by Dave Brockie
Necrosov has moved away from me, going for the German lines, mindful of his orders. But the Germans have supporting infantry now and they send an annihilating fire into the massed Soviet ranks. As numerous as the Russians are they cannot take this punishment for long. Their assault is crushed, even with the power of Necrosov and his Voiden. They retreat.
I sense rather than really know this. I am too involved in my feeding process and the application of the power that I am amassing. My body begins to heave and warp, great fleshy ridges bubbling up out of my back. I form in my mind a vision of horror—a great bug-thing, with a huge and slobbering central maw, around which are arranged the appendages which both propel the creature and serve as the meat cleavers. It hacks its prey into slobbery chunks, swallowing them whole, equipment and all. The thing rises out of its pit, its course and horned hide bubbling with venom, a singular eye searching for more victims. Its me in my most ambitious mutation yet, and I surge into the waves of soldiers that had been seeking escape from the terror of battle, only to find their deaths in an infinitely more perverse manner. My threshing cleavers rise and fall, throwing great gouts of spew to the heavens. I suck men into my gullet with the power of my breath; they are drawn to it. Many think that they have died already, merely at the sight of me. I rear up, now as big as a small bungalow, and leave the last vestiges of humanity far behind. I am a whirling, surging juggernaut of obliteration, and they pour fire into me, but I have gained so much power that it has little effect as huge hunks of my body are ripped away. The holes produced by this violence grow gullets and teeth, forming new maws that I force more meat into, killing hundreds as I absolve myself in the communion of death.
Necrosov beholds this in growing horror. Never before has he seen such a blatant display of necrotic power and he wonders about his place. My Father had promised him that he was the favored son, that he would win the right to lead the army of the apocalypse that would herald the age of the LoiGoi. But now he thinks he has been misled—that the world was populated by other creatures like him yet different, all fighting each other, seeking to curry my Father’s favor. So he attacks to rid himself of his rival once and for all.
His troops lay into me with every ounce of firepower that they possess, to no avail. I am too strong, and I feel the very earth funneling power into me, as if my Father were somehow watching this performance from his subterranean abode (as I am sure he was), and, amused by the spectacle, had decided to intervene on my behalf. I have now become the mouthed and weeping eye, in that my entire body is one great eyeball with a champing gob in place of a pupil. I don’t see anything anyway; I feel the presence of energy and am drawn unerringly towards it. Above, the Germans pour a murderous fire into the backs of the Soviets, while from below they are stopped by me. Giant spines protrude from my central mass at all angles and upon these spines are draped the impaled corpses of my making, inserted with suck-tubes that leave these undead just enough energy to fire their weapons at their friends. So many have died on this slope today and my technique is flawless! I am the perfect murder machine and I begin whirling, hovering four feet off the ground, creating a vortex that sucks men of all passions to their agonizing dooms.
Perhaps if the Germans could see a little more clearly they would not have given the order to advance, but from their vantage point the scene is one of such confusion it is difficult to see the house-sized hell beast which has just slaughtered an entire company. My thoughts are no longer of earthly vengeance or the besting of my rival. I crave godhood and care nothing for what side my prey might be allied with. As the German assault waves come down the slope I am all too willing to stack their corpses in my soul-mill, the wasteful parts of their beings already pouring out of my warty ass.
“Whargoul! Stop!” I hear a voice within my brain. Looking up the slope I see the armored car of the Obersturmbannführer amongst the wreckage of the original German battle line.
“You have done enough! If you consume too much, you run the risk of destroying yourself.”
For him, it is an unfortunate choice of words, for that idea appeals to me more than anything else. I surge up the slope towards my commander, who realizes too late my intent, which is to suck dry the most potent power source in the area. I can feel the feed-sack that is Necrosov moving away from me, but he holds no interest—he’s a steak but I’m going for lobster. The Obersturmbannführer opens up with his main weapon—a plasma gun disguised as a dual 20mm. This weapon can hurt me and does—it pumps out venom that melts my flesh in an acidic smear. I slowly begin to lose my monstrous configuration, and regain my previous form. But the impetus of my charge is too great to resist. I fling myself upon the hull of the vehicle, plunging my hack-arms through its armored sides and then with a final surge I rip them into the very being of my current patron.
