The bells sounded. It was time to clear the streets.
The miner watched the cloaked priest raising his arms in ceremony before the ushers pulled the temple doors shut.
The miner thought that soon his own eyes would become lost like the prostitutes, lost in the bright flashing colors triggered by the yellow fluid in bottles and the purple smoke that filled the brothel. The miner knew that someday soon, his body would be worn out from digging the green ore, decimated by work, hunger, and cold, and that he would be disposed of in the wilderness outside of town.
He returned to his barracks guided by oil lamps and moonlight breaking through dark silver clouds, still reeling from the sour whiskey and purple weed. He stepped into the barracks, mud clinging to his leather boots, sipping a little of the cold stew in a dented pot before undressing in candlelight, smelling of sweat, smoke, and rain.
He did not even feel like drinking from the bottle he had purchased at the bar, which would have rendered him a deathful peace for the night.
Smells of wet canvas and rotting wood drifted through the barracks. Some miners were still locked away in the mines where the yellow eyes of the dead crept about, waiting for the miners to fall into their nests.
Here, they slept, anesthetized by the smoke from a small wood stove at the end of the barracks.
The miner took a deep breath before lying down on his own straw bed.
He thought he heard horses, black riders destroying the old and useless, those used by the company until broken, thrown out to the wilderness, the hooves of the posse trampling whatever remained.
The bells’ final tolls demanding that they sleep.
Miner saw the mountain peaks in the morning light. He stopped, a pick still in hand, and turned, stepping from the line of miners marching into the mine’s opening and walking instead towards the morning star and the mountain peaks covered with snow, pink in the early dawn.
The mine boss demanded in the cool blue dark of the forest, “Stop!” He followed the miner with a club carved of hard wood. “Stop!” He lifted the club, but the miner turned, raised his pick and swung, piercing the mine boss’s breastbone with the sharpened metal tip, ripping through heart and lungs, his blood pouring out and mixing with the mud puddles.
Another mine boss holding a club painted with dried blood attacked him, but the miner raised his arms and brought the pick down on his head. The mine boss’s face distorted with wreckage, dead in the mud, and the miner pried the pick loose from the fractured skull, sunlight rising from the mountain and sweat started burning through his eyes, while striking at the pulped flesh, taking revenge for being put in the ground.
Morning light, and the crows called out over the gulping breaths of the miner’s strikes. Heaving his pick, lifting his face to the Manager’s office at the top of a muddy hill, where inside were the shelves holding the company ledgers that the miner could not read, a skill never made available to labor. Bound pages, written with symbols decipherable only by the clerks.
The miner approached the door of the office.
An office guard started down the steps. A hand thick with gore gripped the pick axe tightly. The guard raised his club to strike, but the miner drove his tool deep into the guard’s neck, jamming it down through the chest, exploding with blood, spraying the office’s front door.
Breaking through the barred entrance, he destroyed the shelves of documents and adding machines operated by collar-shirted clerks dipping their fountain pens into inkwells beneath oil lamps, etching page after page of mysterious script.
The clerks cowered behind their desks, but the miner swung again and again until blood began seeping through the floorboards. The Manager emerged from the back office with a coat made of fine material, with a tie and shirt of equal quality, a quality unknown to labor, pointing a revolver at the miner who wore the thick canvas coveralls of his race.
A shot seared through the miner’s side. Another shot nearly hit his head. He reared back still clutching the pick axe, using it to steady himself, before retreating through the front door, grasping at the burning pain in his side.
Another shot whistled overhead.
The miner charged towards the end of the road.
Another bullet came close, and he plummeted into the shrubs and trees, tumbling into the water that ran high and quick with the runoff from the mountain peaks. Sinking into the currents, he was carried downstream, away from the company town. He dropped his pick axe in the icy currents that started dragging him down. The pain grew, with the blood flowing from his side. Reaching towards the sky he knew that he did not want to die, grabbing at branches, being dragged over rocks, his legs going numb.
