GUN DRACULA VERSUS THE ULTIMATE CRIMINAL AND LORD OF SKY REALM, THE CITY OF THE EAGLE-MEN, SKY COP; HENCEFORTH KNOWN AS: GUN DRACULA VS SKY COP, Part 1: A Fantasia In Fugue
Gun Dracula woke from fantasia in fugue to cold swirling sky, all reds and blues twirled in murk above, volcanic clouds and blistering sun, cold steel in hand. It took him a moment to reconfigure himself: upon gazing at the strange alien sky, he could see peaking beyond those cryptic clouds the deep black of perpetual night and of the iridescent violet glow of the ever-full moon. That meant these swirling apparitions were not the great field of sky, that day had not come; which meant that the sun he spied which burned and cooked him was…?
He did not know.
He supposed, shortly thereafter, that he should have reckoned it was not the natural sun, given its lack of clear effect on his body; no blisters, no scalding, no great reeving of skin. It hung, gold and effulgent, cloaked by those strange swirling airs. Like an eye, a twin to its silver and purpled cousin. Watching.
It clicked: gold and silver, red/blue and purple. Haha. Very funny. And both watching.
He checked his pockets, the chamber, the clip. Plenty of bullets. Good. They would come in handy, almost certainly.
Above, within the queer air of Sky Realm, amongst the golden domes bulging from the spherical surface of their strange home, some domes mounted upon towers great and small and some mounted directly to the surface of the sphere itself, there lay a crenelated castle keep; within that keep, which soared impossibly deep, wide, tall, larger inside than out, seeming to contain a city within its walls, there lay at its center and egg-like room; beyond the gently curved doors, within the walls of that egg-like room, with its wall-mounts upon which lay the heads of the many criminals put to death by the lord of the strange city of Sky Realm, and with its shelves which are decked with trophies of conquest: skulls, femurs, shields, enchanted weapons, there lay a great and complex throne; upon that throne sat the gold-armored eagle-man, who was in fact lord of all the evil men of the city of Sky Realm, known as Sky Cop.
Sky Cop sat perched upon his throne like some vulgar statue, vast and scowling, corners of his lips turned towards the cold of the earth, chin in hand and eyes fixed fast upon the floor in front of him. His heart sat heavy in his chest and his body seemed to sag inexorably into the metal of the throne itself. His spirit seemed trapped, the conduits of his soul clogged by some force. His advisors and lieutenants (he had no generals, trusted not the eagle-men denizens of the citadel that was Sky Realm with such power and title, lest they seek to unseat him as he once had unseated the man who sat upon this throne once before) knew not what to do to appease him, to break this depressive spell; all wealth was had, all power possessed, and all was right upon the rippled and bulbous golden globe that was Sky Realm.
Somewhere beyond the gold and feathers, within the sharpened eagle’s skull of Sky Cop, was this dulling thudding sensation, a throbbing, of something far away, watching. He did not know its name. He knew it was coming. And he knew that, on its coming, either it would kill and consume him or he it.
This thought did not evoke pleasure in his cold heart. It was an organ long turned to stone by what he termed “the necessities of the position”, first as an officer then as a lieutenant, eventually a general and now cruel despot of the magnificence of Sky Realm, the fatal shootings, the imprisonments, the beatings, the abductions, all the cruel worlds and crueler blasts of the rod, gold lightning arcing out from the fasces of Sky Cop’s imperial power to scald the body and burn away each feather until what was left was a blackened body of one once disloyal and now fully completely dead. He attempted in moments when he could to return to his life unharmed by the costs of these deeds, to have weird fucked up bird sex with his wife, to throw up meat into the beaks of his children, to masturbate and play and laugh and sleep and dream, and many times these moments would come easy, until at last that sleeping demon of his regrets crawled up from within him to seize his mind. So the only thing to do was to turn it all off, pursue in stimulant and cruelty the dumb evocations of the dumber body lobotomized to preserve itself from the lacerations of the conscience.
He did not welcome death as a good king would. As all tyrants (and at heart he knew himself to be a tyrant), he was a coward. Death was the end of his ugly and terminal reign, and there would be no songs sung in his honor when he passed. All statues of him would be torn down and destroyed and all mention of him in history books, both in Sky Realm and in all kingdoms adjacent that had ever known his face, would henceforth and forever be adjoined with descriptors of his dishonor and ultimate malice. He would live on not in fame but in ignominy, forever.
Sky Cop did not have faith he would make it through this encounter.
Still he readied his weapon. It would be a fight to the death, at least, and Sky Cop intended to raise hell.
