by Dave Brockie
I claw frantically, like a rat on a treadmill of flesh. I have made my body as barbed as is possible, to inflict as much damage as I can. It is my only hope, to attack in a totally unexpected and apocalyptic manner so as to mortally wound him with the first blow, delivered at the least-expected moment. I hope to assassinate the beast and in doing so destroy myself and free your world. And as I rake at the jelly of his mind I am immediately aware that my attempt will fail.
There is no resultant power rush, no immediate rebirth. No soul-searing testimonial to the transmittal of mutational power. Instead I feel a shifting of his being, a great sloshing which sends the ichor into other, unreachable parts of his mass. He has immediately detected my betrayal; indeed it never had a chance. It did not even cause him pain, if in fact he could even feel pain. But it annoyed him that this part of his plan had been a failure.
I am spat out of his face like a wad of snot. He has formed two perfect human hands to cradle me in, like you would a precious insect that you were about to drive a pin through. He is acting on his new plan immediately. His form is rapidly growing, and I am borne earthward, smashing through the ceiling, through layers of rock, flesh, and magma, towards the surface worlds.
My Father is pissed. I was to have been his sweetest slave. I was to lead the forces he had created in the final conflict, the conflict that would either exterminate or define them. They were the B.A., they were the Voiden, they were many more. They came driving from the depths of hell in the wake of my father’s making. For now, my Father would lead them himself.
I gaze into his face as the last layers peel away. Its surface writhes with life as he strives to remake himself as the destroyer. He will not watch the final battle from the comforts of the underearth. He will lead it, and to do so he must devise a face which will slay all who gaze upon it. And this uncertainty rattles him as a legion of mutants attempt to crawl out of his face all at once. The ugly snouts of tanks protrude from between his grinning teeth; burning pus spatters away in lake-filling quantities as woven armor plating bubbles from his skin, an expanse of waving and toothed tentacles, appendages, and hooves. A giant penis erupts from his chin, spitting venom; knocking creatures away from his face and into the tunnel he leaves behind us, where they join the mass of things following my Father’s movement through the earth.
Things were bad in Times Square, but no one could have comprehended just how much worse it was going to get. The carnage was now loose in all the boroughs of New York as various splintered factions fought each other over the city and its spoils, as the National Guard vainly tried to impose order. The regular army was breaking apart, as a major part of the U.S. Army was black, and they had rebelled quickly. There was much bloodshed on the steps of countless armories, and tanks full of drunken men rolled through the streets, blasting expensive shops to hell. In the time I had been underground, which had felt like years but had really been only a few days, the battle of New York had changed from a ghetto block-razing event to a matter of serious contention. The forces opposing the forces seemingly possessed infinite reserves and an increasing amount of heavy weaponry. They came up from below, moving through the sewers and spilling into the lower levels of the colossal towers that defined New York. People had been trying to escape the city for days but that wasn’t easy. The landings were under mortar fire and military traffic came first. A bomb went off in the Holland Tunnel after years of rumor. The government had organized a massive boatlift to get the refugees out of the city, but it didn’t work too well. There were monsters in the water now, things that dragged ships down with all aboard screaming for deliverance. And above, in the plush and privileged places of control, gibbering things came through the walls and slaughtered all they found. People tried to flee the populated areas as everything broke down. But the woods were full of devils, slavering things with automatic weapons that wiped out your family and ate the Winnebago. In the city, many buildings were still occupied by hordes of terrified humans who were ill prepared to deal with the onslaught from below. They did their best to barricade their dwellings, but defensive measures invariably only delayed the onset of mutilation, and heightened the flowering of terror. Grinning things which became stronger flayed their flesh, and as the creatures claimed the buildings they became towers of death, spewing RPG and machine-gun fire across the concrete canyons. There was no longer any reason for my Father to conceal his intentions, to trick or goad the humans. Malformed things with cleaver arms marched straight out of the East River directly into combat with whatever lived, whatever emanated the power that they craved. They grabbed weapons. They crewed tanks. Things hadn’t gone to hell—hell had come to us.
