He had never killed a child, but if the boy came back he would have to reconsider. Clearly the boy must know who, what the God of Mayhem was. So why wasn’t he frightened?
The God of Mayhem was bothered by vivid memories of the first creatures he had ever killed—an assortment of pets and countless birds, a few snakes, dozens of frogs. When he was just a boy he had called them his experiments. They had been good practice, so he didn’t understand why the memories were so troublesome, but they embarrassed him.
He’d discovered the pleasures of fire when he was a boy, too. The beauty of it, the shape of the flames, and how efficiently it consumed and transformed. It calmed him, filling him with undeniable pleasure as he watched. So pleasurable the fires had been that for a while he didn’t feel the need to kill anything at all.
Once he killed an entire family of adults, planted them around the circular kitchen table, soaked their heads in oil and set them on fire. He’d called it “his birthday cake.”
Daniel had brief moments of self-awareness when the God of Mayhem entered more deeply into a ruminative mode. So compartmentalized was the man, so disconnected from the voices that drove him, Daniel discovered he was able to ride quietly inside this monster for some time.
The God of Mayhem had come to understand that his was a religion best practiced at night, when not so many curious eyes were watching.But the terrain was treacherous—he had to scout things out during the day. Broken building facades were typical in most neighborhoods, wall sheathings sloughed off, timbers rotted and fragile décor disintegrated and liquefied, spilling out of empty windows and past ruptured doors hanging from their shattered frames. That didn’t necessarily mean no one lived there.
This particular night he would invade a shopping district several miles north of his home. The overcoat came on, hiding an arsenal of guns and knives and other deadly devices. By the time the God of Mayhem exploded out his back door he was in full adrenaline mode, his feet propelled into a dance of constant movement, his palms itchy with the need to grab, smash, and tear. He burst through the front door of a house a few blocks away, for no particular reason other than its proximity to his planned trajectory. He swung a hammer into the skull of a man sitting in his kitchen sucking something out of a green bottle. He paused only long enough to pry the hammer from shards of bone before flattening the two younger men screaming into his face, then through the back door and another yard and down a broken sidewalk where he sliced a piece off a figure walking with its head down. His victim tumbled into the tall weeds crying weakly.
Daniel was fully aware then, drunk on whatever chemicals raced through the blood of this outrageous psychopath. Peeking into this head was like the mortals who dared look into the eyes of the most terrible deities—it was impossible without pain and you risked losing your mind.
Feel this! Can you feel this? Like a fire the God of Mayhem had set at the center of Daniel’s mind.It was impossible to say how many were killed or maimed during the God’s venture north. Nor did the God care in the least. When they reached the vast parking lot, a sea of metal vehicles frozen within a sheen of rust and filth, Daniel felt the God’s body pulsing with even more energy.
He roamed through the parking lot on his way to the buildings beyond, the vehicles missing tires, batteries, windows, seats. Now and then the God would stop at a car and peer inside. Most of them were empty but occasionally he’d spy a sleeping form stretched across the upholstery, and sometimes two or three people who looked terrified when the God tapped on their window. He always wondered if they could tell by the look of him that he was skilled at turning living things into dead things.
The building ahead appeared to have been some sort of department store. The front of it had fallen onto the sidewalk, an enormous G, a twisted S rising out of the rubble. As he came closer he saw that several floors of the building had been exposed.
A man with a yellow bottle was standing by the entrance. He staggered, holding the bottle out as an offering. “You find something... maybe we can trade.” The God of Mayhem reached inside his coat, stepped up to the drunk and stuck him below the waistline with a hunter’s curved gut hook, then dragged it up quickly while stepping back. The drunk stared at him blankly, then fell back with a spray of blood. Some splashed on the God’s coat, but he didn’t mind. It was dark and besides he wanted a little blood on his coat. The thought made him slightly light-headed. He breathed in sharply and licked his lips.
