Snow Over Utopia

by Rudolfo A. Serna

  Miner and Eden stumbled through the forest, trying not to fall into oblivion. Eden felt the grip of Miner’s hand and heard his heavy breaths. She hoped that perhaps there were no more deputies left, and that they had been defeated by the yellowish fiends.

  Miner’s eyes adjusted under unnamed stars. The wayward children of the conditioning camp ran until they could no longer hear the clanging steel or shouts of battle, not knowing who had won, not knowing where they were.

  “A glow,” Miner said, looking back into the canyon, struggling to see the torchlight like orange eyes in the distance.

  “Go …” Eden said quietly.

  Eden felt the ground and the branches raking across her face.

  “Wait,” Eden whispered. “You hear?” Her hand reached out, pointed. Miner could barely see anything, just the glow of the orange lights looking for them.

  “It’s over there,” she whispered again.

  “What is?”

  “Keep going. It has to be there.”

  They were both blind. He felt her hand, leading him, following the whisper, it was Eden leading them through the pitch dark woods. The orange glow fading away, swirling in the canyon left behind them, the raiders putting bullet holes in the remaining transmorphins, looking for any of the others that may have gotten away.

  The Manager looking for the old woman, the witch he was led to by the words of the tortured deputy seeking a path to the Nighttime World, interrogated by the skull machine. The words still singing to him, feeling them being guided to the shack, and the Manager wasn’t sure if he had seen her in the orange goblin light of the torches and the opened door of the shack before the transmorphin attacked. Sifting through the ornaments of pelts and skins. The oils and vials of formula in the corner, along with the different bones.

  “No eyes! No eyes!” He yelled.

  The Manager came out of the shack he had lit on fire.

  “Find the witch! Find the witch!”

  The deputies on their horses stomping on the backs of the transmorphins, slashing through their heads in the light of the burning shack.

  The Manager mounted his horse. The pain in his chest already started to puss. The strike of the yellow beast had been deep. The Manager saw the creature standing naked except for the bits of canvas coveralls that signified it had once been a miner in the company town. He raised the pistol and shot one deafening ball into the back of its head. The witch had not released them from their resurrection as promised, instead of becoming human again, the transmorphins were destroyed on the spot, needing the addictive solution that the witch had kept feeding them. The addictive serum in a vial left dangling on a tree branch where their yellow fingers could find it. But the power to free themselves was always there. All they needed to do was die again by having their head severed, or by destroying the brain.

  In the light of the burning shack the Manager kicked the body of one of the creatures onto its back, holding the torch down close to its face. The bright red gums, and razor sharp teeth, like a mouth full of ivory quills. The front of its face holding on to the skull, by a narrow sliver of yellow flesh, and a red eye still staring upward.

  “Abominations,” the Manager said, before shooting it again in the head.

  The Manager grabbed the horn of the saddle and lifted himself to the top of the horse, his chest burning with the wound. He kicked the animal and joined the frenzy of the deputies crashing through the forest with their orange torches spinning, searching for the eyes of Eden. Not knowing that the murderous miner was lost in the forest with her. Already the hallucinations had started, he thought he could see the blue eyes in the dark staring back at him from the tree line at the end of the field where Eden had once stood, feeling for the sun.

  He kicked the horse again and chased after the deputies into the trees.

  The bones of the old woman had been found dangling like the herbs and specimens she had dried on the shack walls, she had already been uploaded by Earth Machine, hanging from a branch with a rope around her neck, she had joined the plane of the third eye by committing glorious suicide.

  Four

  The smell of wet aspen grew stronger.

  The morning star was fading, the morning sunlight warming her face.

  Miner stared at her, her empty eye sockets still wrapped in dirty cloth. He listened for hoofs breaking through the beds of pine needles, and heard only the clacking birds. They stood on a bluff, exhausted, steam rising from their parted lips. But they could not rest.

  “What do you see?” Eden finally asked.

  Miner tried to find a word to describe the sublime world that surrounded them.

  “Mountain,” he finally said. Seeing the snow on the peaks, he imagined animal caves, winged beasts snarling, dreadlocked and fleeced, roaming the purple shades.

  “Mountain,” Eden repeated softly.

  The sight of the peaks on the horizon did not help Miner with his fear. He was looking across an endless wilderness, desperate to find an ocean.

  “What else do you see?” Eden finally said.

  “A tree,” Miner said.

  “A tree?”

  The massive top of the tree formed a triad with the rising sun, and the distant peaks, that only Miner could see. But Eden could feel that it was waiting.

  “That’s where we go,” she said, as if she could see it with him.

  “What?”

  “The tree … I hear it.”

  Miner plotted a course that would take them down from the bluffs to where they would enter the thick edge of the forest, as they had emerged from the crevices that they followed all night through the mountain. The swaying giant stretching tall against the distant mountain range that was pink with the morning light, while the purple peaks were covered with snow.

  Fear gripped Miner. For a long moment, he felt helpless, yet the sunlight began to give him courage. He searched out a direction, scanned for openings, tried to figure out a way to the giant.

  Miner and Eden drank from the waterskin, taking sips to soothe their dry throats before climbing down off the edge of the bluff.

