Like a super lung needing to breathe, the machine made of rock moved air in and out as the cavern grew dark. The light behind the wall continued to fade, and the shadows in the cavern’s corners filled the grooves made by the tools of those unseen faces trying to break in with their transmissions, while the flower petals on the vines withered and floated to the ground.
Eden made her way towards the opening, pulling back the thick animal hide, stepping barefooted onto the snow.
The groaning trees.
She heard horses calling out from the maelstrom.
Peering through the storm, she saw the black riders in the distance, fading and reappearing in the blowing snow, the riders twisting and disappearing into the formless white void, swirling.
She headed for a point of brilliant light cutting through the blizzard wall, hearing the wailing horses, crazed now and suffering from the furious storm. The terror still charging through the frozen land, and growing.
“Head towards the sun,” the voice of Witch Mother said, coming in over the winds and static of the blizzard. She could see the blazing sphere through the wintriest void.
She could not hear the other voices, the other ghosts, the ones she heard in the cave with inhuman voices as if speaking through pipes or into tin cans; she’d hope she had left them behind in the cave with the dead flowers and rotting fruit.
Eden.
She sought out the voice calling her, and it was the only hope she had in the growing abyss.
“Witch Mother!” she called out.
But the roar of the vortex was too loud.
Snow rose around her legs.
She caught glimpses of the black shapes still in the storm—sinister, half animal, half human.
The woods were gone but the point of light remained. She reached for it. Her legs had stopped moving as the whiteout took over, erasing her from the planet, burying her in the snow.
She thought about the voice still calling to her.
“Where are you?” she called out.
The transmissions breaking in and out.
—Losing transmission. Transmission lost—
The radiance from its core. Floating closer, the gnarled form stood with arms outstretched, its limbs extending up and outward as if reaching for help or giving praise.
Eden saw the fire in its chest that should have consumed her—a tree, an animal, its skin glistening, its limbs twisting and moving, melting the snow around her as it seemingly approached her without walking.
She could no longer hear the winds, nor the neighing horses. It was silent as she stepped forward, still barefooted in a white gown. She approached the tree and reached out to hold its center. The ground around its trunk grew with green grass and flowers, a distant memory of a vision yet to happen.
When she touched it, she lit on fire, the sun in the chest of the tree igniting her.
She did not dare close her eyes for she remembered what it was like to be blind, and she wanted so badly to stare into the burning mass, firing on its own.
Her skin felt the heat, but there was no pain.
Eden could hear the sound of snowflakes gently landing.
The gnarled body without legs or a head, with a sun set in the heart of its chest.
She heard a crackling fire, and stood naked before it, her skin turning to ash, falling away. Her ashes drifting like petals of dead flowers. In the sky, a ring of fire, a perfect circle, and the white void turned black, and the storm turned to night; the heart of the tree blazed, and sang with the voice of Witch Mother.
—Continue to the sea—
A whisper from the rotor.
“Transmissions blocked,” Delilah said.
“Yes,” said her father.
Eden’s face had been wrapped with fresh cloth to cover the empty sockets.
The copper lines were braided, flaring out the back of her head like a headdress or veil, as seen in the manuscripts piled on the library shelves.
Green light from the three orbs of the rotor showering over them, transmitting to the Juggernaut tree.
The rotor knew her name.
“Did you find anything with her where she had fallen?” the Librarian asked his daughter.
“We found a broken jar.”
The black glass of the Librarian’s shades reflected the green light.
The rotor’s three fist-sized bearings floated overhead, whispering.
Delilah’s caracal pupils dilated in their yellowish spheres, gleaming with green light along the stacks of old manuscripts, frail pages that carried the knowledge from poisoned cities and their fallen towers.
The bearings of the rotor orbited in mid-air, whispering about old nations and science lost amid the frayed corners of the manuscripts’ pages.
“If we disconnect her from the rotor, will she be vulnerable?” the daughter asked.
“We must kill the bugs that still live in her head,” he said.
“Can you?”
“I will try.”
Delilah stared at Eden, inspecting the copper connections to her battered body, swollen with bruises. A blanket covered her.
“Do you think she feels pain?” Delilah asked, looking down at the damaged girl’s wrapped face, her light-colored hair beneath the braids of copper wiring draped over the edge of the gurney, connected to the battery of pumping machinery lined out underneath the metal frame. Helping to wipe out the mutantoid parasites riddling her brain. The eggs of the living tech injected at birth to take hold and grow with the workforce. Being raised to replace generations of labor with expiration dates of only a few years, Eden was already middle aged. Youth could not be preserved, and labor was always needed. Escaping captivity behind the walls of the only world she knew only to be enslaved by her broken body, somewhere deep in sleep for seconds and forever, as time and space were fed through the chrome-lined connectors attached to her head.
The Librarian crossed to where he kept the vials of potions made from plants he’d gathered between rocks and under trees.
One of the rotor’s bearings floated away from the trinity above, following the Librarian to a worktable in a shadowed corner, illuminating the workspace with green light. The orb pulsed and spun faster above the Librarian’s head, reading him.
