..."

  "And maybe I shoulda stayed dead, you know?" he curled his upper lip in disgust as his vision came back to rest on me. "So I should see this... that is why I am here. So I can see this... throng of crazy psycho señoritas perform their perversions on corpses?! Madre de Dios, mátame ahora!"

  "Stop!" Makayla commanded and, mercifully, my assailant relented.

  Makayla, however, did not.

  "So, like, why do you test my patience, Lord?" she confronted the churlish reanimated limbo king.

  Limbozer's face crumpled in unadulterated fear.

  "Kesley!" she barked.

  A tall, voluptuous girl with short-ish, blonde hair acknowledged her calling.

  "Light up... the prophecy!" she announced and gestured beyond her to a nearby shadowed wall.

  Kesley tapped about on her compute-pad for a moment and suddenly a brilliant spot light lit up the area to which Makayla had pointed. The velvet wall paper had been crudely scratched off of this section of the wall. In fact, it looked to me as if a great many people had used their bloodied fingers to claw through the fabric, padding and several inches of the thick concrete that encased us underground.

  On top of this cement canvas, a darkly sinister liquid had been splashed to create a rather elaborate drawing. It looked like the work of a Renaissance painter reincarnated into the form of an enormous toddler. There were two human-looking figures depicted in the mural, locked into what looked like some kind of awkward and physically impossible combat postures. I'm pretty sure my heart had stopped already, but what I saw next made me far more conscious of that fact.

  I was one of the combatants!

  "No," I thought. "It can't be..."

  "What is it, Preston?" TK's thoughts came back into my mind.

  "TK!" I thought back, happy to hear from her. "This is fucking nuts! There's some kind of... fucked up looking, ancient art work in here. They called it 'the prophecy,' or something, and, get this, I'm in the picture!"

  "What? What do you mean?"

  "I mean, I am looking at this cave art looking shit and I am seeing myself! I mean, maybe it's not me, but It's clearly some kind of bearded baby in some kind of metal outfit like Limbozer is wearing! Although... something is obviously wrong with my feet. They look... broken, or something," I narrated telepathically.

  "What?" TK asked. "Hey, how did you get into this big door thing? And which one did you go in?"

  I was enrapt with the events that were playing out before me; I did not answer TK. Makayla was glaring at a small troupe of girls who were dragging what looked like a tiny version of the same metal encasing that Limbozer was enjoying. My heart leapt.

  "A me-sized surgipod!" I realized.

  "What?" TK interloped. "Preston! Where are you? How do I get in there?! It's fucking freezing out here!"

  "Now!" Makayla announced. "We shall test our faith! The faith in our sisterhood! Sis-ters, assemble!"

  The upright humanoid-shaped surgipod had reached me now. The girls carrying my decimated body began to pour me into the miniature metal suit. My blood, guts and bone sloshed into the healing chamber and an obnoxiously red-headed pledge sealed me in.

  Hummmmmmmm, came from the machine.

  Warm waves of healing light radiated from inside the surgipod, enveloping my body. Immediately, I began to feel worse. I assumed this was due to the fact that my badly damaged nervous system was the first part of my corporeal form targeted by the medical device.

  "Aaaarrrghhh!" I heard myself cry out audibly for the first time since I died the second time.

  The subterranean sorority girls surrounding me were visibly shocked by my exclamation and jumped back in hip hop dance move synchronization, wide eyed.

  "Like, whoa!" one of them blurted out. "He's recovering!"

  My pudgy, bearded face was protruding from the front of the custom-built rejuvenation chamber and I smiled at her.

  "Yessss," I lisped through my mutilated but steadily regenerating lips and realized I sounded like Ralph. Where the hell was Ralph?

  My smile faltered as I caught a glimpse of Marcus' corpse from the corner of my eye.

  Poor Marcus. I let my eyes rest on his wrenched-open jaw. It looked as if he had been flash-frozen at the peak of one of his outrageous gangsta boasts, which always seemed to require an inordinate amount of clearance in order to make it out of his already-oversized mouth.

  Surgipods were amazing feats of modern technology, but they weren't miracle machines. Death was still a line that could not be crossed twice, save for supernatural occurrence as in my case. I had no idea what Limbozer's story was; he'd probably been snatched away at the last moment from the horrors of Directive 34 in a worse condition than I’d been in.

  It had been only a couple of minutes since I had begun recovering, and I felt much better already. Finally, I could focus on something other than my unconscionable suffering.

  How the hell was I going to get out of here?

  Trying and failing to move any part of my body, which was tightly confined by and held upright within the unyielding metal suit, I opened my mouth to address my audience with my newfound lung capacity.