Reaching out again, unable to pull himself free, he lunged for the shore, barely grabbing hold of the rocks, grass, and mud.
Vapor rose from his parted lips, he lay on his back, looking up, barely able to see the sky shaded by a gray sleep that crawled over and blanketed him, unable to remember how bright the sun had been when he broke through the Manager’s door.
Escape could be found in the highest of mountains, free from the company. Freedom in drifts of snow and crags of ice. The sounds of the stream fading. Rings of sunlight distorted his vision, and the gray sleep took over, shutting his eyes.
The miner heard weeping. Drops of warm water fell into his open mouth. Tears washed down his throat with the stream water; small hands cradled his neck and lifted him from the shore. Miner leaned against a mule. He felt the body shift with his weight, smelled the musk of its hide. The miner struggled to get his leg over the animal’s back. The mule jerked forward. Each step threatened to tumble him to the ground. Barely alive, still bleeding, the miner held on.
The crying stopped and the gray sleep finally came up over the mountains.
In a mountain shack made of mud and tree limbs, the miner was placed on a straw bed. The smoke of lit incense floating over him. Candles made of animal fat burned a dirty amber flame through wisps of rising brown smoke.
The miner was just one of many the old woman had found injured and dying in the forest.
She coveted the souls that lingered at sundown, starving or freezing, avoiding the posse that cleared the excess humanity from the woods.
A side effect of resurrection, the humans transformed, their skin turned yellow, teeth and nails protruding from necrotic lips. They developed a hunger, scurrying into mine caves, devouring those who strayed. The yellow eyes stared up from the chasm, and the nails clicked against the rocks.
Putting a hand on his forehead, the old woman felt for a fever.
“You will take her over the mountains,” the old woman whispered into the battered human, pressing the healing paste into the wound in his side.
“Miner. You will be her eyes,” she said in a hushed voice, lingering over him. “You will go with her to Utopia.”
Technology clanked and banged relentlessly, moving the precious ore.
The Manager was a cult fanatic with a sullen face and sunken eyes that watched the parade of conditioned children being marched into mines and across brothel floors.
The Manager was in pursuit of the miner who had defied the state, the Baron, and the company creed: obey, obey …
The Manager could not remember the face, just the angry eyes of the rebel miner.
Buildings darkened from snow and rain. Rusted corrugated metal roofs holding blackbirds. In hot humid red rooms, next to corrals of rotting horseshit, the miners slept in straw beds, high on the purple smoke.
Miners exhausted from their labor dreamt in shacks, waking to meal lines, and fed from the company tins.
Milled lumber and molded metal. Peaks capped with snow, gray and black above the timberline. Rain running down steep canyon walls to the ramshackle structures that lined the muddy streets where labor wallowed in a civilization of toxic potions, bitter tastes, and rank smells.
In the rocks far above the company town, gray walls and bell towers extending beyond gables of pitched roofs and diseased
tops of old spruce and pine, blackened and broken by lightning strikes. The Baron’s palace had been constructed by those conditioned in the camps, dying in the palace’s construction, entombed in the walls, nameless and forgotten.
There was a regal ball for the sons and daughters of the Baron’s court, the aristocratic shareholders of the mines, and members of the ore commission. An orchestra played, and the elite laughed and slipped into palace halls struggling with one another’s tunics, following the trail of sweat licked up from the polished floors.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” The Baron yelled from the balcony overlooking the ballroom. “You see?”
“What, my lord?” An attendant asked.
“If they only knew …”
“Yes, my lord,” The servant said without knowing to whom his master referred.
The Baron listened to the young people screaming, while the gang rapes took place in different corners of the ballroom, drowned out by the music and the psychotic revelry brought on by the yellow smoke released from the large globes that hung overhead throughout the hall.
