Don't Worry--There's Violence and Sex, Too...

Every sense heightened, Nikolai moved like a deadly wraith, carrying three guns and with knives in sheaths all over his body. He drifted like a cloud atop a mixture of painkillers and viral hallucinations, his head full of nails and cotton candy. That's the only way he could have described it to someone, the disconnect between reality and what he saw off and on, as if watching two movies at once and being in both at the same time.In one reality, Nikolai had entered the scrubland of smaller, younger trees mixed with clearings that marked the border between the jungle and the grasslands. The green-tinged air was fresh and warm, insects crawling and buzzing everywhere.In the other reality, he had entered a landscape of almost unbearable intensity, one in which giant jellyfish-like creatures floated, and spike-shaped things translucent, their eyes huge and bulging and completely blue, that preyed on little purple glowing animals that combined the most pleasant aspects of dandelions and guppies. Between them flowed what he could only have described as creatures like amoebas or single cells in rivers like sky-born bloodstreams under a microscope. The air resisted him, as if he were pushing against a warm balloon.He didn't know if he was seeing another world or a place manufactured by his misfiring, suborned brain cells, but he also didn't know if it mattered. All of his fear had receded before the wonder of what his senses reported to him.