by Dave Brockie
DEADITE PRESS
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PORTLAND, OR 97211
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AN ERASERHEAD PRESS COMPANY
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ISBN: 1-936383-36-5
Copyright © 2010 by Dave Brockie
Cover art copyright © 2010 Dave Brockie
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Printed in the USA.
1
Redeemer
I walk into the restaurant that is about to be bombed. It is a Polish diner, well known for its cabbage rolls. Choosing a seat with a solid wall behind me, I sit down just as the bomb detonates. The walls burst, the roof drops, my pants explode. People become bloody foam. Staring into my cup, I ignore their shrieks as my booth is heavily spackled with crimson clods. But my coffee is brown . . . and I am brown . . .
Eating my food slowly, I derive little from it but texture. It’s bland, and it bores me, dulling my senses. I cram slice after slice of heavy bread into my mouth, chewing it with the occasional aid of my coffee, forgetting where I put the bomb or why I even brought it here.
The Poles babble insanely, and I scowl, realizing I have totally forgotten their language. I cannot tell them how very sorry I am for my appalling behavior in Warsaw, during the ghetto assaults. Every Wednesday I come here and eat heavy bread for hours, waiting. But the bomb has not gone off.
I’ve been many men, and once a woman. I have been the sodden earth beneath the wheels of legion. I have fought wars, fucked whores, known love and hate until they were indistinguishable. I have never really died, though I have been the maggot that ate my corpse. Learning much, I have forgotten most of it. I made myself forget many of the more horrific details, but I know that I am not only a child and woman killer, but a devourer of all forms of life, making me into, I believe, the most prolific active serial-mass murderer in the world.
Let this book be a record of my crimes.
I am Whargoul.
***
I have spent my life as a soldier, doing things I would rather forget. But still it comes back—random blotches of foulness and light, and I find myself sobbing uncontrollably as the waitress returns with my check, puzzled at the tears which slash my cheek. It takes great effort to retain control as a gang rape is thrust into my brain, triggered by the sweaty face above the fry vat. Shaking with tremor, I pay and turn to leave, hearing the pathetic cries of the woman and the tearing of her clothing, mauled by half the company as her village was burned.
I bumble out, bell clanging madly as half-chewed bread spills out of my contorted face. Outside the street is crowded with machines and humans, all emitting stench. New York is stinking hot, and the garbage men have gone on strike. Great piles of rotting trash slowly join puddles, turning the vast and once proud city into a colossal landfill. The people look bloated and annoyed as they litter, spit, and bitch loudly.
My presence here, amongst my victims, is a psychic intrusion. If only they were more empathic they would sense my thoughts, turn as one and stomp the life out of me. But they are ignorant, perhaps even de-evolving, believing themselves the masters of their Earth when in fact they barely qualify as prey.
I realize that I am on my tiptoes, arms out rigid, fingers clawed, looking like a stricken scarecrow. Wearing a look of utter hopelessness and growing terror, I bulge at the garbage-carpet and release a spit-flecked grunt. I bolt, bobbing and shrieking, running for my life from a blast that never comes.
I am hunted in the ruins of a great city. A creature much like myself is trying to destroy me. I am trying to destroy a creature much like myself. I have to do all manner of outrageous things. Things I never would have done but for the fact that I was hungry. And hunger gnaws at my mind, makes me writhe . . . hunger is a slow, lingering death for many. For me it is an abyss. It will drive me mad before it will kill me. But it can’t kill me. I’ve tried that.
So I am just mad.
***
Stalingrad. Years ago. We are at the Square of the Fallen; Batz, Eurich, and myself.
We twitch with hunger and anticipation as dusk creeps over the ruined city. Tonight they (not we) are betting everything (and they have nothing left but their lives) on a last-ditch attempt at getting food. It has been days without a scrap. Batz is shitting out his water. He has dysentery and it is getting worse. His guts are liquefying and coming out his ass. The dugout reeks of his waste but we dare not move. By laying quiet we become a heap of rubble in a city of rubble, and do our best to ignore random shells. And tonight, when the planes of the Luftwaffe reach the halfway point of their perilous journey—when they drop their precious cargo with the Square before us as their aiming point, we shall be there, scanning the sky through the beacon of flares, searching for the canisters bringing bread, meat, and the promise of life.
