“Would you destroy the ones you love?”
“I love no one.”
“I remember someone you loved; someone who is no longer with us.” Erik’s mouth went dry. He couldn’t speak, and didn’t want to remember; he refused. “You never much liked girls, did you?” Irvine asked, grinning, playing his trump card. “See, when Argus came to us, I thought he looked like your dead little friend from so long ago. You know… the one who got his throat slit. Remember him? Argus is a bit more Asiatic, perhaps. He could never be mistaken for one of us.” By us, he referred to the “white race,” to which he held the utmost regard. Erik’s own opinion of the “white race” was not so grand.
“Argus came to you?” Erik snapped at Irvine, finding that the question demanded an answer.
“Of his own free will,” Irvine said. “And he told us a lot. Not much of it useful, except in the sense that it confirmed what I already knew. You haven’t changed a damn bit. You’re just the same rotten force that you always used to be, but without a leader, you start spouting off non-sense about anarchy and destruction and god knows what other garbage. You need someone to tell you what to do. You’re a powerful personality, but you need to put your damned leash back on and defecate only where I tell you to. Stop making messes in my house or I’ll put you to sleep, you pathetic dog. Stop biting the hand that fed you. What you did to my associate Simon in the City of the Alamo is not acceptable. You’ve caused me to waste a lot of time working plans around him. Now I have to find someone else to take his place.” Irvine’s eyes were grave, serious, and poisonous.
“You disgust me,” Erik replied. “You’re a clown, a freak.”
“Everyone in this world is a freak,” the ghoulish Irvine said, smiling with his jagged teeth. “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t cast the first stone… or something like that. I can hardly remember the proverbs, they were all non-sense anyway.” Diethylamide started to wash Erik away. The sig rune jumped off of Irvine’s face as he came closer, his teeth shining like moldering tombstones. “This Argus looks very similar to your little… uh, friend… perhaps a bit more Oriental. He says you probably had a thing for him. When he said that, I knew that his appearance here was fate. You didn’t know that he came, you showed up to save the drag queen and the lesbian who is secretly in love with you. But a sign is a sign is a sign, as clear as my reflection is painted on your own face.”
Erik started to black out, spinning around a super-massive abyss, feeling the blood in his veins freeze as LSD crystals dissolved rapidly… The world spun around him as he dosed on adrenaline, from fear, from violent disgust, and he vomited across the room as his Satanic overlord cackled from a world away. He collapsed, thankfully away from his own filth, as the world became vortex, sucking me down into an abyss of black or white, or both. Erik heard Irvine’s voice through the static, like a recording, a remnant of humanity’s past, from a time obliterated in atomic fusion.
“I’m glad you’re back, old friend. We have so much work to do, so much joy to bring to this world.”
3. Karma
Erik returned to his senses from lysergic stupor as the plane circled an ice-capped island below. He smelled Irvine’s oozing, irradiated pores a few feet away from him, the rotten pheromones poisoning the plane’s recycled air. He turned his head and saw the cretin to his right, and his seeming protégé, the lady swastika, standing strong beside him. She glanced at Erik as he came to.
“I think he’s returned to his senses,” she said, her voice in search of the approval of her obvious master. He glanced toward me to confirm her suspicions.
“Welcome back,” Irvine said, satisfied at the gleam in Erik’s eye. “Reconfigure your senses; we’re due for a landing. The veins behind Erik’s eyes pulsated. He knew that it had been stupid of him not to bring the neutralizer. He’d become accustomed to thinking on a somewhat logical pathway under the diethylamide’s minimal influence, but under severe duress, his thoughts became more and more abstract, impossible to decipher; and then there were the blackouts.
He glared downward, through the naenotic portal giving them full view of the island below, and he realized with some astonishment that there was more than one uncharted floating chunk of earth in the Pacific; there was a series of them, each capped in tall mountains of ice and rock, with smoke billowing from opened pores in the earth’s surface, volcanoes bubbling red-hot carbon as they approached the terrain. The plane neared a landing pad, with a bright yellow cross painted along its center. It trailed light as the plane moved, he saw it bleeding through time-space, sticking in his mind where it no longer existed. Erik closed his eyes, felt himself sickening.
