'Mm… delicious, perhaps I won't sell you any after all, Mr. Ward,' Sandra said, and then, 'but you haven't tried it Mr. Ward!'

'Just letting it air for a moment,' he replied and I thought, yeah, right. You're just checking if the bottle is poisoned. Then he said 'cheers,' and I knew we had him.

Two seconds later I heard Sandra grunt and then she quietly said, 'ok, you can come out.'

I entered the room to find her struggling to hold Ward up. The glasses were on the floor and the wine was staining the cream-coloured carpet a dark red as a precursor to what was to come.

'Well done, Sandra,' I said and helped her get Ward onto the couch. 'Go and prepare the escape route. Best close the door after you. You won't want to see this,' I told her and she nodded and entered the bedroom and closed the door.

I turned my attention to Ward. 'Surprise!' I said and looked into his eyes. I'm sure he saw me but he couldn't respond. 'The poison could take about five minutes to kill you but you'll bleed out before then.'

I took out my knife and I thought I saw his pupils enlarge. His legs came off first. The blood flow was prodigious and the carpet was no longer cream-coloured. Incredibly he was still breathing but very shallow breaths. His chest stopped rising and falling when I removed his arms and by the time I cut off his head he was dead. I manhandled his torso into the bag and dragged it into the bedroom. Sandra had already moved the bed and activated the portable elevator unit I'd had installed between our floor and the floor below where I had booked the rooms immediately beneath us. We stepped onto the platform and descended.

Next stop… Wales.


The Tick and The Trampoline were performing at the ancient monument called The Millennium Stadium in the capital city, Cardiff, and it was a sell-out show. Tickets were going on the black-market for more than a hundred times their face value but I had purchased mine and Sandra's well in advance. The honey in the trap this time was an antique 1981 DeLorean sports car which was reputed to be able to travel through time. I've had it three months, and apart from having Sandra drive it once or twice, all I've seen it do is belch smoke and not move forward or backwards in time even for a second or two, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was the Thomas twins believed it did and would give an arm and a leg each to own it - literally. I was in my huge ATV, which I'd had permission to park in the performer's vehicle-park, not far from the Thomas twins' VTOL motorhome and was watching them winding up the concert after taking numerous curtain calls. I had to admit it; they were pretty good at what they did. They had excellent voices with quite a range. But I also had to admit that they were pretty evil as well, for they were just as responsible as Mercedes Cavendish and Ethan Ward for what had been done to me, and tonight they would pay for it. I watched as they left the stage door and crossed towards their motorhome surrounded by an entourage of band-members, groupies and security guards. I wondered if they had heard of Cavendish and Ward's demise, perhaps not. They stopped in their tracks and stared toward the entrance of the vehicle-park and my ATV's external microphones picked up the throaty roar of the DeLorean. Both Jason and Justin's jaws dropped and they looked as if they'd just orgasmed in unison - which I supposed was quite possible, they were identical twins, were they not?  Then Sandra came into view on my monitors as she pulled up alongside the twins and the gull-wing doors of the car lifted up and she stepped out. Instantly the twins were gawping inside the vehicle and bombarding her with questions. I listened in on the conversation, thanks to the many microphones I had at my disposal. They were on Sandra's person, in the DeLorean and of course on my ATV.

'Little lady that is one damn fine car,' Jason said first and then Justin repeated.

'One damn fine car.'

'We've always loved the DeLorean ever since we watched a couple of antique films which it starred in,' Jason continued and Justin repeated.

'Antique films which it starred in.'

I'd almost forgotten how moronic they both were, especially Justin who always seemed to repeat what his brother had just said.

'Wow!' Sandra gushed, 'that's how I came to see it first too! The Back to the Future trilogy, wasn't it just incredible?'

'Totally, it was totally majestic,' Jason replied and before Justin could repeat, I said quietly to myself.

'Totally majestic,' barely a split-second before Justin chorused too.

'You want to give it a spin around the vehicle-park?' Sandra asked and dangled the keys hypnotically before them. They gawped at her as if she'd just told them she was their long-lost mother and then they both grabbed at the key ring. Surprisingly it was Justin that got to it first and he clamped his small, pasty-looking fist around it.

'Too slow, bro,' Justin said and jumped into the driver's seat.

