Mayhem

by Michael MolisanI

  “That’s impossible,” Margaret heard Sammy say, as she watched men boil alive.

  Not anymore, Margaret thought, “The Veil is gone.”

  Eris flew across the battlefield, turning away from Margaret and Sammy. Her wings moved like a great condor, leaking onyx. The downforce created dust devils and gusting wind that slapped and pawed about Margaret’s face and sticky hair. Both armies were cast into total chaos, platoons turning on each other, several squads on both sides running free of cover and charging their opponents with bayonets and knives. Some were driven so mad that they placed a sidearm to their own skulls.

  There was no more order, no survival or flight, there was only an altar on which wholesale death was being offered to the heavens.

  “What do we do now?” Sammy asked quietly, his voice a rattle, something like joy cracking his vowels and something like terror leaking down his throat.

  I don’t know, resigned, Margaret spoke it. A lifetime as a witch counted for naught.

  “I don’t know.”

  One of the 1st Army Abrams was dead, directly in front of where Margaret and Sammy stood. It had been cover for advancing companies, and if it had kept rolling earlier, it would have crushed Margaret. She’d have been bent up and pushed deep into the mud, bones shattered, and internal organs exploded. Now it sat quiet, coated in gold, burning metal creeping over every inch of its armor, across carbon smears. Slowly, almost imperceivably at first, the gold began to shift and turn chrome in a deep shade of fetid urination, whispering, holding Margaret’s heart, a great magnet.

  We’re not done yet.

  She knew it in her marrow. Her fingers trembled and her throat groaned no differently from when Townsend savagely penetrated her in the most intimate of moments.

  Sammy wasn’t afraid, standing at her side. He was only angry. Angry that he was babysitting a witch when he should have been at his brothers’ side. Angry that he didn’t understand these awesome and terrible sights. Angry that he had not yet killed enough of the enemy. Angry that he couldn’t simply fuck Margaret right now, and even angrier that he couldn’t fuck Margaret and kill Antecedents at the same time. Margaret could hear it, pouring off him, a raging waterfall.

  Margaret was entertaining Sammy’s fantasy when she realized who, or what was here.

  She told me the Lord of War was coming.

  The tank, rigid and chilly chrome, was bending and breaking under its own weight. Thick plate armor and metal folding, clipping back like rice paper, pulling itself apart. The sound of ripping steel was something Margaret could never have fathomed. Piece by piece, something in the shape of a person tugged and heaved lose, freeing itself from the tank, a manifest entity, some kind of ingot creature that moved with a jerking twist of legs and arms. Melting, curving, and binding with iron tendons and muscle. Step by step, it approached, fingers rolled, arms next, layer by layer, growing. Biceps, triceps, brachioradialis, and deltoids formed and pulsed with a vibration of solid metal.

  At times it seemed like veins of brass wrapped up around ligaments. Jagged and broken iron, almost ore, fell off and heaped to the earth. Sometimes it would shimmer and reflect fire light. Other times it was dull and dusted in deep grooves, moist in oil and flexing beyond any reality metal could achieve.

  Less than ten feet away, the monstrosity was shoulders above Sammy, dwarfing Margaret as if she was a small cat, feral and wet in the rain, nothing of consequence.

  Sammy dropped to his knees. He knew who this was.

  “Ares, lord of war.”

  Armor plate, god of hate, Margaret remembered The Beast.

  Somehow this sculpted creature of steel, brass, and chrome was more defiantly powerful than a five-hundred-foot-tall golem, commanding unambiguous authority and palpable brutality. Margaret was clenching her teeth so tight that her gums bled, her heart forcing its way free of her chest, and for brief moments she could feel both of her fists balled up.

  “When the Eye of Shahr-i-Sokhta shattered, the remains of the Veil did too,” Margaret spoke, her mouth open, a strained gasp forming syllables. She wanted to turn on Sammy now, she wanted to strike him, straddle him, and fuck him until she bled.

  Each step Ares took rattled the ground under Margaret’s feet, and when he spoke it was a bass growl that brooked no quarter, no doubt, no challenge.

  “The Eye couldn’t simply be shattered. It had to be destroyed in cold murder by one whose heart bled love. Amihan loved you more than anyone else when she drove that knife into you, right through the Eye.”