He had not yet tried tasting any of his kills, although he’d thought about it. Once he’d killed four in a one day frenzy, with gun and knife and holding one fellow under his bath water and bludgeoning another to death—he’d put his nose against the dead flesh, and his open mouth, and breathed in whatever aromas he could, and licked one corpse along the small of the back, and found it to be unusually salty but not unusually foul. Why... Daniel said from somewhere lost within the God’s tangle of hunger, rage, and passion.
The fellow asked me a question, the God of Mayhem thought, at Daniel. Daniel, shocked to be spoken to directly by the God like this, was desperate to hide. The God’s inner voice roared with astonishment and laughter. My conscience, you nag me!
This had never happened before. Daniel hadn’t thought it possible. He was supposed to be a silent passenger, a listener, not a participant.
The God muddied his coat on the damp ground to obscure some of the blood, not wanting to telegraph his intentions to the crowd. Swaddled in a rainbow of rags covering everything but his eyes he strolled inside.
The sheer number of squatters surprised him. As he went room to room and floor to floor he was overwhelmed by the mass of them, filling every available space except for a few cleared pathways, and with entire families jammed even into the spaces under the stairs. And the stairs and frozen escalators had people sitting to one side of each step. Had they noticed the rust flaking off the beams? And the crumbling concrete, the borders of each room layered in gray chips of the stuff? It wasn’t safe to live here.
Violent young men and lazy females, sprawling families, orphans, criminals, all jammed together with their limited belongings, bodies on top of bodies, acts of theft and violence and degradation seeping out between layers upon layers of human stink.
He didn’t care who he killed, as long as they weren’t children. It was hardly his fault that people had become furniture. The God of Mayhem wasn’t obligated to feel guilt over the death of furniture.
Several potential targets of his rage became obvious. There was the thin man wearing the high collar that hid his mouth. His eyes constantly scanned the crowd as he rubbed up against one female after another, particularly the young frightened ones, the exhausted ones, reminding the God that even during the lean times there were predators of different appetite.
Another candidate was that fellow with the bushy black beard that had been half burnt from his face (one of the God of Mayhem’s own fires, perhaps?). It appeared that no beard would be growing anytime soon on that side, but the fellow had made no attempt to modify the damage to his appearance by trimming the beard. As far as the God was concerned that was in his favor. But he didn’t like the way the fellow stared. He noticed too much.
Off in a corner a crazy looking fellow did comical impressions of anyone who passed. He’d suck in his belly and bloat his belly, allow his tongue to loll and cross his eyes.
An old man sat by one of the many fires up on raised bricks. Now and then he would toss a burning stick at a child and laugh. The old man was layered in burn scars up and down his arms and on his face.
Others were guilty of some simpler form of rudeness. A woman who insisted on her right to public defecation, and who did not hesitate to demonstrate; a fellow who enjoyed showing his rotted teeth to strangers; a fellow whose constant monologue mourned everything lost to time and society’s poor choices. Everything he said was true, of course, but it brought those around him no peace.
All no more than rude behaviors, but a desperate and overcrowded worl
d had no place for the rude. The toilet-rights lady received an iron bar across the base of the skull while everyone’s head was turned in disgust. A large rag stuffed into the rotted maw of the dentally-impaired, his jaws held shut by the God’s powerful hands, the two of them huddled against the wall like lovers: the man’s eyes fixed on the face of his new deity until the light burned out of them. A quick shove sent the body out an open window.
The God of Mayhem decided to take his time with his next subject—that vocal mourner of all things lost to the world. “Here, I want to show you something,” he said to the mourner, his arm around the man’s shoulders, squeezing them. “I hear what you’ve been saying, and I am deeply in tune with it. You, my friend, are the voice of a generation.
“I have a gift for you and I think you will find that it greatly clarifies your situation. I think, in fact, that you will find this quite healing.”
At first the man quivered, looking up at the God of Mayhem as if he were the monster that he was, but the God had a way of making his eyes soft and welcoming. The man actually smiled and looked surprisingly eager.
