by Dave Brockie
Emerging on the plateau behind the great factory complex I break into a full sprint, rushing across the broken ground towards the mighty fortress. If the Germans take the complex then they will use the factory as a staging point to drive us into the river, back where I had come from, back to the bitter night that had been before my day. It means the closest thing I know to death, and I don’t want to go back there.
The Germans have renewed the attack through an office complex that were the last large buildings before the first great hall. As I enter its cavernous interior I see the Russians busily preparing its defense. The workshop floor is honeycombed with trenches connecting to various strongpoints reinforced with unfinished gun barrels. Men crouch in these pits and sight weapons. Many more troops are being siphoned into this maze of forts in a great brown wave of men and bobbing weapons. Screaming officers point the way. Instantly I see Necrosov.
He is at the head of them, blaring orders, surveying the scene from atop the pillbox at the base of a huge chimney. Necrosov is the senior officer in the Barricade, and I had heard many stories of him and his squad, the “Voiden” or “devils” of local myth. Necrosov and his men were respected, feared, and shunned . . . they were based in an oppressive black building situated at the center of the factory complex, an old church called “The Black Temple.” From here he directed the defense of the factory. Rumors of devil worship and human sacrifice ran rife. Captured Germans were also brought here and you could often here their screams from outside, as they were tortured to death, indeed these cries were broadcast on loudspeakers. Stories of his exploits in combat, like the time he took a tank shell, always preceded his arrival on the battlefield. He made me uneasy and I usually took pains to avoid him. Today that had proven impossible. As soon as I enter the arena he snaps towards me and points at a position beneath his.
“Get on that weapon,” he screams at me with a voice that sounds like shredding metal. He is tall, and bald, with a huge black scar roughly the shape of Brazil dominating his head. Clad in a black long coat bristling with grenades and ammo, his steel eye patch glares redly at me. I obey.
The weapon is a Browning .50 caliber heavy machine gun. A beautiful piece of death, sent to us from our good (and convenient) friends in the U.S.A. The ammo belt coils out of its gleaming breach, and my loader scrambles into position at my side.
“Hello human. What’s your name?” I say with a bristling grin.
“Uh . . . Peter . . .” he says sheepishly.
I grasp the handles and peer down the barrel, sighting the various lanes of fire from which I am sure the Germans will be coming. My position is excellent, above the factory floor and nestled at the base of the great chimney that rises above the complex. I breathe in deeply and await the joy of the killing.
A sound at the edge of my senses alerts me to the coming death. A whistling, the piercing cries of the fell war birds that dip their wings and drop like liberated gargoyles, towards the hall we have sworn to defend to the death. Now the men in the trenches hear the same thing and look at the roof in panic.
Stukas!
The gray rectangle grows in the bombsights of the approaching machines. This building, filled to bursting with men, cannot defend itself from this attack. The sound of the shrieking wings grows louder, and as it does it becomes more terrifying to the men here. Wide-eyed and foam-flecked, many leap up from their positions and run wildly about, screaming and spreading panic as they seek an escape route in vain. Officers seek to beat them back into position, causing even more confusion. The sound grows to a deafening level and even I cringe beneath the edge of my position as the salvo of bombs burst through the roof, detonating with vengeance ahead of me. The explosion is tremendous in its force and rips a huge hole in the roof, which collapses in a swath of flaming debris amongst the building’s interior. Men are mangled en masse as our forward positions are wiped out. If only the pilots could see the carnage they had caused. Then perhaps they would choose another vocation for the application of their energies. The simultaneous blasts of several 500 kg bombs create a great inferno that engulfs the front two thirds of our building. Men are sucked into the whirling maelstrom of fire. Water pours through the gaping hole in the roof as the snow melts. Men begin staggering out of the devastated area, their clothing burned off, great oozing wounds dripping red, flesh blackened and charred, eyes staring wildly at their entrails, bulging and purple. They fall into our trench—some lay still, others pick up weapons. Truly appalling to most, I am delighted by the hideous spectacle as I prepare for the German assault that is sure to follow.
