Hellyeah vs. the Chehalis Middle School Choir, Which I Was a Member of and I Hated Every Second of It

 

He's Only Thirteen

Gloria Summers’ heavenly soprano voice resonated throughout the empty church as she practiced her hymns. Standing at the altar with a purple choir robe flowing from her petite figure, she sang her heart out as though the church was packed for her performance. She closed her beautiful brown eyes and imagined applause and tears of happiness from the makeshift crowd. But when she opened them again, she didn’t see a single soul sitting in the pews. She wiped a tear from her eye as she remembered how this city had fallen on hard economic times. People would do absolutely anything for money, even if it meant endangering their health and forfeiting their position at the pews.

And then her concentration was broken as easily as church glass when a pounding at the doors boomed throughout the House of God. Gloria nearly jumped out of her dark skin and clutched a hand to her heart at the raucous sound, which continued to grow louder with desperation. She lifted her choir robe and hurried down the church aisle to answer the door. “Who could be knocking at this hour?” she asked herself.

When she opened the doors, a heavy presence spilled over her lap, almost knocking her on her ass. She managed to circle her arms around what appeared to be a dark-skinned teenage boy in a white karate gi passed out and shivering from the rain outside. Gloria dragged the young man inside and slammed the door behind her to prevent the cold from rushing into her church.

“You poor thing,” said Gloria while rolling the little boy over. Cuts and bruises covered his face and his tongue dangled slightly out of his mouth with a speck of drool hanging down. “Come on, little guy, let’s get you all warm and toasty.” The lone choir girl cradled the child in her arms and carried him to the back of the church, where a soft and warm bed just happened to be.

Gloria smiled sadly at the unconscious boy while stroking his damp black locks. “I’ll have some soup ready for you when you’re awake,” she said. It took her little more than three minutes to heat up a cup of noodle soup and present it to him with a plastic spoon nestled inside. Steam rose from the broth while triggering the child’s sense of smell. A few whiffs later and his swollen purple eyes slowly opened.

With a lisp that probably had to do with the karate gi he was wearing, he said, “Where am I? What the fuck is this?”

“I’ll let that dirty language slide for now, sugar,” said Gloria with a smile as warm as the soup. “You’re in the House of God, little man. It’s the safest place you can be right now. Whoever gave you those nasty bumps ain’t coming for you now. Here, have some soup. You’ll need your strength.”

The child snapped when Gloria handed him the soup, knocking the nutritious meal out of her hands and spilling broth and noodles all over the floor. The traumatized kid continued to thrash and wail about while the choir girl held him still. “Get away from me! I have to fight him!” shouted the kid. “Sensei Lector will kill me if I don’t fight him! Let me go, damn it!”

“Calm yourself, child!” belted Gloria while struggling to maintain a tight grip on the rambunctious kid. He nearly slipped out of her grasp when she mounted him and pinned his wrists down on the bed. The kid thrashed some more, but he clearly lost this battle. He could do nothing but shed tears hot enough to trigger the pain in his bruised eyes. “It’s no use,” he sobbed. “I’m dead! I’m never going to get out of that tournament!”

Gloria petted the child’s hair and gently said, “There, there, little guy. Like I said before, this is a safe place where you don’t have to worry about such things. No more fighting. No more bruises. No more blood. Just you, me, and the man upstairs. Now why don’t you tell me what’s going on between you and this Sensei Lector of yours.”

“You can’t do shit about it, lady,” snapped the child. “Saijin Lector is my master. He’s the one who trained me how to fight. I’ve been making a lot of money for the both of us beating the shit out of everyone in that ring. If he finds out I’ve dashed on him…he’s going to kill me!” Tears burned his black eyes once again.

Gloria lovingly rested her head on the child’s chest and said, “It’s alright, kid. You came here for a reason and that reason is to rest up. You know you can’t do this fighting business no more. You’re only a kid. Kids should be out playing and having fun, not beating people up in some dingy arena. Whoever this Saijin Lector is, there’s no chance I’m going to let him mess with you.”

“You don’t understand,” wept the child. “He’s a monster!”

“Of course he’s a monster, son,” said Gloria. “Anybody who puts a child through this much torture for a couple of bucks has got to be some kind of sicko.”

