Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  Sideburns risked a joke about his boss’s tenderness.

  “Shut up!” hollered German. “That’s why all you fuck is communists and whores on the parrot perch. You have to take care of a decent woman, don’t forget it!”

  The other didn’t let it get to him. He kept laughing.

  “Keep on laughing. While you stay here ass-fucking terrorists, I’m going to have a delicious dinner and a clean fuck.”

  They took down the Lady. The cold floor, wet and filthy against her back. Her body deadened. She lifted her head. Her arms and legs were numb. She gathered some strength from who-knows-where.

  “Is tonight a full moon?”

  Only German’s eyes showed a hint shadow. A point of fear, very discreet and soon stifled. And she—the person with the most cracked, violated spirit in the room—was the only one who noticed.

  “And why do you want to know, you whore?” he snarled. “It’s none of your business. Move, dammit,” he urged the others, “take this sack of shit to her cell. Tomorrow, we’ll continue.”

  They delivered the Lady to her cell. She passed out when her head bounced on the ground but soon awoke, her attention caught by the image of the creature they dragged down the corridor. A woman of dark, dull skin, her hair gray. A mature face marked by experience and sensuality. The left foot missing.

  The Lady heard her screams for hours.

  In the end, confused or tired, the executioners tossed Nha in the Lady’s cell. Some rags covered her parts. Her strong body, full of curves, scars, and stories, had been treated even worse than the Lady’s, but the punishment had done less damage to her spirit.

  When they were alone, Nha called the torturers names that even the Lady didn’t know. Upon finishing her list of swear words, she surprised the Lady with a debauched smile.

  “Fuhget it. They dun me bad, but I’ll have my revenge.”

  They had a break from the pain, a crumb of peace. They held each other for heat and comfort. The Lady wanted to back away when she spotted Sideburns in the corridor, watching them. His face twisted in a perverted smile, his right hand on his penis. Nha held her.

  “We have ta keep warm,” she said. “Fuhget that ’un.”

  She gently kissed her new companion’s face and placed a hand over her left butt cheek.

  They heard the heaving respiration and the burping whisper of the man while he masturbated, his moan when he came, half a minute later, and his tottering steps when he left.

  “You best believe ’at I keep ’em all up here.” Nha pointed to her own head.

  They engaged in a murmured conversation like old friends who had just run into each other.

  Nha told one of her many tall tales. The Lady paid her back by speaking of her Poet, of how she’d met him and how wonderfully he fucked her. She had barely laid her head on her new friend’s firm thighs when she heard the first shots.

  Slaughter

  And who said there was a weapon that could kill the wretch? He neither sweated nor smiled nor stopped. He advanced through torn-off legs and dilacerated heads. His claws punctured and ripped, his teeth ripped and dismembered, the long, black hairs shone, covered in fresh blood.

  Executioners ran and died.

  A Poet whose bestiality proclaimed itself in blood and guts, fear and shit. Men who had just tortured and raped without mercy now begged and shat themselves.

  Nha and the Lady would have shit themselves too when they saw the beast fill the cell door. But one of them had seen and lived through much worse, and the other recognized him, even covered in fur and fury.

  The lock burst under the force of the deformed arms. The Lady helped support Nha, who hobbled without the prosthesis that substituted her lost foot, confiscated upon her arrest.

  They passed through bodies and blood, pieces of meat and cloth. Other captives were freed and ran without restraint, guided by a fear much stronger than gratitude.

  They reached the liberty of the night. The fresh caress of a fine drizzle. The narrow, deserted street was the end of the world. A miniscule wound in the city, unimportant, without light, without eyes or ears. In a sky without stars through a break in the thick clouds, the moon showed itself. An inebriating, pulsing disk. The Poet, an inexplicable beast, breathed its scanty light and exhaled power and glory. The Lady touched his fur, his snout, his vibrant tongue. He was naked, and his red member, quivering, was an insane invitation. She searched Nha’s eyes and found a sly, unabashed smile.