They also bring out the Russians, and the Russians bring death. That is my food.
We wait in our lair, listening to Batz’s ass mumble. Listening to the city die. The fighting has been going on here for months, and its grim end result is utter devastation. The square before us is ravaged, littered with broken stone and blackened stumps which once bordered the fair vistas of a city park. All that remains is a vast, desolate space, a killing ground. In the center of the lump-dotted landscape is a statue of a group of dancing children, black with soot and some headless but still standing—laughing at us. Few buildings bordered the square as most were knocked flat, and the ones that stand can provide little cover. They are grinning maws, their scars the broken teeth in a smashed skull, and they beckon only death, in the snouts of weapons trained and the actions of men with murder on their minds.
We have been cut-off for three days, and have to assume that we are surrounded. Though I wear no visible rank, my comrades accept my leadership without question. All attempts to reach our own lines have failed, so tonight hunger has compelled us to change our tactics.
“Look!” Eurich blurts, stupidly. I hiss at him as I see the dog, thirty meters away, sniffing at a pile of debris. The creature moves quickly, purposefully. He is too well fed to be a stray and undoubtedly his master is watching his movements with care.
The creature is searching. Searching for us. We are transfixed, breathless. Batz raises his rifle but I clamp an iron claw down on the barrel. A shell explodes nearby but we barely notice. The dog is coming closer, homing on the column of stink rising from Batz’s ass. Its tongue lolls as he begins to trot towards our position.
“I could eat you,” mutters Eurich.
It stops at ten meters and looks directly into my eyes.
Miles away the shell leaves the tube, soaring with blind purpose. The city on the river curls beneath it, until it leaps to greet the falling projectile.
The blast howls over us, and we bite the earth. For a moment we are gone. A loud buzzing brings me back. It is my brain. I squint through the heat that parts to reveal a smoking crater where the dog had just stood. Batz glares at me with his filthy, miserable face, spattered with bits of dead dog.
“Well there goes all our luck. I was counting on dog stew,” he gasps.
“Lick your face,” I say, grinning like a dirty skull.
***
It is a fine tradition that makes me a monstrosity. It is a noble cause that drives me to slay.
My mission is a sacred edict to commit mass murder. It will put things to right. It will establish order. These are the lies they tell. To be soldiers we must believe this, in order to rape and kill as one without fear of punish
ment. And we must never believe we are the blind led by the evil.
My masters must feed. They must feed on human corpses. Remember this when you are asked to worship their next warlord. See his shining face on TV, now promoting a book of his crimes. Think of his mouth packed to bursting with the flesh of the children that he must consume to continue his existence.
I live in a bad part of town, no matter what color you are. I have lairs all over the city but home for me is Harlem, New York, 2001. The city has been dying for years and my neighborhood is on the cutting edge. The buildings around my domicile are mostly deserted and many are in ruin. In a three-block radius, jammed against the railroad tracks, there are only around 15 legally inhabited buildings. Two highways and the railway, effectively isolating the “hood,” hem in the area. A liquor store and a market where you can trade food stamps for guns dominate the passage out. The locals are generally desperate and chemically charged. They are also well armed and observant of weakness. Police patrol the edges of the area. All of these things made it dangerous to travel in daylight.
