Author's Note: This is semi-autobiographical. The part with the old man putting a doll's head on the bench actually happened, and is part of what inspired this piece to be written in the first place. The rest of these events are true only in unidentifiable causality streams that are unique and unreachable from this one. Your only mode of transportation henceforth is text.

Head

“That looks like a good one.”

Jim Stern bent over at the waist to get a closer look at the manicured hand. “Yeah it does,” he agreed. “I need a drink.”

“Go ahead and have at it, then,” Drake Thompson told him. “And take a look at his feet—manicured hands usually mean some pretty good feet, too. In the mean time, I’ll be over here digging up Ms.—uh—Clairmont.” He shoved the list of names back into his coat pocket and picked up his shovel. “We can hit the bar after we’re done here.”

“Doctor’s orders,” Jim agreed once more.

“Doctor’s orders.”

It was a tough line of work, but somebody had to do it. It paid well—nice and easy payment-as-per-delivery-of-goods plan, tax free, supposedly underhanded and immoral, but why look on the down side of things? At least it took care of the rent.

“How ‘bout this guy’s tongue?”

“Tongue?”

“Yeah,” Jim called. “Looks like he’s got a big one.”

“Probably shouldn’t,” Drake called back. “Tongues swell up after death. Swollen organs make for bad transplants.”

“They do?”

“Sure. Would you want a giant tongue inside your mouth?”

“I didn’t think tongues were subject to swelling,” Jim replied, huffing as he sawed through the cadaver’s shoulder. “I mean, I’m no med graduate, but hey, I didn’t think they did that.”

“I think they do.”

“I think that’s a myth.”

“Could be.” Drake agreed, three rows and two columns of graves away. “I’m no med grad either, so I really can’t say for sure.”

The comment made Jim pause as he lifted the arm out of the grave and tossed it onto the rich soil aboveground. “Say, what are you anyway?”

Drake’s response was interspersed with huffs from hefting shovelfuls of dirt. “Is this some kinda trick question?”

Jim shrugged, knelt down with the saw, started on the other arm. “No, man,” he huffed in time with the strokes. “I mean, what did you do before all this?”

“Oh,” Drake’s breathing was heavy, and Jim could hear the thuds of his shovel against the loamy soil. “Store clerk in Indiana.”

“Indiana? That’s pretty far.”

Drake grunted and pulled out another shovelful of void. It thumped onto the accumulated pile. “Yeah,” he agreed.

“So how’d you get out here?” Jim called over.

“Jackson Davies picked me up,” he replied.

Jim let his eyebrows rise in surprise before he hefted the second arm up onto the ground. “The Jackson Davies?”

“That’s right,” Drake affirmed. “He found me when he was passing through the area. He apparently got a call someplace out west, had to pick up some famous guy’s brain for scientific research—clandestine-like, right?—and of course, my man Jackson was the perfect candidate for that kinda stuff.”

“Yeah,” Jim called back in awe. “I’d heard the stories. That guy stole entire bodies out of morgues—I knew a guy that worked for the coroner’s office in Detroit, said one day they were preparing for an autopsy, and the coroner had to leave the room to take a call. Came back, and it was like the body just got off the table and left the precinct. The guy I knew—he called that the Davies Technique, capital tee.”

“Sounds right,” Drake called back to him. Jim heard his shovel hit casket. “The guy was pretty astounding at breaking and entering, dissection, removal, theft, the works. He taught me all I know, from taking care of locks to expeditious removal of requested organic and bodily items.”

“Wow.” Jim started work on removing the dead man’s boots to get a better look at his feet.

“Yeah.”

“Hey Drake, think I should take this guy’s whole legs, or just his feet?”

“How do they look?” He heard Drake start work on opening his casket with the powerful reciprocating blade. He waited until the noise from the saw died down before he spoke.

“Knees are a bit knobby, and judging from his age, the hips are probably a mess.” Jim called back.

“Then don’t bother,” Drake returned. “The doc’s got enough legs. Just get the feet—include the ankle, though.”

“Gotcha.” Jim huffed as he started work on sawing through the corpse’s tibia. “So what happened then?”

“After Davies walked through the doors of my quaint convenience store?”

“Yeah.”

“Not much to tell,” Drake said. “We took turns driving from Indiana. He had an old beat-up contractor van—it’s actually the very same one we use today. He gave it to me before he died.” Jim heard him huff as Drake jumped into the grave. “After that, well, it’s history. The guy was a fantastic teacher, and much of what he taught me I’ve tried to pass onto you in some form or another.”

