Il Paradiso

            We walked for hours without stop and every time I tried to slow down Belvedere shouted things at me in languages I didn’t understand and I felt alone and tired and misunderstood despite the knotted mass of us together but I kept walking.

            They carried guns and didn’t try to hide them even though we were walking through the most dangerous section of the pass and the tall camera-towers stood on either side and would have called the shadowy helicopters like flies to carrion should they have been seen or even paid attention to but no one did so we kept walking and they kept carrying their guns.

            The ground was flat and hard and broken in parts by large rocks too small to make the road impassable but too large to comfortably ride a cart or car or horse or ATV over so we didn’t seem to make much progress but there was still much progress to be made and if we slowed Belvedere and the rest continued to shout and the young ones marching in the front continued to cry and I continued to swear vengeance in the half-asleep manner of one who has lost his mind or his will aside from that consuming fury.

            (I have no patience) Belvedere would shout in that voice of his that should have belonged to a god or a statesman or someone who would have used it for something else besides that rage that seemed to boil like fire inside of him.

            There was a soothsayer named Salvador that once had sat and muttered by the fire and thrown tiger’s teeth that snapped and clicked together in the air and had scarred his hands as the spirits made the glyphs face up or down to tell us their twisted wills and he had sent the children into battle for us and we had listened to him but now he was walking with us and beside us as though he was one of us but he was not and when we stopped at one of the streams for a blessed break to drink water two of the young men one of whom had lost his brother in the blood and the war spent the precious seconds they could have spent drinking water they would not get again for hours drowning Salvador in the stream and letting his body float downstream.

            I remember Belvedere laughing and cradling his gun like a child as he watched the two young men drowning our soothsayer and letting his body float downstream and I remember hating him the way I had never hated anything or anyone else in my entire life but there was nothing I could do and that made me hate myself.

            They called it paradise but it didn’t look like paradise.

            They locked us in corrugated steel shacks that twelve of us stayed in per bunk and I remember catching Father’s eyes as he tried to get us together again but Belvedere saw our look and singled Father out and dragged him before the rest of us and chained him to the giant stump that stood in the middle of the compound and chained him to it and stripped him of his clothes so that we saw his tattoos and his scars and his shame and Belvedere told us that Father, but he didn’t use that name, was going to die but he would let the gods of nature do the killing and not waste a bullet and I remember the screams far into the night as the tigers that crept through the compound stripped him of flesh and organs.

            They came to me once during the day and they asked me, (do you know the old ways?) I told them I didn’t but they insisted and they told me they knew the scars on my arms and my hands and refused to let me alone until I allowed them that I knew the old ways but if Belvedere or the others found out they would pull my bones from my body like ribs from a pig and they let me alone but made me swear to assist when the day came.

            The day came and they struck at Belvedere but he knew the old ways too and before they could raise their machetes and strike him down he called fire and poison from the trees that surrounded us in Paradise and consumed them like leaves in a forest fire and he ordered their corpses which crunched like cooked pork to be thrown in the clear and blue ocean and I remember that I was carrying a girl named Annamaria but now she weighed no more than a rick of punk wood and when we threw them in the ocean they floated and Belvedere laughed and asked his men politely to shoot their bodies and they did and the bodies exploded across the water like cones from a pine tree and the fish came and ate the pieces.

            (Sic semper ignavus) I remember Belvedere saying which wasn’t right it should have been something else but I cannot think right now but he left and went back to the white and clean house he lived in and we were locked in our steel huts without light or food and in the middle of our filth and starvation two of the young men who had killed Salvador killed again and ate the bodies and descended to madness and the next day was Christmas but we did not celebrate though Belvedere commanded celebration.

           

            

The Savants

I'll admit, this is dark. 

            They landed on Earth on a Tuesday, for some reason I remember that. So many decades of wondering; we had imagined golden bodies and tentacles, green dwarfs or scarlet gods. We wondered about their size, their metabolism, their lusts. When they came, though, they seemed quiet and reasonable, and both terrifyingly and disappointingly like us. They had translucent blue skin, eyes that glowed nebula orange or green or violet, depending on their mood. They spoke quiet, strangely accented languages, but limited themselves to English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Cantonese. We humans, trained by decades of alien movies, expected annihilation. Instead, the domination was short, minimal, and brutal. They had soldiers that we called Samurai who wore sleek black armor that shrugged off tank rounds like a leather jacket shrugs off hailstones. They were nearly invincible. News cameras captured footage of a single Samurai punching holes in tanks, catching armor piercing rounds like footballs and slinging them back. Twenty of them destroyed the human resistance in New York, seven took Berlin, only three strode into Paris. We hoped that was all they had but when one was slain, with a subnuclear ICBM outside Baltimore, thousands dropped out of the sky, falling from their worldship that anchored itself to our moon and disrupted tides. They quietly, almost apologetically, dragged world leaders into the streets and blew their brains out with weapons that shot glowing slugs. Several of their chieftains politely arranged a press conference and explained that Earth was no longer ours, and to avoid decimation and sterilization we would quietly resume our business and allow them to go about the business of extracting the minerals they needed from our core. Afterwards, they would allow us some measure of autonomy. Their name in their language was long and musical. “Call us Savants,” they said.

