by Ryder Stacy
Carnivore stopped Rockson and Rona outside the circular hemispheres as other of the swamp creatures who had been engaged in the incomprehensible activities around the clearing came forward to look at the two humans in amazement. Not that they hadn’t seen such creatures before, but only dead, or quickly made dead, and eaten.
“What, what are they doing,” Rock asked gingerly, remembering Dr. Shecter’s admonitions about questioning native superstitions and religious activities too closely. “The one thing the savage mind can’t bear is that which it perceives as any sort of attack upon its mythical or magical systems. Rule-of-thumb Rock: you can eat the bread, fuck the chief’s daughter, but don’t mess with the gods.”
Still, Nitrogen seemed willing enough to talk about it. In fact, Rockson began to sense a desperate urgency in the creature to make contact with another mind, something outside the largely bestial members of the Narga. He felt a pleasure in the telepathic signals from Nitrogen which now came in softer tones, more conversational than the initial violent blasts he had first received.
“They are calling out to the Megapoison—that being which created us all—we Narga—out of the slime, out of death, out of that which should have stayed dead. We, I, my people, Rockson, we do not wish to live. For us life is—it’s hard to convey to you who are still human—but life is not worth living. Those of us who still have minds are trapped inside this foul wretched prison where all we touch, taste, smell and breathe is rot, disease, excrement. The rest have no minds anymore. I and two others control them like a man would control a dog. But when I first found myself coming into consciousness from out of death Rockson, I thought I had fallen into Hell. And I had. Every minute, every day I have been here I have wished for death. We all do. But we can’t die, Ted Rockson. We are already made of that which death turns to, a soup of brains and crumbled bone, a stew of blood and disintegrating flesh. We cannot die. We are . . .”
The creature’s voice almost seemed to stumble on the thought, as if it was too much to bear.
“ . . . immortal. That is why we pray, why they are praying now. To the Megapoison, whose twelve molecules of ultimate poison are represented by the twelve globes we have built. They chant and they sing Rockson. And they say, please let us die, oh Megapoison.
“We beg you to give us the paradise of nonexistence. Take us from this land of moist horror and into dryness and death.”
Rockson felt a deep sympathy surge out of his heart for the band of wretched creatures. They had been cheated twice. First given lives of degradation and pain to live out as mortal men, and then having to do it all over again as hideous swamp creatures. They hadn’t been given the chance that nature affords to all men no matter how terrible their circumstances: To sink into that sweet oblivion from which nothing returns. Cheated of death itself.
Fourteen
Nearly 800 Nazi troops under the command of Major Heimlich moved into the swamps-of-no-return outside Goerringrad in search of Rockson and the missing goddess, Eva Braun. Von Reisling’s orders had been clear and succinct—not a man should emerge from those hellish bogs unless they had the two Americans in tow. Otherwise they would wish they had stayed.
The troops had to leave all their heavy equipment behind, as the footing, even using the webbed footgear that stopped the Germans from sinking more than a foot or two into the slime, was treacherous. They came in from the north and west to flush out the escaped Americans and capture them at any cost. All the units would meet in the center—a center that was always covered by heavy mists, where even the pilots of the helicopters hovering above the grim-faced Nazi infantry were not eager to fly. There had been rumors of cannibals and worse.
Major Heimlich was determined that if anyone was to be eaten it wouldn’t be him. He wore protective lightweight body armor unlike his troops, and he carried a rapid-fire, gas ejection stengun. No, he wouldn’t die—not him. Not after all he’d been through.
His foot stuck in the glue-like wet green mud for the hundredth time and he wrestled it out, pulling with all his strength with a disgusted look on his face. Hell was for the infantry, while the flyboys just hovered overhead ready to shoot down fire on anything they spotted below. But the only sounds were the sucking of the troop’s boots pulling out of the mud at each step.
“A boat would probably be more useful,” Heimlich grunted to himself. Nothing—you couldn’t see ten feet in front of you. But the major had the creepy feeling of being watched. He glanced nervously around but could see nothing beyond the endless vines and high green stalks that grew out of the slime.