“There, there,” said Jakob, “you’ve never flown before. You probably never will again. I only say that because I can’t count you out, you cunning bastard.” Erik said nothing in response, as was his general preference. To witness what his enemies would resort to for attention; that revealed the true weakness of a human being.
“Do we still get to kill his friends?” the girl asked, a frown on the verge of breaking through her façade
“He has not decided yet,” Jakob replied, never taking his yellowed eyes from Erik’s face. “We haven’t asked.”
“Can we ask now?” she continued, an annoying persistence and pathetic, vacant whimper underlying her query.
“He’s awake, so I don’t see why not.”
Erik stared at the two of them, vacuous cartoons, filled with gyrating ink, squiggling lines and unimpressive symbols. His lightning bolt, her swastika; he was disgusted with himself for even painting the desecrated doodle upon his own face.
“Shall we murder your friends?” Irvine questioned coolly. “What were their names - Morgan and Pixie?”
“Pixel,” Erik corrected, his voice bleeding with apathy.
“Right,” he continued. “It’s up to you.”
“The decision is actually yours,” Erik chided.
A voice suddenly broke over the intercom as Jakob and his protégé continued to stare holes through me. “Prepare for a rough landing in five minutes,” it mechanically informed the three of them. The girl had something like wonder in her eyes as they darted toward Irvine. Erik sensed she worshiped him. She was stupider than he ever was, even at his worst.
“Well, I suppose one might think of this more as a moral quiz, rather than as a simple pragmatic choice. You can let us kill them, or we can enslave them for the rest of their lives. In either scenario, they are doomed, but the question regards your actual belief in the treasonous non-sense that you spout. Will you kill them to free them? Will you toss them to unknowable chaos as a mercy? Or will you let order enslave them? Really, the choice is yours. Not mine.”
“Kill them,” Erik responded. “I answered your question earlier.”
“That you did,” Irvine said. “I just wanted to see if you stood by it.”
Swastika clapped her hands furiously, grinning from ear to ear. “Yay!” she half-shrieked, her eyes tearing up with malicious glee.
“They’ll see your face when they die,” Irvine continued; “they’ll know that you ordered them killed.”
“They’ll know nothing of this conversation,” Erik snapped, “nothing of their other choice. They would do the same for me, I would hope, if our positions were reversed.” He glared at Irvine, his face unflinching, unblinking.
“I don’t plan on letting you die for a very long time,” Irvine said. “No, not until I’ve used you up.”
The plane began to shake, and the world spun. Erik vomited to their roaring laughter, reality went as red as the carpet beneath him, as gray as the metal he envisioned below it, as blue as the sea cascading out of view. They sailed through the smoke of lava, blacking out the naenotic windows. The black became him as he plunged further into another lysergic abyss, his mind exiting his body and heading to a place he could not catalogue.
After a brief eternity, he came to as fresh air snapped into his lungs. His head spun and his eyes opened, and
before him, a mere fifty feet away, Morgan and Pixel sat upon their knees, knives held to their throats.
“To bleed like pigs,” Jakob said from behind him. Though his hands were in chains, Irvine put his arms around Erik’s neck. A look of shock registered across Morgan’s face – ever the gullible one – though Pixel remained completely apathetic. Jakob glanced at the two men holding them upon their knees. White buckets sat before them, their purpose to him darkly clear. Irvine confirmed it with his next command. “Not a drop of their blood is to soil this earth.”
The guards yanked them upright. Morgan shrieked across the broken concrete of the landing pad toward Erik, her voice breaking through the howling, icy winds of the island. He saw her violet irises spinning like galaxies, even from so far away, their memories trapped between black specks, their existence together on the verge of ultimate end. Time swept over him, so often forgotten or blocked out, yet now undeniable. He felt tears wanting to break, but he shut them back, and thought only of whirling darkness, and then an orange explosion, lighting the night sky to a filthy purple; an atomic reaction, the last they had ever triggered, or ever would – Vegas, cast into Satan’s gnawing mouth by their triplicate hands. They had all shared a special bond because of what had happened in Mormon territory so long ago. Before him, that bond was about to break forever.
