“He’s been given a lobotomy. He should still make a fair price as a sex worker, however. Nothing is wasted that can be saved!” Erik felt his heart stop beating at the suggestion, knowing that Irvine was bluffing about neither statement. “If you prefer, I can have him killed like your other two friends. Why stop at two? Although I suppose you might think that what I’ve done to him is in many ways the equivalent of death, since he will never again be the person you remember him as. Those parts of him that made him a person to you have been tossed into the ocean for the fishies to munch on. I suppose today they’ll be getting a hefty dose of brain-food.”
“Why? Why did you do it?”
“To teach you a lesson,” Irvine replied. “I’m going to leave Elronde alone. As I said, we owed him a favor. But there is another of your group unaccounted for. Her name is Shiloh. There are various operatives about, but most of them have been rounded up during your time under IAE imprisonment. Whatever sort of resistance you were building has been completely dismantled. Once I find her, I suppose she will be lobotomized as well, although my Intel says that she’s had her face mutilated in an acid-throwing incident. If this is true, we might as well kill her and harvest the organs. Are you aware that we’ll have to take them out of her while she is still alive, under minimal sedation? She will wish she’d already died and gone to Hell while it’s happening.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Erik questioned, staring Irvine down with cold hatred.
“Why would I not? You can stop it, of course. You just have to agree to join me. You will be heavily sedated for a few weeks in order to prevent your trying to escape or pull one over on me. But I think that, in spite of our philosophical differences, you will see that we shall inevitably come to the exact same conclusion – and thus, we might as well work together to make it happen.”
Erik could think of nothing to say to Irvine’s repulsive proposition; he cursed himself for even letting the monster speak this much. This was exactly how he used to be controlled and manipulated, though at this juncture, he saw no other way out of the situation except to temporarily cede control to Irvine. For a Qabalist, the man made Pope Simon look like an amateur.
“What do you have in mind?” Erik asked, grinding his teeth at having to give the object of his hatred the upper hand in the conversation.
“Complete chaos,” Irvine replied, “at least for awhile. What else would I be talking about? And I don’t mean of the nuclear variety. Been there, done that. I like your ideas of anarchic renaissance. In fact, you unknowingly carried out our first experiment in New Mecca. Elronde provided you with LSD – synthesized on this very island by me. Then, at my command to Dr. Khalid – who, as a true scientist, is very interested in how you’ve turned out – you were dosed for four consecutive months. It has turned you into who you are today: before a common anarchist, now a delusional, self-proclaimed symbol. Your fractured ego has been blown out of proportion with the introduction of a never-ending acid trip to fuel your mania. But you know how I love symbols. And through all of it, I can still see you for what you are – my child, my creation. We were meant to work together.”
“Get to your point,” Erik advised him testily, “and tell me what it is you want me to help you do.”
“I plan to release a virus,” Irvine continued, “that delivers a massive dose of the LSD compound into the host’s body. It is, for all intents and purposes, living diethylamide, airborne, and highly potent. The body’s immune system is incapable of fighting it off. The effects are permanent. I intend to dose everyone upon the American continents first, and if the operation is successful, the contagion shall spread east, first to Japan, and then into Eurasia, until we have complete global coverage. I think it’s finally time for the Islamic-American Empire to come to an end, though I don’t plan on replacing it with some other inane theocracy. From now on, we cut straight to the bone. No more pacification – it won’t be necessary anyway. Gibbering drug abusers will believe anything I tell them to. The initial crest of infection will make people impossible to rally, but after the host has become used to its new, extreme way of thinking, people will do anything that I tell them to do; particularly since I won’t be affected. The neutralizing agent which Elronde has on occasion provided you with was also synthesized by me, and I have an endless supply. This may or may not interest you – I can’t tell whether you actually like thinking like a whimpering egomaniac all the time or not.”
“If slavery is your purpose, I would rather die than help you,” Erik replied.