Times Square had become the focal point for all of midtown’s carnage, and had been in a state of perpetual battle for three days straight. Looters, terrorists, soldiers, and hellspawn all converged on this place in order to kill each other. Burning and mangled barricades, festooned with corpses from all the marauding elements, cut the space up into more defensible areas. Wrecked armored vehicles and burnt-out cars littered the playing field like so many broken toys, charred corpses draped across their hulls, roasted flesh black and glistening. There was no three-card Monty tonight, but there was a new game in town—the deadliest game, the game of war. And to aid this quest the sewers spilled murderers, fresh from the flesh-hives that continued to pump out murderous life until the last possible second. Bullets shattered windows, rockets swooshed redly across the void, random vehicles burst into flames and collided with buildings and occasionally a helicopter would come along and chew the place up with its gatling cannon. This would quiet things down for a while but the fighting would soon flare up again. There were no sides anymore, only the confusion of melee as all creatures involved sought, received, or distributed death. But all ceased their ghastly endeavors at the noise of my Father’s return.
He holds me cupped in his immense yet childlike hands, me swaddled in snot, protecting me as the top of his being torn through the last layers of asphalt, pipe, and wire, and spills into the street. First there is a crested and warty ridge, followed by voluminous billowings of pig-like flesh, splitting open at various junctures to emit stalk-like feelers and legs. These grind into the pavement with sulfurous cracks, straining with the effort of extricating my Father’s central mass from underearth for the first time in a million ages. Then grayish eyestalks squirm aloft, unblinking as they behold the surface world they have come to destroy. The flames around him seem to leap at his presence, and from the ruined streets all manner of malformed creatures leap into the light, capering and twittering their love song to their bloated master, whose pulsing head pushes its way through a mass of rippling and ruined pavement. There is one hideous moment as he takes in his new world and the gaping hole of his mouth splits in the ghastly mockery of a human smile, a torrent of greenish liquid burbling from between tombstone teeth, bubbling down his horned hide and onto the street below where great clouds of steam leap up as the asphalt dissolves. Then a vast amount of his mass pours from the ground and into the air with a deafening roar of hateful triumph, echoing from deep within, shattering glass and picking up the stones of the rubble he has made. His body surges into the sky, a mass of writhing tentacles, joined to heaving masses of decomposing flesh bags, bags which explode with larvae, larvae which rain onto the street below. With the sound of a million whale farts his swollen corpulent being begins to rear as large as the buildings that surround him, then as big and bigger, his malformed shoulders pushing into the shattered sides of burning blocks, ripping through their facades and sending meaty probes lashing down their corridors.
My Father is out on the town.
And so he rears, exultant, hide crawling with festering regenerative material. He glares at the hate of his making, the shattered glass that was his audience reflecting his incomprehensible visage. Any human that gazes upon him goes automatically insane, and they begin to plunge out of windows or swallow their guns.
Suddenly a vehicle bursts
into the mix, careening in from a side street, smashing through a barricade in a fiery burst of debris. Demons cling to the sides, howling, lashing at the skin of the heavy panel van while being assaulted from within by the occupants of the vehicle who are firing madly through the walls. I watch as the vehicle slews about in a great semi-circle, slowly lifting up onto two wheels as the creatures rip the roof back. A flurry of automatic fire erupts from within as the van lands on its side in a shower of sparks, scattering the creatures in flailing bundles. It hits a crater and comes to rest at an angle as the back kicks open. A figure dressed in a red jumpsuit with long black hair, tied back with a red bandana and carrying an AK-47 jumps clear, firing at the things that are already gaining their feet. He knocks them back with well-aimed bursts of lead, then turns and beholds my Father for the first time. I can see his hair turning white as his weapon clatters from his nerveless fingers to the ground. The creatures again rush towards him. He tears his sight away from the surging mass of champing flesh that rears above and produces a small black box with a series of cables, which disappear back into the vehicle. Before he goes down beneath a flailing series of cleaver blows, he manages to turn the key that arms the device, and then hits the detonate button with a wild cry just as he is beheaded. The proud Apache death squad has accomplished their mission. And the Russians didn’t gyp them either. The nuke goes off.
