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| Chronicles of the Cake Stop |
| Vol V No. 4 |
Soundtrack:
Hawkwind - The Xenon Codex |
Ravenbait stands and stares. The Humvee towers over her, the monstrous machine dwarfing everything
around it, including the trees. This one is even bigger than the previous machine owned by the
Humungous. She can see him inside: his pasty grey flesh even flabbier than before; more of it crammed
into and spilling out of the harness that attaches the naked, quivering body to the machine. She can
almost hear the whine of the anti-gravity hover motors that support him when he is not inside the
vehicle and smell his rank odour, which contains notes of salty cheese and engine oil. All this is
dredged from her memory in an instant by a single glimpse of the man-mountain inside his armoured
car. All of this is indelibly imprinted on her mind, branded there during hours of torture that she can
never, ever forget.
She cannot take her eyes off the Humungous. She cannot wrest her gaze from the immense radiator
grill and the BOAT-shredding tyres. She cannot quite believe that he is there, in front of her, rather
than dead and eaten; that the terrible noise deafening her is really coming from his vehicle. It's all too
much.
The High Priestess of the Triple Goddess of Cycling, that bastion of cool, calm, demeanour, one of the
people the cyclists of the Cake Stop turn to when all becomes chaos around them, is suddenly very,
very afraid.
"Oh Rupert," she whispers. "What have you done?"
The Hollow Man looks up then, his face finally fully visible, startled by the use of a name that was last
used so long ago that he had forgotten that there was anyone who knew it.
"His Master's Voice, my lady," he says, and there is no rancour in his tone.
The Humungous guns the Humvee. The engine revs; a threatening, warning roar promising death and
destruction.
Still unable to take her eyes off the vehicle, Ravenbait carefully and deliberately hangs the Met helmet
on Fingal's aerobars and dons the Rudy Projects once more. Inside the Humvee, the Humungous is
grinning and laughing manically. He releases the clutch for an instant and the vehicle makes a heart-
stopping lunge across the clearing, brought short so that the driver can savour the moment.
The ravens, taking an unspoken cue, suddenly launch themselves vertically upwards, rocketing
heavenwards as if shot from a catapault.
"Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right..." the Priestess sings softly under her breath. Her right
hand is holding firmly on to Fingal's top tube. Her left hand is making a series of complicated gestures,
only the fingers moving.
"You're singing our song," says the Hollow Man, apparently moved enough to take a faltering,
involuntary step towards her. The Humvee is winding up the revs again, the 24 cylinder, twin V12
engine leaking hot fumes and toxic stench. The Humungous is slipping the clutch, the SUV inching a
little further across the grass.
Ravenbait smiles at that. It is something of a desolate expression. Her head tilts slightly to one side, as
if contemplating a particularly odious substance found caught in the recesses of a cleat. Her fingers are
flying, a blur of movement that is not transmitted to any other muscle in her body.
"Be seeing you," the Hollow Man tells her as the Humungous decides he cannot tease himself with
anticipation another second and finally releases the clutch, sending the enormous vehicle careening
across the clearing, throwing up a cascade of black earth from its spinning tyres. There is real fear on
the Priestess' face, her expression caught in a moment of utter, paralyzing terror. The SUV leaps across
the clearing, causing the dirt to tremble.
Ravenbait disappears with a crump of imploding space. All that is left is a single feather that slowly
floats down to land on the grass after the Humvee has torn its way past the spot where she had been
standing. Both she and her bike have gone.
The Hollow Man strolls languidly across the grass, frowning a little at the vast tyre marks that have
been left by the passage of the Humungous. He bends down, swiftly, fluidly, and picks up that one
black feather that fell from the sky, picking it out with no hesitation from the hundreds of crow feathers
already lying on the ground, some now matted into the earth, torn and half-buried.
The lid on the Humvee hisses open and the whine of the anti-grav devices provides an irritant
counterpoint to the thrumbling of the now-idle engine. The Humungous floats out, rolls of fat on his
useless legs and enormous belly wobbling, white and grey like a maggot, bald head round and swollen,
now suffused with a red rage that make the flesh around his tiny eyes swell even further until he seems
almost blind.
"Where did she go?!" he screams in a fury, putting a strain on the hissing, clicking pumps keeping him
supplied with the polluted air that he needs to stay alive.
The Hollow Man looks at him with some obvious distaste, twirling the feather in his fingers as if
reminiscing about secret, private things that had once brought him great pleasure.
"Did you expect her just to stand there while you ran her over in your car?" he asks. He folds his arms,
still twirling the feather.
"She will pay for what she did to me!"
"Yes, I'm sure she will," the Hollow Man replies kindly, as if reassuring a three year old that his dead
goldfish really has gone to Heaven to live with the angels, and the toilet bowl is the entrance to Heaven
for all small cyprinid fish.
"Where did she go?" the Humungous screams again in impotent rage.
"Well, why don't you go and find her friends? I'm sure she'll turn up sooner or later and maybe they'll
keep you amused until you find her," the Hollow Man suggests, already bored with what he knows is a
permanent case of road rage, imprinted at the cellular level. "It's all programmed into your sat-nav
system, so off you go. There's a chap."
Tucking the single raven feather very carefully into the pocket of his jacket, he spreads his arms out,
cruciform, and then brings them sharply down. He explodes, and crows fly off in all directions. Many
more feathers fall from the sky.
The Humungous floats for a while, fury bubbling, incandescent. Then, mashing the controls in
frustration so that the quivering man-fat of his bulk is jostled and jerked into seismic heaving, he flies
back into his Humvee and starts forcing his way, roughshod, in the direction indicated by the on-board
navigation system.
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