I had no idea how, but the creature found me almost immediately, wrapping its titan arms around me even as my sister buried herself in its thick, stinking flesh. Before I could brace myself, it hurled me through the saloon-style doors of the kitchen. After nearly colliding with the ceiling, I crashed down into the middle of the dining room filled with feasting cannibals. For the briefest moment, all was silent. Hungry eyes looked up from plates piled high with human meat. The next moment was a frenzy of hissing monsters and talons. Teeth made for man-eating entered my arms, legs, and back. Fists smashed into my face and ribs. A new type of alien behemoth leapt upon my back, its razor-sharp claws sinking into my flesh as it attempted to wrap its jaws around the back of my head. I rose to my feet, bearing the weight of the toothy mob. Inopportunely, one of the cannibals produced a large chair and smashed it into my chest, causing me to topple to the ground. The mob was crushing me beneath its collective fury. My bones would soon fail me, and my blood would be nothing more than spoil and stink stained across so many mouths.
I would not fall to these degenerates. They weren’t even proper monsters, after all, but only puppets of meat and bone stuffed with the souls of pigs. I had to get to my feet. I had to kill them all. I managed to roll to my back, flinging a number of the hungry patrons into the wall. The larger beast descended upon me again. I locked my hands over the creature’s monstrous fore-claws, stopping the serrated things just short of my eyes. Dirty boots slammed into my temples, and greasy hands wrapped around my arms, trying to derail my strength and allow the beast to fall upon me completely. I could feel the bones of the creature’s paws slowly beginning to crack beneath my strength. The monstrosity tried to end our contest by tearing the flesh from my face with its wide maw.
I pushed the creature upward, fully extending my arms, disallowing it access to my face. Tucking my legs beneath its torso, I launched the beast into the ceiling fan. My sister flashed her deadly smile, grinning in all directions, opening arteries and exposing innards, sending a number of my attackers screaming. One of the cannibals leapt at me with reddened steak knives clenched in both hands. My fist removed its lower jaw and my sister freed its bowels. I began to rise up a second time. The gigantic creature was upon me again. I seized its jaws, prying them open. This time, something heavier than a chair smashed across my back. I reeled as they piled atop me once again, sinking down.
“Take his weapons!” one of them screeched. The alien creature occupied both my hands as I felt my father clawed from my back. My anger cracked the monster’s jaw as I threw it into the mob, and a subsequent blow cracked a cannibal’s skull like an egg. I saw more rushing in, brandishing guns and machetes. A bullet tore through my shoulder. My sister retraced the path of the projectile. A stray silence amplified the sound the gunman made when she entered his eye. Something like a club struck my head and neck, over and over again. I felt hands and claws pulling me down. The world was becoming blood and outrage. The man-eater I had followed to the restaurant was holding the great axe above his head, as if to bring my own father down upon me.
When my father was raised into the air—and just as my final and greatest rage brought me from the floor—I watched the cannibal’s shadow swell monstrous and gigantic. Its face twisted into a knotted mask of engorged arteries and inhuman wrath. Its mouth exploded open, sending rotten teeth spinning through the air. My father’s booming laughter exploded from the thing’s ruined throat. The cannibal who now cast my father’s shadow swung the great axe into the huge beast, opening its brains to the darkness. My father’s gaze burned from beyond the possessed creature’s eyes, searing my face with a fury beyond calculation. While the flesh-eater’s mouth was little more than a portal to endless, monstrous laughter, I could hear my father’s words clearly. “To your feet, whelp! Kill with me! Kiiiilll!”
For the first time since his death—and outside of a dream—my father killed by my side. Together, we conjured blood and scream as surely as sorcerers. Death became the air we breathed, and we were father and son once again—unstoppable.
The calm that replaced the killing was deep and satisfying, framing the moment and washing the cries of the dying from the air. An unusually warm breeze made its way into the red rooms of the restaurant, where bodies lay in piles, and the distribution of spoiling blood and flesh made for a confusing portrait of the moments preceding the gathered ruin. I drew a deep breath and readied myself for reprisal as I opened the front door and stepped outside. The city was almost fused to the silence, as nothing remarked on the presence of a population, much less one waiting to avenge its fallen citizens. The breeze continued to play within the calm, invisibly dancing across severed bodies and rolling in the scent of the dead. It also carried with it the smell of smoke. I looked to the north—a smoldering cyclone of smoke and fire rose up in the distance. They had set my art aflame.
My father stood beside me, wearing the dead flesh-eater. He directed his gaze to the distant fire and laughed like wet thunder, further destroying the face through which he spoke. “She’s calling to you, boy! Don’t make her wait!” He placed himself into my outstretched hand, the corpse of the long-dead cannibal collapsing to the ground. My forbearer’s laughter still traveled the night, rattling the windows of the silent city, no doubt rattling the courage of the things that hid behind them. I would give them more than fear. Much more.
My art had always been dismantled, redistributed, cremated, buried—but its meaning had always drawn fear, if not respect. Never had it been burned in spite. My hands turned white as they gripped my father, and for the first time I felt him retreat from the rage growing within me. I would give these wretched things to oblivion, beyond the whispers of myth—where even memory would never touch them again.
