Forgotten Ground Regained
Excerpt from Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage
12 Godzilla
Why wait? These white-shirts won’t just vanish. To Hell with it: Glock-Nine held overhead, you pop off replies, and pillars of components, wired spires, explode in sparks. Loath to harm the high-tech hardware, the parish foot-soldiers refuse to fire back, stalk you instead. Stacks of servers cover their coming. Clever bastards, they will try tackling you, a team effort.Ah, but the rocking of the rack-mounted routers gives you, Eureka!, a grand idea: Why shoot your gun when your shoulder will do?You charge and topple some techno-totems, which knock over their nearest neighbors—and so on, like dominoes, the data dolmens fall and, in falling, fell each other. A chain-reaction! Cheered by the sound of zap and crash, you exult like Godzilla destroying toy towers in Tokyo. What a spectacle! The spreading collapse has crushed, you hope, the crouching hostiles, rubbed them out. You run at random through the remaining maze of modules at the far end, find a fire-door. It opens outward; all is clear. Hot to get the Hell out now, you mount the stairs that meet you, leaping. Four flights up, you find, on the floor with the spacious nave, no one at firstto shun or shoot but, Shit, then, Oof, you run into someone rounding a corner—the darkness-markswoman, that mean mother who hunted you before. The head-on impact loosens your grip, and your Glock goes flying. Before she can point her piece your way and pump your guts, you grab her gun-hand and make her loose her load of lead into the ceiling. A savage knee below your belt, and she breaks the hold. Quick as breath, her Ka-bar comes out, and there’s no way round her to reach the street. Whoosh, whoosh, slicing wind from the air to flaunt her knife-craft, she announces, sneering: “I’ve wanted to kill you for quite some time—the golden boy, the Bureau’s best.” Who is this chick that hates you so? She feints, feints, lunges and, lumbering palooka, you bob and weave the best you can, death-dancing Damn, she’s slick.Biding time until the psycho goes, finally, too far with a slash,you snatch and wrench her wrist with your right hand and with your left deliver no lightweight hook to her temple. She topples quick. Still worked up, you start strangling her,but the resonant tramp of troops intrudesbefore you’re through. Freeing her throat,you collect your Glock and leave at last that homicidal house of faith.
Copyright © Aaron Poochigian, 2017
Reprinted in Forgotten Ground Regained: A Journal of Alliterative Verse, New Series, Issue 1, Winter, 2024