  Margaret was suspended in a state of aggression and lust. She understood everything. Aphrodite had already told her the secret.

  “We only offer kindness when the sweet scent of your soul is required to make the magic work, and we only offer suffering when your terror makes the lock turn.”

  Margaret reached her hand up to her chin, fingers up to her lips, digging her nails in, the kind of pain she begged Townsend for. “This was all you wanted. The Veil shattered, to walk among us again.”

  Ares shrugged, hues of bronze, silver, and grey twisting with his form, “You didn’t really think this was about you. Did you? That we somehow had your best interest at heart? The gifts from Eris and Aphrodite were only meant to keep you alive long enough to reach this day, to die under Amy’s knife.”

  Aphrodite didn’t give me a gift, Margaret thought, and as the metal lips of Ares curled into a grin, listening to her mind, she knew the answer.

  “Townsend,” Margaret whispered.

  I never loved a man until the night I met Aphrodite.

  Though she was small, smaller than almost every adult she’d known in life, and though she was used to looking up at almost everyone, Margaret had never felt as diminutive, as irrelevant, and powerless as she did under the shadow of a war god.

  “You were supposed to die,” Ares nodded to himself, the tendons in his neck shifting colors of mottled tan and gunmetal as he clenched one great fist. The snap and crackle of his knuckles sounded like solid axles snapping, and the twist of his muscles reminded Margaret of singing railroad steel. “So, you will die.”

  2:34pm April 15th, 39 Veilfall

  Manteca Reach, California

  Margaret wanted this death.

  As much as her pulse quickened, the idea of falling before a god, this god in particular, was intoxicating, seductive, and dreadful. She didn’t want to defend herself, there was no magic to summon, no tricks or schemes. It only mattered how she passed. The woman who refused to kneel would die proudly, Margaret knew this for certain.

  “No,” Sammy said. His voice seemed meek and childish against the deep rumble of a war god, but his conviction was no less. One boot forward in the mud, a cascade of rain washing off his tiny eyes, Sammy of the Maul shouldered his antique rifle, leaned in and set his jaw. “I can’t let’cha do that.”

  Ares, towering above them, unclenched his fist and swung both hands together in a clapping motion. It sounded like iron thunder and tornadoes, sparking light behind a rumbling belch of laughter.

  “You’ll ‘let’ me do nothing.”

  Another step forward, forearms tense, Sammy lifted the rifle high, and did not flinch, “I serve warlords of th’Maul, and th’Maul serves Lady Mayhem. I can’t allow an Antecedent, or anyone else to harm her. Not even you.”

  The grave metal face of Ares turned serious, his smile collapsing, his brow a terrible doubt upon the world. “I’ve heard your prayers, Sammy of the Maul. You would cast aside your own god for this witch cunt?”

  Sammy took a third step forward, voice steady, “Lady Mayhem gave us our pride back. She gave us our glory back, and I love her, as I love you.”

  Margaret turned away from the titanic silhouette cast by Ares to look at Sammy’s profile. She didn’t imagine that she’d have such an impact on the boy’s world. He was just an angry hatefuck, and she’d never taken anything in her life that wasn’t paid for. To imagine Sammy so loyal to her for such a simple gift rattled her own pride, in
the face of death.

  “You are no Diomedes. You will die.”

  Sammy answered this with rifle fire.

  Beyond where Margaret’s toes curled down into mud, she could smell the blood clotting at her skull. Sammy’s teeth clenched, his finger jerked against the trigger, and the rifle’s muzzle flashed. He didn’t just loose lead into the face of a war god, he charged forward. He crossed foot after foot, and when his rifle emptied, he tore it from the shoulder strap and swung it with all the fury that a fragile mortal of meat and marrow could muster.

  Each shard of metal that his rifle belched hit Ares in neck and face, burning hot, flattening into his own carapace, consumed wholly by the god’s form. Each falling brass case turned to water on the dirt below, and when the rifle struck Ares it shattered like falling icicles. The hardened steel of the barrel tore apart; magazine, rail, and sights pulled up and were swallowed by bubbling gold and silver muscles.

