Zero the Hero, Featuring Special Agent Kandy Fontaine
Special Agent Kandy Fontaine, last seen spooging ghost jizz all over Bareback Mansion, slowed her Jaguati to a stop outside the club. The neon sign flickered, promising delights both perverse and profound. A dive bar promising less than zero. She’d met weirder conditions.
Inside, the air hung thick with cigarette smoke and unspoken desires, a miasma Detective Joe Oroborus, late of Bone City PD and looking like a raccoon who just lost a fight, navigated with practiced ease.
Oroborus signaled her over, his face illuminated by the sickly purple glow of the sign. He nursed a drink that looked suspiciously like cough syrup.
“Kandy, doll, you won’t believe the parade of freaks I’ve seen tonight,” he rasped, his voice gravelly from cheap whiskey and existential dread. “This place is a goddamn circus.” He wasn’t far off; Reynaldo, the World’s Smolest Circus Bear, knew all about that. Tonight, though, the circus lacked the glamour Reynaldo injected through the LucasFilm people and Gaga’s psychic mindlink skills. It was just…sad. Turns out this job was far from the Bizarro bicycle accident that spelled poor Nico’s end.
“Spill it, Joe,” Kandy said, adjusting the sequins on her dress.
Oroborus sighed, taking a long swig of his drink. Said nothing.
Kandy raised an eyebrow, her shocking locks which looked like serpents of blue neon gas somehow reflecting the flop sweat ooze of this bar. “And this concerns a missing persons case…how?”
“Because our ‘hero’ is connected,” Oroborus explained, gesturing vaguely towards the back of the club. “Name’s Victor Sterling. Silver spoon stuck so far up his ass he shits caviar. Daddy’s a senator, Mommy’s a socialite, and he’s…well, he’s nothing. A zero.”
“But someone’s pulling his strings,” Kandy mused, already piecing together the puzzle. “Using him as a patsy.”
“Exactly,” Oroborus confirmed. “And the strings lead straight to our missing girl, a reporter named Lila Monroe. She was digging into Sterling’s finances, and wouldn’t you know it, she’s disappeared off the face of the Earth. Gone to ground, as Amelia Mangan might say.”
They worked their way through the crowded club, a gaudy tapestry of desperation and cheap thrills. The air thrummed with darkness, that occult mythology Sedgwick explored so well/ Oroborus pointed out Sterling, holding court in a dimly lit corner booth, surrounded by sycophants and the glittering promise of wealth. As they approached, the noise began to drown out the thought, but Kandy was a professional.
“Sterling,” Oroborus said, his voice cutting through the din. “We need to ask you a few questions about Lila Monroe.”
Sterling barely glanced up, his eyes glazed over with self-importance. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he mumbled, waving a dismissive hand.
Kandy stepped forward, her cybernetic eye implants gleaming in the low light. “Don’t bullshit us, Sterling. We know she was investigating you. And we know you’re hiding something.” Maybe something so close, they’d recognize what it was all along.
Sterling’s facade finally cracked, revealing a flicker of fear in his eyes. “I…I didn’t do anything,” he stammered, his voice barely a whisper. “She was just…asking questions. I told her to stop, and that was it.”
“That’s not what our sources say,” Kandy countered, her voice cold and unwavering. “We know you paid someone to ‘persuade’ her to drop the story.”
Oroborus leaned in, his raccoon eyes glinting menacingly. “Tell us where she is, Sterling. Or things are going to get very unpleasant for you.”
Sterling hesitated, his gaze darting nervously around the booth. He was trapped, a puppet with nowhere to run. “She’s…she’s at the old mill outside of town,” he finally confessed, his voice choked with desperation. “They’re…they’re planning to make her disappear.”
Kandy and Oroborus exchanged a grim look, knowing they were running out of time. Justice would be served if they could help it; no matter what “brand of love!” Wayne Dobbins was pushing. As they sped away from the club, sirens wailing in the distance, Kandy couldn’t shake the feeling that they were only scratching the surface of something far more sinister.
Victor Sterling, the zero, was just a pawn in a much larger game. As Black Sabbath wrote, “Impossibility, it’s a fallacy mother.”
The old mill loomed in the darkness, a skeletal silhouette against the night sky. Inside, they found Lila Monroe tied to a chair, her face bruised and bloody. Two thugs stood guard, their eyes cold and empty.
Kandy and Oroborus moved with deadly efficiency, dispatching the thugs with swift precision.
As they untied Lila, she looked up at them, her eyes filled with gratitude and fear. “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “You saved me.”
“Not yet,” Kandy said, her gaze hardening. “We still have to expose the people who did this to you.”
And as they drove away from the mill, leaving the darkness behind, Kandy knew that their fight was far from over. They had only uncovered the first layer of a conspiracy that reached into the highest echelons of power. But with Oroborus by her side, and the ghosts of Bone City PD whispering in her ear, she was ready to face whatever darkness lay ahead. After all, in the twisted world of Horror Sleaze Trash, even a zero could become a hero, albeit an accidental one.
Horror Sleaze Trash 