The energy released is incredible, passing into me in an electric rush of power that floods out of him and crackles into me. My appendages rip deeply into his unseen flesh and meet in the middle. You can’t really say I kill him; it’s more like I steal him, like I would years later to Captain Crinkle. I take everything of value and then pour myself into the interior of his machine, which I have taken a fancy to. It is not at all like the interior of similar models. Instead, the inner hull is coated with a fleshy paste connecting to a central mass of gray muscle with no visible sensory organs, unless they were the stalks which issued from the thing I had just killed. Its outer skin sits in the corner, ready to be slipped on if leaving the vehicle became necessary.
Having just sucked the power of a demigod my being is finally sated. I remove the leaking pus-sac that had been, until recently, my commanding officer, dumping it onto the gore-choked ruin of a landscape with a wet plop. His “skin-suit” follows. Then I settle onto the stalk which rises from the floor of the machine and let the pods attach themselves to various parts of my body. I am suffused with a sense of well being, and information about what is occurring outside floods into my crowded gray matter. It is a simple thing to order my machine to back away from the grayish blob and hose it with plasma, just to be sure of its death.
The battle is over. Appalled by the sights of slaughter, the humans have gone back to their holes to try to forget these things, so that they can live again. As for me, I have fully accepted my new form and the evil that it gives. Every time that I tried to find a drop of humanity in the black well that was my soul I was disappointed, and those that had put their faith in me were rewarded with death. But I would remember Kepler through the legacy he had left me.
***
I sit in the golf cart and weep. I am so sorry, my friend.
When we don’t play golf we go back to Tiki-BoBo’s House of Pleasure. Here Cheng has ensconced himself on the top floor of a five-story brownstone which has four floors of whores beneath it. The whole scene reminds me a lot of the brothels in Frankfurt—basically old hotels or rooming houses where the girls just hang out in doorways, beckoning you to come in. Except with me. They would shriek and retreat into their cum-reeking rooms at the sight of the horribly scarred SS Obersturmbannführer.
Here, however, the women were much nicer to me. I was more attractive—a good-looking black guy with a perfect physique. Way better than a walking cadaver. And most importantly, I had Cheng’s stamp of approval. He was my master, and I was his ward, and nobody fucked with me.
Cheng and I sit on the roof and stare uptown. My part of the city seems fairly quiet. There are no convoys of fire engines and armored units streaming towards the areas where havoc usually beckons. It’s almost as if when I stay away from my neighborhood, peace breaks out.
“I have been put in a position where I can recognize and sometimes befriend beings who are beyond human. I don’t know why I was chosen for this task. Many years ago I was a simple philosopher.”
“Simple?” I snort, having spent many hours trying to decipher his ancient manuscripts and contemporary adaptations of his wisdom. It was all very confusing to an ignorant Whargoul like me
.
“There have been many others like you in the sense that they possessed power beyond reason. As far as I can tell I am here to try to guide them away from the power that brought them to be.”
“Powers like my Father?”
“Yes. Your creator. You were made to inspire the humans to kill each other. At the same time you have been programmed to be obsessed with sex. You have a constant need to mate, and create new life. You have gone through your life both destroying life and creating it.”
“Wait a minute. Creating it?” For some reason I had felt there would be no consequences to my continual rutting.
“Yes. You have sired many children.”
“What! When? Who?” Or more importantly, “How?”
“I think even you know the answer to that question. I can’t say I know where you came from, but I know that your seed mixes with the human female egg quite nicely.”