I doesn’t take too long until I hear the grinding of metal treads soon followed by the hulking black silhouette of the monster tank. Its cannon erupts in flame and it sends a 150 mm projectile into the center of our line, sending sandbags and bodies flying. Smoke grenades burst before us and now I fire, pumping lead into the areas where I know the German assault parties must be. Red tracers strike metal and bounce crazily as bullets tear into their ranks. 50 cal. slugs rip into flesh, tearing off arms, shattering bone and spattering brain. The rest of the line follows suit as the Germans move into a hornet’s nest of Soviet fire. But they have more support as I behold another tank nosing up alongside the first. It fires and the shell explodes directly beneath my position, tearing off my gun’s barrel and my loader’s face. I fall to him and jam my tongue into the bloody hole, feeding quickly as bullets rip the air above me. The inside of the factory has become a wonderland for me, a parade ground of Death’s pale steed as the advancing German assault squads and the Russian line engage each other at close range with a deafening cacophony of small arms and grenades. I hazard a peek over the lip of the trench and behold the gaping maw of the assault gun a mere 20 meters away. It grinds through a perfect mess of smashed tile, twisted metal and flattened men, looking straight back at me and belching a shell in my direction. There is a roar that blots out all as the shell rips into the metal covering of my position, tearing it from its welded foundation and into me, swatting me backwards. Me, the shell, and the wreckage collide with the casing of the chimney, smashing through the three-brick-deep wall with bone-shattering force.
I wake up moments later flat on my back at the bottom of the tube, tendrils of smoke drifting across my field of vision. High above me I see a dull disc of sky. Nestled at my side is the smoking shell, dented by my head.
It was a dud.
As I rise, I feel bones shift and crack in my back and shoulders. Painfully, I crawl back out the hole of my making, back into position. There are shouts of surprise and shrill shrieks of agony. Russians are swarming over the tank with crowbars, tearing at the hatches and tracks. And there is Necrosov, hurling a grenade and firing wildly after it, hoisting a man aloft by the neck and blowing out his guts in a greasy smear of fire. Germans rush into the fray and a savage hand-to-hand fight quickly develops. I throw myself into it. Hands find a throat and squeeze, the vessel bursts open with a gush and the pain leaves me. I suck out his adrenaline and continue with my murder motion, fighting alongside Necrosov, spinning and pumping and surging and killing. I hear his mechanical parts whining and I know he is different but the same, manufactured by the master, the Father. Where I am purely organic, he sports implants.
There is a savage hissing as a flame-thrower vomits liquid death upon the knot of struggling men. Several are set alight and my new coat is showered with the searing stuff. The tank is also sprouting flame as the men inside it cease to be anything but dead. The flames break up the melee and I stumble back into the trench. Necrosov disappears into a hole in the wall, firing. Broken and mangled bodies are heaped about, wounded and helpless men bemoan their misery, I revel in it while above the roof begins to burn, dropping flaming pieces of debris into our ranks. The German assault wave has ceased for the moment as they regroup just beyond our vision. A crew appears, dragging a cannon. In a singularly blatant display of my power, I hoist the entire gun out of their grasp and place it in position where the 50 cal. onc
e stood. The Germans surge forward again in a last-ditch effort to storm into the trench. Their battle cry merges with that of the Russians and the screams of the dying to form a hideous chorus of unrelenting misery and terror. The shred of shell, the rip of metal, the feeling of tearing meat, we kill, burying shovels into each other’s faces. All along the line the soldiers leap and clutch and form into a timeless ballet, with this, their greatest performance. The combatants merge into one great flailing organism bent on self-flagellation. Blurs of motion explode in spurts of red. I slam a shell into the breech of the gun. The second metal monster tank nudges around the flaming outlines of the first seeking a clear shot. I pull the lanyard of the cannon just as the tank gunner pulls his and simultaneously the two shells leap towards each other. My smaller shell strikes the casing of the larger one in mid-air, knocking it off course just enough to send it over my head, plunging into the hole at the bottom of the chimney, where it meets its wayward brother, the dud dented by my head. The two now combine their power and merge into a new truth, a blossoming of force that the chimney cannot swallow. The burst takes out the base of the chimney and sprays us with swarms of burning stone. It kills stone, it kills flesh. People, killing people, are ripped apart. But this is all secondary to the dull rumbling which adds a sinister undercurrent to the cacophony of carnage. The floor begins to heave and buckle, sending men sprawling into the mud and blood, still tearing at each other’s throats even though their limbs have been amputated and are afire. As if they can somehow gain new life through the death of another. As if they aspire to be me.