I would not be baited like some dumb animal, so I bypassed the field leading to the barn and disappeared into the darkness—far beneath the silence, where the scurry of a draft can sound like a blast from hell—and I made my way into the caverns beneath the city. There were many entrances into the great hollows scattered all around me, beneath broken statues, secreted away in basements. I chose a yawning hole that opened up from the bottom of a dry creek bed. As I descended into the earth, I found the darkness to be old and untroubled by the sun, but it was stained by an unfathomable degeneration that caused it to flow sick and slow. It had become a corpse of its former self, having sheltered too much debauchery than was healthy. Its shortcomings were to my advantage, as the slothful pitch was slave to no one, and felt no obligation to alert the under-creatures to my presence.
As I traveled the spaces beneath the world, I encountered entire caverns filled with machines designed for the preservation of dead bodies. Thick electrical cables unraveled from the devices, moving up the walls and disappearing into the many cracks of the ceiling. Other rooms were occupied by a more completely degenerated form of cannibal, a type which apparently had no place even among the filthy comforts of a ruined town spilling over with mold and rot. They were ungainly things, mouth-heavy and blind, as nature had perfected for them a body that was meant only for hunting and gorging. Like plump vermin, overstuffed by a limitless banquet, they squirmed and croaked from the cave floors where they lay belly-up, slick with gore. They wore only the blood of many meals upon their bodies, and were too full from their eating to feel the heat of my gaze as I looked upon them from hidden places. Their mindless indulgence was painfully offensive, but I did not wish to spill so much as a drop of my rage upon the unwholesome things, preferring to conserve my indignation for more deserving causes.
As I suspected, many of the caverns were not natural at all, but were the products of carefully placed explosives. I could see piles of blackened stone distributed liberally around the mouths of freshly created caves. The new hollows seemed to travel in directions that would eventually bring them beneath nearby cities, one almost paralleling the route taken by the train. It had become clear that not all of Miss Patience’s victims were killed b
y her own hand, though they were almost certainly collected on her behalf. Many times, as I skulked around and within Lastrygone, I had heard the creatures refer to their “great and hungry mother under the earth.” I wondered at how long Miss Patience had been expanding her industry of cannibalism.
The caverns were every inch a maze, and it took no small amount of time to navigate to my destination. At one point, I encountered something that nearly stole the breath from me—a gigantic stone archway covered with beautiful reliefs and carvings, all of which depicted what I could only imagine were some kind of titanic alien beings, all of them thick with rot and filled with strange worms that wore crowns. The cavern beyond the archway was large enough to admit a city, and the darkness rushing from the mouth of that terrible entrance was of a type that had never known light. The structure was clearly not the work of cannibals, as they were neither creative enough nor sufficiently ancient to have wrought such magnificence. In direct proportion to the painful beauty of the archway spilled a nauseous odor, as if all the earth’s dead had been collected within to fester and rot. If not for my strong constitution, I would have been most assuredly forced, retching, from the cliff where I stood. Undoubtedly, this was the passage whereby the inhuman clients of the cannibals came and went, and from the smell of things, they were repeat customers.
After I forced myself from the sight of the monstrous archway, I made my way through another collection of rambling tunnels, past crowds of lumbering dead-eaters and the mounds of corpses they ate from. I didn’t know if it was day or night when I finally came upon my quarry—I was just happy to see that the cannibals were in fact thoughtless enough to store their explosives in one central location.
When my work was done, I made my way to the field on the edge of town, where I’d first been set upon by the beasts. I smiled beneath the glow of reddest twilight, waiting. The city seemed to shrink down, as if coiling hidden muscles, preparing to leap into the air. And leap it did.
Lastrygone was lifted upon shoulders of flame. The ground shook wildly as fire chased the darkness from every secreted cave entrance, sending geysers of flame high above the buildings. The earth rolled like an angry sea as the sunset winked out, the air thick with towering black smoke and giant clouds of choking dust. The explosives certainly made for a fine cake, but the ruptured gas lines beneath the town made for a satisfyingly decadent icing.
I quickly made my way back into the city, as the second series of explosives was timed to detonate shortly after the first. I needed time to reveal myself to the creatures, so they would know who destroyed them. I walked in plain view, basking in the heat of raging fires, breathing clouds of thick smoke. But a dream was upon me, and I knew I would endure. I could see the wretches trying to flee into the underground, only to find their fiery deaths. Screams—louder by far than any that had escaped their underground slaughterhouses—battled the smoke for dominance of the air, and the burning debris of flesh-eaters lay everywhere, crackling. My laughter rose above the sounds of fire and dying as I waded into thick crowds of fleeing flesh-eaters, wielding my father, extinguishing the light of fools. Houses tumbled to the earth beneath the heat of shooting flames, cannibals became tinder, and the shapes of forgotten gods moved within the smoke—my art engulfed it all.
