Toenails

by NimrodKirkpatrick

"Grandma, nooooooooooooo!" Tim screams as he watches his sugar-sweet grandmother get mowed down by a cackling guy with a machine gun.

Grandma collapses to the curb, blood leaking from a hundred and fifty-two holes, her glasses broken and her makeup running down her wrinkles. She reaches out to Tim, her old fingers trembling. Reaches to him and mouths something inspiring. Something like, "Achieve greatness, my dear boy. You have a strength in you." She would tell him something similar every morning before school. A single tear joins her mascara as it makes its way down to her chin.

Still she reaches.

But Tim is across the street. He can't reach her. The man with the machine gun is standing in the middle of the road, gunning down anyone who comes to assist the victims. He's got thick silver armour covering his whole body, with a network of tubes leading from his back to his facemask, which is a blank brown thing with haunting yellow eyes that glow. On top of his head is a flat-brim cowboy hat, which makes him look like some kind of gunslinger from hell. But Tim knows that's not what the guy is—he's a powerpeople. It's obvious. The guy's got no visible ammo belt, but yet he never runs out. The guy coughs up bullets and spits them into his gun as if he were his own personal armoury. He laughs while he kills. Screams about how unstoppable he is.

Tim doesn't hear him. Can't hear him. His focus is solely on Grandma. All he'd wanted to do was grab some ice-cream cones with his buddy Josh, then meet up with Grandma for a ride back home after she finished doing her errands.

The guy with the machine gun hadn't factored into those plans.

A siren wails in the distance. Someone called the cops, though there isn't much they can do—not against a guy with a gun and infinite ammo. Tim doesn't know why the cops don't join forces with some of the good-intending powerpeople.

More importantly, Tim wishes he could be a powerpeople. Maybe he could save Grandma. Maybe he could save a lot of people.

The man with the machine gun turns towards the siren's song. He says, "I'll see you fuckers later," and runs off down some back alleys. Leaves the dead behind him. Leaves them for the living.

A few seconds pass before anyone runs to aid the dead and the dying. A few seconds of doubt. Is it all over? And when Tim feels it is, he runs, too.

But Grandma is still.

Dead.

His mouth trembles and he drops his cone. It splats against the bloody concrete and the vanilla-flavoured ice cream turns pink. He whispers, "No..." But he knows there's nothing he can say or do. She's gone. Forever.

Josh shows up beside him, licking his chocolate-mango-mint-chocolate-chip cone. "Damn. She died, dude. That blows donkey dick."

Looking up in disbelief, Tim says nothing.

"How are we gonna get home, dude?" Josh glances around. "Does she have the keys on her? I've got my learner's permit."

"Not the time," Tim says. He can't believe he even has to say such a thing.

"Whatevs. I'm gonna walk. Sucks a fat one about your grandma, dude. Chill tomorrow and listen to some Nickelback, the greatest band in the history and future of music? Tell your grandma I said thanks for the cone. Oh, wait, sorry. Peace, dude."

-----

The man with the machine gun goes by the name "Chaingun." He's been gaining notoriety lately, making the nightly news more often than not. His usual thing is robbing banks. A downtown shooting spree is something different for him.

Tim watches it all play out in the police station, on one of the TVs in the cafeteria. All over again. Someone submitted cell-phone footage to the news station, so he gets to see it from a different angle. Most of the gore has been blurred. Most of the violence. But his memory fills in the blanks.

The cops don't know what to do with him. He's got no other family. Grandma is—was—the only one left. Grandpa died a few years back. Heart attack while digging a hole in the backyard. Tim had found him slouched over his shovel when he'd come home from school. And Mom and Dad had died in a car crash back when he was two or three. So now Tim sits in the police station, waiting and waiting until some arrangement is made for him. He hopes he might live with Josh's family, but he wonders if that might be a bit weird. Josh isn't exactly a sensitive soul.

A cop comes by and leans over the table. "Might take another hour or two, kid. You need somethin' more to eat?"

Slowly shaking his head, Tim says nothing.

-----

Eventually, sometime late into the evening, a butch-looking woman with a hunchback and boils all over her neck comes into the cafeteria and introduces herself as Sally, a social worker designated to take him to emergency housing until a foster family can be found for him.

Foster family. The concept sounds ugly in Tim's thoughts. Comes with visions of slaving away in a crack house until he turns eighteen. Maybe as he's forced to go without a proper home-cooked meal for months. Maybe he gets beaten. Maybe he gets forced to smoke crack and gets hooked on that nasty shit. He sees his life turn to nothing worth living.