The bearings had been forged in shops with hammers that pounded out the metal scrounged from the ruins, the software grown in putrid solutions. Bearings whistled softly, without friction, their motors programmed in an aquarium of computerized algae, powered by the great tree’s supernatural power, channeled through the rotor, and then to the Librarian, who raised his face into the green light, connecting with the Earth Machine and the program of Witch Mother, moving through the streams of green luminance showering down from the bearings.
The two remaining bearings of the rotor swirled over Eden, blocking the voices trying to connect with her from the mutantoid cave, wanting to access her fear and emotions, wanting to cannibalize her dreams. Running from phantoms in a white vortex, towards the tree. The coven that worshipped it, protecting the great tree’s location, burning at the stake to keep its secret, the agents of the tree, the first life, with its heart made of star matter—the first god to be hunted.
Under the green light of the orb, the Librarian raised his arms with the palms outstretched, reaching to the stream, to the plane of the third-eye that could only be reached with help from the rotor’s whispers.
Glowing brighter, the Librarian processed the feed coming through from the antennae of the Juggernaut tree and the Witch Mother tangled in the roots broadcasting from the rocking chair left in the dusty chamber, where Eden had cuddled the jar with her eyes inside.
Delilah looking down at the girl’s bandaged face, and the scars that had tabulated her body, decorating it like an altar.
In the light of the rotor, the Librarian traveled beyond the stacks of manuscripts.
The rotor sang something that only the Librarian could hear.
Delilah moved to his side, studying his mov
ements, for she knew that, one day, it would be up to her to maintain the stacks of knowledge obscura lining the shelves of the library. She knew better than to question her father about his visions; she knew that what he saw was real. Her memories had always been of him beneath the green glow of the rotor, connected to whatever was on the other side of the transmission, speaking to the globes as they rotated—whispering hush tones to the scientists with thick black eye-glass.
Delilah’s yellow cat-eyes were a product of technology, alchemy, and nature—vigilant and precise.
Created to improve the ability of the slaves escaping the mounds of mass graves. Dug to discard the early experiments grown by the Robot Queen during the migration, centuries before. Left wandering, their claws and fangs tearing at the animals they found among the woods, the dunes, and grass lands, seeking cover, ragged, they knew of their creator marching without them to the northern pole. Howling of their abandonment and betrayal, finding the dead city, the library, the science.
What does she see?” Delilah asked, looking down at Eden, who looked close in age to her, but it was hard to tell, since each female contained different programming; both programmed to live short lives, but Delilah and the rest of her kind had centuries to evolve while Eden’s genus did not have any chance to defy the original print, the original plan of their maker.
“I can’t really tell,” the Librarian said. “Everything, nothing—future, past.”
“More riddles, Father?”
“More riddles, child. We will know in time. Go on, daughter, the sun will be setting,” her father smiled.
Delilah prepared for the evening hunt, leaving behind the damaged girl who remained healing, listening to the whispering orbs connected to the living program.
The yellow, putrid stench of the fluid draining from the copper lines connected to her head and the tin machines. The bugs disintegrating. The formula injected through a steel canister hanging next to her bed. The grip of the mutantoid controllers subsided, their voices disappeared.
Her body has been through much, it must last a bit longer, he thought.
Delilah and her hunting partner, Salem, repositioned themselves, searching for a better vantage point in the rocks, watching the deer grazing in the clearing. They knew where the deer had been watering, the small herds moving through the grassland, fed by springs channeling in from the surrounding mountains of the fallen buildings.
With the return of blue skies and sunlight the land had become hot and dry.
The hunters watched the stag move along the tree line.
Delilah leaping from the rocks, dashing through the collapsed arches and fountains, leaving Salem trailing behind. Perching among rocks and brush, Delilah waited for the stag to come closer.
Shadows lengthened. The sun dropped toward the mountains.
The stag was nearly in range, and Delilah steadied herself, raising her bow and taking aim. Pulling back on the bowstring, she watched the stag lift its head, looking out towards the rocks, picking up on the hunter’s scent.
The body of the stag tensed and prepared to flee.
Delilah took a breath, exhaled, and let the arrow go. She hardly heard the strike, the arrow hitting just off its target, missing a vital organ. The deer bolted into the woods.
The hunters took chase, following the wounded deer, heading deeper into the woods, taking up the deer’s trail from where the arrow had hit it, following the blood into the trees at the edge of disciple territory, smelling the wounded animal and its blood on the leaves of the bushes it ran by. The barbarous packs of red-faced hordes wandered the woods, their green skin covered with black leather skinned from their human captives. Their red faces and metal adornment were visible from where the hunters silently watched them with their cat eyes, altered to see in the dark through long seasons with little sunlight. The genetic print of feline bio-matter.
The breeze shifted.
The disciples and their two-headed hounds caught hold of a scent moving towards them.
The deer had crumpled in the tall grass, bleeding out from its wound. It had not been dead long when the disciples came across it, kneeling beside the carcass, feeling the feathers on the shaft with its’ pronged fingers, feeling the warmth of the blood that streamed from the wound.
