Written Sy Wyatt at the now infamous MWM Live! in Bristol, May 2009.

Pressure. Emmett had dealt with pressure his whole life. Pressure to deliver. Pressure to perform. Today, however, he was concerned entirely with the pressure on the outside of his deep sea exploration suit. The soft pinging in his ear told him he was safe, and still attached to the survey ship, thousands of feet above, by the umbilical.

“Can you see it, Emmett?”

“I’m pretty much on top of it. Another hundred or so feet and I’ll have contact.”

Emmett imagined the whoops and back-slapping going on on the ship. After months of searching, they had found her.

Emmett’s heavy boots hit the shell of the wreck. There was no give, ships like the Inca Queen were built to last, built to keep their cargo safe. Emmett couldn’t speculate what kind of ordnance could have sunk her.

“Can you see it? Emmett, can you see it?”

Emmett turned slowly, the high powered lights on the shoulders of his suit skimming along skin of the hulk. They reached a ragged gash, a hole punched in the side of the majestic Inca Queen. Inside, gleaming under the powerful spot lights, was her cargo. Untouched, perfect, preserved by intense pressure and cold of the Inca Queen’s deep grave.

Row after row of containers, their contents still a perfect, creamy white and, along the sides, a tell-tale flash of gold.

Emmett smiled. It would be biggest haul of his career.

“I have it. There’s at least eight thousand pints of gold top down here.”

Emmett flicked off the radio link before he was deafened by the cheers. Since the bovine flu epidemic, milk had become the most expensive commodity on the planet. The contents of The Inca Queen, once the star “milk float” of the global “Creamy Corporation”, was worth enough to make Emmett and his crew richer than God.

This one was for Richard Griffiths, of Crafty Butchers fame, who just wanted “spidermonkeys”.

We live to serve …

Cliff reloaded his rifle as quickly as he could, letting the spent cartridges join those already scattered about his feet. The barrel of the gun was hot enough to scorch the wooden parapet of the outpost as he propped it there, glad for a moment not to have the weight against his shoulder.

“How many of them are there?” asked Delilah.

“Depends,” replied Cliff. “If they breed like monkeys, we’ve got to be getting to the end of the troupe by now. If they breed like spiders …”

The words hung in the air as thick as the tropical heat.

“If they breed like spiders …?” Delilah asked meekly.

“Then I don’t have enough bullets.”

There was a crash out in the jungle, and the familiar screeching of the spider monkeys. Cliff had tried to work out where the nest was, considering in his darker moments that maybe the only way to survive this was to take the fight to them, to find their home and burn it out, but every part of the jungle seemed to be their territory. This was their place.

“Cliff, maybe we should take the other jeep, try and –”

“They know where the road is,” said Cliff flatly. “You didn’t see what happened to Clint, Helen, and the others …  Trust me Delilah, you don’t want to end up like that.”

Cliff closed his eyes for a moment. Hunting was a dangerous profession, he’d seen people hurt and killed before. He’d seen the things that an animal can do to a human in a matter of moments, he’d seen how inhuman the things that were left behind looked. What he had seen on the road out of the jungle though, what he had seen in the spider monkey’s web… that was something different entirely. That was a human level of cruelty.

The crashing in the jungle grew closer, and the screeching grew louder. Cliff cocked the rifle back up to his shoulder and peered down the sight.

“I can help,” said Delilah, awkwardly hefting up a pistol.

Cliff sighed. They were dead, of that he was certain. Delilah may as well die on her feet.

“Remember to aim low,” he said, with an uncommon note of kindness. “If you hit the poison sack, that seems to do the trick.”

Inspired by Ryan Reed, who asked for a story featuring ““A man who has been bitten by a radioactive man, a VW Camper Van, and a pie”

Rain rattled against the side of the camper van. Reed tried to ignore it, and concentrated on cooking. Cooking was a lot more complicated for Reed these days than it used to be as, since the bite, he had to work just as hard to keep things out of his meals as put things in.

Thunder crashed overhead and the VW camper rocked from side to side as Reed gingerly lifted the baking tray out of the small oven he had installed into the van. The van, like Reed, had been through a lot of changes, since the bite.

Four years on the run, four years since the bite.

Placing the tray on the edge of the sink, he picked up the piping hot pie and dropped it onto his only plate. He didn’t feel the heat of the pie, the flesh of his fingers long dead.

Long dead since the bite.