“Calm down, don’t get jittery now,” he told himself. But the words didn’t help.
Another group of Nazi troops with Lt. Himmler in command, edged along a narrow trail between mangrove trees dripping with moisture and covered with parasitic orange blossoms that smelled like fresh sewerage. The hum of the choppers overhead came and went as his men eyed the deep foliage of rot and decay with increasing fear. Fear—an emotion unknown to these Nazi troops in open battle—in a fight where a man could take a stand—live or die. But here you could just disappear in a quicksand pit, or be snatched away . . .
Occasionally they heard footsteps in the distance—slapping wet sounds paralleling their path. How could anything be walking out here, so deep in the swamp, Lt. Himmler wondered nervously. It sounded like more than one, too. Perhaps some sort of multi-legged animal or—his mouth went dry—some kind of super megapede, like those hideous creatures that had ripped his right-hand man, Kraus, to shreds in their last foray into unknown regions.
He patted his rapid-fire submachine gun. This would take out whatever the hell was out there. Let it come—let them all come. And Gunter was right behind him with the new spit gun—a modified flamethrower that shot out quick blasts of fire like a rifle. The squad moved a cautious step at a time, slowly turning their heads from side to side, trying to see through the ever-thickening mists. There was one thing that started bothering them all though. When they stopped walking, so did the sounds in the swamp around them.
“Just an echo,” Himmler explained to his men. “A sound reflection off the mists.” But slowly, without any of them noticing, giant green hands ripped out of the fog, pulling stragglers back with them. A quick crunching sound, and nothing. One by one they were taken. Until there was just Himmler left. He felt strange—silence suddenly all around him. He turned. No one. He ran backward for yards, nearly falling over in the muck. Something around his ankle—he couldn’t run. It was tightening and pulling him down. “Oh God no,” he screamed out in German, the shrill words echoing out into the brownish gray mist. But nothing heard him die—nothing human anyway.
Major Heimlich called a halt. “Count off men, I want to make sure no one’s gone and lost his own asshole in one of these quicksand bogs. Boll, Bitsel, Kraus, Meineke, Megele, Braunwitz, Bergen-Belson . . .”
Only two of them answered.
“Well, what about the rest of you?” he shouted into the peasoup fog behind them. There was only silence. He bit his dry lips, and tried again, not wanting to think the unthinkable. “Come on now, this is no time for foolishness. What is the matter. Where are you? Where are you.” He was screaming by the time he stopped.
“I don’t like this,” he muttered under his breath. “Not one bit.” He had seen action all over this bloody godforsaken radioactive planet. He had fought the dervishes of the Muabir’s fanatical Moslem army of beheaders in the Gobi Desert, he had fought hand to hand with the Kurdish tribesmen in Iran. And he was still alive. And the secret to that being alive was not to panic . . . he knew that . . . but the mist . . . the sound of those huge feet drawing closer.
There was a sudden slurping noise from behind a grove of black-barked trees. Something was coming and fast. He spun and shot off a full clip of his exploding slugs and the shape crumbled down onto the surface of the swamp just inches from his feet. It was a uniform—one of his own men. Why didn’t he say something . . .
Then the comma
nder saw. He didn’t say anything because he had no head and the rest of his body had chunks of flesh ripped from it as if a shark had been munching on him. Then he saw it—coming for him from out of the green stalks—looming, reaching for him with its body from hell. He saw its face, its blood red eyes, its open jaw dripping with swamp slime. He screamed as it bit into his shoulder and tore a six-inch section of meat and bone right off him. He fired a clip right into the thing’s stomach but it merely made what appeared to be a twisted foaming smile and reached down for him, lifting the Nazi up in a muddy bearhug. This time it took a chunk of meat out of his neck, severing the arteries. A torrent of blood poured out which the swamp monster tried to lick up with dark burning tongue. Somehow it took Heimlich nearly 20 seconds to die. Just enough time to fully experience being eaten alive.