The child pushed Gloria off the bed and shouted, “He’s a real fucking monster!” A moment of tense silence hung between them and then Gloria shivered in fear while crab walking backwards. “I can’t stay here much longer! He’ll find me and beat me to death! You just don’t get it! He’s not just a monster! He has a whole gang backing him up! He can do whatever he wants to this city!”

“Not on my watch!” snapped Gloria as she stood back up and towered over the bruised child. “I don’t give up on those who come here for help and I’m damn sure not giving up on you! I don’t care what kind of monster you’re running from, because he ain’t getting nowhere near you! I’ve seen too much bad nonsense go on in this city! People getting shot dead in the streets, people losing their homes, people getting beaten by the police, it has to end somewhere! I say we bring it to an end one step at a time and that means getting you to higher ground!”

Another moment of tense silence hung in the air between them. The child snuggled further in his sheets after being the recipient of Gloria’s tough love, emphasis on love. He softly said, “My name is Danny. Danny Killian. What’s yours?”

“Gloria Summers. Nice to meet you, Danny. You’re a handsome young man despite all of the bruises.” She pulled the blanket over him further and gently said, “Get some rest, little guy. We’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow…”

The cracking sound of the church doors breaking down accompanied by deep demonic breathing caused Danny to cover his head with the blankets even tighter. “Stay here,” warned Gloria as she ventured out in the chapel to see what was up. Danny was right: there were monsters out there and one of them invaded her church with a whip in one hand and a tight fist in the other. “Holy-moly!” she whispered as she looked up at the seven-foot tall red fleshed demon, who came bearing fangs, horns, and sharp claws.

The demon brushed the wooden splinters from the door off of his brown trench coat and adjusted his fedora before saying, “Good evening, sweet cheeks! You wouldn’t happen to have a child about yay-high running around here, would you? He needs to come home with his daddy!”

“Some daddy you turned out to be!” shouted Gloria while she stood terra firma with her fists by her side. “You must be Saijin. Actually, I don’t give a hoot who you are! You’re in the House of God now and you’d better move your biscuit butt on out of here!”

“Or else what?!” bellowed Saijin, knocking Gloria down with the impact of his voice alone. “Is the man upstairs going to zap me to death? Oh, I’m so scared! I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but I’ve got a fucking whip and I’ve ripped a lot of flesh with this motherfucker! So if you don’t want to be the next one to be turned into human jerky, you’ll point me in the direction of that little brat!”

“I’m right here, dumb-ass!” belted Danny, who appeared at the altar shaking in either anger or fear (Gloria couldn’t tell). The child prizefighter’s fists were balled tightly as he entered his karate stance, feet apart, hips distributed. The more Saijin stared at him with those fiery eyes, the harder Danny shook.

“So, you’ve finally grown a pair of balls, little Danny. It’s about damn time! Tell me, little dip-shit: is that a urine stain on your pants or are you just happy to see me?” mocked Saijin with a yellow-fanged grin on his face. Sure enough, Danny tucked his chin and saw that his karate pants were dripping with stale golden fluids. His eyes were also pouring with sorrow and fear while Saijin laughed at him some more. “Holy shit, kid! How did you ever become a champion again? This whole time, I’ve been training a little chicken shit instead of a goddamn warrior!”

The combination of Danny’s tears and urine and Saijin’s mocking laughter caused Gloria Summers’ blood to boil. Her insides reminded her of what the church’s version of hell looked like: fire, agony, venom, and death. Her teeth clenched so tightly that her jaw ached worse than Danny’s. Her heart thudded in her chest like a hip-hop beat echoing from somebody’s car stereo. “Enough!” she roared before nipping up and elbowing Saijin right in the groin.

The demon doubled over in pain, but not without giving Gloria a devilish smile in return. Danny attempted a running strike of his own, but was quickly cut off by the choir girl, who cradled the protesting kid in her arms and dashed out of the church like a bolt of lighting. She looked back and saw that Saijin was upright once more and his whip was on fire.

