The Wound Channel

Deforest. Stripmall, Horse, a short story by Zani D and Emil Ottoman based off of a prompt from Edith Bow's StreamofconsciousnessPOV workshop

(A short story collaboration between myself and

Zani D

, enjoy)

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Open on a skin burnt desert under a flame fed sky, a decrepit stripmall breaks the horizon. Tacky fuck. Reality goes stage script before filming, happens every fucking time. Can't be helped. There's a stray mustang gnawing crab grass, parking lot given to earth when asphalt fails. Not that this earth has fuckall to give, the State Lumber Reclamation Project had them deforest any acre holding over ten two foot wides. Trees older than fifty years are an anomaly now. Snow in Florida.

The horse trots to another sprouting fault in the pavement. I'm the least of it's concerns. Shave and a haircut on the back door of the defunct bank, windows boarded and sealed. A face peeks, nods, opens. Silent approval of a stage fully set. I'm the last to arrive, always am, this presence is a distraction in any goddamn setting but especially here. We do not have time for distractions.

Lobby strewn with shards of glass and broken furniture, looters calling card when the vaults been bled. Roger is behind camera one tapping his damn foot as if I give two fucks that my two minutes early is his two hours late. Salty cunt. We're never late. Dez is on two, readjusting the bum tripod he insists on fixing every time a leg goes lame. They're both zoomed in on the vault. It's all of two stables wide. Fuckin perfect. The boom is stuck between Avery's legs as he wrestles the dead cat looking like roadkill. Filthy from road dust but he insists we need it for this shot or we may as well cut sound altogether. Something about bullets and ricochet.

Watch the cables on approach, can't tape shit down when the end is cut and run. Five men sit on the tile amongst the safety deposit boxes and no longer vital paperwork. The Maritzki brothers. Responsible for the Vista Tower bombing in Chicago, ruled eligible for accelerated execution status after being found guilty on 54 counts of murder in the pursuit of terrorism. They each get point two five in eye contact, a collective nod, air goes haywire in reverence and static anticipation. Don't ever address them. They know the stakes or they wouldn't be here. Pre-corpses need their focus.

Avery lifts the boom and clicks his tongue, Dez throws thumbs up. Countdown from Roger in silent digits.

Three. Two. One. Beat.

Flourish.

Citizens and Comrades, a warm welcome from your neighborhood revelators. If you're joining us for the first time, our comrades would have you know me as Imperator General of the Regulatory Revelators. But I've never been one for the pomp and circumstance of titles.

Effortless smile. Balance. Cater to the carnage.

Tonight we have a very special demonstration, courtesy of the Senate's approval of the Private Citizen Protections Act, effectively legalizing interstate private sales of any ballistic weapon. Seven Hills Elementary saw the direct result of this legislation in the form of nine dead children, three dead faculty, and a dozen wounded.

The causal casual hand laid on the star of the show.

Allow us, if we may, to reenact the aftermath in Lower D Wing, where the remnants of Mrs Johnston were found holding what was left of her students.

Gesture to the vault. Dead men stand with shoulders squared.

Most of you will know these men as the Maritzki Brothers, terrorists awaiting execution. Tonight they've volunteered their final moments to assist with our demonstration, a civil service interested in the fullest of disclosures. Bear witness.

Cameras zoomed, tripods locked. Ballistic shields up. Avery crouches behind his with the boom held high. Can't hate the commitment.

Sideways eye contact with the Brothers as the room hitches a breath.

Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant.

They sound ready.

Gentleman. Die well.

And to think, Mikhail Kalashnikov wanted to design tractors. Now zoom out on cam 2, for the centered over the shoulder hero angle. One is the static cam. Cam two with Dez, it does makes the show.

The potential cyclic rate of the rifle is different from the actual cap for practical reasons. The firing rate on an AK-47 or variant thereof is in the neighborhood of 600 rounds a minute. In the real world the fully Automatic Romanian Wasr-10 dangling with its hunnerd rounds of hot, +p+ handloaded to exactly 15% over the standard 125 grains, producing the extra drama only 50,000psi of chamber pressure pushing armor piercing rounds can.

Those rounds in the drum and one in the chamber.