The Baron feasted on youth, taking particular pleasure in watching them suffer. “Come! Feed! Feed!” he demanded of the revelers. The white powder thick on his cheeks, and the black makeup around his eyes, streaked. The children ate off of the platters of food from unknown stables and fields. Chunks of meat fell on the floor. Bones and flesh were ground under frenzied feet.
“Pray! Pray!” The Baron suddenly yelled.
The banquet floor broke into a shrieking cry that rose up to the balcony, where he stood laughing, and their cries echoed through the hall.
Sacrifices beneath the palace floor, tortured and mutilated, dragged away to the eaters of human flesh.
“For the Juggernaut!” The Baron smiled.
“For the Juggernaut!” The crowd repeated.
Later that evening, the Baron would walk the cold dripping stalls of his dungeon and look at the faces, at the naked bodies huddling together to stay warm.
He dragged out a young human male who had been fed just enough to live.
“Would you like to be free?” The Baron asked.
The young man’s wet eyes looked at the Baron’s grinning face, the deep lines in his face caked with white powder and thick rouge, the black makeup outlining his eyes.
Brushing back the boy’s hair, the cold hands of the Baron ran down the youthful chest. Taking him by the hand, the Baron led him upstairs, bringing the young man to a device made of wood and steel. The Baron leaned over and kissed the boy gently on the cheek, taking one of his hands and placing it in the straps. Taking the other hand, the Baron slid it into another strap. Tightening the bindings, he smiled, kissed the sacrifice on the lips, and walked away.
With confusion in his eyes, the frightened young human watched the congregation enter the torch-lined hall, thinking for a moment that he had only to perform for the Baron and the congregation whatever perversions they would wish on him, and then he would be allowed to go free. The large guillotine blade dangling overhead—the wood and steel device constructed by the cage-keepers whose specialized talents included butchery, carpentry, and stagecraft—preparing devices for ritualized slaughter.
The boy was lowered headfirst and facedown over the altar, a gray surface stained crimson red.
The Baron stood at the foot of the stage in a purple cloak decorated with green and gold filament. Purple smoke drifted from a skull bowl among candles and symbols of the Juggernaut, the stars and bones, eyes sputtering the golden spark.
“Which of you claim this sacrifice?” The Baron called out.
“We do!” The cult chanted.
“Nighttime World!” The Baron shouted.
“Nighttime World!” The hidden faces repeated.
Panic overtook the young victim, and piss started to drip and flow over the altar’s surface, mixing with the dried blood and semen of other masses conducted in the candlelight and purple smoke.
With a flash of steel, the guillotine blade dropped, spraying the altar with the sacrificial blood as a thick flow ran down to the base of the floor.
The Baron filled a chalice with the effluent flowing from the human’s severed neck.
“We will find the Juggernaut’s eyes!” he proclaimed, raising the chalice in a toast.
“Midnight Queen!” The Baron called out in ecstatic glory.
“Midnight Queen!” Black hoods hymned back.
“For the Juggernaut!”
“For the Juggernaut!”
The Baron took a long drink from the cup, letting the sanguine flow drain warmly into his gullet.
The palace became the site of a rapturous orgy, staining the quarried stone that had been carried up the rocky bluffs on the backs of human labor bred in the conditioning camps.
Before a wall of skulls, the Baron consulted the company soothsayer.
“I see a giant river,” the soothsayer said, “and on it is the Midnight Queen, riding a demon.”
The Baron knew the story, for he claimed to be descended from the union.
Maps and documents were spread out across the table.
“Eyes?” The Baron commanded.
The mystics tried to surmise the location of the Juggernaut’s eyes, convulsing and speaking in tongues, high on the strong bitterroot they had poisoned themselves with.
“Blue eyes infused with atomic soul,” the intoxicated soothsayer slurred.
“Yes, the blue eyes!” the Baron screamed, sweating profusely. “The eyes. Will they save me?”
“Yes,” the mystic said, feigning exhaustion. “I am sure of it.”