  Sammy died instantly.

  Ares raised a mighty fist and struck down. The force and speed created a wake that shoved Margaret back, stumbling. Sammy’s spine collapsed, his knees broke, the very skin of his body rippled like waves under gusting wind. His head split open, five ways, a ripe cantaloupe falling free. His hair parted and gray fluid erupted from within. His blood coated the armor of Ares, and it too was absorbed like the lead and rifle, welcomed into a warm embrace.

  Margaret was close enough that some of Sammy’s blood coated her face and chest, in her eyes, and on her lips. One last time she could smell his semen and sweat, remember what it was like when he forced her face to a sticky bar, hammering her pelvis with his erect cock.

  You have the glorious death I promised you, Sammy, Margaret thought.

  “I will make sure your Maul sings of this for a hundred years to come.”

  The body of Sammy crumbled. His boots and ankles had been driven into the mud, holding up his hips and lower back. Blood and brains leaked down his body, and his arms slowly drifted under the weight of gravity. He was frozen in a strike, a statue dedicated to unmitigated aggression and rage.

  Ares lifted his eyes, liquified metal turning solid. No emotion could be read on the steel statue, “I’ve heard his prayers since he was a boy.”

  There was regret in his voice, a humming drone of steel, something like sorrow. With her lonely hand, Margaret reached up and ran index and middle fingers down her face. She drew cruor and tears, depositing the sweet salt against her tongue and lips, “He just died at the hands of a war god for his mistress. This was the glory he desired, and you know it.”

  Ares stood, a perfect specimen of masculinity. An unobtainable example of humanity: wide hands, long fingers, and dangling phallus. When he answered, his voice echoed in total pride, “All these years, and you never prayed to me. A wretched cow so consumed with war, so in love with my boys, and yet all of my altars you ignored.”

  Margaret had been called plenty of things in her life. Some kind, others cruel, or crude, but up until this second, ‘wretched cow’ had never been one.

  “I’ve never feared death, Ares,” Margaret smirked, “Let's get this over with.”

  Turning from Sammy’s corpse, headless and broken, standing eternal, Ares began to shift in color and shape. His height seemed to pull and ebb back like a falling tide, his metal flesh and muscle paled and turned a shade of mist, veined, and wholly human in deception. Leather grew upwards and wrapped around his thick calves as knee-high boots. The dread clamber of his footfalls were no less heavy, bouncing rock and stone, thumping at pooled water, chasing rain and sending a biting vibration up Margaret’s legs and hips, chewing angrily at her clitoris.

  “Without fear, what value does this world hold for you?”

  Standing before her, every bit as real as Sammy was, Ares cast a shadow of unbridled brutality and beauty. Margaret’s eyes fluttered beyond her control and as much as she tried to focus on the metamorphosis of a steel god, her vision blurred and she bit her lower lip, choking on a whimper that sprang free.

  The world holds no value.

  “There’s only fighting and fucking.”

  While pandemonium reigned in all directions, Ares met Margaret in this holiest of places. His chest was inches from her chin and his eyes burned with flame reflected through marbled glass. He smelled of musk and oil, and an intoxicating weight of copper, prompting total avidity in Margaret. She raised her one palm and pressed into the chest of Ares, heavy in boiled leather and notched metal. It may as well have been a mountain that her hand trembled before.

  A witch until her last breath, Margaret saw things beyond reason. Colors and sounds, glimpses into worlds unlike any she’d imagined. Gods moved about her for a fraction of a second, spoke in languages no human could learn, and felt emotions magnified by untold power. She was drowning, and breathing, all at once. Parts of her mind switched off in total disbelief of what they witnessed.

  Pulling her wrist away from his chest, Ares’ hand wrapped around much of her forearm with such pressure that Margaret imagined her bones snapping like twigs. No physical act could have replicated it, as painful as it was pleasurable.

  “Are you going to kill me, or do I have to beg for it?” Margaret looked up at him.

  Crouching low and leaning forward, Ares kissed Margaret. For a few seconds, she knew what it was like to be a god.

