by Dave Brockie
***
The non-combatants were the biggest victims of the mad scheme. Their worlds were ruined, houses destroyed, toilet off, no food, dead son, dead family. No one was unaffected by the rending claw, and the wounds never healed. Hate bred hate which was celebrated through the ages. Oh, the incredible splendor of the military parade! The ribbons, and champing mares, and proud old men with tentacles up their butts. Men who, at the end of a busy day, lay down in a gauze box, while twittering servants pumped fluids into their bodies. All of this came from something.
Like a train full of humans, terrorized, displaced, held guilty for the ills of society. A convenient scapegoat or a lump of coal? Crated like cargo, they, as I, draw closer to the camp. There is no mistaking that you are drawing closer to the end. It smolders on the horizon much the same way as Stalingrad would when its furnace was at full blaze. But when approached by the subterranean route, I know that most of the victims go below. It takes so much energy to run an operation like this, and the walls heave with it. Sometimes they are of solid stone; sometimes they seem more fleshy, dripping with great bulbs of forming pus. Often, a thin yet indestructible membrane of resinous tissue will restrain molten magma. And always, I will catch phantom glimpses of unseen things scuttling away from the edge of my sight.
Now the flesh raft has left me and I move at my own pace, yet ever downwards. My way is strewn with a gut-garland until the innards become part of the walls. The tunnel clamps upon me with all its length, pinioning me in a suffocating embrace, squishing me into the audience chamber of my Father.
Above, the train has arrived, and the first wave of fodder is chosen. The rest will be worked to the point of death, and then consumed. About half go straight to the showers. They are stripped, whipped, shaven, and driven by vicious dogs. Some are fucked. Some are fucked by dogs. Some fuck dogs . . . but I digress.
Naked and humiliated, they stand huddled together under the nozzles, sobbing, screaming, some praying, some smashing at the scarred steel doors. Then the sound begins, a great deep groaning, like the sound of your hungry belly but a million-fold vaster. It is the opening of the abyss, and it comes from below.
The floor drops out of the shower room, revealing to those within a bottomless pit ringed with muscle, adorned with tooth and spike, belching with noxious fume. They drop into it with a chorus of despairing shrieks which fade into the groaning depths. Some manage to leap off the shoulders of their fellows and desperately grasp the dangling nozzles, only to be shot from the doorways by the laughing guards. Sometimes thinner tentacles will rise from the depths and wrap a toothy tongue around a kicking leg. These are dragged below. All that remain are the suitcases and these are burned. The chimneys at Auschwitz work day and night, burning clothes and luggage. The stench comes from the many unburied dead in the fields and within the camp itself. That does not sit well with the Germanic sense of order but the truth is that no Germans work here anymore. Some of the creatures that run the camp may have once been Germans, but they are no longer even human.
Gas is no longer needed.
Now before my maker I fall to my knees in supplication, attempting to understand the writhing mass that is He, the Creator, my Father. The closest thing your world has to a god.
The viewing-chamber is several miles across, and his being takes up fully half of the place. And it is only one small part of him, a continuous wall of pulsing, oozing, contorted tissue shaping and re-shaping itself in a infinite multitude of feasting organs and champing maws, exploding up, out of, and into the pus-choked sea like some horrific paddlewheel. Every organ, every limb, every possible mutation of every possible configuration of flesh is represented in an ever-changing rotation of form. Eyeballs bulge and give way to a harvest of gesticulating arms and penises; which surge, in turn, to a devouring maw that floods forth with the vomit of God, which in turn brings forth another set of impossible life. What ripples like cilia is a sea of legs and fingers, all out of scale and jerking across the surface of this grisly canvas in which can only be agony. Entire generations of families are spat forth, dangled through stinging clouds of urine and smiting insects, only to be obliterated as they are sucked again into the flesh-wheel. And not only the form of the human being is exploited here—all forms of life are sucked in and despoiled, devoured and regurgitated. Huge crab claws dwarf inverted whale cunts, which spew forth with a wretched ichor loosed from the unseen and then seen bowels of some great, mutated insect. Herds of bloated buffalo stampede through bottomless planes of shit as the LoiGoi struggles to define itself, dislodging chunks of loose matter which cling to the walls and ceiling, quivering with confused life, oozing, groaning, and then dropping back as the entire chamber turns upside down, all this re-assimilated into the greater mass of the LoiGoi. His tentacles and questing pseudo-pods, his yearning and multi-segmented feeding stalks stretch forth from his squirming central mass through an uncountable collection of holes and chambers, disappearing into the hollowed earth, towards whatever distant slaughter from which he drains his lamprey-like existence. A hole like a giant mouth, surrounded by a collection of bearded men whose brains drip from their ears, opens with a great sucking sound, spitting out the latest shower stall-full of cattle to be consumed in the hatred that is the LoiGoi’s hunger and need—to thrive on the misery of others.