They didn’t mean any of it.

Millions died. Those who resisted the massive, gaping holes they tore in the surface of the earth were put down like rabid dogs. The skies were blackened with soot.

            I don’t know who discovered the properties their blood carried. No one ever knows these things. We called them Cannibals. A few fighters in Saint Petersburg managed to kill a Savant who had removed his armor and perhaps in some orgy of bloodlust, drank the blood. They became godlike. They moved nearly faster than people could follow, ran on walls, gained strength beyond natural abilities. They attacked six more Savants and tore them apart. They stole their weapons and assaulted a shuttle heading for the worldship.

            And then the effects wore off. They had assumed the effects lasted forever and hadn’t bothered to put on a samurai’s armor. They were slaughtered like animals when their reflexes slowed, their motor skills returned to normal. They weren’t able to raise the guns the Savants carried like pistols.

            More followed suit, stealing bodies of Savants and draining them of blood they then injected into their arm like heroin. The long-term effects became apparent. They went crazy. Cannibals craved Savant blood. They snapped and snarled. They became feral and would lose themselves in that place in their mind, the eternal ecstasy of the bloodrush. They would hurl themselves, naked and furious and totally without the protection of armor or bloodrush at an armored Samurai, leaving us to dejectedly hose them off the streets. If they had enough blood, though, they could be kept sane enough to keep fighting the way they had. We stole more weapons from them, because as it is with any species, the ones who know best how to kill them belong to their same species.

            I heard about the Cannibals and their fight to get the Savants’ God-King in the worldship, but I continued to hold to my strategy of remaining quiet and going about my business.

Everything changed when the Savants found my wife and daughter had a rare type of gene they wanted for their genetic museum back on their homeworld. They broke into my house at one in the afternoon, found my wife and child there with me, and while one of them smiled gently and held me back, dissected them on the living room floor and harvested them like cuttlefish. I still remember the Savant who did it tying his golden topknot back before surgically laying my still-living wife open from clavicle to pelvis, ignoring her screams as they snipped her organs from their places and sealed them in plastic. Then, my daughter, my child. I went away. I remembered holding her hand as she skipped to her first day of school. I remembered watching her blow out the candles on her fourth birthday. I remembered teaching her how to say her alphabet. And now, along with those, I remember a blue-skinned Savant snapping her ribs as he opened her like a box, taking out her tiny, perfect organs and hosing the blood off of them as she screamed for me, until he took her lungs too.

People ask me why I fight, why I am a Cannibal. I tell them it’s because I’m crazy.

Maybe I am.

The Dreamer

This is an idea I had for a dark, eerie short story. While the execution may be a bit rough the plot is one that is both classic and expansive. It may have potential. I was going for a Lovecraft or Shelley feel in the prose, almost romantic sort of baroque feel, an agelessness that defies strictures of horror or fantasy, like a supernatural Dickens. There is an intended scene with the Dreamer later on in the story, if I ever finish. 

Update: I added some stuff. 

            The old man gestured towards Edward. “You like books?”

            Edward didn’t. He liked book stores. The smell, the look, the feel of gnarled and worn leather against his hand. Thick, tarnished bosses on the spines like taxidermied creatures of eras bygone.  He never read them, curiously enough. What had started as a harmless walk and browse an evening after work had become near obsession. He chose books purely on aesthetic appeal. The more beautiful or different the book the greater the draw it exerted on him.

            “No.” Edward said simply. The man smiled, teeth gapped and angled like broken sidewalk tiles.

            “I have a book you’ll like.”

            Edward hadn’t been to this store before. It was off Burbank and Chancellor street in Grand Braxton, England. The door had been broken off a lorry and hung in a frame of some sort, and Edward had found it by taking a wrong turn and ending up in front of it, staring at the curious sort of place.

            “What does it look like?”