He blasted, “You’d better keep running, you little harlot! It won’t do you any fucking good, but you can try anyways!” Saijin lashed his flaming whip around at various pews and set them ablaze. He even managed to pop Gloria in the back and send her crumpling into a bloody heap. Danny groaned in fury and tried once again to engage his former boss only to have Gloria use the last of her energy to hold him back and vacate the burning church.

The two of them stumbled down the stairs together while the church’s flames and Saijin Lector’s laughter rose sky high. Despite Danny’s raging protests, Gloria continued to hold him back and push the two of them down the streets until they were able to turn a corner into an alleyway. Even with the glowing flames producing hell on earth behind them, Gloria Summers and Danny Killian had found temporary safety.

“How could you let him get away with that shit?!” Danny sobbed. “I could have taken him! I swear I could have!”

Gloria hugged Danny’s head tightly and whispered, “Your fighting days are over, son. You’ve got to know when to run away. There’s no shame in being scared. It’s a natural part of life. You can’t just keep on going like this. If you didn’t die at Saijin’s hands, you would have died in that ring.”

“But it’s not fair!” Danny whined. “I need the money! I need to beat people up! I need to be tough!”

“There are other ways of making money that don’t involve that macho garbage!” yelled Gloria as she shook Danny. She hugged him once again and whispered gently, “I’m not going to leave your side. The church can be rebuilt, but you can’t be replaced, Danny Killian. I’ll make this right for you, son. Just trust me. You’ve trusted Saijin long enough and look where it got you.”

“But…but it’s not fair!” whined Danny again.

“I know it isn’t, son. There’s nothing fair about any of this. But we can make it fair. You just have to have some hope. Do you trust me?” asked Gloria with a reassuring smile.

Danny wiped away his tears and smiled as much as his swollen cheeks would allow before saying, “Yeah…I trust you, Gloria.” The two of them hugged each other and watched the church burn to its final ashes. Saijin would get his someday, just not tonight and not at the hands of a frightened child fighter.

Dayton Spoke Choir

The ethereal beauty of the choir’s voices haunted Detective Matt McQueen’s mind like a schizophrenic voice. He felt as though he was being lovingly pulled into the center of this heavenly sound, but kept his pistol drawn knowing this was the calm before the storm. He already ventured into the unknown by looking for clues in this dense forest. Every once and a while a spider would land on him and he’d get chills running down his spine before swatting the arachnids away. Those voices. So innocent. So magnificent. They couldn’t have been older than the single digits. What were small children doing all the way out in this secluded nightmare?

Matt took a massive gulp of saliva and wiped the sweat off of his forehead when he found the source of the voices: a broken down church covered in foliage and insects. Another plunge into the unknown. With every one of Detective McQueen’s steps, the choir grew louder and more haunting. His finger tightly wrapped around the trigger, the cop slowly advanced toward the front entrance, which was guarded with little else than a cracked wooden door barely on its hinges. It wasn’t so much the robust structure that kept city folks away; it was the creepiness of it all.

Matt’s eyebrows furrowed and his goateed mouth curled into a dark frown as he kicked down the front door and stormed in on the church screaming, “Freeze! Paulson City Police!” His all-business attitude softened into creeped out jitters when he saw what was inside. He lowered his weapon and asked, “What the fuck?!” He was careful not to drop the pistol, but with his shaky hands, it almost happened.

The children’s choir’s lovely voices were tainted by blue jumpsuits and putty-faced masks with blood dripping down from their mouth and eye holes. Each and every one of them had puppet strings attached to their ankles and wrists, strings that lifted their arms in conformist salute when prompted by their leader.

“Matthew, Matthew, Matthew! It’s so good to see you again. Perhaps you’d like to sing some hymns with us.” Detective McQueen quickly turned around with his pistol aimed at the source of the creepily sensual voice: Reverend Laguna Pearman. No longer was he the trusted member of the Paulson City religious community. No longer was he a donor to the poor and an educator of children. All that remained of Reverend Pearman was a wicked smile and a black choir robe with his fingers tapping together playfully.

“Laguna…I trusted you!” shrieked Matt before bull rushing the preacher and slamming him against the wooden wall. Even with the barrel of Matt’s pistol planted firmly in his jaw line, Laguna’s smile never faded. “I went to your sermons every Sunday. I let my child around you. And this is what you’ve been doing this whole time?! Where’s Caylee?! She better be in here or I’ll blast your fucking head clean off your shoulders!”