Jason just replied, 'Bro!' and then slunk into the passenger seat. The gull-wing doors lowered and they started the car. Sandra wandered closer to my ATV, and as all eyes followed the strange vehicle as the twins screeched it around the vehicle-park, she slipped aboard.

'Nicely done, Sandra,' I said as she sat next to me at the ATV's steering console, 'let's get this finished, shall we?'

She smiled. 'Sure, that was too easy; those boys are so stupid it was almost painful to watch.' She started the ATV up and we pulled away. 'Ready?' she asked.

'Ready,' I replied and she activated the directional EMP which knocked out the Thomas twins' VTOL and every other vehicle near it. I keyed in the code to the DeLorean's miniature AI and told it to proceed.  The car's doors locked, the cab filled with a knock-out gas and the AI-powered DeLorean followed us as Sandra and I crashed through the vehicle-park's security fence and sped out onto the road away from the stadium.


The warehouse was in the docklands area of Cardiff and was large enough to take half a dozen ATVs and DeLoreans but it only needed to contain one of each and Sandra, the twins and myself. We'd secured them both to a large stainless-steel operating table which had blood gullies that led to a drain. Both were waking up but neither of them could move. However, they could speak.

'Holy shit, it's you! I never thought I'd see your sorry ass again,' Jason said and as Justin opened his mouth to repeat the phrase I picked up the nearby lump-hammer with my tentacle and smashed it into his mouth. He sort of gurgled, coughed once and passed out.

'Holy shit!' Jason repeated and I wondered if I'd mixed them up somehow, but didn't really care anyway.

'I've waited a long time for this,' I explained. 'I've put up with a lot of crap, abuse and pain. Now it's time to end it all.'

'Hey, man,' Jason said, 'it was just a joke, man. Nothing personal you know. Mercedes came up with the idea, Ethan had the facilities and we…'

'And you thought it would be a bit of fun, a laugh?' I asked.

'Well, yeah,' he replied, 'a laugh.'

'Do you see me laughing?' I asked, 'did you ever see me laughing after what you did?' 

'Um, no,' he conceded, 'but you did split almost immediately and we thought it best to not bug you, you know. Especially when you started getting famous, and all. You've done all right.'

I almost did start laughing then. 'I split because I was traumatized! Dropping off during one of Ward's wine tasting evenings and waking up the following day with my face spliced onto a pig's head that you'd decanted my brain into, my body exchanged for an orang-utan's, my left arm now a tentacle,' I shouted at him and then raised my right arm, 'and this one from a chimpanzee. Then to top it all off to find my legs had been swapped for a pair from a kangaroo traumatized the hell out of me. I was kept in psychiatric custody for over a year until I managed to collect my scattered wits and convince them all I was still sane. I was going to kill myself and complete your manic 'exquisite corpse' but decided on a different course of action. I elected to survive, to 'do all right', and I have. And I did it with one goal in mind and that was to make one of my own.' 

'Make one of your own?' Jason repeated and it took a prodigious amount of will power not to smash him in the mouth too with the lump-hammer I still had my tentacle coiled around. Instead I put it down and nodded to Sandra who unveiled my partially constructed masterpiece that was on the wall nearby hidden under a pristine white sheet. Jason gasped when he recognised Mercedes' head grafted onto Ward's torso.

'As you can see, I'm still missing a pair of arms and legs,' I explained and then I drew out the fractal blade and extended it, 'but that's where you and Justin can be of great help to me.'

As I've said, I was pretty impressed by Justin and Jason's singing voices, they had a terrific range. Justin reached a falsetto scream that I imagine only dogs could have heard before he died and Jason, once awake again, repeated the tune.

My goal has been achieved and I finally feel strangely calm and at peace. I don't think I'll make any more public appearances and might retire to a private little island somewhere in the sun where I can hop along deserted beaches, swing from palm trees and quest in shallow pools with my tentacle for rare and delicate-flavoured sea creatures. I'll take my finished freeze-dried collage of former friends with me and I have asked Sandra if she would like to come too. She said she'd love to, especially when I told her that once my time on this world is over, everything I owned would revert to her. She wished that wouldn't be for quite some time and assured me that if I was to go first she would make sure I would look my best at my funeral, that my corpse would indeed be - exquisite. What more could a man, pig, orang-utan, chimpanzee, octopus, ask for?