The rain was gradually turning into hail, hammering harder on the sides of the van. Reed knew that he didn’t have long, that soon the rain and the hail wouldn’t be the only things hammering on the sides of his van.

The village was less than an hour away and he was sure that the children would have been missed by now. He wished that it didn’t have to be children, but they were the only things that worked.

The only things that worked since the bite.

Edging down the van, the wind threatening to topple him at any moment, Reed caught a glimpse of himself, reflected in the windscreen. His flesh was rotten, sloughing off every bone. The poisoning was getting worse. The poisoning that had been eating away at him ever since the bite.

He sat down, and let the aroma of the pie fill his nose.

Soon, he would look like everyone else. Soon, he would be able to walk among the normal people, and no one would know.

The secret was in the pie.

And all it would take was a bite.

The last, I think, of our podcast appearances from the Bristol Con 2009 is featured in Comic Book Outsiders Episode 46.

Chaired by Scott, from Comic Book Outsiders, the Orang Utan panel metamorphosed in a round table discussion on indie comics that also features Stu and I, and the guys from Geek Syndicate.

It’s somewhere in the region of 45 minutes of unplanned, unscripted, but hopefully insightful and amusing banter between the two studios as we share war stories from the world of small press comics.

Particularly worth listening out for are the moment where I blantantly repeat myself and then shamlessly deny it, and the moment that Pete Rogers confesses that the biggest hurdle Orang Utan Comics face is Monkeys with Machineguns .

For the benefit of the tape, I think he just means that we’re both tall.

Many thanks to Scott for chairing the panel and special thanks to Peter Rogers and Ian Sharman for sharing their panel with us … absolute gentlemen as always.

Barry and Dave, the Geek Syndicate, very kindly made mention of Monkeys with Machinegun’s MWM Live! mini-event at the Bristol Small Press Expo in Geek Syndicate – Episode 119.

I must admit, I was a bit concerned about words in these guy’s mouths when I wrote “Scott vs. Geek Syndicate” for Scott from Comic Book Outsiders, but it seems to have gone down well. Writing dialogue for fictional people is much easier, as they rarely come back to you and want to talk about it …

More MWM Live practice. This one took a little longer, had trouble getting rid of the word “crawl” from the list of random words.

Travis woke up, still tied to the bed. He couldn’t see Laura, but could hear movement downstairs. Cups clicked together, water pouring. He guessed that she was making tea, and was surprised that he didn’t immediately want some. Looking up, he could see why.

Banging on the surface of the mirror that hung above Laura’s bed, desperately trying to break through from the other side, from whatever place it was that lay on the other side of Laura’s mirror, was a carbon copy of Travis. The copy’s skin looked parched, cracking in places, and it clutched at its throat from time to time. Behind it, other versions of Travis crawled across the surface, like men trapped under ice, their mouths open in soundless screams.

“There’s no point looking at them,” said Laura as she walked in, holding the predicted cups of tea. “They never do anything else. They are such base creatures.”

Her voice was emotionless and yet Travis did not find it cold. There was some pure about it, some clear and resonant, like listening to church bells chiming on a quiet morning. He realised it was not the world that had become quieter though, but his own mind.

“Will I miss them?” he asked. His own voice, although not quite as clear as Laura’s, had a clarity that he had never experienced before, as if the world moved slightly aside to accommodate his words.

“No,” replied Laura. “The mirror is so greedy, it always takes the needs first. Another few days, and you will never want or need anything again.”

“I thought so,” replied Travis. “I heard you making tea, but didn’t think for a moment I wanted any. I’m sure I used to love tea.”

“You did,” said Laura, “But now you are free even of that foible.”

“Man unbound …” whispered Travis, remembering the name of the book that Laura had given him, back at the very beginning of their bizarre experiment.

“Not quite yet,” Laura countered, and poured the boiling tea across Travis’ chest. “We have still to remove your pain, and your fear.”

But Travis didn’t hear her. The part of him that was screaming in pain was already trapped on the other side of the mirror.

More practice for Monkeys with Machineguns Live!

Found a fantastic site for generating random ideas, http://shortstoryideas.herb.me.uk/index.html, which I will blog about later. In the meantime, here’s the end of the line.

Vera had heard about the telephone box. It was the last one left in the county, apparently, sitting quietly on the corner of the village green. It was never vandalised, unlike the play area just a few yards away, never put into service as a make shift toilet or short term accommodation for teenagers overcome by hormones and cheap cider.

No, the phone box just sat, and waited for you to make a call.

It was after John left, that Vera used it.