My building is a two-level garage of very durable construction, with crumbling wooden structures to either side. In front is a block-wide vacant lot littered with debris, behind is a mass of tangled foliage that drops steeply to the tracks. Anyone surveying the area would see a mass of shabby, untenable structures, but upon closer inspection would discover my building is sound, though all the doors and windows are boarded. Prying these loose (it had happened) would reveal bricks beneath. It would take nothing short of a battering ram to enter my property, and even if you succeeded, I would be waiting for you, and if I weren’t, my pet would be. You have to know the hidden way, a tunnel connected to the bottom of the lift shaft. It emerges in the weeds out back, at the end of one of my burrows. This area is littered with trash and bones, which have been split and gnawed, sucked for the marrow. The burrows through the brush are a maze, and I delight in hunting bums through them. And so far, no one has discovered the ancient manhole cover, which is the first gate on the way to my lair.
***
1942. Now it is fully dark, a moonless night that fades the ruined buildings to dull smudges. A plane flies over, spewing flares that slowly float to earth. The light washes the faces of the dead, creating accusatory shadows which jab towards me. The sky is fused with the dust of today’s bombardment, and even with my eyes, it is hard to see much. But I can hear the stomachs growling around me.
Tonight should be fun. I will continue my research and hopefully fill my “belly” at the same time.
Somewhere up there is a plane filled with supplies. Perhaps the pilot can even now see the smoldering city on the horizon, like a rift to hell opening through the crust of the Earth. I gaze into oblivion and imagine I’m looking into his eyes, trying to draw him to us.
We hear the drone of the engines. We look as one to the sky. Behind us searchlights snap on, stabbing the night. The stage is set—the judges of hell await amusement.
The noise grows—there are perhaps several aircraft closing on this spot. The Russian lights now join the spectacle, searching for the interloper, and the flak begins to rise. Burning darts cleave their way aloft, and as the pilot draws near he worries for the fire is intense. He can see the shimmering tract of the great river, and the city clutching it like a diseased lesion. He scans, face bathed in the glow of the instrument panel . . . there! The call of a thousand dying men brings his machine to the Square of the Damned.
Orders are barked; bundles are prepared. The moment is at hand. A cargo door is opened, revealing the frigid void. From below we gape up at blackness, torn by light, ripped asunder by the now-deafening flak—can he make it?
No, we see the pulsing daggers find his machine, even as the packages begin to tumble. The shredding lead makes short work of the JU-52’s wing, reaching the fuel tanks, erupting them in a crimson blossom that heralds its destruction. It screams, then crumples, and begins to die.
Yet the canisters live. The chutes billow and fall crazily, they scatter, and careen through the evil light and in that breathless moment we know—we shall go! We shall go!
The noise is appalling as the plane sears a scarlet crescent against the sky. People stop killing each other for a moment to behold the falling angel. Within, the pilot flaps vainly against the tide that engulfs him. From where we lie in filth, Batz even now softly moaning, we plot the fall of the closest parachute. It will land close-by, and our lips draw back in lunatic delight.
Machine-gun fire rocks away—artillery pounds the square—smoke envelopes our position and within this smoke we rise. Eurich turns to me, so young, so wasted, eyes gleaming with starvation.
“Come on! Let’s go die!”
He laughs and leaps away, into the acrid fog. We follow and immediately lose each other in the choking shit which moans about us, corpses whispering as they burn. I move forward, practically blind, one clawed hand clutching my weapon, the other groping the air. Stumbling over rubble, I sense the smoke dissolving and rush forward, low and fast. There are heavy sounds behind me, terrible sounds. The ground heaves with the constant detonations and then the smoke is gone, the arena beckons and I see the canister, parachute riddled with holes, crash into the center of the square moments before its deliverer, the flaming plane, meets earth, in the form of a squat stone building containing men of the NKVD (elite Russian troops), who in less than three seconds are erased in a ruinous hail of shattered block, searing metal and flaming gasoline.
I feel the wash of their deaths, much as you may breathe in moisture on a humid day.
I run for my life towards certain death. Batz and Eurich are to my right, both howling, and I let them pass, for there are others to be dealt with. To my left is a gaunt, wolf-like figure, clad in gray rags that were once the uniform of a soldier of the German Wehrmacht. An unwanted intruder masquerading as an ally, stumbling in my wake. And then before us, we see brown forms bobbing through the night. Russians, making for the prize.