Fifteen
Nitrogen Carnivore took off the head of the German soldier he was holding in one hand with a single bite. He crunched the fleshy peanut around in his swampy mouth, cracking it, and then swallowed. Something approximating a smile crossed his green mud face.
“Not bad Rockson—you want some?” The immense swamp creature handed the headless body, oozing blood from the stump, toward Rockson, who held up his hands signaling decline of the offer. Rona, sitting near him on a log, turned away and went pale, feeling her own stomach rising inside.
“These Nazis are the best things I’ve eaten in months,” Carnivore went on as he chewed off an arm which disappeared down the cauldronous throat, hand last, waving goodbye.
“Good, good,” agreed the other Narga that sat around the clearing, eating their fill. There were dead Germans everywhere, being eaten, hanging in trees upside down, being cooked over fires and smoked for storage and future eating. Myriad fires burned around the island as the Narga cooked their booty—nearly 300 crack commandos—now just swamp chow.
When they had finished, Nitrogen Carnivore leaned back and lay on his back against a tree, his huge sopping mass squishing halfway around the lower bark. “I suppose we owe you that meal, Rockson, since these troops came to get you.”
“My pleasure,” Rockson telepathed back, sitting a few feet away. The smell of the sizzling German skin filled the air with the slightly sweet scent of roasting pork, cutting through the constant overpowering stench of the swamp gases that rose bubbling up through the green muck. “And now I have a favor to ask of you,” the Doomsday Warrior said.
“What would that be? Your lives? I told you we would return you to shore tomorrow,” Nitrogen said, still lying on the ground. A vibration shook his tremendous girth as a burp from the recent meal exited from his cave-like mouth.
“To help us,” Rock sent back, brushing away a small swarm of flies that had been drawn to the island by the smell of meat. “I left a lot of men back there—men like yourself—like you used to be, anyway. Slaves, beaten and destroyed by the Nazis until they’re consumed and turned into lifeless shells. You know the story better than I do. They helped me back there and I promised them I would return. With your help and the help of your people, we could wipe out the German base completely. Even from your lives of eternal pain you could reach out and help the living—help them to avoid becoming like you.”
“Ah, you don’t know, Rockson. These creatures around me—they don’t think like men. You and I—we are civilized—at least our minds are. But they—and even the other leaders—I don’t think they would.”
“Would you? Would you help?” Rock asked.
There was a pause while Nitrogen seemed to think about the concept. Then he answered with a firm, “Yes. I’ll help, Rockson. Revenge—yes I could use some revenge. My soul is twisted, inside are forces that want to destroy, to kill everything. It is hard to control. Perhaps by at least directing it against the right enemy my people and our dark natures and energies can be focused on a good cause. Yes I will help—but the others I don’t know.”
The entire island was filled with the hulking green monstrosities lying around exhausted from their feast. They hadn’t eaten this much since the munitions explosion three months earlier—that had given them nearly 200 bodies to eat—but those had already been torn and broken—the best parts missing. These—these were so fresh so sweet—like freshly plucked fruit. Their huge burning pumpkin-red eyes closed in sleepy satisfaction. They rested for an hour or so and then rose and walked over to the Megapoison Shrine for their nightly rituals. They lay down on their faces and stomachs and began chewing on the dirt, asking their gods to return them to that state, back into the soil from which all things had sprung.
From across the clearing, where Rockson sat, his arm around a sleeping Rona, he watched, and tried to understand the telepathic songs, the choruses, the questions and answers of their religious ceremony that shot like a thunderstorm through his mind. Rock could dimly pick up the thoughts of helping him, of fighting the Germans. A debate seemed to rage between groups of them, filling the others with bellows and roars. But at last the ceremony came to a close, the Narga ceased their wailing and rose from the ground. Nitrogen Carnivore walked over to the Doomsday Warrior.