“Erik!?” Morgan shrieked, her voice drowned with confusion, fear, perhaps betrayal. It shattered the vision of their time together; the memories could not over-ride the terror of the present moment, and Erik could not escape it. He tried to block her emotions out, her presence and her fear, but it was in vain. “What’s going on!?” she demanded, horrified at her impending, undeniable fate. She sounded like a lost child.
Suddenly, without warning, the knives were drawn almost surgically across their throats, breaking them both in synchronicity. The executioners pushed their thrashing bodies toward the empty buckets, letting the plastic catch every drop of their warm lives, which according to Irvine’s superstitious beliefs, would be boiled into non-existence as to prevent them from ever being re-born upon the planet. Their eyes fixed to Erik, for the first time some kind of realization blossomed across Pixel’s face before the thought was suddenly cut off, enslaved to the order of entropy. Her eyes lost their gleam as she died. Morgan lasted a moment longer, staring at Erik in love and hatred, bleeding the last of her life through the jagged wound in her throat. His friends died before him, extinguished for eternity, bled out like so much dinner.
He heard clapping from behind, and turned to see the lady Swastika, Irvine’s follower, his brat, smacking her hands together like a stupid seal, a portrait of amusement fastened to her soon to be ruined face. He decided that he was going to mess her up quite badly, but he wasn’t going to kill her with his own hands. It would be more interesting to watch her slowly die of blood loss. Jakob, however, would give Erik his soul on this very evening. There would be no escaping that fate.
He glanced at his captor; saw his clownish face illuminated with cheer, fueled by endorphins and serotonin, and whatever other substances he might find useful. “I’m going to pluck your eyes out,” Erik informed him calmly, “and then you’re going to choke to death on them.”
“We’ll see,” Irvine replied, grinning his tombstone teeth.
“You won’t see anything ever again, or think of anything but pain in the few seconds before I cast you into the abyss.”
“Don’t take life too seriously,” Irvine continued, ignoring Erik’s promise to make him eat his own flesh. “Karma is a bitch. You did try to kill me, remember. That being said, welcome to Hawaii. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the weather.”
4. Future
With his eyes closed, Erik listened to the skeletons converse, their teeth chattering through words, rickety bones colliding. In his mind, their images formed. The loudest had a large crack down the face of his skull, extending down to his eternally grinning mouth, a bolt of jagged splinters and broken bone. The voice that spoke from within that face belonged to Erik’s maker, the sewer of his damnation – Jakob Irvine. “Our journey is almost complete,” the skull said to his companion. Viscera began to form around their bones, eyes materialized inside of their bleeding skulls as Erik’s brain painted them into existence. Faces formed upon their new flesh, and the cracked skull’s fracture suddenly exploded into a filthy, grease-painted rune, a lifeless lightning bolt on the corpse to the right and on the corpse to the left, a familiar face broke into his awareness – the face of Elronde.
“You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Erik’s traitorous companion asked.
“I could have killed him much more easily, and for a smaller fee,” Irvine said; “your thirty pieces of silver, then?”
“Your anecdotes fail to amuse me,” Elronde replied.
Neither of the corpses seemed to realize that Erik was awake. Bars formed into his vision, cold gray metal sealing him in; the world became more terrifically real around him, and he understood with horror the gravity of his situation: he was imprisoned, locked in a tiny cage. Across from him was another cage of equal size, and inside of it, yet another familiar face – one which he had expected to see, but not as it appeared to him now. It belonged to Argus. Through blacked-out eyes, he stared straight at Erik, but said not a word. Erik couldn’t tell if the look in his eyes was one of hatred or desperation, or perhaps it was the gaze of pure oblivion. The boy’s nose suddenly started to bleed, and at the sight of it, Erik felt a heart breaking that he had long ago thought turned to dust. He still didn’t blink.