I am confronted with the undeniable proof of the existence of my creator and ruler of this world. I am of him, and he has called me home. I watch the spectacle in weeping horror, knowing full well that I have contributed to its making, that my efforts has assured his domination, and that his death will be mine. Boiling madness grips me with paralysis as I loll in a pool of clinging, foaming slime at the belly of the beast, a belly that splits in a mile-wide explosion of obscene jelly and scalding suppurations, sprouting out a coiling meat-rope with a great toothy anus on one end, an anus that could have been a vagina, as long as the vagina had eyes and horns. It’s a slimed opening that rears up on high above me for one brief and endless moment, the last tableau before my new transmosis as it slams down upon me, engulfing me and stripping away the lairs of my being, chewing me into pulp and remaking my form, to spit me out again to the surface of your earth as the latest version of one of his most faithful murderers. And so had Pieper been reborn, to wreak the havoc upon the surface world that was my Father’s plan.
***
In my boat on the seething sea of liquefied flesh I tear my eyes away from the crystal, staring blankly at the mass of twisted and decomposing flesh which surrounds and threatens to engulf my craft, tucked here in the lowest corner of the known world. It was true, all of it. All of my worst suspicions were confirmed. My Father was a world destroyer, and one day he would destroy me as well. All this death, all this hate, and the killing that it led to, all of it was a pattern of behavior that was normal to creatures like the LoiGoi. You couldn’t even call him good or evil, he simply was.
He had drifted through space for a million years, shunned by his kind, until he had found this place. He had found the humans here, and judging them to be of good stock, he had burrowed deep below the surface of their world, sending out the feelers that would grasp and control them, and which one day would lead them to the brink of oblivion, the prepice upon which we stood today.
From far away comes the sound of grinding boulders and screaming cows, bursting floodwalls and whispering cobwebs. The sea begins to heave, scattering droplets of reeking disease, spattering upturned jowls with necrotic load. The boat begins to move, propelling me sluggishly forward, displaying the caked walls and their secrets in a merry-go-round parade of rot. Slowly we begin to tip inwards, towards the center of the vortex. It’s like an immense toilet is being flushed, and as we drop into the gurgling depths I laugh, though a flowering of wormy growths erupts from my thighs. For this time my Father would not find me a willing supplicant.
I drop into the lowest of levels, swallowed whole and moving inside the tremulous and heaving corridors that are my Father’s bowels. P
assing through the thickly gelatinous and sometimes transparent passageways, I observe the great hive chambers where thousands of flesh-sculptors work diligently on the abominations that are the realizations in flesh of my Father’s will, created to be spat out upon the surface of the world. These creator-creatures are much like the arm-thing that I had encountered in the chambers beneath the temple of Necrosov. They note my passage with twittering approval, waving their clawed and instrument-bearing appendages, hissing and mewling with gaping and slickly glistening maws, mouthing to each other the obscene comments which only they could bring themselves to understand.
For I had been invited here, drawn below to fulfill the purpose for which I had been created. I was to lead the army of the apocalypse in the final war of this blighted world. But I could see beyond the plan that was designed to complement me for years of diligent service. I knew that upon the completion of my mission—the resultant devastation of the surface world and all the life that walked upon it, then my usefulness would be at an end. I would be consumed again, my body broken into bits that would give my Father the power to break free of the planet that was both his home and his prison. He would leave behind only ravaged chunks of debris that would travel the universe for eternity, mute testimony to the struggle that had engulfed and ultimately annihilated this world. And my Father would drift again into the void, empowered, yet still ravenous, searching for another world to consume in his quest for what he ultimately desired—the destruction and consumption of all reality, to remake it again in the form of his choosing.
How I could know all this, I was not sure, but for all appearances I came to my Father as a willing and obedient slave. I came to accept a commission, but really I faced a choice. The fact that my Father did not know this was my only chance of defeating him. If only I could find the strength within me to resist his will.
But before I could face this, which promised to be the defining moment of my life, I had to prove my worth one last time. For during the years of my service on the surface world, others had struggled for the same master. Created by my Father, they sought to curry his favor by mindlessly obeying his will, by murdering millions in the name of a god who had none. Some of these creatures I had met, some I had destroyed. Some had attempted to destroy me. Many others I had never met, and they had slaughtered and been slaughtered in the never-ending wheel of war. Now, on the day before the apocalypse, there were only two left. They had to fight, and one had to destroy and consume the other before he could be emblazoned with the rank of high executioner. My Father would watch this battle with interest and amusement, and provide the tools necessary for its implementation. And I knew full well the name of my rival.
Necrosov.
“How are you, my brother?” I say to him, as we face each other across a vast and murky chamber that will shift and form itself into whatever battlefield my Father deems appropriate.
“I am well,” he blares back at me, his voice cracking with bile. “And I congratulate you on getting this far. It is a shame to have worked so hard, only to meet your death on the doorstep.”
He’s changed, as have I. Flesh covers all of what I suspect to be a fully metallic exoskeleton, full of hidden weaponry. I briefly regret not bringing a weapon, then just as quickly forget it as the world whirls into the comforting-yet-cramped confines of a bunker dug into the western wall of the corpse-generating machine that was Verdun. World War One, what fun. But there is considerable comfort in the filthy hole that we call our home. It is much better than slowly bleeding to death in a reservoir of mud like so many others are doing this evening.
