Iron Fist
The club’s neon sign buzzed and flickered like a dying insect, casting sickly purple shadows across Joe Oroborus’s face as he watched Kandy Fontaine saunter through the entrance of Club Euphoria. Her leather jacket caught the light, transforming ordinary street grime into a constellation of sin. Behind her, Princess Cherrypop’s flame-red hair created a bloody halo that seemed to pulse in time with the industrial music bleeding through the walls.
Joe’s cybernetic hand twitched, sending sparks of pain up his arm where flesh met metal. The implant had been acting strange lately, picking up phantom frequencies, whispering things in the dead of night. Sometimes he caught himself having conversations with it, his organic fingers tracing the chrome joints while the artificial ones spelled out messages in a sign language he never learned.
Kandy noticed the spasms, her FBI-trained eyes missing nothing. “Your tech’s got the jitters again,” she said, sliding onto the barstool beside him. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten that upgrade from that back-alley clinic.”
Princess Cherrypop leaned against the bar, her alabaster skin almost translucent under the strobing lights. “The one run by that doctor who disappeared after the incident with the flesh cubes?”
The music shifted, became something darker, more visceral. Joe’s artificial hand clenched involuntarily, crushing his glass. Blood and bourbon mingled with shattered crystal, but he couldn’t feel the cuts. The hand was moving on its own now, fingers dancing across the bar top in precise geometric patterns. Princess Cherrypop’s eyes widened as she recognized the symbols. “Those are the same markings we found carved into the walls of the quantum computing lab after the massacre.”
Kandy pulled her service weapon, but kept it low, hidden beneath the bar. The other patrons seemed oblivious to the horror unfolding, their bodies swaying to the rhythm while reality began to crack around the edges. Joe’s mechanical fingers were leaving trails of light in the air now, tear-tracks in the fabric of space-time.
“It’s not an upgrade malfunction,” Joe managed through gritted teeth. “Something came through when they installed the new neural interface with cybernegative twisties. Something old. Eldritch, even. Something that’s been waiting in the spaces between binary code.”
His artificial hand lunged for Kandy’s throat with terrible purpose, but Princess Cherrypop was faster. She slammed a crystalline vial onto the bar, and the air filled with ozone and the smell of burning circuit boards.
The hand froze mid-strike, trembling. Shapes began to emerge from the chrome surface, faces screaming in silicon agony, bodies twisted into impossible Möbius strips of flesh and metal. The entity that had been riding Joe’s circuits revealed itself, a thing of angles and edges that hurt the mind to look upon.
“Now!” Cherrypop screamed.
Kandy moved with the fluid grace of a killer, her gun spitting sanctified code-bullets programmed by techno-priests. The things living in Joe’s artificial hand shrieked in frequencies that shattered every screen in the club. Reality buckled as the entity tried to maintain its hold on our dimension, but the holy algorithms were stronger.
In the end, Joe’s mechanical hand lay smoking on the bar, inert but finally clean. The club’s patrons continued dancing, their minds automatically editing out anything that didn’t fit their comfortable version of reality. Kandy holstered her weapon while Princess Cherrypop swept the dead hand into her purse like it was nothing more unusual than a compact mirror.
“You’ll need a new one,” Kandy said, lighting a cigarette. “I know a guy. No demons, guaranteed. Just good old-fashioned chrome and steel.” Joe nodded, cradling his cybernetic arm. The music had returned to its regular rhythm, but underneath he could still hear echoes of that other frequency, that digital death-jazz that played in the spaces between ones and zeros.
He ordered another drink, knowing he’d need it for what came next. After all, something had opened that door between worlds, and it wasn’t the kind of door that stayed closed for long.
Horror Sleaze Trash 