Jim grunted and strained when he found that his saw was stuck in the unrelenting tibia. “Hey,” he called. “Sorry to interrupt, but can ya give me a hand? My saw got stuck in this guy’s shin.”

“Shin?”

“Yeah, you said you wanted the ankle.”

“But I didn’t mean for you to try and cut straight through the shin!”

“Sorry.”

“Psh, no skin off my back. It’s just more difficult than it needs to be.” Jim heard Drake’s sigh from his own grave. “Just cut above the ankle. You should be able to split apart the ankle from the tibia easier than cutting straight through the actual shin.”

“Oh.” There was a silence as Jim struggled with the saw. “But that doesn’t help me. The blade is still stuck in this guy’s leg.”

“Try getting it out like you would a piece of wood,” came the reply.

“I’ve never removed wood from a man’s shin before.”

“No, I mean—for chrissakes—when you’ve got a saw stuck in a chunk of wood, you bow the wood a little bit so it unclenches the blade, get me?” Jim could almost hear Jim massaging his temples in frustration.

“…Ah, gotcha.” The blade came out with a sick crunch. “Easy. Thanks for the uh, advice.”

“No problem,” Drake absently replied. “When you’re done over there, come and gimme a hand. The doc wanted this woman’s head, but he didn’t specify which one.”

“That does sound like it could be an interesting dilemma.”

“It’s certainly turning out to be.”

Jim pulled the ankle off the leg after sawing through it, and set it down on the ground above his head. “They sure bury these suckers deep,” he said.

“Don’t I know it,” Drake said. “Mostly to discourage us, I think.”

Jim nodded as he started work on the other ankle. “I suppose you could be right.”

In minutes, Jim had harvested the cadaver for all the limbs the Doctor had requested. After he had made his way back up and out of the grave, he started to stash the limbs in a burlap sack.

“That should do it,” he said to himself.

“You finished?”

“Yeah. How’s Ms. Clairmont coming?” Jim made his way over to the grave Drake was currently standing in.

“Not bad,” he said, looking up at Jim. “I’ve already harvested the limbs we needed. All I need your help with is the heads.”

As he stepped back to offer Jim a better view, Jim noticed the problem. The elderly woman had a single head exactly where it was supposed to be, however, there was a second skull, covered in partially decomposed flesh, which seemed to have grown out of the side of her neck. While the normal-looking head looked as though the body had just been buried yesterday, the second head looked as though it’d been rotting for months.

“Well,” Jim started, “that looks… appropriately repulsive.”

“Grotesque,” Drake noted, mater-of-fact.

“Stomach-churning,” Jim continued.

“Hideous.”

“Appalling.”

“Monstrous.”

“Macabre.”

“Revolting.”

“Horrible.”

“Gruesome.”

“Repugnant.”

“Just help me take her heads off,” Drake consented.

Jim nodded, handing him the saw and leaping into the grave.

“Alright,” Drake continued, “If you can hold that head in place with your foot, I should be able to take this one off pretty easily.”

“How about we just take it off at the lower neck?” Jim suggested.

Drake stood back, observing the body. “Yeah, we could do that. Good idea.”

And so they began. Jim had his foot firmly on the abomination, while Drake used his left hand to keep the normal head steady as he sawed through the neck. In minutes, the body came apart. The stench was horrendous.

“Dear god,” Drake gasped. “Usually doesn’t smell this bad.” He stood up, waving his hand in front of his face. “Get the sack,” he told Jim, “and stash the limbs up top there. I’ll handle this… thing.”

“Sure.” Jim jumped up and clambered out of the grave, kicking a bit of dirt into the hole as he did so. Drake picked the pair of heads up with a steady hand, staring at it in lurid fascination. Instead of eyes, there was black void as deep as the cosmos; he could not see inside the head, his gaze pierced nothing; the black was opaque and as spacious as eternity.

“Drake,” Jim tapped him on the head, and broke his stare. “The limbs are all in the bag. You ready to start filling the holes?” Jim held out his hand.

Drake sighed, suddenly tired. “Yeah, might as well.” He took the offered hand and climbed out of the grave, shutting the casket with his foot. “Pile it in,” he said.

The night, whose silence first was a comfort, now bothered the pair. Eerie silence had crept in while they weren’t paying attention, and it was everywhere. Neither could shake the ominous cloud that held their sway, even as they shoveled dirt into the graves.

“Y’know, I never understood why the Doc has us going after limbs now,” Jim said, trying to break the silence.