  “Don’ you know these wolves is like that? You carry they litter, they knows where you be.”

  The Lady touched her womb. A promise of weeping came from her lips.

  “I’m …”

  “Gots ta be. How else you think your wolf done found us?”

  “They hit me so much … Do you think …” Her voice faltered.

  “Sons o’ wolves is strong. [Si apuquenti naum].”

  The Poet stared at her with welcoming eyes. With his wet snout he smelled the face of his offspring’s mother. She felt his shivering and in the heaving groaning could smell the metallic taste of blood. He had killed so many for her. Almost all of her torturers.

  Almost.

  They heard a crack. A shattered howl of pain. The furry body collapsed. Behind it, the Lady saw German. He held a smoking revolver.

  “I knew it!” he said. His eyes bugged out, injected with fear, paranoia, and victory.

  The weapon spat two more times. One shot wounded the Lady’s leg. The other knocked down Dona Nha.

  German’s finger didn’t stop pulling the trigger, but the gun’s hammer struck in vain. Three bullets was all he had in the cylinder. While he put more bullets in the gun, he slobbered and muttered, “Sons of bitches. They’re all sons of bitches. I knew that fag was a werewolf. I knew it. I told them so.”

  The Poet rose up, his body trembling, blood running from his snout, but this time it wasn’t from enemies, it was his own. He advanced on the cop. Desperate and afraid beyond reason, German gave up on the gun and fled. Why stay there risking death at the claws of a dying beast? But he wasn’t as fast as he should have been. One of the Poet’s claws drew a scar on his back that would accompany him for the rest of his life. The tear burned but didn’t stop him from fleeing at an insane run, far away from that madness.

  Then the Poet died. Without a goodbye, a last stanza, a final kiss. He just died.

  The hairs fell out, the face regained its softness, and in death, the human prevailed.

  Dona Nha barely escaped death but not without a price. The shot that had brought her down shattered her left eye. With pains that punished them from the surface of their skin to the depths of their souls, she and the Lady braced each other and got out of there.

  The newspapers mentioned nothing the following day. No one beyond those present knew, and not many were left.

  The bullet that one of Dona Nha’s friends pulled from the Lady’s leg was a macabre souvenir. A silver bullet. German had known. He had always known that a wolf would come after its lover. He could have put silver bullets in all his colleague’s guns but was selfish in his triumph. No one ever knew why or how, but life was generous to German.

  There he is now, so many years later.

  It’s drizzling. The same soft caress that cradled the pleasures of my parents over the flagstones. Dona Nha points him out, but she doesn’t need to. He’s fat, satisfied. He drops a bag of trash on the sidewalk in front of his house. I’ve never seen him before, but I know who he is. It impregnates him: all the arrogance, the disorder, the hate.

  “The time has come,” my mother announces. In her voice, a coldness I don’t recognize.

  We get out of the car. Dona Nha offers me an accomplice’s smile. She’s the one who calls the man’s attention.

  “Gehmun?”

  The man freezes. He faces them a bit challenging, a bit frightened.

  “Do you know who we are?” my mother asks.

  “More or less,” he sneers. “I think I’ve seen your snout
s before. Didn’t I fuck your assess?”

  Dona Nha laughs.

  “We ne’er forget you. Our asses don’ either. They still hurtin’.”

  A nervous smile trembles on the man’s lips. The realization of the inevitable shines in his old eyes.

  “You took a long time.”

  “No,” my mother responds. “We didn’t take a long time. We waited. Have you had a good life?”

  “I can’t complain. Family, cash. Life was good.”

  “How nice.”

  “What do you want? An apology.”

  “We could start there.”

  He smiles with disdain and sizes me up.

  “And that one?”

  “My daughter.”

  “One of mine?”

  “No. The Poet’s.”

  “Oh … A bitch, then? I guess I didn’t beat as hard as I should have. I should have made you shit that little turd before she was born. Disgusting, the daughter of a werewolf with a whore.”

  He growls and tries to pull a gun from his pants. He doesn’t have time.