“It is only for emergencies,” Vera’s mother’s voice rang in the ear of memory as, with a trembling hand, she took hold of the telephone box door’s shiny brass handle. “Real emergencies”.

Vera caught sight of her reflection in the glass. Dark rings surrounded her bloodshot and tear ruined eyes. Her hair had taken on a peculiar shape, mirroring her dishevelled three-days-on clothes.

“Real emergencies,” she whispered to herself, and opened the door.

Inside, the telephone box was silent. The outside world seemed a million miles away as the door shut behind Vera with a soft click. Vera had never been inside the phone box before, but she had heard descriptions, in the rumours and the stories that people told from time to time.

She looked at the sturdy gunmetal grey telephone case. She gingerly lifted up the handset. As she had been told, there was no dial, and nowhere to insert any money. Just a grey metal box, a handset … and a voice at the end of the line.

“Hello?”

Vera jumped, involuntarily. “Hello?” she replied.

“Hello. This is the voice at the end of the line. Can I help you?”

“It … it’s an emergency,” said Vera.

“We understand,” replied the voice. “Tell us what you need, Vera”

Vera didn’t even flinch at the mention of her name. Her mother hand told her that the voice at the end of the line knew things, things about the people in the village.

“It’s Steve, my husband,” said Vera. “He’s left me and …”

“Do you want him back?” asked the voice. “Back can be … difficult”

“No, I don’t want him back,” replied Vera.

“Good,” said the voice. “Then let us discuss your options”.

More MWM Live practice. This time I try to fit Hitler, a museum, and a monkey covered in jam onto one side of A5.

It is a little known fact that Hitler maintained a secret museum, three storeys below his bunker in the heart of Berlin. At first, it was home to the ransacked treasures of the nations crushed under the Nazi jackboot but, as the war came towards its end and Hitler’s mania for the esoteric and the occult reached its height, the museum became home to artifacts and relics of a very different nature.

On the final night of the war, it was Private Klaus Gunderson who held the keys to the museum. Loyal to the end, he believed it to be the safest place in all of Berlin. And so, naturally, he brought his wife and child there, sure that the Feurer would approve. She was good, Arian stock, their child a blond haired, blue eyed boy.

He walked with them both through the cramped aisles of the private museum, their small talk designed to drown out the sounds of bombardment and fighting from above, but failing miserably.

“What’s that?” asked Klaus’ wife, pointing a shadowy, hunched figure in the darkness.

“That is a stuffed monkey from the court of Louis the Sixteenth of France. We liberated it from the Bastille.”

“It has been … mutilated?”

“Louis had his private surgeon stitch bladders into the creature so that he could be breast fed his favourite foods by it. When we took it from them, the French had it full of jam.”

“Amazing. And how about this?”

Klaus took the bottle from his wife and studied it carefully. “I believe we took this from the body of a British spy.”

He turned the bottle over in his hands. Although his English was not terribly good, he could read the simple inscription.

“Drink me …”

With a thunderous crash, something hit the bunker from above. Boxes toppled in the museum, throwing up a thick cloud of dust.

Klaus could hear shouting from upstairs, and splashing noises. Someone shouted something about kerosene, and that the Feurer must not be captured, no matter what the cost.

“What should we do?” asked Klaus’ wife.

Klaus took a last look at his wife, uncorked the bottle, and drank.

PRESS RELEASE: For Immediate Release

MONKEYS WITH MACHINEGUNS OFFER A VISION OF THE FUTURE AT BRISTOL COMIC CON

Monkeys with Machineguns are producing an extremely limited number of promotional comic books to accompany the Monkeys with Machineguns Live event at the Small Press Expo in Bristol on May 9th.

While stocks last anyone buying a unique, one off illustrated short story from Chris and Stu will receive it mounted inside a copy of the limited edition twenty page book. Featuring not only an eight page preview of their upcoming book “The Magpye”, being published by Markosia, but also a full colour eight page preview of a brand new secret project, this is an opportunity for those taking part in Monkeys with Machineguns Live to own a small part of the future of comic book history.

For those not in the know, the Magpye is a “supernatural superhero psychological horror story”, a genre-bending tale of an amnesiac vigilante charged with defending mankind from monsters, creatures, and things that lurk in the dark whilst being haunted, and sometimes hounded, by the ghosts of his fallen predecessors. When the Magpye’s identity is finally revealed however, he may have to face the worst monster of all … himself.

As for the secret project … the details of that will be revealed at the show!