            The wrinkled little man brought out a very plain book from behind his teetering counter. Edward liked it. It was as though someone had sat down and very carefully thought of how to possibly make the plainest book imaginable, except the cover was wood. There was no ornamentation, and the cover was a sort of blackish, stained, gouged out wood. The pages were yellowed but cut perfectly even. The pages were so thin that the whole think resembled a block of layered wood or clay, not a book at all. Edward touched it and nearly recoiled. The cover was like ice, so cold it burned for a moment.

            He opened it. Every page was blank, but with the faintest suggestions of words like ink had once stood like marching soldiers on the cream pages before fading like ghosts. The harder he tried to make out the words the less the words seemed to matter or exist.

            He bought the book and left, taking a right turn and a left and finding himself once again in the familiar streets.

            At home, he placed the book on the table that sat next to his bed. It sat there unmoving as Edward stared at it. He shook himself. It was as though he expected it to move, to jump or dance or speak like men. It remained comfortingly, or disappointingly, booklike. The evening grew chill, Edward warmed a potato in the coals of his oven and baked two rolls in a pan. A bit of cold beef came out of the icebox, and Edward drew the heavy velvet curtains to his apartment and ate his meal in a silence that was neither lonely nor comfortable. The sounds of passing trucks and carriages grew seldom, the voices of the adjacent apartments faded into the swaddled night. Up the stairs, into bed Edward went, pausing a moment to brush his fingers across the cover of the book. It was warm to the touch now. As he laid down in the bed, he pulled the curtains of the bed closed. He thought almost he heard a soft, catlike step across the floorboards, but a breathless moment passed without further sound. As Edward fell asleep he turned his back to where the book sat, and whether this was conscious or unconscious flickered through his mind a moment longer than a thought of that sort might.

            Edward awoke in a cave.

            The air was warm, like the breath of a stranger on one’s neck.

            Thinking himself in a dream Edward thought nothing of it. The passage in front of him was lit without light, and stretched away for a short distance. Edward followed the passage, feeling the walls thoughtlessly as he went. After a moment he reached an opening. He stood in a cavern so enormous a feeling of something like terror flitted over him. An ink dark pool stood as flat as a plate in the center of the enormous cavern. The pool was round like a porthole, opaque but reflective, and so large the other wall of the cavern was swallowed in darkness. Edward found himself drawn towards the pool as though not of his own volition. He reached towards the pool and awoke.

            The moon threw shafts of deathless light threw the bubbled glass of his windows, etching grids on the floor. Edward pressed his hands against the glass, reassured by the coolness of the window against his palms. The street below and away the window rested like a stone river. A faint feeling, neither hunger nor nausea but some brother of the two knotted Edward’s stomach. He took the stairs with the care of the recently awoken, standing in his silent kitchen as he poured a glass of water from the silver pitcher he kept in his icebox. The water drove needles into his teeth and swept the musty flavor from his tongue. Edward left the glass on his counter and returned to his room.

            The book lay open on his nightstand. Edward tried suddenly to remember opening it, and could neither determine that he had or had not. He closed the book. It shut with a slap that was not unlike that of a water snake sliding into a stream, a sound that ran a cool finger down his spine.

           The next morning was the chill gray that heralds bone-cracking cold. Edward sat on the edge of the bed and regained wakefulness before rising to dress. In the middle of putting his waistcoat on he remembered the book. It wasn’t on the nightstand, but instead another book had been set there. A copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth sat in its place. Confused and not a little unsettled, though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, Edward searched the apartment half-dressed until he came upon the volume sitting on his kitchen table. It was open and on the page was a strange symbol, filled with intricate hairlike lines and knots that so tricked and confused the eye it was hard to follow, seeming only to change position and orientation the longer you looked at it. Edward flipped quickly through the other pages, looking for new symbols but nothing was there. When he tried returning to the original page, the symbol was gone. Edward looked at the clock that sat in his foyer, cursed, and resolved to search for the symbol another time.

            He worked at the First Anglican Bank on Halifax, across from a seedy pub he took lunches in. At noon, Edward walked across the street for a bowl of fish soup and a muffin. Inside, a group of sailors had taken up residence at several of the tables Edward would normally sit at so he was forced to take a position at the bar. Not three minutes later a large Swede, stinking of rum and ocean, stumbled to the bar and sat directly next to Edward.

            “Have you heard?” His ice-blue eyes bored into Edward’s brown ones.

            “Heard what?”

            “The graffisk. They found a graffisk in morning.”

            “What’s a graffisk?”

            The Swede emanated exasperation before replying. “A white squid was found this morning on the beach near the pier. Bad omen.”

            “What does it mean?”