“Yes,” he replied, and the God led him out of that crowd, and down the stairs, and outside. He walked around the exterior of the building, his arm still over the man’s shoulders, which had started trembling again. “What—what is it exactly we’re looking for?” the man asked.
“I think we will find him, ah, here,” the God said, and pulled the tremulous man closer, and made him sit down with him on the ground in front of the fallen corpse. He increased his grip on the man. “So, you see, all those things you have mourned, all that we have lost in the city—art and culture, beautiful parks, a sense of safety—those are nothing compared to a human life. Because as long as there is life we can hope that things might change, even though they probably won’t.”
“Wait, just wait—”
“No, no, have some patience,” the God of Mayhem said. “You have to be patient. Tell me, do you believe in God?”
“I don’t, I don’t know. In times like these, with all that has happened to us—”
“No, the times shouldn’t matter. Either there is a god or there isn’t.”
“I can’t believe a god would be so cruel—”
The God of Mayhem laughed. “Sometimes it’s part of the job. I’m a god, and I’m right here in front of you.” He took the man’schin and turned the head to face him. “Can you believe in me?”
The man looked terrified. Hesitantly he nodded. “Just please don’t kill me.”
The God of Mayhem made his sad face then. “I’ll be honest with you. I’ll consider it, but once I start to kill someone I don’t stop until the job is done. It’s one of my rules. Hesitating, having second thoughts, that’s how I might get myself caught or killed.”
“How ... how?” He tried to kick his feet. The God raised a finger and wagged it in warning.
“I do have some ideas as to what I’m going to do, unless I change my mind, which I’ll just say again, is highly unlikely. Although I prefer the quickness and efficiency of a gunshot to the heart, or into the back of the head, or under the chin, ammunition has become much harder to come by. Have you ever tried it? Do you own a gun?”
“N-no.”
“I believe you. Now if I didn’t believe you, or you had answered yes, I would have made you take me to your home and I’d take that gun and all your ammunition. Hell, I might just leave the gun behind, if it’s one I already have, and I have plenty, and just take all your ammunition, because that’s what’s really important. A gun without ammo is just another piece of iron to beat somebody with, you dig?” The man nodded shakily. “Oh, and then I would kill you,of course.
“Now I use a shotgun from time to time, but I don’t really care for them. I shot a man in the head once with a sawed-off and the man’s head just completely disintegrated. Imagine my surprise! I thought that just happened in those old movies. Hey—when you talked about things you missed, things that had been lost from the culture, you didn’t mention movies! I used to love movies! Anyway, I’d lured this fellow into my house and did it there—always a mistake but at the time I felt I needed to seize the opportunity. The clean-up took most of a day and the house stank for weeks!”
“I—” The man looked sick. He started to cough and choke up.
“Don’t you vomit on me! You vomit on me and I’ll be beyond angry!”
The man’s eyes went red and he kept licking his lips. Finally he didn’t look sick anymore. “I avoid poisons—they never really work for me. Sometimes they will vomit when you feed them poison, and I hate vomit. If I happen to find the right amount of cyanide that’s okay—I know how to use cyanide. Everything else is too unpredictable and likely to have a messy, drawn-out, and generally unpleasing outcome.”
The man’s nodding looked strangely eager. The God assumed by that he didn’t want to be poisoned.
“But stabbing always works out pretty well, if you have a pretty good sense of anatomy, which I do. I know just where to stick it in. Just like I know how hard and where to club someone in order to kill them, as opposed to stun them, depending on what I club them with. It’s all about knowing the job, understanding the craft. It’s good to know a craft, but it doesn’t come easy.
“Of course it’s hard to make a precise strike if there’s a lot of frantic wrestling around. It’s best to blindside them, catch them unawares. Otherwise you’re exhausted and covered with someone else’s bodily fluids by the time the job is done.
“So, should I club you, or stab you?”
