by Cervo, RD
The head temple guard, shouts, “Quickly, we have many here! Let’s begin again!”
With a tap to the soul of the left foot with the end of a guards’ spear, another boy is chosen. In the hole in the obelisk, Gulla has its stinger raised waiting for the second human penis to be inserted. A young virgin at the head of line of females awaits her turn. She is next. She is shaking with fear but also prays that she too will become a princess.
The drummers continue to drum.
CHAPTER 5
6,000 BC
Sodom
Dawn
HAZY WISPS OF SMOKE DRIFT FROM THE CLAY URNS AND HOVER IN THE AIR. The embers are dying out. Gallons and gallons of sticky spermatozoa-secretions cover the stone floor of the altar like splattered guano from a large flock of birds. All the maidens had been impregnated, wrapped in white linen, and sent out in procession on their way to Gomorrah. Quietly and obediently, the males have also left the ziggurat, their brains and foreskins infected with the essence of Gulla. Inside the hole in the obelisk, the little white scorpion is curled up, drained and dead.
There is an echoing hollowness in the temple. The drummers and horn blowers are gone. In the dimness of the sanctuary, there can be heard hungry feasting and bickering. The black-robed hags have been allowed to eat the bodies of the six male youths killed during the start of last night’s ritual. Most of the old women are toothless and must gum the raw, dead flesh. Earlier, a temple guard had split open the corpses’ bellies to allow easy access to the slippery, wet innards. Coiled lengths of intestines are pulled out of abdomens by greedy clawing hands. They fight among themselves over who will get the greatest portions of liver.
In the corner of the sanctuary, Ado arouses from an exhausted slumber. The joints of her hips and lower back ache and she curses the burning pain from her torn and swollen labia. She had only slept a short time having stayed awake throughout the entire night to watch the ghastly pageant of the hundreds and hundreds of fertilizations. A fleeting moment of sadness stirs in her mind. Ado knows the misery that those girls are about to endure. Years ago, Ado had been impregnated with the seed of Gulla but her offering of her own womb was rejected. The mutant sperm devoured her ovaries and left her barren. Promises of being a celestial princess was dashed and instead she was given the role of temple whore. Her husband Lot is a righteous man but dimwitted and a drunkard. The man was easy to fool. His gullibility allowed her to live her double life. Since her youth, Ado had always craved sensual passion. After being infected with the essence of Gulla, her desire was amplified into a boundless carnal torrent. Her moral code has since evaporated and allows her to not just fuck unabashedly but also to kill. Gulla has nurtured and brought out her true inner savage.
The only two people that Ado loves are her daughters. She protects them like a lioness. Ado vows to never to allow her girls in this temple. She desperately wants to find the right suitors for her daughters and to see them safe. The tribe of Abraham is forbidden. Gulla whispered in her dreams and told her that the tribe was the enemy and all acquainted was to be slaughtered.
Now, near the temple ceiling and among the dissipating smoke, Dover’s invisible presence continues to survey from above. He too had to endure witnessing the entire ritual with no ability to turn away. Dover observes Ado walking over to the group of black-robed hags eating the dead bodies. She kicks at them. The women hiss back at each other like cats. Ado reaches down and steals something from one of the old hag’s clutches. It is a human heart. Starving, Ado takes a big bite out of the organ with her jagged gold capped teeth. Blood pours down her chin as she chews with her mouth open. The raw cardiac muscle is hard to masticate. Ado swallows the large chunk of munched heart. She senses Dover’s presence and looks up to the ceiling and smiles at him with a heart in her mouth, meat in her teeth and blood dripping wholesale.
CHAPTER 6
6,000 BC
Road to Gomorrah
Morning
BEFORE THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAWN, the procession of impregnated girls had filed out of the temple of Gulla and exited through Sodom’s main mud gate. There had been an initial macabre festive vibe with the old black-robed hags singing and banging their tambourines and shaking their rattles to honor the departure of the maidens from the city. A great number of the temple guards accompany the procession to prevent runaways.
Fresh laid stones mark the path to Gomorrah. It is a journey through the wasteland. Searing rays of morning sun glow from behind sand dunes and begin to heat up the atmosphere. The girls are starting to sweat in their linen garb. All of them are barefoot and feel the pain of walking on the rocks and sand. Sounds of whimpering and fear reverberates throughout the line. Many experience strange stirring in their wombs and are inflicted with waves of nausea. A few puke and stumble. The guards striding nearby, threaten with their spears and bark orders to the females to be silent and keep going.