The chimney is coming down. First the bricks and then the beams. I know well before the others, but also know that I cannot escape. Through the hole in the roof I see the huge cylinder shudder, then shed a skin of bricks, and then begin a horrid crumpling towards us, like some crippled colossus. It blots out the sun and I gather all my strength, crouching and then leaping into its 100-ton falling mass. The air is the last thing to escape.
Someone kicks me in the head. My eyes bulge open and a stream of obscenities pours forth from my foaming mouth. I have been kicked, but because I am not decapitated, my head cannot roll. So it just hurts.
I am buried up to my neck in a vast pile of rubble. I had almost made it to the top. They dig me out and fill me in.
Night is coming. The attack has ended. The Germans have gained ground today though to what end we know not. Of Necrosov there is no sign, though none will say that he has died. I can guess where he is—back in his fortress, laying naked, attended by his gibbering slaves. We are already digging in for the next day’s fight, and the Germans have fallen back to lick their wounds. The rubble of Manufacturing Hall # 2, “The Grinder,” has become the tomb for the 2,000 men who have died there this morning. But it is not a silent one. We can hear the moans and whimperings, the desperately phrased pleas for help in two languages, as the entombed wounded expire. We can’t dig them out as snipers kill any who approach the mound. They die as the night comes and soon it is silent.
I sit in my vault and rest, scratching lead and stone fragments out of my hide, champing and yawning, still feeling the lingering pleasure of the soulsuck. You could ask me why this had happened and I would have been hard pressed to supply you with an answer. You may as well have asked me where I had come from, and at that point it certainly was not something that I put much thought into.
But I was beginning to. Something vast was occurring, something I was an important part of, yet knew next to nothing about. They called it “World War II,” but it was so much more. As I pondered the day’s events, for the first time I wondered where it all was leading. Where had it come from, where had I come from? And for what purpose? Who was calling the shots, and could I get an appointment? I resented being left in the dark. I thought I knew where to start looking for answers.
The Black Temple of Necrosov.
5
super bowl slaughter
The war that destroyed America began during the Super Bowl. A supposedly harmless sporting event became the powder keg which would erupt to ultimately claim billions of lives.
Sports events often represent the best and worst qualities of the countries that host them. And they often are used as gaudy sideshows to mask other more significant events. Like the forbidden love men often feel for each other. Human males were not supposed to be touchy-feely, at least not with each other, unless of course they were gay. Some men were, and that generally alarmed other men. In elevators people keep their space, especially males. They don’t want to rub up against other men—the feeling repels them. Yet these same men will jump all over each other, they will hug, slap each other’s buttocks and even kiss, if one of them scores a touchdown.
Football masked other, more sinister practices. Like the organized drug use, graft and gambling which was rife throughout the game since its inception. It was a sad fact that many of the games were fixed, and that players, coaches, and especially the referees conspired to keep it that way. Those phone calls on the sideline often were from Mafia bosses telling anxious quarterbacks that their families were safe.