I fire while running, casings spinning forward, skipping my bullets off the pavement into explosions of fragmented lead, stone, and flesh. The gun roars with hate, and men go down. I am killing. I turn to the left, spraying. I am clubbing with my entrenching tool. Our new “friend” has his skull smashed open, and I plunge at the wound. He dies beneath my flapping tongue. I turn, panting, face slick with blood, unable to take the time to feed properly. I see Batz and Eurich grabbing at the shattered canister of salvation, oblivious of the advancing Russians, who gasp their surprise as I am suddenly amongst them, belching lead into their bodies, tearing apart their faces.
A confusing jumble of heat and stones. Batz is quickly torn in half. The blast deafens me and sets my hair on fire. Batz is screaming through a blood bubble, and Eurich just stands there. I re-load in slow motion. Always against the dirt which clutches everything in the war zone, there is blood cutting through in greasy rivulets, channeled through chunks of gore, and leading to the mangled shell of Batz, ripped like a pillow sack as me and the Russian collide. I drive my knee into his chest, putting my weight high and locking his leg with mine in a nauseatingly intimate manner, made palatable by the sheer pedestrian level of our contact. His gun fires, burning my leg, and he goes down beneath my combat weight, which bursts his throat.
Eurich still stands, though his helmet is gone. I wonder why the mortar that killed Batz doesn’t fire again, and why Eurich stands, giggling.
“Toilet paper,” he says, holding a roll aloft. A tail of white unrolls in the cordite breeze.
“Well, at least we can wipe our asses tonight!” I yell.
They sent a load of toilet paper. And I was hoping for grenades!
Eurich glares back. He doesn’t know if he should loot a corpse or run. His needs, so different than mine, make him so weak. The mortar fires again and we flee, side-stepping the ruin that once was Batz. Eurich is now sobbing, wobbling with exhaustion as we flee a hideous cacophony of Russian lead, which begins to hose the square. We
retreat back through the rubble, back to our hole and for a long time we just lie there gasping at the dirt wall. Finally I get up and look around, then sit back down opposite Eurich.
We have not a drop of water, not a crumb of food. But I have to feed tonight, so my friend must die.
Eurich’s glittering eyes bore into mine, already hardening with the resolve to last another day. He is a desperate animal, cheeks sinking, lips cracked. Death would be a great favor to him. He is shuddering, rocked from within, as if a great cold had settled upon his form.
Well, after all, it was ten below zero out there!
He emits a long, low moan, closing his eyes and slumping back. I regard him closely, wondering about this bag of flesh, about the last three days, about the fact that I almost don’t want to kill him. Then my needs take over.
Eurich looks up as I take him in my grasp, moving him like you would a doll. I hear him sob. Like a flapping bat I twitter about the wound he takes, stiffening. I’m slobbering my thanks as I produce a rasp of cartilage upon my tongue, with which I lick off his skin and tear into the flesh, pushing his face into the dirt to muffle his screams. I burrow into the back of his neck, which emits a gout of thick, hot, blood. Beneath the muscle is what I’m after—the brain stem.
It’s sloppy but quick. Well, not really . . .
As usual, there is no summation to Eurich’s life. There is no last word, no denouement. He just dies. His life passes into mine. I grow stronger.
Later, crouched over my prey, I strip off my German uniform and throw it over Eurich’s corpse. The game is over. Still his bulging eyes peer out over the edge of the bloody cloth.
Looking at his face makes me uncomfortable. Or just his eyes, so I shut his eyes. Naked from the waist up, I make my way back to the Russian lines. You see, I have spent so much time killing Germans that I now desire to know a little more about them. I already know how they die, but what did they scream while they die? I seem to know their language, and I am beginning to like them more than I did the Russians I have been fighting with. After all, none of my commanders can control me, and one is trying to kill me. As I slip through the fading night, I once again consider switching sides. I believe I can pull it off.