Rise of the Leatherwolf, Pt. 3

It says to tell a story. One time, when I was a toddler, I stuck my finger into a hornet nest. That was a stupid thing to do. 

Here we go with the next installment of, "what happens when I write Brutus and Steven as humans," featuring Henry being reckless and a mysterious shopping trip. If you're waiting for hardcore sex, this isn't really destined to be erotic as much as graphically sexual so sorry, you just get to read about sex mannequins for now.

---

Henry intended to spend Sunday doing nothing, only to get a frantic call from his boss. 

“It’s all wrong.”

“What’s wrong?” Henry stared out the dormer window in his bedroom at the street below. 

“Everything,” his boss said, breathless.

“Be more specific.” Someone ran down the street.

“Everything you’ve done over the past week, is wrong. Completely wrong. Like did you even checkout the right test parameters?”

Henry did not quite believe what he was hearing on the phone. He also was only half paying attention, as the runner was followed up by a mattress rolling down the street with someone perched atop it. “Well, that sucks.”

“You need to fix this. Now. Literally, get your ass in here and fix this. Don’t make me tell you why. You wouldn’t like the answer.”

Henry sighed and threw on some of his clothes and headed into the office. His boss was entirely correct: Henry had been doing completely incorrect test simulations for an entire work week without anyone noticing - not himself, not his boss, not his peer reviewer, and especially not the automatic bounds checks that were supposed to work but clearly did not. 

He solved the problem via brute force, by commandeering all of the public-use stations in his office to run five days worth of simulations in parallel. An on-call IT guy helped, and Henry paid him in a marijuana wax cartridge for a vape pen that he’d left in his jacket pocket months earlier. 

His boss gave him the all clear just past sundown, and even gave him the next day off due to the creative ‘save’. He headed home with exactly one thing in mind: depravity. Filth and depravity and sexual deviance and reckless abandon, and all completely by himself.

—

Bang bang bang BANG BANG BANG HEY TURN OFF YOUR FUCKING DEATH SHIT

Henry woke up face down on the floor in his bedroom next to a puddle of slime. He wiped at it with his fingers, and sniffed at it. 

Vomit.

He got up and flew into the bathroom to throw up again, heart pounding, sweat and drool dripping into the toilet. He wiped his face under the sink, and the pounding started again. 

“Fuckingahrright,” he yelled back, and went to his computer. He grappled with the keyboard and knocked it onto the floor, swore to himself, and just pulled the power cord from the back of the whirring, overly-illuminated tower. The shrieking blast of extreme death metal died out as he slumped back onto his bed. Only there was no bed in his bedroom, and upon falling half onto his found-on-a-street-corner faux-leather chaise, he toppled onto the floor. 

He felt terrible. His hands and feet were cold but burned, his ears hurt, his ribs hurt, and a sweet vaguely alcoholic smell permeated his nostrils. What the fuck did I do to my fucking self, he sniffed, and continued notching up towards full awake. He was wearing his motorcycle riding jacket, a pair of black leather riding gloves with suspicious stains all over the hide, an old pair of motorcycle chaps which were now too tight on his caveman thighs to wear over pants, and his Alpinestars boots. 

Henry tried to get up onto the chaise, but every time he put his foot down, something skittered out beneath it and he skidded back to the floor. One of the items clanked against the metal shin plate of his boot; he picked up the small gray cylinder with its punctured-foil tip. He looked around; he’d knocked a gas mask off onto the floor, a fully hooded customized contraption with the hose leading to a black rubber anesthesia rebreathing bag, a smaller hose running off at a T to a bastardized emergency bicycle tire inflator. He snatched the pistol-grip device and unscrewed it; another cartridge fell out. 46 similar cylinders, food-grade nitrous oxide cartridges, were scattered all over the floor.

His brand new bottle of poppers was spilled amidst a dark, fuming stain. Next to it lay a handkerchief balled up and covered with the same vomit slime he’d woken up in; next to the cloth lay a slender aerosol can labeled, “MAXIMUM IMPACT”. Streaks of dried spunk streaked the seat’s padding, matching the dried mess all over his floppy tool. His sex mannequin lay angled face down by the window, anal-style jackoff toy lodged in the ass and similarly messy. 