“What happens next?” Elronde asked, still unaware of Erik’s burgeoning awareness. “Can you assure me that no harm will come to Silas?”
“Why do you give a damn?” Irvine replied. “You sold him to me. Can you honestly consider him your friend? You really have no say in what happens next, or any a legitimate interest.”
“He and I are alike,” Elronde replied. “We just went down different paths at a critical juncture. I am only delivering him to you because I know of what value he is to our cause.”
“We don’t have a cause,” Irvine snapped at him. “I have a cause. Erik Silas belongs to me now. So once again, you have no stake in this. He’ll live, if that appeases your conscience.”
“What about our other associate?”
“The Asiatic?” Irvine answered, vaguely disgusted.
“If you must refer to him as such,” Elronde sneered, “though his name is Argus.”
“Like the guardian with thousands of eyes, standing watch outside of Hera’s garden; my, what an inappropriate name. He didn’t even have eyes in the back of his head. He was stupid enough to come here, perhaps under the same influence as you. Except that he didn’t have the connections that you have. He wasn’t owed any favors, as you were. I think that you have exhausted your welcome in Hawaii. You should leave immediately, or you might end up like Argus.”
Irvine’s eyes shifted to Erik as he finished speaking, finally noticing that he was awake. His chattering teeth flashed into a grin, white against stale, brackish black. Candle-light flickered upon his features, lighting the sig rune like a bolt of lightning, momentarily and spontaneously. “Awake,” he said. He glanced toward Argus, who continued to stare lifelessly at Erik. “And you noticed the mongrel,” he hatefully added.
“I’m sorry—“ Elronde started, looking straight at his former friend.
“Shut the hell up,” interceded Jakob, returning his powerful gaze to Erik as he commanded Elronde to cease speaking. “I think you should leave now,” he added.
“I have something to say,” Erik said, mumbling through the bars.
“Say it,” Irvine replied, the grin on his cracked face not faltering.
“After I kill Irvine, I’ll find you, Elronde. And what I do to you will be worse than what I’m going to do to him.” Elronde gave Erik a cold stare, hiding a faint terror, then dispelling it with the fantastic presumption that this was the last time he’d ever see his former leader.
His fear faded, or at least was momentarily buried, and he nodded toward Erik one last time, looking amusingly tragic.
“Goodbye, Erik,” he said. He left the room silently, his bones clacking along the floor of the room as he exited into the black silhouette of the doorway, out into unknown territory. After he was gone for a moment, Erik’s would-be owner broke the silence with a vulgar revelation of his own nature.
“I can have him killed, if you want,” he told Erik, bargaining; “once we see eye to eye.”
“That will never happen.”
“Oh, it will happen, or you are useless to me, and I will have to put you out of your own misery.”
“Perhaps you should try that now,” Erik told him, returning the lunatic’s grin with a predatory smile of his own. Irvine’s colors bled into the orange candle-light as a crest of diethylamide descended his spine into his central nervous system. The world became momentarily animated. Erik saw Irvine’s bones gleaming through his skin as though it was translucent, the crack in his skull descended down the greasepaint lightning bolt smeared across his putrid, irradiated face.
“The future of the human race will look no different than the past,” Irvine continued, ignoring Erik’s remark. “You see yourself behind bars, and your tragic little crush, the Asiatic boy across from you.”
“His name is Argus,” Erik said.
Irvine ignored him, continuing. “Slavery,” he said. “That’s the human way. There is no escaping it. Empires have been built upon slavery. The IAE has brought it back into popular fashion here in the west, but only under the direct orders of the Qabal. My Qabal. Ours.”
Erik glanced toward Argus, who only continued to stare at him through his blacked-out eyes. He suddenly realized that there was something very wrong with the boy. He had not moved an inch or altered his breathing in any way since Erik first awoke from his lysergic blackout. “What’s wrong with him?” he demanded, interrupting Irvine’s diatribe.
Strange Violence Page 15