“What?”

He tossed another shovelful of dirt into the pit. “Limbs,” Jim reiterated. “First he had us going for organs—breaking into morgues and sneaking around hospitals and stuff, and blood, and now what? We’re robbing limbs. What’s he gonna do with limbs? The organs I can kind of understand, but limbs?”

Drake shook his head and huffed in time with the filling. “Beats me, man,” he said. “But the money’s good. We get what we want, he gets what he wants, everybody’s happy, nobody’s dead. That’s a win-win in my book.” He stopped for a moment, and looked into the grave. “Except, well, them of course. They get nothing.”

“Kind of ripping them off,” Jim agreed.

“Like conmen.”

“Grave robbing, limb-snatching conmen.”

An hour passed, and both holes returned to an unburied state. They managed to reseat the topsoil well enough to make it look mostly undisturbed. The twilight was their only witness.

“Time to hit the road,” Jim stated.

“Yeah,” Drake’s voice was far away, even though he hadn’t moved an inch. “Yeah, I suppose it is.” He picked up the head as he started toward the cemetery gate while Jim grabbed the sack of limbs.

“Speaking of which,” Jim started, “you got the time?”

Drake shook his head. “No watch, man.”

“Well, I wanna make a quick stop in this church here. I gotta take a piss.” Drake shrugged absently as he closed the gate. Jim had already walked towards the entrance to the somewhat-overbearing Catholic church. Reflections of the stars poured down its stained glass windows like water trickling down the face of a cliff. “I won’t be long.”

Drake shrugged again and sat down on one of the benches that lined the walkway. The sidewalk itself was a T; it connected the graveyard to the church in a straight line, and about halfway in between the two there was a separate path that ran perpendicular. It led to the currently empty street, punctuated by the fluorescent bulbs of streetlights. They had parked the van a block from here.

The head next to him did not make any noise, but sat still in the agreeable silence.

As Drake leaned back against the bench, a ragged, panting, stumbling homeless man in rags limped up the stem of the T. He approached Drake, but did not stop as he passed. Instead, he placed a plastic object—pale, spherical in shape—next to the grotesque cadaver’s head. Drake looked at it awkwardly as the man continued down the path, opening the gate to the cemetery with ease and staggering inside.

The plastic object was the head of a baby doll, Drake observed as he held it aloft. One of the eyes had been roughly gouged out, as the plastic looked torn and cracked around the empty socket. It had obviously been ripped off of the body, since the base of the head was jagged and sharp.

When he looked back at the homeless man, he found that the guy was now confronting two other men who brutally threw him over the short fence of the cemetery and onto the adjacent sidewalk that bordered the street. They savagely beat the man, but since they weren’t under a streetlight it was impossible to make out any distinctive features. They were merely shadows assaulting a vague and mysterious persona.

Soon they grew tired, bound the man, and tossed him into the back of a van. The doors closed violently, and the vehicle sped off down the street. As it passed Drake, the driver fired a handgun three times—the bullets ricocheted off of the sidewalk and bench, narrowly missing him, but startling him into bailing from his position and lying flat on his stomach.

Jim flew out of the church doors, a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. “Jezus, Drake—I heard gunshots, what the hell happened?” He looked around, but the van was gone.

“I don’t know,” Drake replied, getting off of the ground. “I almost got a face full of lead and I’d like to know why. Some guys driving a van like ours just beat the shit out of a homeless guy and stuffed him in the back. Then they fired off a coupla rounds at me as they sped past.”

Jim stared down the street in the direction the van had fled, but couldn’t even make out taillights. “Good thing they missed,” he mumbled.

“Yeah,” Drake replied, shaking himself off. “Yeah it is.”

“I suppose we should head back, th—hey,” Jim pointed at the plastic doll’s head on the bench. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Drake answered, picking it up. “The homeless man gave it to me. He didn’t say anything, either—just plopped it down next to this head.”

“Weird.” Jim stuffed the revolver back inside his coat pocket.

Drake sighed. “Well, that was our excitement for the evening. Now we just gotta get this stuff to the van before sunrise, otherwise we might have some awkward questions to answer.”

“Alright,” Jim acquiesced. “I’ll grab the limbs, you got the uh… rest?”

His partner nodded. “Yeah.”

But before they could make it to the curb, they were sucked up an invisible tube that deposited them inside a flying saucer.