Henry had absolutely no memory of how he ended up on the floor, but he could guess from the scene in the room. He tried to squeeze his mind but aside from coming home after work, he had a gaping hole. 

Someone pounded on his front door and the jolt made his heart flop in his chest, then sent cold sweat down his face. 

“Fuck fuck I turned it fucking off alright?”

“Well! When you talk like that, you turn me on!” Came a sarcastic, sing-song reply muffled by the wood. 

Henry pushed up, kicked the whip-its out of the way, and went to the door. He yanked it open on the chain. “The hell are you doing here?”

Steven reached a scrawny arm through the gap and undid the chain, then pushed in. “You asked me to come over last night, but I had fallen asleep like a princess and didn’t get your text until I had to pee. Do you have to show that thing off? We get it, you have a horse-cock.”

Henry felt dizzy and his stomach lurched. He sat down on his living room futon, which was in couch mode but still made as a bed. “Why do you know what my cock looks like.”

Steven traipsed around the room. “Because I followed you into the bathroom at The Dawnrazor. What on earth have you been doing? You said you were gonna have fun, and invited me to come over. Then you sent me a picture of a Fleshlight sticking out of the ass of a department store mannequin, and a can of spray poppers sticking out of its fake little asshole. Hence me standing here, just in case you needed help.”

“I don’t need any fuckin’ help. I don’t need anything,” Henry groaned. He felt desperately hungry and also desperately ill. “Alright I need some water and like some toast or some shit.”

“I’m not your servant,” Steven sniffed. “At least if you attempted to do anything bad, it didn’t work.” Steven did get a glass out, filled it with water, and brought it over. “You know what I mean.”

“What would you do if I’d done it?” Henry sipped and felt the coldness riding down deep inside of him. His heart flopped again.

Steven spun on a heel, then looked out the window. “I’d eat your dead body to destroy the evidence.”

Henry snorted. “Look, sorry I made you come out here so late…”

“Late? It’s seven in the morning!”

—

Henry would not have admitted it to himself, but he felt better after Steven forced him out of the apartment and led him to a diner. Now wearing pants and with a freshly scrubbed face, the fresh air made his stomach settle to prepare him for actual food. 

“I’m not actually sure why you wanted me to come over. You know me. I’m straightedge.”

“Hardcore triple-x,” Henry grunted, as he picked at some hippie hash. Steven’s choice of diner was a greasy spoon with an emphasis on the grease; the metal-sided building was seemingly transported from a mid-20th-century dimension of blue collar mediocrity, plopped in between a hip artist space and an office building.

“I’m just not really into intoxication. At least of myself.”

“You vape.”

“I’d hardly call nicotine an intoxicant.”

“It’s addictive. And it kills bees.”

“Yes I completely forgot. I’m a bee. Bzzz,” Steven rolled his eyes. 

Henry continued eating a few more bites, then stopped. “You can stop buzzing now.”

“Your phone,” Steven pointed out, as he draped sideways in his chair. He looked, as he always did, like he was going to a goth club. 

Henry flipped it over. The screen was filled with message notifications from his work chat, increasingly frantic from his boss and several coworkers, as everyone was looking for him. “I can’t even take a day off without someone blowing up at me,” he sighed, and belched. “First, I fuck up, and no one tells me I’m fucking up for an entire week even though they had about a hundred chances. Then, I fix it in one day, and get the day off. Now, everyone wants me in at…”

[HENRY THEY’RE CLEANING OUT YOUR DESK, THE BOX WILL BE AT THE FRONT DESK]

“Hmm?” Steven had folded his plastic drinking straw up into a one-inch section, and then flicked it with a loud snap. Henry merely grunted and turned his phone around. The screen held a photo of several empty cubicles. “The Cubes of Capitalism. I’ve heard it’s a traveling exhibit.”

Henry took a deep breath. “About a month ago, our company was acquired. They promised they weren’t gonna do anything, but I don’t believe anything anyone with an employment contract says.” Steven gave him a blank look. “C-level executives. They have employment c… whatever. Well, today, they laid off my entire team.”

“I’m so sorry,” Steven said, and received another angry grunt. “No, I mean it. That’s awful.”

