by Dave Brockie
Several hours pass. Saddam watches until the last lawn chair is folded up. Still the band plays on. And all the while the sound of that damn fly continues with a maddening vibration. I put my brain on autopilot—this could be a long night. The men around me are swaying from fatigue and boredom. But something has to give and it finally does. The band, after considerable debate, finally quits. They begin to pack up their instruments. As they do so, Saddam leans forwards and whispers into a tiny microphone. Within seconds masked security men burst into the party area. They arrest the band members in a violent manner, smashing their instruments and bloodying the men. Then Saddam abruptly spins his chair towards us, a gun in his hand.
“So. There was a fly in here,” he says in his usual expressionless manner, shooting the unfortunate insect out of the sky with a thundering report.
That finally breaks the ice. Saddam motions me to sit down across the desk from him as the security men shuffle out. Behind Saddam I can already see band members being tortured in horrible little rooms.
“What do you know of this?” he says, motioning with an almost imperceptible movement of his hand as the imagery on the screens abruptly shifts. The bank of 64 televisions combine to make one giant image, an image of a blood-drenched figure waving a gore-flecked broadsword and brandishing a great shield. But the edges between the screens I find somewhat distracting to the comprehension of the image as a whole, especially considering that we were a scant 12 feet away from the display. I say this to him and he makes no move in reaction, but within seconds, with the undetectable hum of hidden hydraulics, the entire wall of TVs slides back to reveal one single immense TV, at least 128 feet across.
“The Japanese,” Saddam murmurs.
And there it is again. The footage has been shot upon a battlefield on the front—I recognize the natural flora of the area. The ground is marshy and loose, typical of some of our more northern positions. The sky is black with smoke, and the ground choked with corpses, all lying in increasingly stiff attitudes of death. At the center of the destruction is a conflagration of whirling steel and flesh, chemical and soil.
At first I can’t tell much about the figure because of the confusion surrounding it. But it is dressed in pre-medieval armor, lets say 800 A.D. A Viking in the classic sense, horned helmet and all. And those scholars are wrong—they did have horns on their helmets, the larger the better, even if that meant going through grog-house doors sideways.
Unfortunately, the Viking with the coal-red eyes kills the camera crew and the imagery shifts to a long shot of the thing, which kneels with his broadsword on a now silent battle plain. It screams at the sky, features drawn and skeletal, teeth chattering with the force of its ancient voice.
Now tanks attack him. With his great shield raised on high, he absorbs several shells. The projectiles arc towards it—they are drawn to it. The eldritch shield protects him from the hail of hate poured towards its owner. He rushes the tanks and attacks them with his sword, slicing into the hulls like they are butter, until the machines explode.
Now there are ten smaller screens that have appeared at the bottom of the screen, at first showing only the large image, then a set of different ones that filtered in across the screen. They were:
A man eating a women’s pussy. Actually eating it.
A man being attacked by rats.
Midget-wrestling.
A middle-aged woman sleeping in a bed, surrounded by armed guards.
Saddam and I sitting here.
The guards outside.
A view of the view screen which I took to be a shot through Saddam’s eyes (neural implants).
A man (Uday) changing into women’s clothing.
A man has his guts nailed to a pole. Then a tiger is released into the room.
Men fisting children.
A woman fucking a man.
Saddam turns to me.
“Can you destroy it?” and his lips don’t move.
Uday bursts into the room, dressed like a woman.
“Fuck me!” he screams.
He runs at me shrieking, and I slap him across the face with a blow that lays him against the wall. I quickly disrobe him and throw him at his father’s feet. Then I return to my chair.
“Yes,” I say to Saddam, who is now smiling broadly.
Just another day at the palace.