  He pushed the branches out of the way of Eden’s face, as they pushed through the heavy brush and pine-riddled floor of the forest. She held his arm, stepping over the fallen timber.

  Morning passed into noon. Then the sun started to set, the light changing.

  Eden could hear the boughs of the Juggernaut calling, the tree swinging in the fading sky. It was as if she had done this all before.

  Miner felt her tug, silently watching her bandaged face.

  “Can you hear it?” She asked.

  Miner looked through the woods but still could not feel the giant.

  “It sings,” Eden said, remembering the long moments she spent sitting in front of the old woman’s shack, just listening, thinking it would take her an eternity to understand the cryptic language being spoken among the trees.

  “There!” Eden said, pointing.

  “What do you hear?” Miner asked.

  “It’s talking,” she said.

  The scar down the side of her face was smeared with dirt and sweat.

  Miner tried to hear what she heard.

  “Keep going,” she said as she changed direction and walked carefully and steadily, with one hand out to protect herself against the dangling branches.

  Miner only heard dead timber being pulled and pushed in the breeze, creaking as if speaking, until a strong gust would cause the top of the Juggernaut tree to roar.

  Its skin was thick and rough, blackened with old fire-scars grown over layers of trenched bark, where parasites had lived living in the decay, and the cawing crows filled the highest of branches, hanging with moss and diseased mistletoe that dangled like broken spider webs. Shrieking birds took flight, their black wings flashing.

  Eden’s hand felt the rough skin.

  The jar holding her eyes scraping along the surface of the goliath, tucking it further in to her sling to protect it, walking the base of the tr
ee in the fading light. Miner noticed the entrance. He grabbed at a thick frayed rope connected to a wooden door that had been set in the root and ground.

  He tugged at the door. It creaked open.

  A brownish glow emitted from a globe embedded in the earthen wall. A dull brown light dimly lighting the den and its stone floor.

  Miner saw a chair, strangely curved, old and peeling, its function unknown to him.

  “We should leave,” Miner said.

  “No. This is it,” Eden said. There were no books, candles, or parchments scribed with symbols, but Eden knew. She remembered the vision of Witch Mother hunched over the ledger. It had spoken to her, telling her about the sea, the color of her eyes, revealing the mission that awaited them. Eden remembered the layout of the den in her dream. She felt her way down a set of steps dug out of the ground, reaching out to find the dimensions of the room, trying to remember where the objects were placed, while the Witch Mother sat at the table, scribbling in the ledger.

  Miner remained at the top of the entrance, unwilling to enter.

  “Nothing here,” Miner said.

  “It’s here,” Eden said.

  Miner did not want to wait with her.

  He studied the orb light. Its construction was unfamiliar to him. Made of material round and smooth, formed without metal welds or rivets, neither candle, lamplight, nor ember glow. Despite the orb’s faint illumination, the den was still too dark. He no longer wanted to be underground.

  Leaving her behind, he tried to get comfortable on the dried bed of needles at the base of the tree. He rummaged through his satchel for food, trying to recall the face of the old woman. But she existed only as a voice, visions transmitted, hallucinations in the smoke of her magic.

  Yet, Miner knew that the tree existed and that Eden was below, attempting to make contact. He did not know if the posse was still out there pursuing them. He was sore and tired, picking slowly at the hard slivers of squirrel, lying beneath the Juggernaut with a breeze picking up then fading away again. The giant’s head slowly banged against the sky.

  Miner was hungry and remembered that when he was still in the mines, the meals were announced by loud steam whistles, whistles that freed the miners from their graves, bloodied and exhausted, full of green dust from the shattered ore. Then the same whistle condemned them again in the morning.

  He didn’t know how far they had walked.

  He drank a little water. We will need more. Lying on the ground beneath the tree, Miner looked at the entrance to the Juggernaut tree, a faint light washing through the opening. Eden was in the ground among the roots. Miner could smell the dank soil at the tree’s base. He did not want to disturb her, so he remained still so that the posse would pass them by if they should find their trail.

  Miner took the blanket and covered himself with it.

  Inside the tree, Eden rocked in the strangely designed chair, cradling the jar that held her eyes. The chair creaked with her weight. She teetered back and forth, connected to the Earth Machine, and the Witch Mother waded in a stream of transmission.

  At dawn, they stumbled on, leaving the Juggernaut tree behind them. Rummaging to find the last bits of food in the satchel, the crumbs of biscuits and parts of squirrel that the old woman had given them, but it would not be enough.

  Eden remembered the old woman whispering, the cold lips pressed to her ear, feeling the breath forming images against a sky that lingered neither in wake nor sleep.

  They ate the last of their food.

  Eden felt the sun rising. She held the jar still wrapped in a sling across her chest.

  Witch Mother had transmitted to Eden in the rocking chair: Agents of the Witch Mother, in their timeless war against creation’s killers, and they were heading towards Utopia to get Eden’s eyes put back into her head.

  The deputies bivouacked in the hills, the reins of their horses jingling in the cool night air.