“Humans of Earth,”

A loudspeaker announced its presence as the protagonists came to terms with their abrupt seizure. Jim’s grip on the bag of limbs faltered, and the bag immediately dropped to the cool floor of the sleek, sterile room. Drake’s grip on the mysterious head intensified beyond his control; the hypothenar muscles in his hand began to ache and cramp as they dug into the malformed body part.

The loudspeaker continued: “We have brought you here, to this place, in order to analyze your behavioral tendencies. Do not fear, for we are a peaceful and intellectually superior group of hominids that have traveled far and experienced much. In order to maximize our understanding of your primitive culture, we will expose you to radically different stimuli and then subject you to extended periods of examination.”

“We’re rats,” Jim mumbled under his breath. “We’re a couple of grave digging rats who just got caught by some sicko scientists from another planet.”

“Actually,” the loudspeaker interrupted his ramblings, “We have come from an entirely different dimension to subjugate those beings that do not respect our superior intellect.”

“Oh, that’s just great!” Jim roared at the speaker box. “Now it’s a bunch of sicko egocentric scientist megalomaniacs from another dimension!”

Drake rubbed his head with his free hand. “Look fellas, just let us go home. We aren’t worth your time.”

“This is correct!” The loudspeaker boomed. “Beings of your lowly sentience are of no value to us whatsoever! We do not need what little information your puny minds could comprehend, as your most intelligent aspirations are akin our most primitive thought processes!”

Jim looked over at Drake. “What?”

“We have no use for whatever information you could dispense to us!”

“But you just said—”

Before Jim could finish his sentence, a door protruded out of the far wall and opened, revealing six tall, lanky, vaguely humanoid creatures dressed in silver outfits.

“Surrender your weapons, Paraxoid bastards!” The one who spoke looked like the leader—the only thing differentiating him from the other five being a slightly more menacing-looking weapon that he hefted in his hands like a 4x4 chunk of lumber.

“Yeah!” One of the men behind him uttered. “Surrender your weapons or we’ll kick your ass!”

“Oh shit!” The loudspeaker exclaimed. “Cybermelons! Who dares point weapons at the interior of our intellectually superior spacecraft?!”

A third intruder spoke up, “We do, motherfucker.” With that, he fried the loudspeaker right off the wall with a well-aimed shot of lightning.

Jim and Drake stood like petrified logs. Drake shifted the head in his hand so that it was obscured from the intruder’s views by his body.

“Relax, little earth creatures.” The leader of the intruders spoke as he lumbered over towards the Earthmen. “We may look imposing, but we’re gentile spirits—”

The wall upon which the loudspeaker had previously been mounted suddenly erupted in flames as an explosion rocked the ship. Three refrigerators with brains encased in Teflon mounted inside Plexiglas freezer doors stood like pillars of madness eroded by the obfuscations of time and space. Three mechanical arms covered in an alien mucous sprouted out of the braincases, but each was fried by the newcomers and their plasma guns.

“You see,” the leader yelled over the din of plasma discharges, ion disruptions, and spatial distortions, “our planet is inhabited by nothing but monks and nuns. We couldn’t dig that too well, even when all of us were raised in a monastery. After a little mishap that resulted in the destruction of our moon—” the leader blinked as a stray piece of shrapnel ricocheted off the ceiling and missed his nose by narrow fractions of an inch, “—we left the planet to pillage and plunder.”

“So,” Jim spoke up, “that kind of makes you like space pirates, doesn’t it?”

The leader rubbed his eyebrows thoughtfully. “I suppose it does,” he concurred.

The refrigerators sat in smoldering ruin. Two of mechanical beasts had been blown open, and copious amounts of brains and oil and blood and unidentifiable organic material decorated the area accordingly. The last of the trio had once again tapped into the loudspeaker system onboard to deliver a last message.

“Curse ye,” his voice buzzed and hissed with static and interference, phasing and distorting like an improperly tuned transistor radio. “Curse ye ignorant Sangrealians. May your whole existence rot out from beneath you like unstable scaffolding on the brink of eternity—”

“Man, shut up!” One of the intruders fired a final plasma bolt into the brain case, splattering the room with singed pieces of Paraxoid intellectualism.

The leader’s attention was once more focused upon the pair of Earthmen. “I believe one of you has a universal homing transponder?”

Drake paled. He pulled the head out from behind his back, revealing it to the Sangrealians in a mixture of fear and disgust. “Is that what this thing is?” he asked.

One of the Sangrealians vomited. Another screamed. The one that had just shot the remaining Paraxoid bugged out, choked, and coughed out a piece of his own lung. The leader shit his pants.