Daniel squirmed, if squirming meant anything without a body to squirm with. Aware that Daniel had risen back into consciousness, the God of Mayhem swatted Daniel’s self-awareness away. I’m busy.
“No!” his victim cried explosively.
The God covered the victim’s mouth with his hand and brought a finger up to his own lips. “Shhh. If someone hears I’ll just have to kill you and leave. You’re not ready for that, are you?” The victim shook his head. “I didn’t think so. And by the way, that wasn’t a Yes or No question. So, no stabbing, no clubbing. For now. So what else can we do?” He scratched his head in an exaggerated fashion. “Let’s use our imagination. Not a good thing in general, by the way, but I’ll get to that later. But when you have a specific problem to solve, an imagination can be useful. Simply for variety’s sake if for no other reason experimenting with your killing methods is a pretty good thing. You don’t want to get stale—and that applies to any line of work.
“I once shot an arrow into a fellow’s eye at close range. He died eventually, but not without making a lot of fuss—so you’ll be happy to hear I won’t be using that method again anytime soon. I also once set a couple on fire while they were sleeping.”
The victim began to sob. “Please, I have a child. Please let me go!”
“I won’t warn you again—not so loud. Don’t make me rush this, okay? And if you really have a child, I’m curious why you didn’t mention it before. Anyway, I hadn’t planned on using fire—don’t make me change my mind.” The fellow nodded. Daniel wanted to weep for him, but as soon as he thought that his self-consciousness evaporated. “I once killed a man who lived in a shack, a real eyesore, simply by pushing the shack over on him. It was that easy. People should take better care of their property. Hey, lie down. I’m getting a cramp sitting this way.”
The man wavered, but finally lay down in a slightly fetal position but with his face skyward, because the God of Mayhem had him firmly by his shoulders, and then when he was at last still, by his neck. “You c—could let me go,” he said to the god hanging over him. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“To be frank, what are you going to tell them? I’ll tell you what, if you happen to get out of this, which you won’t, but if you did, tell them God did this to you. Is this too tight, what I’m doing with my hands?”
“G—guess not.”
“I knew that it wasn’t—I know what I’m doing. I just wanted to see if
you’d be honest about it. I know how to create the right amount of pressure with my hands, how to support, how to caress, how to kill. See, you can feel my palms on either side of your neck, and the fingertips, they’re near the base of your skull, just below the ears? That’s your sternocleidomastoids. They hold a lot of tension, and I have to say yours are really tight right now. When’s the last time you had a good massage? Never mind, I realize people are too busy just surviving anymore to get massages, but they really should—it would improve their quality of life. There, doesn’t that feel good?
“Once I let some rats eat a fellow down in an old abandoned cellar. No, don’t tense up again. I’m just telling you a story. It was hard to get the both of us down in there, and that in itself was a little exciting. Dragging him through narrow spaces, and climbing down a shaft. At least it was different, kind of an adventure like you fantasize about when you’re a kid, you know? It ended up being just too much trouble, too much of a time investment. But it was an experiment. Not all experiments are bad.” He paused, and grinned. “Well, depending on who’s the scientist, and who’s the lab rat. But I brought all of these spreads with me—mayonnaise, mustard, peanut butter, whatever I could think of. And I spread them on different parts of his body. He was tied up, of course, otherwise he might have eaten everything.” He stopped. “That was just a joke. Anyway, see, I wanted to see which parts the rats went for first. What they liked, what they didn’t like. What they wanted to eat most. When he was all done up I just stepped back as far away as I could and watched. But the screaming went on way too long for my tastes.”
The God of Mayhem leaned in closer and almost whispered, “I like my hands on your bare skin this way. It’s a little more personal, as this kind of thing, well, as it should be. There’s always a kind of... charge, when it’s skin on skin. Much more intimate than a rope, or a chain, or a wire attached to handles.” The man began to struggle, and the God tightened his hands just enough to still him. The man’s eyes kept moving around. The God could tell what he was thinking.
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