Salty Loser

Sweat. Salt. Saliva. All mixed together as the sea of people turned into a tsunami. Waves of flesh crashed against the walls. Bodies stacked upon bodies. Shoes upon skulls. Teeth between hair. The chaos in Jack’s Jackpot made it more like Jack's Crackpot.

All it took was the broadcast to return to the main hall. The match that ignited the tension and emotions condensed in that room into hysteria. As the static regained clarity, the screen proudly displayed Tim’s winning hand. A hand that not only slingshotted him to first place, but also brought Ansel O’Keefe’s score to the ground, breaking into the negatives and ending the entire match.

Tim’s victory was their victory. All those who wagered on the drunkard saw their lives changing in an instant. Cheers and celebration erupted throughout the casino as strangers hugged each other. Exchanged high-fives. Infected each other with their euphoria. The marbled floor they stood on quaked in excitement as the glass panels shook with chants of, “Tim! Tim! Tim!”

With so much passion concentrated in one area, the invisible container holding it all in cracked. The counter denied one single gambler their winnings. Then, two. Followed by four. Before long, the queue, packed to the brim, collapsed. Fervor became fury.

Meat rammed into metal as the crowd laid siege to the iron grills protecting the counter and the money behind it. Shoving. Slamming. Shouting. All hell broke loose. Security was quickly overwhelmed, their firearms rendered useless in such tight quarters.

Some tried to push further. Others tried to escape. The result was a human blender. Bones snapped as human tissue squeezed out blood. The entire casino melted into anarchy. In the end, the gamblers were right. Their lives changed in an instant.

But in the private theater, the meltdown was only just beginning.

“Y-Y-You cheated!” Ansel leveled the accusation twice. First, through his words. Second, through his handgun, aimed at Tim. The rest of the VIPs followed the mob boss’s gesture, drawing their concealed weapons, muzzles hungry to be unleashed at the winner of the mahjong game.

Tim’s eyes flickered. Between the bright lights, the black orbs of gun barrels sparkled in his vision like a reverse starry sky. It wasn’t beautiful. But it was oddly nostalgic. Ever since he took care of Mia, he had not seen the end of so many barrels at the same time. He reached into his coat. Now was a good time as any for a smoke.

“Now, now, everyone!” Jack got up, arms at his sides as he tried to placate the crowd. “Let’s not get carried away here. We all know bullets won’t w—”

“Shut yer trap, Jack!” Ansel pointed his gun at the mediator. “This is all your idea! Maybe I should give your head another hole to think from!”

“General,” whispered one of the two bodyguards, dressed in black from top to bottom, the color of the Greerian Military. “It’s best we make a move.”

General Walker replied, “Go. Give the green light. I’ll stay here for a bit. See how this plays out.”

“Understood.” The bodyguard tilted his head, giving a quick glance at the other. Both of them left the theater just as the scene was getting to the good part.

After taking a nice, warm drag, Tim spoke up. “Relax, O’Keefe. Cut Jack some slack.”

“I don’t take orders from you, freak! So what if you’re the Guardian Deity of Pitstop? You’re just some washed-up Surface-Dweller from a hundred years ago! It’s time for you to leave our town the hell alone!”

“You’re right,” Tim agreed as he got up from his seat. “That’s why I’ll need a car. Jack, if you’d so kindly—”

“You ain’t going anywhere!” Ansel yelled, waving his gun at the drunkard.

Tim paused, shooting a glance over to Jack that screamed, “Seriously?”

Jack could only shrug his shoulders in response, answering with a wordless, “I told you so.”

A smoke-filled sigh left the Exiled’s lips. “I’m in a hurry, so—”

His cigarette dropped to the ground, the two fingers that held it now reduced to stumps. His eyes moved from the blood spurting out of the stumps to Ansel, smoke trailing from his handgun. Odd, Tim thought. It wasn’t that loud. But as he questioned his aging hearing, the train of thought was punctuated not by a question mark, but a bullet through his skull.

Steel and lead rained on him, each droplet leaving behind holes of all sizes in his body. In just a few seconds, close to a thousand rounds have hit their target, the deafening din of gunfire almost setting Tim ablaze. Red smeared all across the floor as the white of his bones became visible.

“Argh! Fu—” One shot missed, hitting Jack in the shoulder as he knocked the mahjong table over to take cover. Ivory tiles scattered across the floor alongside bullet casings.

The General watched the entire scene play out, cross-legged and glued to her seat. Even as projectiles whizzed past and Jack groaned in pain, she calmly lit a cigar. Not with a lighter, but with a bullet that flew too close. A few more would actually hit her if they weren’t deflected by the saber in her hand. Even Jack, despite being a few feet away, didn’t see her unsheathing her blade at all. One moment, it was in her scabbard, and in the next, several sliced bullets fell harmlessly on the floor.

By the end of the firing session, Tim looked less like a person, more like the concept of a person. A surrealist portrait. His face blended in with the background. Organs dangled in places where they did not belong. Limbs hung loosely like suggestions. This mangled corpse of a man did not belong in the ground, but in an art gallery in The Mids.

Silence took over the private theater, more deafening than the gunfire storm moments earlier. Even as bullets replaced his bones and cloth mixed with flesh, Tim was somehow still standing. Ansel and the VIPs froze, unable to breathe and process the impossibility before their very eyes. But what truly sucked the air out of their lungs wasn’t the fact that he was standing.