“You will help me,” Irvine answered, “but only after you watch Shiloh get eviscerated.” Erik glanced to Argus one last time. The boy’s eyes were still fixed upon him, blank, expressionless. He thought of Argus’ future, and of his past. “As an added bonus, you can have the Asiatic,” Irvine continued, as if bartering with Erik to try and seal the deal. Erik’s body went cold, every hair upon him stood suddenly on end; his fists clenched tightly, desiring to shovel the eyes from Irvine’s skull already. “You can have him, or anyone. You can rule the world with me. You can forget your petty, purposeless existence, and give your life a meaning. It will be easier than you can imagine. I want you to rule with me, Erik. Don’t forget what I’ve offered. It’s inevitable. The future of the human race is slavery. You will either be on my side or on a leash and heavily sedated.”
Irvine walked to the flickering candle and spared a final glance at Erik, whose own eyes were locked upon Argus in tragic reverie; then Irvine blew it out, leaving them in darkness, Erik’s most familiar of sanctuaries.
5. Chaos
Erik heard voices, but didn’t open his eyes. “Leave the mongrel for now,” one said, “he’s not going anywhere.” He felt himself lifted into the air, the chains of gravity tugging upon his atoms as he was carried from the darkness into an outside air with vaguely putrid under-currents. A cold chill spiraled through the bars caging him in his hovering prison, carted forth by those who bore the many voices breaking into his sanctuary. He wished them to leave him alone, though he knew that wherever they were going, he was going with them. He kept his eyes closed tightly, wishing not to leave the safety of the black world inside of his own mind. Still, he could not fully shut the world out; when he heard their alpha speak, his voice was louder and clearer than the rest.
“We’re nearing the facility,” Irvine said. “Has it been properly prepared?”
“Of course, sir,” replied a voice – one belonging to the doomed brat that Erik had come to think of as the lady Swastika.
“I propose that we use the nullification agent first, to see if he can be reasoned with under a normal degree of sentience.”
Erik opened his eyes and gazed out of the cage carrying him, first upward, toward the void. He read once inside of a withered text from the 21 century that a black-hole sat at the center of the universe, inhaling all of creation into its void. It was this that he prayed to. A pale green full moon hung high in the ebony sky, hovering above the silhouette of a petrified tree-line. He gazed around as they marched through the darkness, noting stone wood all around, a forest petrified during the blight of nuclear winter. Chilly air blew through it, opening his pores, freezing his bones. He had not realized as they approached earlier on the plane that the jungles had been completely mortified, frozen to dead stone on the tide of humanity’s great apocalypse.
He said nothing as they moved forward, and the rest of the group went silent as well. He heard only foot-steps upon gravelly dirt, but otherwise the jungle was eerily silent. He wondered how this was possible; Swastika for the most part had been unable to shut her mouth for more than a few seconds when they first met upon the plane. He supposed that she was terrified of the night. He’d have to remember that.
He became so focused upon the shuffling of feet, lost in the pondering of their present destination, that at first he did not hear the approach other foot-steps, seemingly different in their dynamic of carbon upon carbon, as though more accustomed to silence and st
ealth. It was only when the brigade carrying him forth came to a complete stop and put his cage upon the ground that he realized that the group had been quietly surrounded. The soldiers moved out, away from him; one of them, he noticed, was Randolphus. The green moon shone a reflection in his goggles for a moment as he passed through Erik’s vision.
“Do you hear that?” Swastika asked, her voice trembling.
Irvine was surrounded by four men, who all drew their weapons. Two aimed up into the trees, and the other two aimed into the surrounding darkness of the stone jungle.
“Didn’t you assure me that wild-life had been kept at a safe distance from all of our facilities?” Irvine snapped toward Randolphus. His gun quavered as he moved horizontally through the tree-line, looking for the source of the noises that had been surrounding them a moment ago. He noticed now that they had stopped. Erik suddenly realized just what the sounds had been: tree-branches cracking, and strange, soft foot-steps.
