Content Warning: This story contains some disturbing themes and graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.
Pt. 1
Whilst the polar bear had never played tennis before it was unfair to claim that he was an amateur. His life in the wild had presented many interesting challenges over the years, not the least of which was the spearing of young seals with a herringbone spear fashioned very much in the traditional fashion.
This action necessitated much the same motional zest as that inherent within a standard game of lawn-tennis.
I should convey to you the name by which the polar-bear had been nominally identified for a number of years. His name was Marcus. I say ‘a number of years’ for, unlike humans, polar-bears alternate Christian names in an attempt to alleviate the tedium of their rather repetitive existence.
Pt. 2
The night fell with all the elegiacal omniference of a felled horse and filled Marcus with a sense of cold wonder.
Adjusting his cravat, he strolled purposefully across his finely manicured lawn and settled comfortably into his Saturday routine of smooth laughter and refute allegations of style.
As he poured himself a rye and coke in a highly generous fashion, Marcus pondered on the day’s events.
Whilst the tennis game had been incredibly cool, the aftermath of failure had hung loosely with the loser. To say he had not taken it well, would be a devastating understatement. Indeed Marcus could think of better ways to spend his time than prising off his fingers from around the neck of a contentious opponent.
Resorting to the Uzi snub-nosed auto-special he had secreted in the inside pocket of his brogue jacket had been a necessary, if desperate act.
Explaining the situation to the man’s parents had been awkward. How do you tell a mother and father that you’ve just taken their son out with a .38 calibre revolver after he performed poorly in a game of lawn-tennis.
Their inital reaction had been one of shock which had then swiftly mushroomed into open hostility.
Not having had the greatest of mornings, Marcus was not in any mood to put up with that kind of nonsense and took out both of the seething mutthas with a Black n’ Decker C-70 he saved for special occasions.
The Raid on San Sebastian - The Marcus Files Pt. 3
The grey rain bled horizontally across the thick pained glass of the BA porthole and collected in one long pool at the side. Each drop vibrated with the throb of the gargantuan engines whilst pale wreaths of condensed body-fluid slithered over the monstrous wings.
Marcus sat in first-class, his knuckles whitened-ivory as he clutched the arms of his finely-cushioned chair. The Boeing dipped alarmingly as it entered another pocket of violent turbulence and Marcus felt his Indian bhuna rising uncomfortably up his oesophogus.
'Damn these missions,' he cursed under his breath. 'Damn it, damn, damn it.'
CAA Search & Sanction were really taking the piss this time. Sending him on some half-assed under-researched mission to Sweden to liquidate a Florentine zoo-keeper who just happened to be working undercover and was actually a ZQ-90 informer and probable saboteur.
And as per usual it was Special Agent Marcus PB Canastus who got landed with the shit detail. On the premise that he was a polar bear and so could pose ostensibly as an official zoo-resident whilst clocking his prey.
Those bastards.
Marcus fondled the hard mahogany butt of the Berretta 9mm automatic secreted within the waistband of his Lord Fauntleroy cords and cursed the day he'd ever joined the division.
The Restless Waves of Philancia (Prece') Pt. 4
Marcus lay on his cast-iron mattress, his mind gyrating like a Turkish belly-dancer. The disappointment of the afternoon lay heavily upon him like a moist handkerchief and he longed for the good old days, the days of his youth - the days of splendid innocence.
It was twelve years since he'd been ensconced within a polyurethane smock-suit, performing idle gymnastics to the tune of Abba's 'Name of the Game'. The money had been great, but effortlessly surpassed by the adulation, experienced on such a scale that at one point Marcus had checked himself into Evangelical Trustees Central to determine whether he was in fact a demi-god or merely a highly-paid Tanker Receptacle.
The answer had sucked and, hugely disappointed, Marcus had been forced to reduce the place to phosphorescent sulphur. But not before he extracted his fee. Never before he extracted his fee...
But soon he tired of the expensive holidays, the wild parties and the three in a bed sessions with the local (and all too willing) clientele. Restless and disillusioned, he began searching for a way out, a release from the nine to five repetition of diving hundreds of feet through vertical halos of scalding flame whilst simultaneously machine-gunning throngs of wildly gesticulating recalcitrants via the vicious muzzle of his Uzi-.910 millimetre which spat heavily weighted dum dum bullets with all the devastatory thorax action of a cobra.
It was time to change the backdrop.
The Yufletta Hit - Pt. 5
The body lay before him twitching like a headless lizard, entrails pouring from the stomach in a vibrant plume of purple and yellow slivers. The partly severed forearm rested on the empty magazine of the Schmeisser automatic machine-pistol, whilst droplets of fermenting mucus dripped ceaselessly from the open mouth onto the hot grey tarmac of the downtown pedestrian precinct.
Marcus stood over the scene, uncomfortably warm in his African safari-suit, his fur plastered across his forehead with the sweat of recent exertion. His ears still hummed from the reverberation of the shotgun blast and the smell of cordite tickled his inner septum like a cleft duck emblem. That had been close - damn close.
If that son-of-a-bitch had appeared round the corner five seconds earlier Marcus’s ass would be grass by now. Research Division were really going to have to do better than that if they wished to preserve the health of their most prestigious operative.
Now he was going to have to act with all the rapidity of a thrice victorious Cresta Run champion if he was going to extricate himself from the extreme desperation of the situation. Plunging the ugly Dirk-Diggler-like butt of his sawn-off shotgun into its oiled chamois leather underarm shoulder holster, Marcus adjusted the buckles of his Black’s of Greenock Gaiters and stole off like a jet-ski down the heavily trafficked street.