Time this is over the chrome lined barrel on my marvel of engineering will be so hot enough you stick it up a cow’s ass it’ll produce you 1,300 pounds of barbecue and bones in just a minute.

The hero shot raises up just one more degree and, nailed it. Dez is earning himself a beer today.

My rear foot slides back and I bend my knees and lean forward, driving my front booted foot into the ground, the rifle lifts angel swift to the pocket between my shoulder and pec, elbow in, drive it back, lean forward into it, this extension of myself, my one and only tool.

Ahchough-cough

Fuckin’ dust, coughing with near twelve pounds held tight to my shoulder one handed.

The shot from Dez on 2 is centered with me from the shoulders up and angled perfect, framed symmetrical, give it to him, arranging them five boys on their knees, bein’ so particular, this cinematography is enough to get hard for.

Left hand raises in a full grab of the foregrip furniture. Dig that shoulder in, hold steady, pull back on the front end, that long AK lever selector and its theoretical safety is always pushed all the way pedal down. All gas no brakes.

Fuck that cough, gotta make up for it with a dramatic beat or this whole cut is fucked.

It’s not like there’s gonna be another take.

Hawk tuah

Spit a gob a that lung butter out the side of my mouth leftwards, my trigger finger pulls backward, and time slows down, skies open up, the first click of the mechanism and whirring of the machine to the firing pin that clicks and plinks forwards starting the cycle is always holy slow. The flash from the hot burnin’ load shoots out three feet from the barrel tip for one neversecond and the projectile is already halfway to one of the five men on their knees. The gas in the barrel blows back through the cylinder, the port opens, the shell ejects tumbling, the cycle repeats.

AD INFINITUM

A 123 grain 7.62x39 round leaves the sixteen inch barrel of your standard AK or variant somewhere around 2,350 fps. These hot load AP rounds make their exodus at 2,468 fps. This would sound like a minor increase if not for the fact that the target is five men on their knees in a bank vault, and these are armor piercing rounds rated to near go through a small armored recon vehicle.

First chop is so loud the stray mustang bursts into a run with nary a noise.

The report of an AK-47 is very distinct in comparison to a .223, like the difference between a tiger roaring fuck you and your orange housecat whining for more kibble.

From left to right we have them lined up one, two, three, four, and five, and the first round rips through the cheek of three, the center man.

Money shot.

For an entry wound so seemingly discreet, his skin puffs out as the bullet cuts a wound channel through his head, bright crimson gore, hair, skull, his thinkin parts, upon exodus, one side of his head curls open around the bullet like a budding flower spitting his consciousness into the air.

2 takes one in the stomach that comes out his neck, never knows what a bullet does when it hits bone.

Not sighted and with no optic this is just pageantry.

Motherfuckers, are you not entertained?

Bullets ricochet around the closed space of the bank vault, pinballing through flesh and bone, gristle, meat, the reducable human body taken to the limits of its violent deformation. Bone shards and meat chunks, red mist hangs in the air along with the powdersmoke, the brass plinks tumbling off three or four feet to my right out the ejection port, spittin’ into the wind, and

The AK goes

CHOP,

CHOP,

CHOP,

As I draw a slow Z across all five men. Their flesh unrecognizable as human halfway through the drumroll, their clothes shred, a finger flies in front of the static cam, blown off by shrapnel or a round, no one will know or care on playback. These sick terrorists are turning into time dilated sloth falling garden of cordyceps and human colored mold sprouting and then being blown to bits. They’re emptying their bowels and leaving piss on the floor. A hit to the T zone on 5 opens his head out the back a meat pinata. Gutshots all around and bouncing ricochets have viscera starting to push through their clothes. Oh this glorious bloodmess.

I got the best job in the fuckin’ world.

The AK goes

CHOP,

CHOP,

CHOP,

*click*

Drum is empty, driven like stolen, content as the falling garden of five men at the extent of the limits of their human forms, hit the floor right after the last ejected brass tinkles off rolling to a stop in the dirt. Smoke hangs in the air. Black powder smells of the love of my fellow man.

As you can see, citizens, the nine children cut down in their cute little crayon colored classroom had little chance of survival in spite of having a safe room vault right there with them.