It was called the Seirka, translated—“the Wraith.” Wraith meaning an undead spirit of vengeance. But I knew more; due to the ageless hours I had spent studying the encrypted walls of the sub-tunnels beneath my old tomb-home in the Kurdish hills. Jeez, I had had so many pads. And that had been a good one. Those walls had told me much about the local legends. Like the Persian Emperor who had favored Nordic strongmen for his personal bodyguards. One, a hulking brute named Olec, was falsely accused by the King’s son, who was jealous because he thought Olec was banging his sister (whom he was banging). Olec was put to death, but before he died he swore a curse upon the family that he would return from the dead to kill the Persian king. No doubt the whole thing had been caused by the constant tinkerings of my Father, striving for entertainment and power at the expense of your race. Now the creature was back from the dead in what I could only assume to be an attempt to draw me into the open. They knew I couldn’t resist a good fight.
Olec was alive and wreaking a bitter harvest on the Iraqi front, slicing hither and thither, but making steady progress towards what looked like Baghdad, and the Persian king within. And I knew how to stop him.
Two days later I am standing nude in a ditch. Blinders have been set up around me so the rest of the regiment cannot see into the area. It’s dark and they are not paying attention to anything except the sirens howling, warning of an impending attack from the Seirka. I can hear the rasping cry of the thing through the din of the shells that are the only thing that slow it down, besides actually taking the time to hack the hell out of people.
My trench is full of captured Iranians all screaming at my arrival. Stories of my prowess have preceded me. There is not a single Khomeni who has not heard the rumors of the blood fiend that fights with the forces of Saddam. Now they meet me in the flesh. I am nude, and my generous breasts jut forward with vigor and strength. The captives stare at me, hard with the view of their impending deaths and my beautiful body. I approach the mewling mass of men with my scimitar held out, my clit vibrating against the penis-stub in a most exciting fashion. They begin to drop to their knees and scream for their gods. But their gods have deserted them as my sword buries itself in a bowed head.
I kill them one by one until their mass of flesh becomes one writhing mass of severed musculature, pumping its living ichor into the soil—the brown soil that had given home to the organ which had spat me out into water. The blood feeds the earth. It feeds the maw and I am a more local projection of that maw, taking my fill first from the victims but still dutifully filling the sloshing coffers of the beast that is my creator. I am his filthy minion.
So I slaughter them all as my commanders excuse themselves. I fall onto the victims and hump their mass, an ululating muscle of coitus, my membranes flooding with venom. I hear his call and obey, sucking my gratitude, baring my genitals in a furnace of exposure. And as I feed, I stare at the blurred dawn, the crimson reckoning beyond all ken. And in my motion I feel the motion of the world.
Soon, they have passed unto me their force. And I have breathed the life of dawn. I have kissed creation and come away whole. And I come from the trench and am surrounded by specialists who wrap me in the swaddling shrouds of war. They want me to go and kill and I don’t kill too many of them as I pass with the force and hatred of my being, such a thing as I am, totally borne to my devotion. Suffused with their hurt, I rise to the hate and bear down upon my target.
He is two miles away, involved with a tank battalion. His only love is that of destruction. He has the ability to make magazines ignite, and the force to blot out all. And still, my allies drive towards him in a dream that somehow they can
kill him and absorb his life. They cannot, but they can supply their corpses to the inferno, in order to distract him from my approach.
The whole area has been plastered with so much smoke that I am blind in the ocular sense. But I feel his hatred in a way that transcends the ages that separate us. And I think he feels it as well as I bear down upon him with the vengeance of the centuries. My hand is so tightly wrapped about the hilt of my sword that my knuckles jut out like burial mounds. My being is bolting across the sand, his form illuminated by the burning tanks, and the burning people who spill out of them. The keening wail of those who roast pipes my ears with the rush of the wind. And Olec sees me, turning with his ancient sword. Oh, bloody Olec, I return to send you to a deserved rest. My body heaves, as my muscles ignite and light my explosion of flesh that spurts from my arm like a mass of snakes, seeking purchase in his moldy undead flesh. Tendrils of mutation leap from me as his form rises 20 feet away, bellowing and shaking his sword at the sky. I avoid his shield and attack through flesh. His shield gives him power of aversion against the projectiles that seek to rend his hide. But against my questing feed-tubes he is unprepared. The flailing octopus limb reaches into his guard, slips behind his shield, and burrows into the forearm that holds it. It infuses tiny spines into his arm. They release venom, weakening his flesh. At that point, the Seirka is doomed. Its feeble undead mind is able to grasp this, and at that moment, peering through the Viking’s eyes, my master catches his first glimpse of me in many years.