  I’m my daddy’s girl. And that is his only legacy. I’m not a male son preceded by six sisters. The full moon will never transform me. My incisors will never grow, my hair will not cover me. I’m just a bit stronger. A bit faster. Not much, but enough to take the gun from the hand of my father’s assassin. He, a pot-bellied torturer unaccustomed to defending himself, barely sees my strong hand snap over his. The revolver flies. I grab it in the air. I toss it away. We won’t need it.

  My mother came prepared. She draws her pistol and points it at German. She savors the moment for two seconds. Time enough for German to regret everything he’d never done. Everything he’s built and will never enjoy.

  She pulls the trigger with neither hurry nor hesitation.

  The hole between the eyes is small. The gap that opens on the back of his head lets out blood, brains, and spirit. Dona Nha watches, her glass eye gleaming like a black fire.

  We flee without hurry. Practically a stroll. Our chests are light now, uncongested and without sadness. We walk without asking anything of each other. Up in the sky, the moon shines with force, bathing us with promises of anonymous glories and love stories. It congratulates us for the love we’ve lived and for the revenge that is so cold and sweet.

  Like so many other times, they tell me stories. They’re all as fake as this one. I promise them that, at home, I’ll write about the Lady’s love for her Poet Wolf, and like them, I’ll insist that it’s all true, even the drizzle’s caress on our faces.

  Salvation

  Claudia De Bella

  Dislocating. Dismembering. Flaying. It’s in your blood, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  I’ve been an executioner since I got to Salvation. Back on Earth, I was hunted, locked away, and drugged to prevent me from relapsing. Here, I get a government salary. And more important, I’m completely happy.

  I’m asked to kill them slowly, but sometimes I can’t. Some of them whine and beg for mercy, and those are the most annoying. I look at their faces, and I only want to crush them—their eyes popping out of their skulls, their jaws broken in three parts. I can’t wait to smash their ribs. I want to see them dead. Then excitement makes me hurry, and they don’t get the proper punishment, the suffering quota established by the Law. But the Court Head is satisfied with me. I do my job very well. I’m useful to society, he always tells me.

  The crime they’ve committed doesn’t matter. Father Alfonso says that any action against the Doctrine is an equally serious offence and deserves the highest penalty. Here in Salvation there’s no difference between insulting a workman and murdering a priest. You are pure, or you’re not. You can’t damage the Creator’s work in any way. Except for me: I’m an executioner, the armed hand of the Divine Justice.

  So they come to me. The ritual is very simple. Once they prove to be guilty, which they always do, they’re quickly removed from Court and brought here. There are no prisons on this planet, just waiting rooms. I wait for them a little uneasily with that tickle of enthusiasm and anticipation I always feel when work is coming.

  The iron door opens, and I see the convict for the first time. I immediately start to consider the method. If they are big and strong, much better. There’s a lot to do before they give up. The weak need more subtlety. A powerful, well-applied blow can kill them at once, and that’s not the idea. Men, women, young, old … each requires a special, customized treatment adapted to their bone structure, their more or less rebellious personality, their will to fight the punishment or to submit themselves to it.

  I’ve developed my technique to such a point that I can plan the whole procedure in a few seconds. A quick look is enough to diagnose the sequences which guarantee the longest hours of pain with the deepest possible damage, yet keeping them alive. The Law orders they must die at least a week after the verdict. I’m proud to say some of them last as much as three weeks. I’ve been awarded for making them last that long.

  When we’re left alone, the first thing I do is remove their cuffs. It’s funnier when they’re loose, running around the dungeon like frenzied rats, thinking they can escape. Other executioners use tools, but that’s not very manly. I think my hands are there for a purpose, and so are my feet, my shoulders, my elbows. No weapon is more sacred than this body the Creator has given me. Knuckles hitting flesh until blood sprays out. From both of us. My colleagues don’t know what they’re missing.