            “Death is coming.” The Swede hailed the bartender before turning back to Edward. “Death is going to come to Grand Braxton, mark my words. It won’t be pretty.”

            “What should I do?”

            “Leave. Go to the states, or up north, if you can. Ireland or Scotland. South, per’aps. The West Indies. Anywhere but ‘ere.”

            “Will it reach London?”

            “The last time we found a graffisk was the beginning of the Great War. Before that, the potato famine in Ireland. When it happens, it will be bad.”

            Edward nodded, shaken, and returned to his soup. The Swede drained the beer he was given, threw a coin on the counter and shambled off.

            That night, Edward went to bed with some trepidation. The book was still sitting on his kitchen table where he’d left it that morning, but with shaking hands he put it in the cabinet below his desk and locked the door. Mentally laughing at himself for his superstition, he traipsed upstairs, locked the bedroom door and after getting into his nightclothes, pulled the curtains on his bed. Sleep didn’t come at first, but deep into the night rain began to fall and somewhere in the depths of his racing thoughts, Edward fell asleep.

Hungry Jack and Montezuma

                Lee felt the familiar feeling come over him again: the raw, shaky panic that rumbled low in his chest and made his stomach roil. Outside the cell, the caravan was rolling up the gates. Hungry Jack’s armored trucks, salvaged from a forgotten Loomis motor pool and splashed with a crude red crown on their bulldog hoods, idled outside the steel rolling gates. Lee stood and watched out the reinforced chicken wire window as the black flagship armored truck started forward once the gates had opened, followed by the next three.

                Hungry Jack would eat now, Lee thought. Then he and his men would summon the women, spread the wealth they had torn from the dead fists of vagrants, gypsies, tribalists and the homesteaders that stubbornly attempted to carve a home from the thick jungle that boiled from the superrich soil. After that, well, Jack would sate his lusts with his favorite concubines and then call—

                There was the sound of a steel lock sliding back, and the door swung open. Two soldiers stood there, heads wrapped in the damp white headscarves that kept them cool in the unrelenting tropical heat. One carried a machete, the other one of the precious shotguns.

                “Up, you.” One of them roughly grabbed Lee by the arm and hauled him to his feet. The one with the shotgun stayed in the hall. Lee was frog marched out into the dilapidated passageway. Hot sunlight tore through holes in the plaster walls, throwing shards of light on the slick, mossy tiles of the ancient mental hospital. Through these holes creeping vines the thickness of a strong man’s bicep snaked, spreading their roots on the eternally damp surfaces. Through the holes in the walls Lee could see the climbing baobabs with dark fortresses of roots, colossal kapoks and abiu trees with swollen yellow fruits like warning buoys.

                The double doors to what had once been the chief administrator’s personal quarters were thrown open and Lee was shoved forward onto the moldering carpet. Hungry Jack sat on his makeshift dais, four of the largest desks in the building had been pushed together in the cathedral-ceilinged room. Four oriental rugs and a huge papasan chair had been sat atop this, and behind it all a brightly colored, hand-carved wall of wood was nailed to the desks, creating a sort of throne. Two of the concubines lounged at his feet, wearing only long beaded loincloths about their waists. They gazed at Lee with hooded eyes, slight smiles. 

                Hungry Jack claimed to be as old as the Cataclysm. Few believed him, as it would have made him a hundred and fifty years old, but others claimed the Cataclysm had changed more than the atmosphere and the soil. He had no memory of the time before the Cataclysm, Jack claimed. He had been sent to earth as a child of the sun, a god. He had no name and no occupation, but awoke in a factory of some sort. The story, as he told it, was of him standing and seeing a sign before him of his name and his purpose. He had torn down the sign and taken a vehicle, driving until it would not go any further. He wandered, clutching only his banner and a monkey wrench until he reached a small tribe wandering the grasslands that were swiftly turning to jungle. He had taken control, founded his empire in the mental hospital, and put up his banner, his mantra, in the throne room in which he now sat.

                The banner behind Jack said “Hungry Jack: Everybody’s happy when it’s Hungry Jack.”

                “So this is the assassin.” Jack’s eyes were devastatingly lifeless, the blue of a strangled man’s face or a vein under the surface of the skin. His face was dark from the sun, his hair was an unnatural white that stood up in every direction, a strange disconnect with his otherwise youthful appearance. His body rippled with muscle, wearing only military style cargo shorts in camouflage and swimming shoes. Across his chest was a tattooed jolly roger, and dozens of crosses decorated his arms. Each one of those stood for a man he had killed. He lounged in the throne, smiling.