“Daddy, no!” shouted a little girl from the choir, who came flying toward her father on puppet strings before clamping around his legs tightly. “Daddy, please don’t kill him! He’s going to take us to heaven to see God! This is our mission!”

“You heard her, Detective. Caylee is much happier here than she was at home. She’s not your child anymore. She belongs to Jesus Christ now,” said Laguna, still not wiping that smug grin off his slender face.

“Shut up, you snaky piece of shit!” yelled Matt before pistol whipping Laguna’s breakable face repeatedly. Caylee begged and pleaded with her father while pounding on his legs with those tiny child hands. The rest of the choir levitated in on their puppet strings to pull Matt off of their “master”. By the time the detective was being held on the ground, Laguna’s visage was covered in blood and bone splinters.

“My face…my beautiful face…how could you do this to me? How could you do this to the face of God?!” sobbed Laguna as he dropped to his knees clutching his shattered mug. While some children held a struggling Matt to the ground, others circled around Laguna and hugged him tightly while crying drops of pink tears.

“Is this what you call leadership?!” bellowed Matt. “This guy’s not your master! He’s not anyone’s master! He’s a false prophet with a child fetish and he needs to be locked up forever!”

“Don’t talk that way about my new daddy!” shouted Caylee with tears running down her masked face.

Matt’s own eyes were sore and swollen from the sorrow of watching his daughter being ripped away from him by this monster. Detective McQueen’s heart felt like it was being put through a juicer. His stomach felt like he’d taken a liver kick from an MMA champion. “Caylee, please don’t say those things,” begged Matt with all of his soul.

“I hate you, Dad! I hate you! I belong to God now!” shrilled Caylee with her fists at her side.

“Oh, Matthew, don’t you ever get sick of questioning things you don’t understand?” asked the bloodied Laguna Pearman rhetorically. “Don’t you ever get sick of taking my name in vain? You should be. It’s a mortal sin after all. And you know how we punish sinners in my church, don’t you?” That last line was punctuated by Laguna gently rubbing his calloused hand across Caylee’s trembling back.

“Don’t touch my daughter!” roared Matt as he struggled even harder to free himself from the choir’s grips.

Laguna spit out some teeth before he reached down for Matt’s gun (which he dropped on the floor earlier) and pointed the weapon at the wiggly detective. “Looks like your beautiful daughter isn’t the only one who belongs to God now. Rest in peace, Detective McQueen!” Matt wiggled his foot free and kicked Laguna in the ankle, causing his gun blast to accidentally strike one of his pupils in the chest. The false prophet along with his choir watched in horror as the child clutched his wound and bled all over the floor, dying a slow and painful death.

“No…no, no, no! Why, God?! Why would you take this innocent child from me?!” shouted Laguna as he dropped to his knees and shook his fists to the sky. “We’ve done so much for you! We’ve done everything we could to make you happy! Why, my lord! Why?!”

The shocked children’s grips were loosened by this sudden turn of events and Matt shoved them off to earn his freedom. He spear tackled Laguna to the ground and wrestled the gun out of the preacher’s hands. Despite the knee-bending pleas from the choir, Matt unloaded all six rounds into Laguna’s already shattered face, spreading his brains and skull all over the wooden church floor. Caylee shouted, “No!” as she watched the preacher’s blood run down a tiny crack in the floor.

What started out as a kidnapping investigation turned into a full-on massacre for Matt McQueen. His hands trembled as he held his now unloaded gun still in Laguna’s splattered face. The cop slowly climbed to his feet and finally holstered his weapon when the realization set in at what he’d done. Still shaky, yet firm to the core, Matt declared, “Alright, kids. It’s time to go home to your parents. This investigation’s over. Enough with the Halloween bullshit. Take your masks off and load up in the van outside.”

With their puppet strings loosened and their heads hung low, the children, Caylee included, removed their putty-faced masks. When they lifted their heads again, Matt’s newfound resolve shattered into trembling fear. Their faces were even bloodier than Laguna’s was. Their frowns were contorted beyond their natural limits. Some of their teeth and eyes were missing. They even had abscesses that peeled off parts of their faces to reveal their teeth.