  The Manager suspected the Baron of being something other than human. He’d seen the Baron speaking to skulls glowing with purple eyes, in the walls of his study, receiving direction from a mysterious source far from the palace. The Manager could not know of the Baron’s mutantoid connection, but he suspected possession by some alien force.

  The Manager understood the power of the blue yes, coveted them.

  The posse got further away from the company town, drifting into the wilderness. The Manager’s greed for the power broke the bonds of company training. He’d come to believe in the supernatural powers of the Midnight Queen, the mysticism of the eyes, the eyes that were given power through belief in the Nighttime World, and he would be allowed to live forever in the harem of the Midnight Queen.

  The Manager remembered the bloodied miner rampaging through the office door, striking down the clerks and enforcers that he had been in charge of. The rebellious face of the miner would not be tolerated. The Manager wanted to take his head and present it to the Baron and place it on the wall of skulls. Then he would steal the blue eyes of Eden in the hope that the fanatical beliefs of the Baron were real.

  He wanted the miner’s head dangling from his saddle, and the eyes in its jar, nestled in his lap. The hunt had gone on for much too long. The Manager felt feverish, the claw marks across his chest that burned and ran with pus, but he had no way of tending to the festering wounds inflicted by the witch’s transmorphin servant.

  The Manager did not know where the transmissions came from. He did not know of the faces that stood under the purple illuminants. The Manager’s fever raged with company fanaticism and infection, while the deputies waited silently and morosely in the flickering flames of a small campfire.

  The Manager was sure that the deputies would remain in the Baron’s service, following the company orders, dying for holy causes. The deputies took long drinks from the skins filled with potions that gave them the strength to kill for holy causes. But they were away from their core of worship, the whips of enslavement, the chains of imprisonment and industry.

  Like the fascist princes of long ago, the Manager mounted his horse and plunged forward into the night to puncture the demon’s lung, to draw breath from the wound.

  Five

  The fusion of black-mass was contained just before the advent of the green sky, and the only light in the catacombs for a thousand years was the purple glow.

  The mutantoid priests learned how to channel the purple energy.

  Rediscovered the technology of their ancestors scribbled on the wall by the suffering descendants of scientists struggling in the purple light, trapped in the catacombs of secret labs and the factories that generated the black-mass.

  The Baron must be removed.

  Dangerous infections.

  Imagination.

  Bizarre transmissions being received by the continuum, coming from the Baron’s brain, his fantasies carried on streams of data, appearing on screens, images of monstrous Juggernauts losing their eyes to the silver raptors under a green sky.

  The beliefs of the cult flowed on in to the continuum, a virus—infected by the Baron’s imagination: The Midnight Queen on her throne, grinning and beckoning the mutantoid children with coal black eyes, naked breasts undulating from a leather corset.

  The mutantoid children of the continuum licked their lips and rubbed each other’s genitals, watching the demoness beckoning them across an obsidian floor. They wandered out to the dead forest under the full moon, removing their goggles and staring at the moon.

  Bring the Baron home.

  The Baron sat in front of his wall of skulls, flashing purple light from their sockets.

  “You must return to the continuum,” the skull told him the words that only he could hear.

  “Are you my queen?”

  “You are no longer management. You must return—return—return.”

  “Return?” the Baron said. “There is nowhere to return to but the Nighttime World. Are you the Midnight Queen?” the Baron asked.

  “There is no Midnight Queen—no
Midnight Queen—no Midnight Queen.” the continuum deemed.

  The eye sockets of the skulls flickered a sequence of flashing blinks and pulses that mirrored the voices of the mutantoid comptrollers, touching one another, yanking at their sex organs, wrapped in black, oily imitation skin, put on and removed. Thoughts transmitted from the catacombs of the apocalypse, across the desert valley to the Baron’s castle on the edge of a cliff overlooking the company town.

  “My queen, I am here, take me, please, I cannot stand it—I cannot stand it here anymore!” The Baron lowered himself to his knees and reached up with his hands to the skulls that spoke to him, but he could not hear anymore transmissions; the skulls had gone silent, no longer emitting psychic transmissions. The Baron bent over in agony, grabbing his knees.

  He rose and crawled back onto a chair with the glass ball bubbling with yellow vapor rising.

  “I am here, come, take me—please!” the Baron pleaded, pumping the foot-peddle, filling the glass ball with yellow smoke swirling with visions of blue eyeballs. The Baron stared deeply into the globe, attempting to enter the Nighttime World, where in a great temple, the Midnight Queen sat on a metallic throne. Temples to her glory with bonfires of bodies piled high, orgasmatronic sainthood bestowed on demon lovers torn apart by her claws and teeth. In desperation, the Baron spoke to the silenced skulls. “Look! There! A great river long and wide, running deep where the serpent lurks!”

  The first explosions sounded outside the castle doors.

  The wall of skulls no longer answered his pleas, floating in the yellow swirl. The yellow liquid flowing down the lines, entering his veins, gurgling, releasing noxious odors as explosions collapsed the wall of skulls behind him.

  “The eyes, I have found them …” He reached out for the glass ball. It rolled from the frame that had cradled it on the desk, shattering on the floor, the vision of eyeballs swirling around him, rising from the floor.