“What has become of my children?” I say, fighting a growing sense of panic. I didn’t need a mutant bastard smashing down my door with a submachine gun, screaming for child support.
“The women that you have impregnated are taken below into the hives of the flesh sculptors. The fetuses are removed and are used to power new life forms. They are not allowed to develop into fully-realized beings.”
My face scrunches up with a bevy of conflicting emotions. How would you feel if you had found out in the space of a few minutes that not only had you been a father several times over, but your children had all been murdered.
“You know well the power that dwells within the soul of a child. You have killed many yourself.”
I look up at him sharply, remembering the taste of Baby Kiesha’s brain. Cheng never changed the inflection of his voice, whether he was helping me hit my 2-iron or telling me that I was a baby-eating mutant alien with a Father several miles across. We sit for a long time in silence as I ponder ridiculous fate.
“There is so much I don’t understand, and so much that I don’t remember. So much I don’t want to remember. I tried to erase my mind with drugs and alcohol, but it doesn’t work for long. The visions are beginning to crowd my mind again.”
“You must confront these visions. You must draw them from yourself and master the fear that they contain. Your creator is calling to you, sending you these thoughts. The drugs you think are helping you are actually making you more susceptible to the control the LoiGoi is attempting to assert over you. You must control yourself without using drugs or violence.”
“But I like drugs and violence!” I say, totally exasperated.
“And a life of misery it has been, not to mention the pain you have meted out to countless humans. Not long ago the thought of you even playing golf would have been ridiculous. But today not only did you break 100, but also you did not murder that racist old man. It is time for you to change.”
It’s true. I haven’t shot junk or felt the urges for weeks, ever since I started hanging out with Cheng.
“How do you do that?” I ask.
“Honestly my friend, I do not know. I only know that when I was upon my deathbed some 2000 years ago, I did not die. Instead I entered a dream state where I saw the future of this world laid clear to me. I saw the nature of the struggles to be and identities of the players to come. I think I even met you then. You see, I have known you many times before. You have dreams sometimes where you see yourself in bodies that you do not recognize, do you not?”
“Yes, yes, all the time. Me hacking and killing with the Roman legions, fighting Celts and Gaul’s, flying a Sopwith Camel, lining up with Napoleon. I’m sure I was there.”
“Yes. You have lived for thousands of years. And in many of those years, I was your friend, fulfilling my purpose, keeping an eye on you and others like you. For whatever reason, the gods have chosen me to observe this war and if possible affect its outcome for the benefit of nature, the only true power. I know much but there is still much that escapes me. Like where you and your kin come from. What the ultimate goal is. And how you can be stopped before this world is destroyed.”
“Okay. Well, here are a couple of guesses. We are an alien race bent on making earth or own personal buffet table. My Father creates murderers in order to lead the humans to slaughter. The murderers also fight each other in an attempt to gain Daddy’s favor, y’know, be the favorite son and maybe get a fat inheritance. And the only way to stop it is by chopping off the head.”
“But before then, we must finish your story. We must find all that we can in your past so that when you confront the LoiGoi he will not be able to use it against you. He will try to drag you over with the weight of your crimes. You must destroy your own past before you can attack the future.”
And there were many black pages left in my infernal story, pages I had not dared to look at. But it was pointless to delay any further. I had to purge myself of the blackness before I could step into the light. I felt that I was getting close, but I instinctively felt that the last memories were going to be the hardest ones to deal with. That’s why they were the final ones, because they were so submerged in the pit of my being. I had to draw them forth, face what I had done, and move on. If I could do it, then I might be able to save the human race. If I could not then I would be fated to destroy it.