The disciples stood from the dead animal’s side.
The winds shifted and the scent of the cat eyed warriors grew strong in the nostrils of the Disciple on watch, squinting at the rustling in the trees. He thought it was just the wind, until an arrow struck his chest. The Liquid Meth surged and kept the Disciple from falling.
The hunters attacked.
The dual-headed hounds fell first, arrows piercing their necks and sides, slicing through the leather covers made of stretched human skin. The warriors’ blades slashed and stabbed, freeing streams of blood to streak the ground. The heads of the disciples rolled to a stop, still staring into the trees with coal black gazes, their gaping, fang-toothed mouths full of grass and dirt.
They searched through the darkening woods for their enemies. The last hound attacked, Delilah’s blade cut one of the heads off while its other head was left dangling beside it, held by a hank of fur.
The sounds of battle stopped. The forest was silent except for gusts that blew through ruins and treetops.
Delilah looked into the satchels that the dead had carried, found the chunks of recently-slaughtered human meat stuffed inside.
“They’re gathering food.” Delilah said.
“It is approaching snow season. They will be moving,” Salem said. “We will need to find their camp.”
The hunters left the disciples’ bodies in the bushes.
Taking the deer with them, they headed back into the safety of the cliffs and canyons. They moved silently through trees, among rafters thick with overgrowth, across the destroyed state of industry vining with thorns and flowers.
The gangs sought out what was left of the transformed land, a land sprouting thorn-brush and elm from cracks in the streets and sidewalks, ruling that which was denied to them in a previous cycle, before the green sky.
Then the day came when the green sky appeared and all motors running off petrol stalled without spark, and steel was stripped from tailpipes to be used as weapons. The pumping pistons had stopped. The human animal rumbled on with violence and anger, running wild with old vendettas that drove the gangs to clash, and nothing could stop them from killing each other and taking what little was left. In the insanity of the cities that had no power to run their engines, the humans experienced the horror of their freedom.
Centuries passed and the chaos persisted until the only food left to them was the humans themselves.
Worshipping their origins of the satanic being that graced their backs, the image on the gang patch—a horned, bearded face with sharpened teeth, a red face that had become the visage of those left in a valley of fallen cities.
The Satan’s Disciples remained permanently changed. Spikes sticking from their bodies, horns fashioned from bone, riveted to the tops of their skulls with iron fasteners combed from the sand. They became the countenance of their god, craving human flesh, imitating the beast of their creation, ruling their kingdom.
The gang took up the tradition of tattooing their eye balls black, their skin green, their faces blood red, imitating the colors of the old gang patches that had long ago been shredded and torn from their backs in the rubble and weather.
The image of the Satan Disciples survived, and their self-mutilation became ritual.
Black coats made from human hides stretched out on debris, dyed with black ash rubbed into leather—the ends of the skins sewn together, protecting them from the storms that blew in from the wastelands.
Ingesting strange alchemical mixtures of Liquid Meth and Weird Lucy—dancing naked on cracked pavement—puncturing themselves with metal spokes, wrapping themselves in barbed wire—rolling in piles of human bones and flesh among the ruins of pillars and plazas. Fires burning the thick smo
ke of human grease, and the disciples reveled with hallucinations brought about by frenzied dancing and intoxicants.
They smelled blood. Their sharpened teeth tasted it. They bellowed into steaming bowls made of skull, slurping the intoxicant. Their brutality assured them of their dominance on land reclaimed by blowing sand, by flowers blooming in the forest and valley.
They mixed the poisons ingested for hallucinatory purposes; that drove the disciples berserk, enraging their bestial tendencies, helping them to bear the pain of disfigurement beside ceremonial fires.
The two-headed dogs had been bred from mutations. Fed in crude pens, the misshapen dogs snarled and cried, straining at their chains until the cracks of their handlers’ whips settled them. Their feral temperaments could not be trusted, for the dogs would attack and consume their masters, both heads working at the carcass, the masticating jaws dribbling blood and diseased saliva.
Foundations lifted from ancient buildings, tumbling over—the floors of fine houses sunk in mud—seed captured in the wind blowing across the valley, seeding the remnants of neighborhood homes where families had once felt safe—breezes whistling through gaps and openings of ruins, toppled and decaying.
Trees and grass sprouting—plants vining from observation decks and balconies—crowded tree limbs drooping with wet leaves and blackbirds—roofs dried out and broken open letting in rain and snow, rusting metal rafters leaning like tortured witches on an inquisitor’s board.
Streets collapsing into sinkholes—the two-headed dogs attached to their handlers, roaming the fallen city—the abominations praised, the viciousness vaunted—pouncing on prey that scurried for cover while the disciples, who were once human, looked for skulls to add to the decorative piles of bones in the plaza.
The hunters slipped into the valley at night, wending through the trees that curled and twisted around decomposed floorboards, growing in heaps of crushed plaster. They dropped down from hidden passages in the rocks, following a foul smoke that drifted just over the treetops.
Snow Over Utopia Page 7