“We’ll go. I can’t tell you they want to do it for the good of mankind—but because they’ve grown to like the taste of fresh Germans. Besides maybe—if we’re lucky—some of us will die. That is our greatest dream, Rockson—to be given the gift of eternal death. Perhaps for me this time.” There was a note of infinite sadness in the swamp creature’s thoughts. Then the hoot of an owl silhuetted against the corpse-colored moon.
They came ashore like an army from out of the darkest nightmare, nearly a hundred of the swamp creatures, dripping foul exudations as they stepped onto the ground. Rockson and Rona jumped up from the raft that Nitrogen Carnivore had pulled and for the first time Rona let her stomach relax. Somehow she had thought she was never going to see land again.
“Which way Rockson?” Carnivore asked, as the elephant-sized creatures spread out in a long line, their hunger already growing for more of the tasty creatures they had eaten yesterday.
“Straight through that fence there,” Rock said, pointing to a dumpsite a mile off, “and then into the fort. I don’t think with a backup team like you guys we really need much of a plan. Please, you have instructed your men not to eat the slaves—only the Germans.”
“Of course Rockson,” the green slime thing answered back, towering over the Freefighter who stood several yards away. “We are monsters but we’re not savages. Besides Germans are tastier—and fatter.”
Rock walked ahead of the field full of moving slime things, he and Rona having to doubletime it to keep up with the huge step of the Nagras’ legs. He felt a deep satisfaction that he was returning to help the slaves. That they would see he hadn’t broken his word—that he had returned. He just prayed there were some left to save.
They came to the first gate blocking the garbage collection site and the lead Nagra knocked down the ten-foot high, iron link gate as if it were a twig, bending the six-inch thick steel beams over like rubber. The rest followed behind Rockson as he ran down the two-lane dirt road that led to the fort. The lights of Goerringrad twinkled desperately in the black night ahead.
The five guards on duty at the western entrance to the fort sat around their machine-gun emplacement, covered with blankets. It was cold here in America. Too fucking cold. It was one thing to come and fight and carry out the Führer’s grand military plan—but they had done nothing but guard this old backyard that led to the swamps, for months. When the hell would something happen. Something they could write home to their girlfriends about—something that would make them proud, make them men. The small crackling fire in their center, around which they all sat, puffed out little clouds of blue smoke as the resins of the half-dried pine they’d thrown on caught and exploded with bullet-like snaps.
“Ach, I am disgusted, Heimmel. I want to fight, I want to feel the shells going off around me, the smell of blood and gunpowder in the air. The blood-red sun of victory rising over my shoulder, as the Fü
hrer himself wrote about. The glory of fighting for the Fatherland, heroic Teutonic knights carrying out our sacred mission of world unity and purification.” His face suddenly changed from animated and firm to a look of the sheerest horror in the space of a second. His mouth dropped open as his eyes focused on the horrors he was seeing coming up the road. The others turned with a start and caught the same frozen expression as if it was a disease. A disease of terror. What does a man do when an army of dead, hideous giants, made out of the foulest mould and slime is coming to kill him? They sat paralyzed in a frieze of blind terror, their heartspeeds nearly tripling in seconds, their faces draining of blood. They were about to get their wish to die for the Fatherland—but not in a very heroic way.
The things were almost upon them, impossible, nightmarish creatures with reaching dripping arms of sludge, and mouths that opened to consume—bottomless—teeth of black fungus. The five guards somehow snapped out of their trance of doom and swung their Kalashnikovs around, shooting wildly on full auto. The slugs tore right into the first four or five of the Narga and settled in the center of their swamp chests and stomachs, just another addition to the filthy mound. One of the hideous creatures reached into the emplacement and lifted two of the Germans out. He squeezed them both, his hands fitting completely around their chests, squeezed until their chests caved in, and their hearts and lungs were condensed into a bloody putty which sprayed out the men’s noses, mouths and eyes. Another Narga picked up two more, slamming one right into his mouth, feet first. The man screamed a sound that cut through the air like a razor as the cavernous mouth chewed him down in four quick bites. Just the head was left at the very edge still screaming—then it too disappeared inside with a quick slurp.