Henry shrugged and put another mouthful of his hash into his mouth. “I think I’m already in the denial phase. Too drug-over to feel much shock about anything. Also, I fucking hate my job. My boss tries to be cool but he freaks out all the time. It’s boring. I don’t get to engineer anything, I just simulate other shit people have engineered. And, I don’t make a lotta money. You think engineers make money like doctors, right? Nah, it’s like airline pilots. You start off doing shit for shit.”

Steven tapped the side of his boot toe against the booth table’s leg. “Well. I have an idea to distract you even more. Retail therapy.”

“Yeah, great, I got laid off, time to spend some money.”

“You haven’t even gotten your final paycheck yet, and there’s probably a severance if you aren’t fired. Oh look who knows about jobs too!” Steven picked up the card-swiper from the sticky table, bopped his smartwatch on it, and set it back down. “Come on, before either of us changes our mind or you fall asleep.”

—

“The Crystal Jar.” Below the sign, in harder to read script, “Antiques”. The sign was hand-made, while the building was just another storefront on one of the off-main streets in downtown.

“Mmm. Sounds intriguing, eh?” Steven pulled open the door with a clatter and headed in. 

“Sounds like where I put my weed,” Henry huffed, but followed anyway. The store was cramped and true to the name, even the fixtures looked old. Instead of grandmother antiques, there was an assortment of oddities usually found in a neo-pagan trinket shop. Steven fit in immediately, pointed black boots with twelve buckles up his leg, black jeans, a long black coat, poet shirt ruffles coming out his wrists, and a scintillating satin vest with a blinking vape pen tucked into the pocket. Henry did not fit in at all, looking like a homeless biker. “What do you want with an antiques shop, anyway?”

“Inspiration, mostly. Also, perhaps a dragon statue.”

Henry picked through a few items on a shelf. “The jewelry thing?”

“Yes the jewelry thing, otherwise known as my true calling, in case you thought selling pussy electrodes to middle-aged women and poppers to gay men in motorcycle gear is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Good artists steal. Great artists can afford a lawyer to deal with the copyright infringement lawsuits.”

“How’s it going?”

“I’m selling, although not terrifically much.”

Henry picked up a wooden box that caught his eye from a display shelf. It was made of a deep maroon wood and the size of a large cigar box, held shut with three black iron keyed latches. The box was carved with ornate designs depicting knot-work, greenery, and wolves. 

Steven wandered over. “Oh, you found a box. You can put your weed in there.”

Henry ignored his friend and took it over to the cashier. “Hey, do you have the key for this?”

“If it wasn’t on the shelf, it isn’t anywhere else in here,” the man said. He was middle-aged and nondescript to a fault. 

“Any idea what’s in it?” Henry gave it a gentle shake. Something moved inside, but only slightly, a felt thud instead of a sound. 

“A mystery. Maybe it’s worth the price of the box. Maybe it’s worth a million dollars. Chances are, it’s not a million dollars.” The man smiled. “Twenty dollars. It’s a nice box, but it’s just a box.”

Henry pulled his wallet out and started to pay, then hesitated. I’m fired. No, I’m laid off. No, my job doesn’t even exist any more. I’ll wish I had this twenty dollars. Then he remembered that he had a motorcycle quite possibly worth more than what he paid for it, and handed over two tens. 

Steven slid up next to him. “I’m suddenly not so interested in anything myself, because you, Henry Schenke, have just bought something at an antiques shop. Soon, you’ll have doilies and plastic covers on your furniture.”

“I already put plastic covers on my furniture,” Henry grunted, and took the plastic bag with his purchase from the cashier. 

“Ahh, that’s not what I… meant,” Steven watched as Henry simply walked towards the door and left the shop. He turned to the cashier. “He’s quite single-minded.”

Henry had exhausted his social spoons already, and it wasn’t even lunchtime. Steven didn’t follow, or did follow but gave up. Henry wasn’t sure. All Henry was sure of, was that he wanted to get home. He gripped the bag firmly, then fussed and adjusted it, before finally grasping the box through the plastic as if afraid someone would snatch it. He didn’t feel settled until he returned to his stuffy apartment and had locked, deadbolted, chained, and then armed the alarm camera on the door.