“Put it away! Have you no decency?! Put it the fuck away!!” the leader cried. After Drake hid it from view, the leader was able to speak. “That—that thing—is an abomination!”

“Not a universal homing whatever?” Jim edged.

Various cries of “No!”, “Fuck no!”, “Hell no!”, “You stoopid?!”, and other assortments of profanity resounded.

The leader explained: “The universal homing transponder is made out of a thin beige plastic, and is spherical in shape. In the coldest temperatures, the plastic gets brittle and cracks very easily—”

Drake produced the head of the doll from his pocket. Its eyeless stare gazed at the Sangrealians. “Some bum gave it to me before he was kidnapped.”

“Hmm, I see.” The leader gazed at the pale head, whose little doll eyes gazed back. “You must retrieve this bum for us,” the leader explained. “We require his services.”

“That’s going to be a bit difficult,” Drake said.

“Yeah,” Jim’s reply was slow. “He kind of got kidnapped.”

The leader turned to his group, who were busy staring at the scorch marks on the walls. He regarded them speechlessly before turning back to Drake and Jim.

“We can solve this dilemma with time travel,” he said.

Minutes prior, the saucer hovered in Earth’s atmosphere, and an invisible tube spat the pair of Earthmen onto a curb next to an old white van.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Jim mumbled, dusting himself off as he stood. “It’s our van!”

“The head!” Drake exclaimed. “They took the head! They kicked us out and kept Clairmont’s head!”

“It’s still onboard their ship?” Jim asked, walking around to the driver’s side door. “Good riddance. The thing was hideous and it smelled like a dead rat stuffed up someone’s infected sinuses. The keys should be in the visor, right?”

Drake searched his pockets. “The doctor’s gonna take our heads if we don’t get it back!”

What Drake and Jim had no possible way of knowing was that the head hadn’t been stolen, but simply misplaced. It was, in fact, still on board the spaceship, and the Sangrealians were currently going insane and losing all control over their bodily functions. The leader, in particular, was at that very moment in the process of vomiting in such a way as for his stomach contents to spill out his nose while he sneezed, ejaculating blood into his nylon trousers, and farting. Several other members of his squad were disemboweling themselves in order to hide from the fearless gaze of the disembodied head. “MAKE IT STOP!” they wailed, “TURN IT OFF! GET IT AWAY!” But alas, the head’s resolve continued unabated by their horrific pleas for solace.

The van started with an agonized mechanical sneeze. Rust flaked off the fenders and sides, and the cabin rattled Drake and Jim in their worn, semi-upholstered seats. “We gotta get that head back,” Drake whispered.

“Well, don’t feel so bad,” Jim tried to console him. “I mean, I had a whole sack of limbs with me, and I lost those. Think of how pissed the doc’s gonna be at me! Ah? Eh? Hah?” He tried a Jim Belushi impression, but his grunts sounded like barnyard animals in heat.

“Shit, you’re right! We left the limbs there, too!” Drake gritted his teeth and gazed out the window. “Let’s find this hobo. Let’s find him, abduct him, take him back to the Sangrealians, and hope they’ll hand over the body parts.” He cracked his knuckles as his glare became more determined.

Jim shrugged. “Okay,” he conceded.

In seconds, the van was upon the doddering old man as he stumbled through a graveyard. Jim yanked the van’s steering wheel sharply, jumping the curb as he slammed on the brakes.

“Get him!” he screamed.

Drake jumped out of the cabin and approached the bum as he made his way toward the fence. He grabbed hold of the bum’s jacket and hauled him over the iron ribs just as Jim circled the van. Together, they beat the old man senseless with their fists and shoes, viciously assaulting the hobo’s neck, abdomen, thighs, face, and back with brutal blows.

“Motherfucker,” Drake chanted with each blow. “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker…”

“Yeah,” Jim grunted. “Yeah, howzat? How are you liking this, ya filthy old codger?” He slammed his fist into the side of the man’s face as Drake violently kicked him in the ribs.

The man could only grunt with each blow.

Drake stopped and bent over, putting his hands on his knees for support. He was breathing hard, and a reasonable sheen of sweat was present across his forehead.

“Satisfied?” Jim asked, cracking his back.

“No,” Drake replied, enacting one more carefully-placed stomp in the geezer’s chest. “Okay,” Drake conceded. “Let’s go.”

Together, they picked up the beleaguered old fogy and, pausing as Jim fumbled with the double doors, tossed him into the back of the van. Jim circled around front and started the engine as Drake took one last look around. He slammed the doors shut and climbed back into the cabin.