  His lips burned and his tongue bored into her mouth like a bullet through flesh. This was nothing as simple as lust. She was greater than herself, Valkyrie incarnate, an echo of every dying breath, the cry of victory and the howl of defeat. She was the winner and the loser, the living and the dead, over and over again. She was the ghost on a radio frequency, witness to the shelling of the Bay Area Reach, and Sacramento’s atomic fire. She was cluster munitions coating the enemy in flame and hate, the succulent taffy of napalm as men and women and children burned alive. In this moment, Margaret knew what it was like to not merely fight a war, but what it meant to be the war.

  Let me stay, let me stay, let me stay here forever.

  It was also a whisper. She was begging as his unyielding form tightened around her, dense beyond imagining, stronger than a thousand tanks and burning so very hot. She wanted to die here, she wanted him to consume her. Just the same as Sammy’s blood.

  Let me stay here forever.

  Ares released her, drawing back, and Margaret heard herself beg for him with a cracking and broken voice, sizzling on her own tongue.

  His appearance had shifted, and now Ares stood before her in a coat of onyx leather and shimmering blood, a uniform that she’d never seen. Wide lapels and wool jacket bore metal pins, a strap crossed his chest, neck tie clutched with white linen collar. His cap bore a single skull at the pinnacle, and below the brim his eyes blazed the heat of burning cities.

  Margaret realized she had never loved a man before Townsend because no single man could have compared to the maul of war itself. Her favorite lover above all others.

  “I love you,” Margaret wept as Ares growled. One hand clutched her shoulder, the other her twisted collarbone.

  The battlefield around her was quiet, frozen in time. Margaret could see tracers hanging in the air, Antecedent, Owens, and Maul soldiers alike, charging each other. Rifles held high, bayonets fixed, caught under cold explosions, the mist of burning diesel and evaporating rain.

  Her place was out there.

  “It’s frozen,” Margaret spat in wonder.

  Ares answered, his voice no less broad than before, “We are caught between seconds. We are standing in the place that gods walk, between the moments that you believe are so important. We watch you live, your blood running fast and hot. So afraid. You seem as ants to us. Do you understand now? Why we did this? Why we manipulated you?”

  You love this world, Margaret thought, aware that Ares heard her, “You wanted to return to this place. To walk with us again.”

  She couldn’t focus on Ares now. His eyes blurred the very air that made her heart stop. She could smell
the gunpowder and blood and fire, all the fire, all of the cities burning. She wanted to be loosed into this fray, tossed free and discarded. She wanted the wind to lift her high like leaves, she wanted to unleash terrible dread on these armies.

  I must help my men, they need me.

  “No, Margaret,” Ares answered, and something about his words pulled her back to his smoldering eyes, reflecting millennia and devastation. “Your soldiers will die, and there will be no witches to hasten this end. They will fight. They will not run or retreat. It will be a symphony of death not seen by your kind since the world was two-thousand years younger. You will not deprive me of my feast.”

  She didn’t want to accept this, but there was no room for negotiation. The fingers that held her were stronger than falling mountains. It was now that Margaret understood, she’d never had a voice. This outcome was decided long ago. She was just an actor in a play. The illusion of her control, the deeds she’d accomplished, the pain she’d felt, all her hardships, had simply been a part of a greater scheme.

  “They’ll die,” Margaret replied, crying.

  “Yes, many of them will die. I don’t know who will be victor. The two sides are equally matched, equally skilled, and equally brave.”

  I can’t protect them anymore, Margaret realized.

  “No, you can’t. But this is how it shall be.”

  The air was so thick, Margaret imagined she’d gag on wet and smoke. Her heart detached from her chest, a thing drawn up and out of her, beating free of her body, a living creature with its own dreams and desires.

  “I can’t give you the freedom to command this battle, but I can give you the one thing you wanted above all others in this life.”

  What?

  Margaret’s eyes unfocused, and she remembered so many dreams she’d never had.

  “A child.” Ares answered.

  Long after she’d worked so hard to forget, decades had passed. She’d spoken her eulogies. She never stopped being angry, every bit as angry as Sammy had been. The part of her born a witch knew she’d been robbed of her ability to create life. She didn’t need a doc or medic to grope her cervix, she knew what had been stolen, the one thing that could never be given back. The price they believed she had to pay.