“There’s nothing out here, sir,” Randolphus told Irvine, though the tone of his voice revealed that he didn’t even half-believe that statement to be true. “Nothing could survive on this half of the island. We do daily patrols.”
“It’s the night, you idiot!” Irvine snapped at him. He withdrew his own weapon, and then glanced toward Erik, trapped in his cage as it sat upon the rocky floor of the wood. “Maybe it’s someone coming to rescue you,” he said, sounding vaguely sarcastic, though a slight undertone revealed that he believed it to be within the realm of possibility.
“Think what you want,” Erik told him. “Plot out, plan all that you desire. Imagine slavery forever, think yourself above the other ‘races,’ suspect yourself of magic, and godliness. But none of it will be true. You are nothing but a man, and the tide of fate is on my side. It’s time for your kind to fall forever.”
“You would destroy all of mankind?” he questioned, sounding somewhat delirious with terror.
“What kind did you think I was referring to?” Erik replied, unable to conceal a grin. As he finished his sentence, something flew from out of the tree-tops, landing with a thud on the broken jungle gravel. Torch-lights flashed toward it, illuminating two dead eyes, their whites marbled with blood; eyes that belonged to Elronde. The head had been torn from his shoulders, perhaps clave initially with some kind of weapon, and it was covered almost entirely in blood. Still, through the mask of red, he made out the features without a doubt. Swastika began to scream in a high-falsetto; it signaled the beginning of the blood bath.
“My God—” said Randolphus, but was interrupted by the shriek of an animal, one which sounded like nothing Erik had ever heard before. A large, irradiated beast ran out of the darkness toward him, larger than a gorilla, with huge monkey’s eyes, blood-shot and filled with crimson radiance. It practically galloped across the petrified landscape, its large, yellowed-teeth bared and hungry for human flesh.
Randolphus fired at it, but three more of the beasts dropped from the dark tree-tops, suddenly attacking him, tearing him immediately to pieces. Erik saw his arms and legs flying through the air as the monstrosities sank their teeth into meaty, shrieking flesh. Flashes of their bright red, patchy skin illuminated the darkness as the torches of Erik’s Qabalist exploiters fell to the dirt, their screams piercing through the silent, petrified air of Hawaii. He recognized the species immediately as they neared his cage, staring at him with strange intensity, and yet not even trying to pry him from behind its bars; they were baboons, and remarkably irradiated.
Irvine screamed the loudest as his limbs were ripped from him piece by piece. The alpha of the pack, adorned with a large scar across his chest, tossed Irvine’s still living remains toward Erik’s cage. He wheezed, lost in pain and suffering as blood poured from his missing limbs. Chaos was being very cruel to him. He gave Erik a few sparing glances, but his attentions were largely concerned upon the mortal wounds inflicted upon him by the tribe of mutated monkeys, bringing him to a well-deserved end. Erik decided that he was not paying enough attention, and decided to make good on his promise to rip out the man’s eyes and shove them down his throat.
He grabbed Irvine and dragged him back toward the cage, then plunged his fists into the man’s face, clenching his eyes long enough for him to realize what was about to happen. He had a brief moment of sentience and began to try and bargain for his life. When the first eye was removed, his bargaining turned to cursing, but before Erik could remove the second and shove it into his mouth, the baboons dragged him away and began to have seconds. They tore him apart and feasted, but sensing his rotten, irradiated biology, they spat his flesh into the rocky dirt. Erik wished he had not yet died, living still to suffer on, but he seemed to have departed. At the realization of the death of his maker, he breathed a sigh of relief that seemed to carry with it the confusion of his purpose, and the burden of his guilt.
When the impromptu massacre was finished, three torches burned upon the ground, and one flickered to death. A mutant baboon leaned down and looked into Erik’s cage. He stared into its eyes, waiting for it to try and maim him. He sensed something behind its visage; something which his adrenaline lead him to believe was an intelligence, perhaps even mystic in nature. Feeling himself in a dream, he recited to the beast his favorite passage, from Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad. It was the first book he had ever read, given to him by Jakob Irvine himself.