With my body extended into that of my foe, I deliver a crushing blow to his shield, bringing forth a shower of sparks as I inflate my fleshy tendril invasion. It tears his arm off at the socket with a dry and crunchy sound, accompanied by shrieks of undead disbelief. The arm, holding the shield, is thrown through the air, maggots trailing from its torn end, tracked by the baleful eyes of the Seirka who cannot believe I just ripped his arm off.
The creature stands, swaying slightly, holding its ancient broadsword in its remaining hand. It voices a rasping cry to the fates which have deserted it and then charges at me. I leap to his assault with my own, and we rain poundage upon each other. The snap of his blows was enough to tempt any man into the furnace which shone through his eyes. But I fight him to a standstill throughout the swirling night, until the sky begins to accept the dawn.
I cut into his defense, wanting to finish it before dawn. I take his leg, and then I take another leg. He howls his annoyance as I cut off his withered head. 2000 years was a long time to spend in a tomb plotting eternal vengeance, only to have it rudely revoked by a demon more powerful than you and all your centuries-old hate. His bits continue to grasp and kick and so I fight several weakened opponents. The bits try to crawl back to their host and reconnect, but I kick them away. Soldiers run up and place the struggling limbs in separate metal containers, though several men are strangled in the process. I grab the wriggling and limbless trunk and we return to the lines. We take the parts into an underground bunker where a giant kettle awaits us. Soon all of the bits except the chest are bubbling away. The chest, which has finally stopped moving, is split open as the remains of the corpse are boiled into a stinking mush. The internal organs, shrunken and useless, are tossed in the pot. The bones are then removed and smashed up, then returned to the soup. It blorbs along, driving all from the room, save me.
I eat it, along with a whole mess of Metamucil, or at least its Arabic equivalent. Soon I squat above what is left of the moldy corpse, coaxing the rest of him out of my ass. My bowels erupt and I am filling the emptied trunk with vicious, reeking shit. It’s like giving birth, at least in that it takes hours. After I’m done I wipe with a large towel and sew up the incision. Next, we encase it in a heavy leather bag and wrap it in chains. Then it’s a quick transfer to a waiting Hind. We lumber into the air and fly to a nearby SCUD battery. The creature’s remains are loaded into the warhead and then fired at Teheran.
***
Gabby and I are sitting on the porch. It’s a beautiful sunset. Far in the distance we can see the glittering diamonds of the Mediterranean as a robust-yet-gentle wind caresses our food. This is our first real “date.” I mean, we had had sex for money several times, but my resources were not unlimited. It was financially prudent to try to fuck her for free. But it was more than that. I was interested in her as a companion. I was lonely, and the dreams were starting to come back, the horrible dreams of burning flesh and blazing machines.
“I don’t like sex,” she says, a piece of toast hanging from her lip.
“You don’t like sex? You’re a whore!”
“Shut up you pig, just because I’m a whore doesn’t mean that I enjoy it.”
“People should always enjoy their work. You spend so much time there, if you don’t enjoy it, then you are in danger of not enjoying a significant portion of your life. Besides, you seem to enjoy having sex with me.”
“That’s different. I’m drunk when I have sex with you.”
“So when you are drunk, you get horny,” I say, refilling her glass.
“That’s right and only then,” she says, upending her glass noisily.
“That’s a shame. You should experiment more. Loosen up a bit.”
“You men always say that. You always say that you should experiment, or that you are the one that can make me enjoy sex. But all you want is to shoot your dirty load and then get back to your drunken friends.”
“You know what I think?” I say, scooting just a little closer to her.