“Will it free me?”
“Yes. Of course, my lord.”
Knowing that the Baron was satisfied with the premonition, the soothsayer collapsed, and tried to conjure up other visions so that the Baron would not kill him.
Gods created. Myths promised relief from toil and an eternal life enticed the humans to come out of the forests and go to work in towns. Councils created with members clothed in refined material, different than the hand-stitched canvas garments of the workers that served them.
When he was finally alone, the Baron pulled a bleached skull down from the wall of bones. With damp hands. he placed the cranium on a large wooden desk.
A glass ball with coiled tubing and copper lines fastened to a steel frame stood next to the desk.
A yellow fluid bubbled in the glass.
The Baron unraveled the cords and connected a fitting to the metal nipple in his arm. Pumping a foot pedal, a strong, syrupy drug smoothly ran through the copper lines and finely crafted glass, getting the Baron higher. Purple smoke rising from the machine became orange, green, and red.
The fireplace consumed the unburnt logs.
The Baron, trailing the coil in his arm, took the skull and looked into its glowing purple sockets.
“Where are the eyes of the Juggernaut?” the Baron asked the skull.
“The eyes do not matter, they have no power—no power,” the skull’s dim metallic voice crackled.
“But the eyes.”
“There is no Nighttime World—Nighttime World,” the skull transmitted.
“But there is a Nighttime World. I created it. I made them believe. It keeps them digging. They will remain digging until they mine all the green ore and we find the eyes. We can then destroy them all, and we would not have to feed or house any of them … and the fields will grow back, and the humans will go back to the river, and …”
“The Midnight Queen is not real—is not real—is not real,” the voice crawled through his mind, repeating, “not real—not real.”
“I am its prince … It is real …”
“Maintain ore production—the ore—the ore,” the voice said, ending the transmission.
Deep in the empty sockets of the skull, a violent static boiled, electric and fluid-like. The Baron stared deeper, trying to locate the blue eyes.
The Baron fell to the floor in the purple smoke, unable to control h
is convulsing body, pissing himself.
Deep in the catacombs was the mutantoid continuum, their faces almost indistinguishable from one another, inbred and scarred by radiation, they stared at the screen that flashed with thought.
The purplish glow from the fusion of black-mass lit their chambers. The gray faces gathering under the purple illuminants:
The Baron believes the religion.
Gray lips barely moving, but the words were amplified out of speakers retrofitted after a couple of centuries. The image of the Baron’s white face with rouge cheeks and blood red mouth floated on a screen, the purple light reflecting off the black, rubberized material that covered their lean, gray bodies.
There was once blindness and hunger, and the only source of light was the purple glow from the experiment, flowing from the glass and silver cylinders in the lab.
Hunger growing after the food ran out.
Drinking the blood, eating the dead, naked and beastly, they huddled around the purple light; once human, they devolved in the filth, tracking through the dark halls sniffing each other out, dragging bodies into corners.
Generations of the old race procreating among the experiments of the black-mass’s purple light. Then, finally, they were able to open the metal blast doors of the secret laboratories, never seeing the green sky that had given birth to them.
They ceased to hunt one another, raising the human flesh beside the river for food and experimentation.
They traveled at night, unable to endure the burning sun, a condition that developed from being trapped in the secret labs, while previous technology disappeared in the dirt, structures tumbled over, and rivers reclaimed their shores. Government agents in their mountain graves, and the green sky turned blue again.
At night, the flying crafts lifted out of the ancient labs, dropping down from the mountains, heading towards the riverside in the valley. Adjusting dials in purple light glowing from the craft’s control panel, the machine humming, leaving a trail of purple emissions from its exhaust portals over the wild-grown humans that had remained in the valley since the time of the green sky. Descending on the naked humans that hid within the banks of the river, where the cottonwoods grew tall and lush, where during the day, the thick leaved canopies shaded the sandy shores.
Snow Over Utopia Page 2