  "IT IS TIME, BITCHES!" Makayla thieved my moment. "Now we will witness the word of our Lord Limbozer, Kalimbo Jesus!"

  "¿Y Qué?" Limbozer queried. "What are you talking about? What word? The only word I've got for you is let me the hell out of here!"

  "That's more than one word, boss," Broman counseled.

  "Silence!" Makayla boomed. I realized the girls surrounding her were slowly slinking to the shadowed corners of the nightclub, popping and locking with every choreographed step. "Lord Limbozer, come!" she beckoned to him. "And you..." she turned towards me, disdainfully. "… the false prophet. The one they call... Cleveland Jesus," she spoke my god-name as if it were a shit-covered tapeworm that had somehow worked its way up from her bowels to her mouth.

  "There can be only one true savior on the dance floor! There can be only one!" she continued, shrieking.

  "Hey, I'm not no dancing Jesus," I tried to explain, my second utterance.

  She took no notice of my words and continued. I, however, noticed that Broman was wheeling the armored Limbozer down from the DJ booth and towards the ground where Makayla and I stood. Limbozer was, of course, protesting vulgarly, but to no avail. None of the other girls were visible now; the immense dance floor was wide open.

  "We shall grace this day with, like, scripture," Makayla continued, producing a preposterously thick book from beneath her skirt.

  "Broman, you are so fucking fired. Just what the fuck are you doing? Put me down! Manda huevos!" Limbozer riddled his companion as he was brought to rest within feet of me. I could now more clearly see his face, which was somehow even more handsome up close.

  Makayla, unfazed by Limbozer's outbursts, began to read from her tome.

  "And, like," she started, dramatically. "The sons of Keturah, the secondary wife of Mhrabam, the which she engendered, or conceived, were Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. And the sons of Jokshan were Sheba, and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were Asshurim, and Letushim, and Leummim..."

  I had no idea where she was going with this, but the time her recital provided was quickly put to good purpose.

  "TK!" I mentally reached for my lover, and mother.

  "Preston!" she shouted back, louder than I had expected. "Where are you in here?! I got in, but I can't find you!"

  Frantically, I darted my eyes about.

  "Where are you?" I demanded. "How can you not see me, I'm in the middle of the dance floor?!"

  "What? What dance floor?" she thought to me.

  "What are you thinking about?"

  "What? What do you mean, what am I thinking about? I'm thinking about fi
nding you!" TK telepathically shot back.

  "Arg, I was trying to be funny," I thought to her.

  "Aren't you dying?"

  "Not anymore," I beamed, feeling stronger with each passing moment.

  "What? Never mind. Preston, where are you? There are hundreds of men in here!"

  "Uh..." now I was confused. Had she gone into a different door? "TK, there are all girls in here. It's some kind of sorority or something. Where are you?"

  "What?!" she shrieked back. "Preston! I'm surrounded by short, hairy, middle-aged men! There must be a thousand of them!"

  Despite my growing concern for TK, my attention was snapped back to my present situation as Makayla was finishing up her reading.

  "...and the sons of Midian were Ephah, and Epher, and Henoch, and Abida, and Eldaah. All these were the sons of Keturah, hashtag datassdoe! Amen," she concluded and tossed the ancient volume to the ground beside her. "And now, badass bitches!" she went back to her announcer voice. "We shall commence..

  "KaaaalleeeeemmbooooooooOOOOO!"

  A great cheer erupted from the mass of maidens concealed in the dark corners of the velvety cabaret. Makayla offered an odd half-curtsy and stepped back from Limbozer and me. While I was not afforded the range of motion necessary to look down at myself, I could see Limbozer quite well. The surgipod suit he was wearing was quite bizarre. It looked like some of the first attempts at humanoid robots made by twentieth century man. It had no joints or seams that I could see. The suit's iron exterior was unkempt, rusted and badly scarred; I could barely make out some kind of emblem painted and fading on the breastplate shadowed by Limbozer's striking jaw.

  "Russia!" I gasped as I recognized Putin's seal. What did he have to do with all of this?

  A catchy Afro-Caribbean thumping echoed through the chamber, building in volume. Kesley came back into the light, this time leading a squad of her sisters who were straining to move an enormous and evil looking scaffolding of some sort onto the dance floor. Or was it some kind of machine?

  Easily twenty feet tall and twice as wide, the metal conglomeration of sharp angles that they were pulling and pushing between them looked dangerous. Strike that, deadly. Long blades, laser cutters and diamond wire saws adorned the structure, and it was stained red by its bloody past.