“Someone saw,” Drake’s voice was calm.

Jim drove the van off the sidewalk and pulled out his pistol. “Not for long,” he grinned, rolling the window down and punctuating a figure perched on a nearby bench with bullet holes.

The tires screeched as a sharp corner quickly obstructed the cemetery from view. Drake sighed and leaned his wet forehead against the cool Plexiglas window. The night sped past outside.

“How do we get back in contact with those guys?” Jim asked. A few drops of rain spattered the windshield.

“I’m not sure of that myself,” Drake replied solemnly.

Seconds later, they found themselves driving into a sleek silver and white room, littered with scorch marks, debris, broken glass, blood, pieces of organs, and various pools of guts. The van was nowhere to be found. Jim and Drake stood just inside the doorway, uncertain, and the homeless man they had just kidnapped bound and gagged on the floor at their feet.

Silence greeted them.

“Um,” Jim started. “Hello?”

A head peaked above an overturned computer console. It was the leader of the Sangrealian party. The rest of his men were distributed evenly about the room—three of them were whole enough to be recognizable, the other two decorated the ceiling, walls, and floor.

“Oh, I see.” The leader coughed out his reply. He stood up and dusted himself off. He was covered in red slime. “You’ve returned with the man, I presume.”

Drake kicked the old man in the kidneys. The codger groaned through his gag.

“Good,” the leader said. “Good, good, good.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his head as he looked about the cabin. “We’ve had some… difficulties, as you can probably see for yourselves.”

“What happened?” Jim asked.

The leader gave Drake a hard gaze. “Your friend’s goddamn abomination happened,” he seethed. “That rotting orb of flesh happened! That miserable, empty, debauched head happened!” The leader ripped open his shirt, exposing his chest. “Look what this bitch did to me!” he screamed.

His ribcage had been exposed via an open gash that ran vertically from his sternum to just above his navel, revealing his internal organs. There, nestled between his lungs, liver, and heart, was the head, whose rotting flesh had bonded itself to the leader’s skeleton.

Drake stared. Jim gaped. The hobo sneezed vomit that oozed out of the sides of his gag. Then he choked.

“That’s…” Drake started, but lost his words.

“That’s really fucked up.” Jim remarked.

The leader sighed and shook his head in a last-ditch effort to remain calm. “And that’s not all she did,” he whispered.

Suddenly, his entire uniform was torn to shreds. Various different-sized arms and legs had grafted themselves to his body. Three arms sprouted out of his left thigh. His left knee had another foot attached to it. Another pair of legs began where his shin tapered off.

He towered over Jim and Drake, his overabundance of limbs sending him to heights of fifteen feet or more—and all under the control of Ms. Clairmont’s head, buried safely within the cavity of his chest. The dead eyes were aglow with sickly green flame. The light seemed to leak out of the sockets, dribbling down the rotted jaw and pooling collectively within the man’s open abdomen.

A short bark filled the cabin and left everyone’s ears ringing. The barrel of Jim’s revolver was smoking. The leader doubled over, groaning, and fell backwards.

“You bastard,” he cried. “You bastard, you killed me, you bastard…”

As abruptly as it had begun, it ended. The head ceased its otherworldly glow, and retracted its slimy tendrils from the marrow of the man’s bones. The limbs disconnected and fell away. A pool of blood swelled around the corpse.

The hobo stood up, removed his bindings, and took off his gag. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“Gentlemen,” he nodded, as he took off his coat. Jim didn’t hear him. Drake barely regarded him. Both were shaking and sweating and cold.

The bum frowned, but returned his attention to the dead body. “You have completed the task assigned to you by the doctor,” the codger solemnly divulged. “I see now why he recommended the pair of you for such a task. You work was exquisite and well executed.” He knelt down and observed the head, before retrieving it from the chest cavity. “But, I believe I’ll be taking this now,” he grunted as he stood. “I commend you for your fruitful labors, and hope to enjoy the pleasure of doing business with you and your employer again.”

He regarded them once more, smiling beneath his brown-spackled grey beard, before recovering his canvas jacket and stepping through the door in the wall. It hissed shut behind him.

Finally, Jim lowered his arm. The pistol was still situated firmly in the palm of his hand. Drake shivered and shuddered and let out a cry.

“Why does this always happen?!” he yelled to no one in particular. “Why are we never in the loop?! Why?!”

Jim took a deep breath before pocketing the revolver. “I don’t know,” he replied, “but I sure need a drink.”