"You'll likely get worse parents if you don't pay attention," Sally says to him. She has the annoying habit of constantly waving her finger in his face as she speaks, as if he's a four-year-old troublemaker. "So if you have ADD or you're stupid, keep that on the down-low." Finger waving like it wants to come off. "Nobody wants a moron for a temporary child."

"Can you not wave your finger in my face?" Tim asks, trying to stay calm.

"I will always wave my finger in your face," she immediately replies. And from that point on, she somehow wags her finger even more than before.

He thinks to himself: There's no way any foster family can be worse than this woman.

-----

Mr. Dilmore packs the rest of Tim's belongings in the back of the station wagon. Tim tries to help but Mr. Dilmore turns him away, says it wouldn't be right for him to do hard work after all he's been through. This simple kindness nearly moves Tim to tears. His emotions have been a rollercoaster ride as of late. He stares at the big bearded man with mixed feelings. This is his new... dad?

"Tim," says Mrs. Dilmore, a pretty blonde lady, "would you like a Popsicle from the convenience store before we go?"

A Popsicle sounds lovely to him. He's about to answer as much when, out of nowhere, a giant fucking meteor shoots down from the stars and crushes him.

Blackness engulfs Tim, and it doesn't take half a brain for him to realize he is dead. Oh well, life was pointless anyway. For a moment he starts to think of the Dilmores and hopes he hasn't caused them too much pain, but then he stops caring, remembering that suffering is always eventual in this meaningless horror known as existence.

His buddy Josh appears in the darkness of his newfound nonexistence. He looks the way Josh always looks: shirtless with nipple piercings, a blond mohawk with the points spray-painted black, a markered-on moustache that fools nobody and amuses everybody.

"Fuck you, Josh," Tim says, not understanding the hostility that's come over him these last few moments of nothingness.

"Fuck me?" Josh asks, giving his nipple rings a twist for good luck. "Fuck me? Fuck you, Timothy. Stop being a fuckin' nihilist, you stupid cunt. It's not cool anymore. Maybe back in the late-'90s, when Y2K was a big scare. And maybe even back before 2012 turned out to be a big fat sack of nothing. But not anymore, numbnuts. It's 2017, for fuck's sake. Trump is president. Have some fuckin' hope, you worthless sack of shit. The good guys are winning again! Oh, and by the way, you're not dead, dumbass. That meteor was imbued with Powerpeopleite, a recently discovered element that grants powerpeople abilities. Enjoy, asshole. Now go kill your foster parents. Bye."

-----

"Is he dead?" Mrs. Dilmore scurries into the car and tunes the radio to her favourite station, FNKME FM. She cranks up her favourite song, "Give Up the Funk," and gyrates her booty to the bassline. "I never liked that dumb kid, Herby. Even though I just met him ten minutes ago."

Mr. Dilmore—Herby—rips down his woman's pantaloons and bangs her over the hood of the automobile. "Yeah, there ain't no way that little scrooge survived getting crushed by a random meteor. Maybe if it was a bus, or somethin', we'd be questioning it, but not a meteor. I mean, look at it! It's all purple and glowin' and shit. That's one o' them killin' meteors, isn't it? Ooooh, yeah."

Too busy gettin' busy, the two don't notice the meteor begins to levitate. Underneath is Tim, a bit bloody and more than a little bruised, using his throbbing brain to float the meteor over the Dilmores.

He drops it. Amidst the shriek of metal is the spray of blood.

He dusts off his hands, a hard day's work now complete. Once more he is an orphan.

"Ah, shit, you found the meteor before me?" asks a voice from behind. "Anyone under it?"

Tim turns to see Chaingun, his eyes aglow, his gun ready to rock. "I was under it," he answers. Oddly enough, he feels no anger, no desire to kill the killer of Grandma. Maybe it's the meteor, maybe it's the brutal crushing of his foster family—he doesn't know and doesn't care.

"You were? So you're a powerpeople now, huh? Welcome to the club. You wanna get your jimmy wet and kill some innocents with me and the others, head to our secret clubhouse. But you're gonna need the password..."

-----

By torchlight, because there ain't nothin' more badass and evil than that, boys and girls, Tim—now known by his new name, Braindrain—walks a conveniently spooky path to the evil clubhouse of evil. Towering to his left and his right are massive statues of hooded, praying, and yo-yo-playing bad guys. The path is murky, but a little murk is good for the blackening soul.

He reaches a door at the end of the path. There's a hole to insert his penis. He does and feels a knife circumcise him. Then a voice asks for the password.

"Toenails," he says, and enters a world of evil.