Marcus & The Love Cushion: The Saga Continues - Pt. 6
Marcus was not prone to exaggeration but the creature sprawled across the sidewalk in front of him elevated ‘grotesque’ to entirely new levels of comprehension. It was not so much the obscene odour which emanated from the putrid mass and permeated his olfactory sensibilities with all the restraint of a diseased water-bison, but rather the creased insignia which was emblazoned upon the crumpled mauve polyester of the animal’s smock. Such incongruence was truly incomprehensible. A twelve foot high, three pronged love creature from the Planet Press was strange enough, but a twelve foot high, three pronged love creature from the Planet Press clad in a Milwaukee Brewers sweatshirt strained the seams of the bizarre to cognisance.
Marcus settled back on the dark mauve chamois of his saddle and lit a cigarette, his first of the day but by no means his last.
How he detested the Space Council for introducing their new guidelines on cosmic re-entry. Now it was becoming the norm for clapped-out, washed-up old reprobate Space hogs from solar-systems you weren’t even cursorily familiar with to appear without warning on a downtown side-street.
With little more preamble, Marcus dug into the oiled webbing knapsack secured on his inside-ankle bracelet and curled his fingers around the cold steel of his infra-phosphorescent flume grenade.
Calmly, he popped out the pin with his thumbnail and stooped forward over the creature. Prodding the animal’s left lymph ventricle, he observed the parting of the internal lobe and inserted the grenade in the creature’s oesophagus.
The animal exploded with all the incessant fury of the birth of a planet and Marcus had to source a separate love department to cleanse the downtown area of miscellaneous cosmic gristle and internal organic waste.
Such was another day in the life of Marcus: Super Agent C112 - Licensed to Blumate and Crumple.
Yeah, life could be cool sometimes.
Pursuit of the Seal: The Marcus Files - Pt. 7
Marcus lay there on the bed, his arms spreadeagled like a flayed water pheasant. A single bullet of sweat popped out onto his furred temple as he tugged at the thick khaki webbing which bound his wrists his ankles, threatening to gnaw at the very fibre of his being. He cursed ferociously under his breath and bemoaned the tiresome catalyst which had preempted such a mirthless circumstance.
That sonofabitch saboteur, that three legged dog, that son of Cerberus. He must have been out of his mind to entrust the lives of himself and his platoon to such a diseased canal rodent. Holy Crikey, what a goddarn sorry state-of-affairs and on a Bank Holiday of all days. What the heck was he meant to tell Martha and the kids? ‘Oh yeah, sorry dear. I was just wrapping up my top secret mission on the way back to the house when I happened to drive my convoy of fourteen highly trained sub-amateurs into a High-Vulnerability B-10 Access Zone. Yeah, bit of a mistake really. Seeing as it caused nine of my guys to be instantly pseudo-vaporised and the rest of them to be banged up, trussed head to foot in a freakin’ downtown drain -cleaning fluid factory.
With all the tenacity of a farm-mouse about to be pulverised by the razor-sharp rotary blades of an industrial-sized combine harvester, Marcus grappled desperately for a radical solution to his problems. He discounted self-annihilation almost immediately. With his khaki constraints, there was no readily accessible route available to him. The only one he could think of was holding his breath and that wasn’t exactly going to present Martha and the kids with a handsome and dignified-looking corpse, not with his cheeks flayed out like a Ribena coated helium balloon, three weeks past its launch date.
Besides he had to think of the men.
Think. Think!
The aircraft struck an air-pocket and dropped sharply, causing Marcus to belch disgustingly like a Canadian water buffalo. Dammit, he thought, that chicken jalfrezi he’d consumed for luncheon with a bottle of chilled Moretti had been a mistake also.
Concentrate. Concentrate!
It was then that he caught sight of the MIG fighter, barely discernible through the oval window of the fuselage. He could just barely make out the face of the pilot under the glassed canopy and that sonofabitch was smiling.
The MIG dipped dramatically to the right and disappeared from sight and Marcus heard the whoosh of its trajectory as it passed under the rear of the aircraft’s fuselage.
Everything happened very quickly then. Before you could say ‘Jiminy Cricket was not a real animal’, the lower aft-deck fuselage simply disappeared. This was alarming for two reasons, the most pressing of which was that Marcus was now in imminent danger of being sucked into the earth’s stratosphere in a hugely unappetising fashion.
The aircraft now inverted and Marcus found himself staring 27,000 feet down at what would have been other circumstances a delightful country hamlet, resplendent with a freshly applied coat of alabaster paint.
With no small concern, he felt his bindings begin to slide as if oiled by high quality liquid imaginary candelabra wax.
Schpuling Through One’s Gut: The Marcus Files - Pt. 8
Marcus had always loathed Maths lessons and this was one of the longest and dullest he had ever experienced. The vagrant in front of him was hurtling onwards like some relentless battalion of teenage ants, seemingly oblivious to the damage he was inflicting upon Marcus’ nervous system. However, his plight, Marcus reasoned, must be obvious. How many 6’8” polar bears were there sitting straddled across three seats in the front row, decked out resplendently in full regimental colours with a G-21 Thermodiser (Kurf Division ) cradled across their thighs. Not to mention the fact that his paws were now twitching sporadically with all the alarming capriciousness of a severely intoxicated gibbon.