I stood amongst the fires and bodies and shrieks, calling out to the Mother of Cannibals. My voice rose with the smoke and fire, crashing down upon the burning city, cracking aged timbers and worrying the red-hot flames. Suddenly, emerging from without the smoldering mouth of a giant crater, they came—baying and hungry, blind and monstrous. This was the great company of Black Molly Patience, atrocious creatures from the underground, all of them sculpted by the dusky hands of a blind god under the earth. There was a white bear, without hair or eyes, equipped with claws so overgrown as to seem almost comical. Alien wolves with their frosted eyes of lightest blue. And a lean, hungry cougar with a mouth that occupied nearly every inch of its head, evicting even its ears and nose in favor of jaws that could open wide enough to admit a whole person. My sisters moved to my sides, our laughter growing with the fire.
The wolves were the first to fall to us. They attacked as a single force, hoping to drown me in their numbers. My sisters were like whirlwinds, twisting and turning with maniacal precision, entering and exiting the beasts like wind blowing through tall grass. When the wolves fell to the earth, they did so in pieces that quivered and whined.
The gigantic bear-thing came next, its unearthly roar a challenge to my father. I returned my sisters to their sleep, and he entered the fray, striking the fool creature’s head with such force that it exploded into a starburst of blood and brains, the finale of a fireworks display made of gore rather than gunpowder.
It was the great cat that managed to momentarily break my stride. It attacked from behind, seizing my neck in its enormous mouth. I reached behind my head and spread apart its jaws until I heard the wet cracking of bones deep beneath flesh. When the creature reared backward to escape my grip, my sister glided across its exposed belly, releasing a crimson tangle of gleaming entrails. The beast collapsed upon the street and was quickly set upon by ravenous flames. The fire seemed to join my side, surging and roaring across streets, engulfing or routing the crowding cannibals that tried to stand in my way. Then, she appeared from the darkness and smoke.
I had no idea the Deadworld could encompass such a dream. She was a wicked song of teeth and claws, set to the awful melody of burning, sightless eyes. Though she was a living horror, an echo of dethroned beauty reverberated throughout her features, suggesting the distance she had fallen from grace and dream. Blind though she may have been, some invisible force from her whited eyes plunged beneath my flesh, searching and summing. I could feel her conjuring alien hungers from the emptiness of my stomach, trying to fill me with forbidden appetites. Something about her eyes held an actual power, not some abstract force, but a tangible violation of nature, and it was trying to change me. She took a step from the smoking ruin of a tunnel entrance, as if looking more fully upon me would better allow her to focus her strange power. But my body kept its own secrets and would admit no mysteries beside its own. I felt the searing gaze of my family meet the sightless eyes of Black Molly Patience, and I could smell her fear.
I was airborne, my sisters laughing out in front of me, their metal teeth glittering with the lights of a thousand fires. Molly snatched me from the air in a cage of claws. Though my body ceased its advance, my sisters’ journey was far from over. Their laughter dimmed as they sank into filthy layers of cannibal flesh, severing the vital tubers of Molly’s neck. Pitching me with surprising might, Molly sent me crashing through the wall of a nearby barn slathered in hungry flame. I toppled to a dirt floor covered with burning hay and corpses. Quickly leaping to my feet, I prepared to receive the monster as she came charging after me, through wall and fire. She lowered her horned head and rammed into my chest, lifting me from the floor and pinning me upon her lethal antlers. She hurtled onward, smashing me through anything in her path. Finding nothing else, she finally crushed me against the undercarriage of an overturned truck.
Somehow, I still lived. I think the Red Dream had been born between us, and within its extents, she and I were true monsters, beyond the call of conventional pain and fragility. I tore myself free of her evil headdress, snapping off spines like branches from a tree, calling up screams from her hellish, gaping mouth. I seized hold of her remaining horns and attempted to twist her head from her body. Shortly after her vertebrae began to crackle, she stood to her full height, well above my own, denying me the leverage of the burning earth, dangling me before her forest of teeth.
I reached to my back, raising my father into the air. Miss Patience lunged forward with her terrible mouth yawning impossibly wide, revealing the path so many had traveled. Before either of our blows could land, the world became thunder and fire, and the ground opened beneath us. The second batch of explosives had detonated, and
Miss Patience and I tumbled into the stygian depths.
We led a tumbling parade of fire and stone into the smoking pits of the earth, intertwined like two serpents, each trying to swallow the other. Comprising the tail of our downward procession toppled the cannibals and flaming structures and smoking earth that comprised the corrupted town of Lastrygone. I found it ironic that the detestable creatures suddenly found themselves swallowed by the fiery maw of the earth, dinner to the greatest cannibal of all. Though the earth had ever been the eater of its own children, it was also shelter to the oldest darkness—and I had just betrayed it to a dead, burning star.
Even as we plummeted, Miss Patience was busy trying to work her enormous jaws around me. All the while, I was doing my best to wrest her head from her thorny shoulders. We splashed beneath the waves of near-liquescent darkness, the depth we achieved containing shadows sufficiently old enough to turn away the glare of the sun. Once the light had vanished, the quiet of buried secrets rose and stole the sounds of thunder and death from the air, plunging them beneath the unceasing knell of nothingness. We were alone in a void, and for a moment, it seemed we were no less than gods, floating within a primal void, battling each other for the right to fill creation with our singular and inscrutable designs.
The Red Son Page 12