The less obvious evil was by far more dangerous—the one that set off the bomb. Football promoted the idea that whites were superior to blacks. The white slave masters of the U.S. government needed to keep the blacks under control. That meant, at first, outright slavery and then a campaign of social strangulation. But as time went by they realized that the money that was to be made off the blacks’ many talents was too lucrative to ignore. One way to hold them back but still cash in was to channel their efforts into the realms of sports and entertainment. But even then they needed to be reminded that they were considered inferior, even as they basked in the adulation of millions. The symbolism of 22 powerful black men being bossed around by five old white guys was unmistakable. That was the power of the referees, the power of the man.
There were many problems with the game and an attempt was made to address them with a strike. The shit dragged on and on as people increasingly turned to the other leagues. Arena football and newer, more violent sports flourished. But people missed their football, and the players missed their paychecks too much. And those giant stadiums simply had to be filled.
People were sick of just about everything, sick of the Mid East War, and the Apache Terrorists, and White Jihad (fanatic white Muslims led by Cat Stevens). They were terrified by a campaign against drugs that had become a real war. The growing German and Japanese colonies in South America had transformed that continent from a U.S. coke farm into a disputed territory. They wanted a bigger cut. As the flow of coke began to dwindle, the Ghetto Wars became more violent. In some cities, Houston being the largest, cushy suburbanites could hear the fighting rage nightly.
Finally the football strike was resolved and the schedule was announced. The country heaved a collective sigh of relief. Maybe the very fabric of society wasn’t unraveling after all. Then, as if to affirm this, Saddam Hussein was assassinated. Drunken Americans danced in the streets, delighted by the death of their old foe. His killer, Cat Stevens, who had taken the name Mohammed Ali Khomeni, usurped him. Cat had been, in western eyes, radical in his sudden conversion to fundamental Muslim beliefs and scary when he had moved to Iran to support the Ayatollah Khomeni. The lungs behind “Peace Train” burst forth with a new rhetoric that amongst other, more spiritual things, had called for the death of Salmon Rushdie for his novel, “The Satanic Verses.”
He forges a military pact with Iran, and begins to build up forces on the border of Kuwait. The U.S. predictably responds by sending carriers towards the region. One of these carriers is the brand-new U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, a gleaming multi-billion dollar death machine with an onboard shopping mall. As it passes through the Straits of Gibraltar it is destroyed by a nuclear mine.
The carrier is vaporized. Ali denies any involvement and backs off on Kuwait. We bomb the shit out of him (well his people anyway) but the damage is done. The deadliest terrorist attack in history has left over 8,0
00 American sailors dead. Ali, safe in his bunker, begins to forge a Pan-Arabic alliance with himself as the leader and the final destruction of Israel as the goal.
As a country, the U.S. felt truly threatened for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Panic gripped urban centers as people fled to the country. But the “One-Shot-War” was over. The act was never traced to any group nor did any take credit. So nobody knew when they might do it again. This had the result of creating an even more oppressive atmosphere in the U.S. No one was to be trusted.
Finally the football season, dedicated to the dead sailors of the U.S.S. Reagan, opened to record-high crowds. People wanted to forget about their dying child empire (it was only a couple of hundred years old) and go to the big game, even though in many areas it was unsafe to travel.
The TV ratings are still huge. The whole country is coming down around us but we still having our mother-fucking Super Bowl. The rest of the world can fuck off and play soccer—that’s right, soccer, and I’ll call it anything I fucking want you back-stabbing piece of Euro-shit—we are having a FOOTBALL season here, and after we are done kicking each others asses for a few months you better pray we don’t come for yours.
***
Desert Storm. On the receiving end.
“They are coming. See them?”
I can tell he’s terrified. He’s been underground for most of the last few weeks, hiding from machines that were trying to kill him.
I put down my binoculars.
“There are many of them. Close to 300, and more behind. Mostly tanks, M-1’s, but also Bradley’s drawn up behind the tank wedge. Infantry in those.”
There is a giant cloud of dust on the horizon from which comes a solid and unrelenting roar. The sound grows slowly but steadily in scope and terror. But I’m not scared. I pause and turn to him.