  It’s just a matter of hitting and punching and piercing and pulling hair out and dislocating members and tearing skin open and breaking mouths until they can’t scream anymore. When they’ve turned into a bloody mess, you apply different punishments, less frequent but more insidious. And on and on, until one pain or another destroys their last resistance and they let themselves die. That’s mercy, Father Alfonso says—giving them enough time to be purified by suffering and to regret their sins.

  I’ve never understood why Salvation is excluded from the usual navigation routes. There’s so much holiness here, so much attachment to the true precepts of harmonic cohabitation that everyone should spend some time on this planet and learn and follow its example.

  When the Earth jailers dropped me in a field near New Bethlehem, hoping that I, unable to restrain myself, would soon go back to my old tricks and be arrested, judged, and executed by the Salvation Courts, they never imagined I’d become an executioner myself. I’m eternally indebted to them. Thanks to those jailers, I discovered my real vocation, the mission the Creator had set aside for me since I was born. I only had to find the place where my particular skills were needed, not considered a perversion but an exceptional gift. People here appreciate my real value, and I enjoy every single day of my life as I serve the only true religion doing what I like best.

  How many sinners have I redeemed? Two hundred and thirty-seven, according to the ecclesiastic records … two hundred and thirty-seven souls that finally admitted their mistakes thanks to me. I know I’ve already gained my place in Heaven. But I’m not eager to get there yet. My paradise is here, in Salvation, in this dungeon I’ll never leave because Father Alfonso says I must not be blemished by the impurity from outside. That’s why he protects me with the padlocks securing my door.

  But who cares about freedom? As long as that door keeps opening, as long as there are sinners who challenge the Divine Law, as long as I am the one to lead them along the path of forgiveness, and—above all—as long as I continue hearing their bones shatter when I throw them against the stone walls, I’ll always think I’m the most fortunate man in the universe, and I’ll thank the Creator for the pleasures He has bestowed on me, which I’m certain I rightfully deserve.

  How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War

  Rose Lemberg

  for Bogi Takács

  At the budget committee meeting this morning, the pen in my hand turns into the remote control of a subsonic detonator. It is familiar—heavy, smooth, the metal warm to the
touch. The pain of recognition cruises through my fingers and up my arm, engorges my veins with unbearable sweetness. The detonator is gunmetal gray. My finger twitches, poised on the button.

  I shake my head, and it is gone. Only it is still here, the taste of blood in my mouth, and underneath it, unnamed acidic bitterness. Around the conference table the faces of faculty and staff darken in my vision. I see them—aging hippies polished by their long academic careers into a reluctant kind of respectability; accountants neat in bargain bin clothes for office professionals; the dean, overdressed but defiant in his suit and dark blue tie with a class pin. They’ve traveled, I am sure, and some had protested in the streets back in the day and thought themselves radicals; but there’s none here who would not recoil in horror if I confessed my visions.

  I do not twitch. I want to run away from the uncomplicated, slightly puffy expressions of those people who’d never faced the battlefield, never felt the ground shake, never screamed tumbling facedown into the dirt. But I have more self-control than to flee. When it comes my time to report, I am steady. I concentrate on the numbers. The numbers have never betrayed me.

  At five p.m. sharp I am out of the office. The airy old space is supposed to delight with its tall, cased windows and the afternoon sun streaming through the redwoods, but there’s nothing here I want to see. I walk briskly to the Downtown Berkeley BART station and catch a train to the city. The train rattles underground, all stale air and musty seats. The people studiously look aside, giving each other the safety of not-noticing, bubbles of imaginary emptiness in the crowd. The mild heat of bodies and the artificially illuminated darkness of the tunnel take the edge off.

  When I disembark at Montgomery, the sky is already beginning to darken, the edges of pink and orange drawn in by the night. I could have gotten off at Embarcadero, but every time I decide against it—the walk down Market Street towards the ocean gives me a formality of approach which I crave without understanding why. My good gray jacket protects against the chill coming up from the water. The people on the street—the executives and the baristas, the shoppers and the bankers—all stare past me with unseeing eyes.