We regard each other across the stained and pitted table. He pours me a cup of dark wine.
“You don’t deserve this, you know,” he says, as outside far-off artillery rumbles. “You disappeared for years, and there was good killing to be had. You hang around with whores and an old fool who fills your head with shit. You play golf . . . pathetic.”
“Golf is cool.”
Another blast shatters the night, this time closer to us. We both look to the roof.
“The blacks, the whites, all the races, they are all trying to kill each other. One of us will rise from the depths, to lead them to the point where they can finish the job once and for all. So—a last drink before we kill each other,” he growls, as his eyes burn hatefully into mine.
“What shall we drink to?”
“To our Creator, and the wonderful world He has made for us.”
“A world you won’t be enjoying much longer,” I say, a leering smile curling across my thick lips.
He chuckles and we raise the cups. Necrosov whips out an unseen pistol and tries to shoot me in the face. I manage to get a hand up and the bullet tears into my palm. I burst forward, bulling the table into him as he fires the pistol repeatedly. My fingers elongate and sharpen, tearing into his chest, ripping and slicing the flesh and exposing the gleaming metal beneath his skin. He ignites his boot jets and blasts off through the ceiling in a flurry of flame and splintering wood. He flies back to his lines, trailing a comet and followed by my coarse epithets. I order a series of assaults across the hell of no-man’s land. The fighting rages for days in a pointless and agonizing manner. When all of our forces have been consumed, we go to meet each other in a field so thick with decomposing corpses that you can walk across it for miles and never touch the ground. Years later, they will build a monument here, a great and colossal piece of brick and mortar inscribed with uncountable names. A real eyesore, and they built it that way on purpose.
As the blood sinks into the mud so do we, dropping out of one time and into another. We are both ape-like creatures, fighting over a particularly bountiful tract of hunting real estate, both tribe leaders responsible for the feeding of an entire clan. The clans are based in cave complexes which are passed down through generations of the same family or change hands as the result of fighting. If the leaders are killed, the rest of the tribe is eaten except for the young women. We fight everyday at the watering hole that is on the edge of the hunting area.
We are young and fresh at this point, reveling in the most primal form of our beings. Necrosov is unspoiled by the savages of the wars and wounds he will grow into. The scars of endless surgeries and transformations have yet to road-map his bestial frame. His body gleams with sweat and spit as we eye each other across the expanse of the watering hole, glittering in the sun, showing off for the girls behind us. It is fun to be a kid again.
Large clubs are the weapons of choice. Our fight involves lots of screaming and yelling, splashing water all over the place and rushing to the brink of bone-crunching violence, only to shrink away from its edge. It’s as if we know that if we kill each other that it will set off an eternity of pain. We, the warriors in their earliest form, are reluctant to bestow our curse upon the world. But then the women withhold sex from us, demanding we make an end of it.
So, the next day I smash him upside the head with all the force that I can muster, knocking a handful of teeth into the bloody water. His tribe bears off his inert body—I’m already getting fucked in the mud.
But he’s not dead. He can’t die, and our contest, at this point, can have no victor. We are putting on a show for a limitless audience of one immense being. The curtain rises on the next spectacle of carnage. While our tribe lies drunk and insensate next to the dying embers of our cave’s fire, our rivals set fire to huge boughs of dried twigs they have gathered and placed around the entrance to our dwelling. The choking fumes billow in upon our sleeping forms and cause immediate panic amongst us. A wall of living flame blocks our only escape route. The only choice is to rush headlong through it—unless we do this the tribe will be suffocated. But no one will take the chance except me. I grab a thick sleeping skin from the floor and quickly urinate on it, forcing out my pee in a painful stream. I then drape it around my shoulders, imploring all to follow as they stare at me with wild and uncomprehending eyes.
“You idiots wouldn’t last a day in Stalingra
d,” I scream, assailed by a memory of a future past. I rush through the flames in an instant, dropping and rolling to extinguish any flame which may be clinging to me. Shrugging off the pelt, I am immediately assaulted by a horde of club-wielding tribesmen who beat me to death, as the rest of my clan is burned alive. This one goes to Necrosov.
But there would be another transmosis and another chance to avenge my latest destruction. We fought in the court of Vamier Tomb, Lord of the Realm that you would one day call Atlantis, though they called it Talingar. The people were harsh and warlike, and their empire in its developing years was dedicated to the subjugation of the entire world. Vamier was a cruel warlord that I had served for many years, slowly working my way up through the ranks of various units, earning a reputation as a cold-hearted and ruthless warrior, fearless in the embrace of death yet not lacking in the lust for life, and adept at hypnotizing chickens. One day there was a great ceremony in the Hall of Hatred to affirm my position as leader of the Sho’kai, an elite group known for their berserking battle-lust. I had endured and undergone the ritual scarification and genital mutilation which marked my passage into this order. A collection of ears circumnavigated my neck and shoulders several times, and I had acquired the nickname “Babyraper,” for my activities within the bowels of the newly born. All that remained between me and the assumption of my command was the ritual of acceptance. My deeds would be spoken in front of the unit and any who expressed doubt in my abilities would have the opportunity to try to best me in battle for the right of leadership.