***
The Native Americans had arguably been more mistreated than the blacks. Or the Irish, South Americans, or Asians. Some of these cultures were able to better adapt to the rigors and ass-kissing of the American machine better than the others. Some showed nothing but contempt and a total unwillingness to do anything other than fuck with whitey at any possible moment. Like when black people walk across the road in front of your car and give you that “come on and hit me” look. They don’t really want to get hit, they are just happy that they have done something to fuck up your white-assed day. Of course you don’t see the Asians doing that. They want to hurry up and get to the corner store they run in the middle of a black neighborhood so they can charge black people 2.89 for a loaf of Wonder Bread, then take all the money which they had gouged out of the blacks, and go shopping at Super-Fresh.
The blacks wanted to fuck shit up. They were the warriors, and my Father had invaded their gene pool long ago. He knew, determined as they were to fuck themselves into perpetuation, that they would produce many strong sons, who when they went missing, would not be so easily missed. These sons were conveyed below, and copied, replicated, cloned, whatever . . . it was like no science ever known to man other than on the receiving end. They kept what they needed and discarded the rest. The savagery, the aggression, the coordination, they kept those things. The sympathy, the understanding, the compassion, they got rid of that. And they had to instill obedience. And that came hard. Large sections of pinkish matter clogged fleshy drains. There was no need for that in a warrior. From the blacks, the LoiGoi found the perfect soldier to buff out the ranks of his infernal army.
In the Native Americans he found his heavy artillery. The U.S. government had strangled the “Indians” to the point of extinction. It was only the outcry of the liberal press that saved them from being exterminated. The reservations they had been given in return for their sacrifice was a paltry trade, a ghost of the glory of their past. Perhaps martyrdom was better, and many braves died to prove that, leaving a legacy of guilt upon their living ancestors. This feeling would boil up on occasion, like at Wounded Knee and the place in Canada where they wanted to build a golf course on Native holy ground. And when they did assault the braves holding the fort, they shot their own guy and tried to blame it on the natives. Just like with Koresh, who, by the way, is still very much alive, alive in the lower regions, bubbling in a vat of life-sustaining ichors. Ahh, poor David! Just when he thought that everything was over, his dream existence of having the pick of the litter and dying in a blaze of glory on his way to meet the maker—well, that just was not to be. Instead the floor opened up (I’m sure he thought it was the ATF) and out came a great and clutching tentacle to drag him thro
ugh the caverns of the underearth where fleshy devices were pressed against his. How his eyes bulged as they stared through the thickened crystal at the workings of the flesh sculptors as they created new life from death, occasionally moving over to his tank to change the mix of chemicals sluicing into his brain.
But the natives. The Apaches were the most aggressive in many ways. They had the legacy of Geronimo to guide them, a name that still scared schoolchildren one hundred years after his death. They were pissed and they were poor and they were about ready to POP! So, fearing a total insurrection in the reservations, the government did something so dumb that you almost couldn’t believe it. Yeah Mr. Indian, I know we invaded your country, and raped your women, killed your Buffalo and made you live on these stinking reservations, and we’d like to make it up to you. So here’s a gambling casino!
That’s right, they legalized gambling on a lot of the reservations. I guess they thought all the Natives would do was get drunk at the bar (they always were susceptible to booze). But those dumb Injuns had learned a lot from their captors in the many years of subjugation. They know that when an enemy has you by the balls that the best thing to do is play possum, lay back and observe for weakness. And that’s just what they did. They learned how to be capitalists. And when they finally got those casinos they sure knew how to make money off of them. SO MUCH money that the government got immediately concerned and tried to stop it. But it was a lot harder to rip up a contract than it had been in the days of Custer. So they just kept banking, because they were saving up for something special.
The government had been initially worried about the Italian Mafia moving in on the Native-Americans casinos and trying to bring in drugs and prostitution. But the accepted rationale was that the Mafia had its hands full elsewhere and besides, who wanted to fuck with a bunch of drunk Injuns? But as soon as the declared incomes for these places started coming in, and they were substantial, people started showing real interest. If this was the declared income, then what was the undeclared one? Before you knew it every Sleazy P. Martini wanna-be was sliding into town, looking for a cut. And they would get it. Right across the throat.