“Thy hand, great Anarch lets the curtain fall,” he whispered, “and universal darkness buries all.”[5]
For a moment, it seemed as though the mutant grinned at him with its bloody baboon’s teeth. Then it stood, motioning to its comrades. Even in the desolate irradiation that had ruined their genes, they were evolving, learning to communicate more directly; their evolution was perhaps even spurred on by their near-extinction during the cataclysmic fallout of the last world war.
Once they had departed, Erik waited, expecting to starve to death or freeze in the jungle, or to be eaten by something even more vicious than the mutated monkeys. He stared at the shredded remains of the cultists, of Jakob Irvine, laughing internally – his best laid plans, all of his conspiratorial workings, his energies, his years of plotting – destroyed by irradiated monkeys in a petrified jungle. Erik could hear Chaos laughing, he felt Discordia stroking his hair. The wind picked up, and in it he heard the light foot-steps of a savior, an angel.
A moment later, leaning in front of his cage, was the cloaked face of a ninja, and peering out through the only opening in the mask were the damaged eyes of the most beautiful woman he had ever known.
Shiloh.
“I led the mutants here,” she said. “They followed me when I arrived. I was almost dinner. Then I saw Elronde was here, and he saved us; I got them to follow the scent of his blood after I cut off his traitorous head.”
Erik could think of no words to show her his pride, and simply beamed a grateful smile at her. She disappeared for a moment, and he heard her picking the lock to his cage. After the door swung open, he stepped out and stood up, stretching out fully, cracking his neck. A crystal shard broke off, trailing a vein.
“What now?” Shiloh asked.
Erik glanced around at the chaos, noticing immediately that the brat with the Swastika on her forehead was nowhere in sight. He made it a priority to track her down and slit her throat for her hand in the murder of his comrades. He decided to tell Shiloh about this later.
“Argus is alive,” he said. “Or at least, breathing. He is to come with us when leave this island. First, we need to survey the facilities, and acquire anything that may be of use to our future operations. We will need to re-group and acquire others who are willing to die for our cause, as we are.” He pondered Irvine’s talk of the diethylamide virus, and weighed its potential use in his campaign for the destruction of human consciousness. It seemed clear to him what he must do. The voices in his head debated, but his mouth spoke without listening to them. “After that,” he continued, “we have some chaos to unleash.”
Bullet
proof Faces
1. Face erasing.
I took seventeen LSD blotters two days ago. I saw many things. I still see them, even though the visuals have mostly departed. One memory of my trip sticks in my mind like an ominous sign. In the hallucination, I was no longer under the dome. There was only darkness overhead. The air was different, colder. And there was no noise.
There is constant noise in the waking world. All hours of the day and night the government plays something they call “music.” Sometimes it’s tolerable, even likeable, but usually I can’t stand it. Neither can anyone else. It keeps us on edge.
In the hallucination, there was no music. There was silence of the type I’ve only ever experienced in my sleep. I was standing on something, some kind of metal track in the ground. And there was a sound in the distance, an alien howling. A wailing monster was heading right for me and it’s eyes were bright lights, so bright that they blinded me.
I stared at this harbinger heading toward me at an indescribable speed, coming out of the blackest depths of the Nothing. I moved off of the track and it sped past me in a blur, and I realized it wasn’t a monster at all. It was some kind of vehicle. It was metal, and there were people in it. I stared in awe as it passed me and disappeared into further blackness.
Then, from overhead, I heard the frightened whispers of a rapture, a salvation from Bit City for a chosen few that surely must have already come, one that left the rest of us sinners to die beneath its dome. I saw no source of the voices, but I knew I was not alone. Then, like another memory on repeat, I heard the shrieking of the metal thing again, saw its lights in the distance and watched it pass.
This time as my eyes followed it, it didn’t head into the outer darkness. There was something in the Nothing that was not there the first time the train had come by. I saw it clearly. Some kind of dome. And there were smoke and lights coming out of the top, shining like a spotlight into the darkness above.
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