He walked.

Head missing. Chest cavity empty and exposed. Legs broken and warped. And yet, he walked. Each step slow, deliberate. As if a puppeteer controlled each piece of the shattered piñata, defying the very laws of physics to compel it to move. It wasn’t human. It tried to be, but it simply wasn’t.

Everyone in the room could only watch as the abomination lumbered closer to the center of the stage, their focus briefly shattered by laughter in one of the elevated seats. The deranged cackling ended as the VIP shot himself in the head, mind raped by the horror before it. Others couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Frozen in time and fear.

Ansel found himself trapped. The cage of his body moved against his will as his hand planted the muzzle of his gun onto his temple. Sweat flowed in reverse the instant the abomination walked past him in utter indifference. He was like an ant. An ant that began to grasp the infinite gap between itself and the thing right beside it. This thing, this corpse god, could end all of humanity at a whim. But why would it even bother to do so? This was the knowledge that tainted Ansel, driving his finger ever closer to the trigger.

As his life flashed past, all the memories stopped. The mob boss’s hand was forcefully lowered by the General.

“I do not consent to your death. Unfortunately, you still have use for me,” she stated. How she maintained control of her body was nothing short of a miracle.

The being ignored them, approaching the fallen mahjong table. Jack trembled under the weight of its presence. Flesh, fabric, bullet, and bones moved in unison. Engulfed by its shadow, it took him everything to ignore the whispers in his head. The voices that did not belong to him. Even the pain from being shot in his arm ceased to exist as his senses vanished one by one.

He felt it “looking” at him. Like a cell under a microscope that gained sentience. As it reached out to him, he no longer knew if he was alive or dead. If those concepts even existed in the first place. The entire weight of everything and nothing entered the membrane of his cell. Pure bliss. As his mind melted away, all that was left was joy.

“Jack!”

He heard Tim’s voice. The Exiled stood near the door of the private theater. Intact. That was when Jack realized the lone bullet hole in his arm was gone. As if he never bled in the first place. But he knew he had been shot, the hole in his shirt proof that Tim healed him.

“I need a car.”

“R-Right.”

He got up, dumbfounded like the rest of the VIPs. They didn’t know whether they were dreaming. Realization took its own sweet time to creep in. The guns in their hands felt lighter. Their experienced hands told them that rounds had indeed been fired. A few of them noticed the dead body in the seats, a victim of suicide. The fallen mahjong table. The bullet holes and casings on the stage.

Everything they saw transpired in reality. The only anomaly was Tim, who looked exactly how he used to. Eyes half-opened, slightly buzzed. Hair unkempt. Was this really the same eldritch monstrosity they had just borne witness to?

Jack stumbled over to the Exiled’s side, the two of them heading out of the theater. But before Tim could open the door, the General called out.

“Once you step out, you will be declared an enemy of Greer.”

Tim turned around slowly. “Then, I hope you wouldn’t waste too many bullets on me.”

Opening the door, he backtracked once more, addressing the General, Ansel, and all the stunned VIPs one last time.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Here, you’ll need this.”

His words were met with confusion and silence. But when the sound of clinking bounced from the floor, they pieced together what his words meant.

Bullets emerged from under Tim’s skin, passing through his clothes before dropping like flies onto the ground. Fragments. Shrapnel. Any piece of metal that tore through him before was excreted like sweat. Akin to one of the slot machines outside hitting a jackpot, bullets piled up in front of Tim’s shoes as if they were casino chips.

“Bye, everyone!”

And as the door closed behind him, the ice in the air turned to oxygen again. The gangsters in the room found themselves able to breathe once more. Found themselves confronting their mortality.

Ansel plopped onto the floor, kneeling. Defeated. Drowning in his own sweat.

“W-W-Why… why did we pick a fight with such a monster?” He asked the General, standing beside him as she enjoyed her cigar.

“He’s getting old.”

“Old? Even if he were a pile of bones, he’d kill everyone in a heartbeat.”

“If you’re referring to him when he was younger, then yes, I’d agree. That course of action would fit his past personality.”

“What? You think you stand a chance against him?”

“Of course not,” the General admitted.

“Then?! Why are we starting a war we can’t win?”

“Wars are not won by strength alone. If that were the case, The Surface would have conquered everything below several times over by now.”

“I don’t know what you’re smoking, lady, but I. Quit!”

Ansel stomped on the floor, giving weight to his exclamation mark as he stared the General down, the woman a few heads shorter.

“Even after I saved your life?”

“And if I go any further, I’d just be throwing your ‘generosity’ away. Goodbye! Displeasure working with you.”

Ansel turned around, signalling to his men to leave with him. But their feet were stuck to the floor. Their eyes trembled in their sockets. The mob boss’s frustration grew, sick and tired of the behavior of his men. He glared at them, head cocked at an angle.

But that angle kept growing. From a slight slant to an impossible tilt, even he was confused how he could stare at them at such a bizarre angle. It was like the world was spinning around him. This was the last thought that went through his head as it landed on the ground a few feet away from his body.

Flicking the blood off her saber, the General asked the VIPs, “Now, is there anyone who would like to replace him?”