“Sorry, Daddy. We warned you!” whispered Caylee. The choir formed a circle around the shivering Matt before jumping on him and chewing at his flesh. The detective’s screams were muffled by the blood pouring out of the hole in his throat. His eyeballs squished and squashed inside the maulers of the deformed children. His blood was slobbered up off the ground and his flesh was ripped and shredded. The final munch came when the evilly smiling Caylee devoured her father’s exposed heart like it was a juicy steak. All that remained of the detective were his bones and small pieces of slashed skin.

As the children lapped down the final pools of blood and chewed the last of their meals like animals, one of them asked, “Hey, Caylee! What should we do with Master Pearman’s body?”

The little brat’s grin never washed away from her bloody face when she said, “We’ve already had our supper for the evening….but we haven’t had dessert yet! Come on, everybody! Sing with me!”

As the choir carried the lifeless body of Laguna Pearman away from the church, they sang in their most innocent voices, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

Pussy Songs

VERSE 1

Loving thy neighbor sounds so romantic

Keeping the Sabbath sounds necromantic

A choir teacher with the words of a preacher

Kept us all in line like fucking bottom feeders

The songs we sang brought up bile and vomit

Armageddon couldn’t come sooner, a fiery comet

Love is an emotion that comes with devotion

No wonder Romeo and Juliet drank the potion

CHORUS

We had to sing a bunch of pussy songs! X2

VERSE 2

He thought heavy metal was the work of the devil

He thought rock and roll was on the same level

He thought hip-hop was simple gutter poetry

He made me sing without ever knowing me

Forget the choir; we should become a mosh pit

Destroy all the music that we all think is shit

Crowd surf the teacher to the back of the room

Lock him in the closet; leave him to his biblical doom

CHORUS

We had to sing a bunch of pussy songs! X2

VERSE 3

A whole year has passed since we sang that trash

Where the fuck is our money? Where the fuck is our cash?

I know we were students, but we need compensation

For all of the nausea and the heart-burning sensations

The school janitor should get a triple salary bonus

For the vomit he cleans right after our magnum opus

If you can afford the rights to all of those fucking songs

You can afford to keep our families going long and strong

EXTENDED CHORUS

We had to sing a bunch of pussy songs!

We felt violated, we felt so damn wrong!

We ate shit for breakfast, turned it into lyrics!

No more should we ever have to hear this!

Sunday School

VERSE 1
Masturbating doesn’t make you a sinner
Jumping for Jesus doesn’t make you a winner
Having a wife doesn’t guarantee dinner
You were told otherwise by the holy swindlers
It’s all a distraction from the bigger picture
The altar boy with his finger on the trigger
The barrel pointed to his sweating forehead
The only way he could learn how to forget


CHORUS
We’re not going to Sunday School!
We’re staying home!
We’re not joining the congregation!
We’re doing this alone!


VERSE 2
Bend his little body over the holy altar
Make him scream in pain, make him holler
To you it’s just business, not worth a bother
Just drown him in the river, the Baptist water
Your deadly sins tend to go unnoticed
The police do nothing, though they know this
A transfer request to a different church
You can do it all again, except much worse


EXTENDED CHORUS 1
We’re not going to Sunday School!
We’re staying home!
We’re not joining the congregation!
We’re doing this alone!
We’re not singing in the choir!
We’re picking up the phone!
We’re going to tell anyone who will listen!
Something they’ve already known!


VERSE 3
Heaven doesn’t want you, neither does hell
Neither does the chime of the funeral bells
Neither does the water of the holy wells
Nobody is buying the things that you sell
We know it’s bullshit, we don’t say it enough
What you did to that boy was far from love
Tell us the truth, we don’t scare so easy
Though the news makes us feel queasy


EXTENDED CHORUS 2
We’re not going to the mega church!
We’re protesting outside!
We’re not going on your private jet!
We’re forming a line!
We’re not going on your holy mission!
We’re turning the tide!
Keep your hands off our fucking bodies!
I’ll see you on the dark side!