“What?” she says, her bottom lip extended valiantly, glistening with booze and spit and lipstick.
“I think you don’t want men to touch you because every time that they do they hurt you.”
She looks up, the evening sun draping its fading warmth across her lovely face. It is perfectly formed, so saucy in its make-up. She has gone to great length to look especially slutty tonight. Her firm and swelling breasts thrust against the fabric of her blouse, her unspoiled cleavage calling to my face. The smell of a breast, or breasts, and the heart beating against them.
She is beautiful. Well, for a whore. After all, there was that large knife wound which ran down the side of her face. I suppose that is the reason such a beautiful woman is a whore. But there is actually a lot more to it than that. She had received the wound from a jealous suitor who could bear no man to have her if he could not. So her tried to kill her but had only succeeded in maiming. But there are many who say she had deserved it because she had been such a bitch to poor Carlo. And she had killed him. Stabbed him in the neck as he tried to kill her. After courting her for five years. If Carlo had only known that her father had raped her, and that is why she can bear no man. Maybe he would have been a little more patient. But now he is dead and she is a whore.
I try to suppress the sudden image of me raping Nurse Faber. It’s a horrid return to a time I had been living to forget. I remember what the Obersturmbannführer had said, how she had been borne below and how I might be allowed to mate with her again. But I flush it. Flush it in the face of the fact that this woman is actually looking at me with something other than terror. A smile spreads across her face, bending her scar. I know I’m getting laid tonight.
“You’re sweet,” she says, holding out her glass. “Now give me some more wine.”
7
everything i touch
turns to shit
How similar is a golf cart to a tank, in the way that they lurk under trees. It’s so nice to ride around in either through the beauty of nature, observing the animals and vegetation, feel the cool breeze upon your face, gaze into the azure summer sunset as you make your way down a rutted track, pausing only to wipe out pockets of resistance with your hull-mounted flame-thrower. Well, I guess a golf cart really isn’t like that.
“So, Whargoul, what happened to the Obersturmbannführer?”
I have to pause and grimace. The memory of that day is so painful. But I won’t be able to avoid the question so I just blurt it out.
�
��I killed him. Killed him at Kursk, the day Kepler died. I killed him too. Hold on.”
I am lining up a 30-meter chip shot into a green guarded by a large side bunker between the hole and me. Cheng watches from the cart as I line up on the ball, check my aim, and then have at. And of course, I hit it way too hard and knock it over the entire green deep into the woods on the other side.
“Who is to say that because you hit it poorly, that you did not also hit it well?” Cheng says from the cart as I fume towards the green. There follows the “cascade effect” where one bad shot leads to another in a rapid series of flails. Soon I am adding an 8 to my card, the dreaded snowman. Of course Cheng rolls in a 20-foot putt for a birdie.
“Who is to say because you made that putt, you also did not make that putt?” I say.
He holds up a finger.
“Nature,” he says. He almost pulls it off, but quickly erupts into hysterical laughter.
“I can’t believe that shit keeps you immortal,” I say.
“I admit my philosophies seem a little dated after meeting a being like yourself. My ideas don’t give me my extended life.”
“Then what does?”
“I don’t know, my friend. But there is no such thing as immortality. Even gods die.”
“Or can be killed?” I say, taking out my 5 iron.
“Perhaps. Now tell me about Kursk. We’ll go at it step-by-step until we find ourselves there.”
I look towards the next hole’s tee box. There was a great black lump in my soul that I had yet to face. These memories come out at odd times, like when I am playing golf. Not until I master myself can I hope to shoot good golf, or save humanity.
There is a group of elderly white men teeing off on the short par 3. We have been running into them all day and their oblivious attitude begins to irritate me. The obvious thing to do is to let us play through. I glower at them as Cheng smiles serenely. They tee off one-by-one, hitting a string of poor shots that careen about with the accompanying chorus of lame remarks. Then unbelievably they play on without so much as a nod in our direction. I tune in my ears and close my eyes, forcing the blood in my head to boil up.