They all land in splatterfuck heaps curled at angles unnatural, impossible features carved into their topography, their blood escaping elegantly in a cinema perfect pool expanding rapidly on the floor of the vault.

Though it is worth noting the children at Seven Hills Elementary were shot down with a heavily modded AR15 short barreled rifle and a double can monkey nut mag that held 100 rounds of .223, or 5.56 NATO. I would remind you that the initial nine children massacred at Seven Hills, a paraeducator for disabled and developmentally challenged children, and the teacher: may they rest in power, absorbed a full 78 rounds at near point blank range before the shooter’s rifle suffered a feed malfunction leading to a jam.

Rack the charging handle on the AK one more time and throw it over my shoulder, fucker burns but you do something once and it turns into a signature. Turn to the static cam.

When I drew that slow Z across those five, it took was really only slow fer me, to any observer it was less than four seconds of me scribbling bullets into flesh.

The 5.56x45 Nato round is a wounding round. What you behold, citizen audience, is the result of hot load AP 7.62x39 Soviet. The 5.56 NATO round however is a wounding round, designed to tumble upon entry by design. While it doesn’t have the capacity to pierce Class III+ body armor that Annie here can, it creates horrific wounds and are unpredictable, especially in the bodies of small children, as testified by the trauma teams that are permanently scarred from trying to piece together the children slaughtered in their schoolroom.

The entire show was all of 10.023 seconds long.

The children and their teachers absorbed 75 rounds of 5.56 NATO ammunition from a SBR with a 12.5” long barrel traveling at a velocity of somewhereabouts 2800fps.

One hundred rounds of God’s love and they may as well be monkey’s going to heaven because no one could recognize these as distinct men, they are but pooled flesh and odd angles, an arm, part of a hand, most of number 2’s shoulder meaning his head is, oh, there’s some teeth, and part of his jaw is hanging, but the rest of the head is persona non grata to what’s left. No heart unpierced. No flesh left unmolested.

The children and their teachers, the first and worst of the victims, suffered from 185 separate bullet caused wounds between the 9 of them. That’s just over twice as many wounds as was fired.

I know I had to have blown the cock clean off number 1, all the way on the left, not that anyone will check

One slow pan of my head as I take in this unholy fuckin’ mess. Jesus Christ. What’s it gonna smell like in ten minutes?

The photographs from Seven Hills inside the classroom, citizens and comrades, I will tell you, and you might know if you had the Patriotic NUTS to even look at them, looked worse than this pile of chop meat, half limbs, organs, offal, and near recognizable pieces of human head.

I turn to the static cam, thumbs up from Dez.

Cam two comes in for the sweep.

You see five men who look like they just melted and fell apart, all sorts of em splattered on every wall, ceiling, and inch of floor, you might think twice about being a degenerate.

The view is topological.

Miss Johnson had mere moments to cover as many of her students as she could. In the pictures I’ve seen she looks like a doll torn to pieces with its guts pulled out draped over an around a pile of raw meat and kiddie clothes.

In final it will cut from this passover to blood on the walls, bits of brain on the ceiling, an errant eye that’s half smashed, a tongue. Bits of tooth, that always gets a person where you want, tooth pain is the worst.

What’s that rule they got in physics?

I am the Imperator General of the Regulatory Revelators citizens and comrades. Behold my works, look upon justice.

The spooked mustang runs until it trips over an unnoticed rock and takes a neck breaking dive.

The arrow of time only runs one way?

Once you drop an egg and crack it.

Ave Imperator, fiat iustitia ruat cælum.

The horse lies dying huffing with burnt up lungs, eyes glassing, blood running in a trickle from its nose and mouth, tongue lolling.

Our next demonstration will be announced to the police and citizenry in due time. Until then

You can’t uncrack the egg and have it fly up from particulate bits back onto the counter it was knocked off of.

Super Imperium Americanum Aeternum pax et iustitia regnant. Ave, Imperator.

Turkey buzzards are already circling the horse, anticipating its termination of breath and final heartbeats.

Yeah, I’d say humans are about like that.

It takes the Mustang longer to die than it does to shoot B footage and coverage, pack up, and burn out. And he’s wondering as they drive past where he saw it, what happened to that pretty little mustang havin’ a bite to eat?