It is a ten-megaton device, ground bursting with roughly 600 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, and it explodes about 100 meters in front of Dad and me. It’s a modest bomb by today’s standards but nevertheless it is the single most destructive event ever visited upon a populated area of the planet. Times Square melts as we are engulfed in a searing wave of thermonuclear plasma. Like a great expanding soap bubble the beast annihilates all in its path, as the concrete canyons of Manhattan do their best to swallow the blast. But it is to no avail. The blast peels back the stone facades of the glittering towers of Babylon, the flames surging through the expensive offices of the corridors of power, ruining upholstery. The boiling flames of vengeance pour into the richly appointed lobbies, melting carefully crafted corporate logos. Offices where corpulent bosses bent their slutty secretaries over the water cooler simply cease to be.
And the sound. How can you describe the sound of a city collapsing under the weight of a nuclear fireball? And the people within, their screams, the sound of their souls escaping? We will never know how many died in that blast, but they numbered into the millions. It was as if a rift to hell had opened up, as the streets cracked open and released the infernal fire that would cleanse the world. And at the center of the blast, my Father and I lock in the last chapter of the death embrace.
Our bodies have been destroyed. The tremendous destructive power of the nuke is great enough to make our flesh as to nothing. But we cannot die. Though our bodies, mine human in form, monster in being, and his, the indefinable mass, are reduced to slag, our beings cannot be ended. Because here, on the eve of the apocalypse, we enjoy the greatest soul-suck ever known. It was payback time for all those bombs that I had missed. Our beings are stripped to atoms, the only living things able to retain their personalities, their souls, if you will. And these souls become the conduit for the countless other souls which were stripped from their bodies by the death wave. Stripped and sucked into the feeding hole that was the ravenous appetite of both my Father and myself. Pouring into our gaping beings which gobbled this life into an expanding power pool, growing beyond ourselves at unthinkable levels, until thinking itself was no longer needed, so that spontaneous knowledge of all that had ever past was achieved with scarcely an effort.
The obliterated outlines of the stricken city are erased as our exultant forms become one with the fireball and expand towards the heavens where we take our place as gods, hovering over the flaming crater that up until an instant ago had been known as Manhattan. There we continue to suck in the discarded souls of the countless victims of our violence. I can comprehend the form of my Father, far away from me, floating in the fire like an immense embryonic bug, his outlines illuminated by the blast. His true outlines, totally alien and repugnant, sucking with chittering valves all that the race can give him. And I suck too, intoxicated by the sweetness of the souls, trying to gain as much power as I can in hopes that I will be able to grow powerful enough to somehow destroy him. And, curiously detached from the carnage of our making, we enjoy a moment of perfect peace in the center of the vortex of slaughter. I come to look upon and into myself, so that I may know the truth of my being, and understand the mystery that is Whargoul in a way that I never could before.
As the sky-borne strata of the stricken city roils about me in its venomous green and bloated purples, beset by the assault of the red and orange, I see the things which my Father has hidden me from me peeled away one by one. The basic building blocks of my existence are laid bare. And when it is before me, I accept it with the deepest sense of gratification that I have ever known. In that instant my cause is validated, my purpose affirmed, and my mission reforged. I meet the truth of myself, and it fulfills all my dreams.
I see it all replayed, how I was stolen from the steppes of Russia over 50 years ago, stolen from my mother’s side, adopted by an other-worldly master, poisoned and pumped with agonizing alien life in an obscene effort to create the ultimate Judas, the race-betrayer. The human that was more than human who would lead his race into oblivion. But a human nonetheless. This basic truth had been hidden so well even Cheng-Tzu had never suspected. Despite the alien filth which had infected my body and damned my soul, I was a human being.
