Agent Orange - Inconsequential

Episode 4 - DEMON

FROM THE JOURNALS OF AGENT ORANGE:

Man has always had his demons.  Bigfoot, the Lochness Monster, Count Dracula, Satan, Count Chocula. Hosts of nameless goblins, gremlins, aliens (though that's a department of its own), bogie men, restless dead (yet another department), morlocks, ogres, giants, mutants and monsters of all kinds find ways into our psyche whether they actually exist or not. Skeptics claim it's all bunk but we have proof of "abnormalities". What of the elephant man, the tree man, conjoined twins, pinheads, the human caterpillar, the dog-faced boy, is it such a stretch to believe that monsters really exist?

Perhaps the real question is: Are these monsters more, or less fearsome than the human monster? Do we make up these creatures to distract us from the real threat - ourselves? We are versatile, devious, populous, resourceful, covetous, passionate, gluttonous and vengeful - we are legion.

CHAPTER 4

After the encounter in the park, Agent Orange checked his lamp again to make sure there was no trace of the supernatural activity he had witnessed. There was almost nothing.  Video playback showed a woman in a wheelchair and a man in a hotdog costume. The man had suffered some kind of cardiac failure and died almost immediately. The only clue that anything out of the ordinary had happened was the man in the costume standing almost completely still for less than a minute. Even this was not much. He may have been evaluating his condition or tensing from pain, hoping that it would go away. Because his face was covered by the fleshy-colored hotdog part of the costume, his expressions gave no hint to what he was thinking at the time.

Orange had seen the man's attacker leave but thought better of approaching her. He wasn't sure his gun would be of any use against the spectral apparition she had released and the park may have had some rule about the number of corpses allowed to litter its walkways in a single day. The better part of valor, he told himself, though in truth he was too interested to be afraid. It was more like he was justifying his actions to some unseen judgmental party.

Orange knew what he needed was information. There had to be something on file about these kinds of creatures. He could have looked it up, but the database was not always current and he had missed an appointment with Kathleen last week.

A ten minute walk and a twenty minute bus ride later, Orange ended up at his final destination. The neighborhood was rundown, a block of closed storefronts, graffiti and bizarre piles of miscellaneous garbage that could have been art installations if they had only been placed in a studio. Besides a sleeping, homeless black man and his, only slightly less awake, and also black, terrier, the area was deserted.

Orange approached the man. The dog opened a single eye and looked up at him. The glare seemed to say, your attempts at subterfuge have failed, indolent human. I now have you exactly where I want you.

"If you stand behind a vampire in front of a mirror, can you see your own reflection?"

It wasn't obvious if the question had been addressed to the sleeping man, the lounging dog, or if it was a solipsistic fetish Orange had picked up in his youth.

"Not unless you can see through vampires."

The man was either a ventriloquist or the dog spoke English better than a third of the residents of New York City.

The dog got up, shook himself, gave Orange a disdainful look and walked down the street. The sleeping man didn't move.  Orange followed the ill-tempered canine 30 feet to a grey blue metal door heavily illustrated with graffiti.  The dog lifted his leg and a stream of urine blasted the door and sidewalk at its base.

"You could have just pointed with your nose," said Orange. He waited for the dog to finish, but it didn't. Forty seconds later the piss continued to pool in the pitted sidewalk then slid over the surface like an amorphous yellow snake toward Orange. "As I mentioned," he said as he lifted a foot and placed it in safer territory, "completely unnecessary."