And in that moment of self-realization my Father’s plans become undone. It is a moment so profound that he stops his feeding to observe mine. For the newly-gained knowledge of my humanity gives me the ability to suck the cast-off energy of the dead at a greater rate than that of my Father, perhaps because they were were drawn to a like kind. And, sensing this failure, he releases a scream that makes the universe shudder and cringe, alerting his brothers. A fell cry of utter defeat and wailing hopelessness as the plan that has spanned thousands of generations, who dutifully fed their young to the war-machine, meets its failure. For in that moment my power surges beyond that of my Father, and I reach across space to open the dimensional rift which must consume him. He feels the cosmos slip and he begins to be drawn from the world that for so long has been his home. I do not have the power to destroy him, but I can banish him to a corner of the multiverse so remote that he can never threaten Earth again. He has no choice in this matter, for fate has ordained his doom. A doom ordained by me that I shall be victorious, and the affirmation of my humanity makes my cause just. I pass my transparent hand, as big as all of Asia, across the heavens, re-ordering the stars and setting forces in motion that soon I would never understand, but for this one moment of omniscience comprehend as easily as you may know yourself. A rushing of stars heralds the creation of the hole, a folding of space marks its presence. Recognizing his fate he begins to slip into the blackness, stretching and warping as the infinite confines of deep space begin to envelope him. Shrieking his protest he struggles mightily, thrashing the world, slaying as many as he can, seeking to somehow match my unexpected supremacy. I straddle the globe, bundling up his many tentacles and pulling him from the crevasses of the planet with a series of grisly pops, much like a dentist would remove a diseased tooth. Huge sections of the world are annihilated—the destruction visited upon Manhattan spreads across the globe in his last futile strugglings as whole continents are dislodged or drowned. This final ravaging kills billions, and their deaths give me the strength I need to complete my task.
Now his endless hordes realize their Master’s fate, and their fearsome countenances cloud with fear and uncertainty as they pause in their butcher’s work. Father’s lowly minions are drawn to him and his removal, and they begin to leap from the surface of the world, burrowing into his flanks and clustering at his fleeting being. With a last mighty heave I pull the entire writhing mass
free of the world, which for so many eons has endured their hate. I ball it up like so much trash.
“This is our planet,” I bellow in a voice that can be heard throughout the solar system. “You don’t belong here. Now go!”
With a final Herculean spasm, I complete my exorcism. Flopping and flailing, his minions flaking from him like dandruff, he hurtles from the Earth and into the cold hole I have prepared for him. It greedily sucks his soul, if he had such a thing.
Already my power is dissipating, my body changing again. I plunge through the atmosphere, shredding cloud and vapor and almost knocking Air Force One (with the new lady President) out of the sky. I fall back into the ruin of the city, colliding with the crater with the force of a fallen angel. The icy waters of the Atlantic rush in, drowning the nuclear fire; taming the Earth-plasma, and sealing the wound the world has endured.
As the water closes above my head I shut my eyes, unsure of my fate. I feel the portal in the heavens shutting, locking him in limbo, placing him behind a wall from which he can never reach Earth again.
He is gone.
I settle back into the seething pool of nuclear magma that once was Manhattan. My consciousness blots out as my body begins to reform, wracked by the spasms of the rebirth. But I pass through them unaffected, bathing in the feeling of well being that suffuses my body. My journey is nearing its end. As my flesh re-knits itself, so your world begins to heal.
As it has before my new body comes forth from the river, gaining the blighted bank and gazing back on the destruction I have left in my wake.
The city is gone; the land reclaimed by the sea. The entire area from uptown to the southern tip of the island has crumbled into the deep. Great powers have been released by the detonation of the bomb, forces greater than the power that the weapon had contained. The elemental power of Earth has been awakened by the blast, another force that had long struggled against my Father. The boundless destructive energy of the Earth was added to that of the bomb. And the force generated was truly amazing. The Earth has been scooped away in the area that had been Manhattan, leaving a great pothole which quickly filled. The greatest city on Earth has paid the price for its own indulgence. A great blossoming of crimson and azure energy expands above the still frothing surface as debris continues to rain back into the water. I turn my back upon the spectacle and walk away, the heat of the reclaimed city burning across my naked shoulders.