One of the girls already has a protruding belly. Whatever is inside her uterus is developing at an unearthly rate. Growing and growing, her tummy pulsates. Suddenly she halts and lets out a piercing shriek. Her scream echoes throughout the desolate wasteland. The others startle. She frantically rips the linen white robe off her morphing body.
“Mother, come save your daughter!” she cries. “I’m sorry!”
In the next second, the girl’s pregnant belly explodes with a shower of blood, embryotic fluid, placenta and a thing tethered to a looping, wiggly umbilical cord. She falls to the ground with a large wound in her lower torso, sections of her abdominal wall flapping. Thousands upon thousands of minuscule, slimy black flukes pour from her open belly and instantly start burrowing into the sand. The glistening mutant green fetus, which is still attached to the umbilical cord, attempts to breathe. It has an infant’s humanoid skull with a quarter meter long arachnoid thorax. Eye sockets are empty. The eyeballs have not developed yet. Reaching out blindly with its single tiny baby arm, it appears to be wanting to be held. It gags and a fluid bubble balloons out from one of its little nostrils. The snot bubble pops. The thing expires experiencing only a few moments of life.
Some of the girls close by that witnessed the horror, bolt. Wailing in terror they attempt to flee into the desert. They dash about aimlessly. The guards make chase. One of the girls is speared in the back. Panic runs throughout the crowd.
The lead guard yells to the girls, “Stay in line or you will be killed! Gallu rejects the unworthy with a stillborn. If you are pure, you will be rewarded with giving birth to a prince!”
The insidious presence of Gulla in the brain tissue of all the girls is activated. An eerie calm abruptly comes over the crowd. Controlled like puppets, all the girls come back into line and resume their march to Gomorrah. The dead young mother and mutant fetus are left to rot and swell in the growing heat. The procession proceeds in silence.
CHAPTER 7
6,000 BC
Gomorrah
Noon
THE BLINDING MID-DAY SUN RADIATES FROM ABOVE AND HEATS UP THE WASTELAND LIKE AN OVEN. From a bird’s eye view, the procession is seen approaching the gates of the primitive desert city. Gomorrah has high outer walls made of sandstone. Inside is a maze of tattered tents and open trench latrines. All around the perimeter of the confines, are heaps of bleached white human bones. Cinereous vultures glide and encircle over the tiny settlement, waiting for fresh kill.
Amidst the scavengers, Dover’s consciousness continues with the voyeuristic torture. The CIA agent is on the verge of going insane but he is blocked into having a protective dissociate meltdown. He continues to be forced to witness the ancient nightmare. What he is about to see next is even a greater glimpse of hell on earth.
I can’t watch anymore. I can’t take this.
With the hoisting of ropes, the heavy wood gates of Gomorrah are opened. The guards accompany the procession of females inside the city. A blast of putrid, fecal perfume mixes with the stench of rotting meat and permeates the hot dusty air along with swarms of millions upon
millions of sarcophagi flies. Instantly, the insects attack and cover the faces of the new arrivals. Buzzing and biting, the flies try to crawl into the mouths, ears and nostrils of the females.
A welcoming party of midwifes, besiege the impregnated girls and start dragging them off to the tents. The flies follow suit in swirling clouds of fury. A deafening crescendo of screaming and moaning echoes throughout the slum. Some of the girls break out of their controlled trance-like state and start crying hysterically. Many have expanding bellies, appearing to be on the verge of giving birth.
Doves hears one the midwives yell at the crowd, “Be silent! Lay down in the tents and wait to see if you deliver the chosen one! Keep your eyes shut! Don’t look at what is happening around you!”
It is impossible for Dover to turn away. He witnesses the absurd madness. Years of numerous attempts of crossbreeding Gulla sperm with homo-sapiens DNA has failed. Most mothers and fetuses die within a day of conception but there is a menagerie of far worst outcomes. Gomorrah is full of biological blunders.
What is that?! Dover screams to himself as he sees one of the mistakes stagger out from a side passage and into the dusty common area. Its human self has expired but the alien fetus is still alive in the womb and propels the dead mother’s corpse. The human head is now a bald rotting skull with a few wisps of hair. Retracted blackened lips, expose a skeletal grimace. One eye socket is empty while the other bulges with a dead eyeball that is about to burst and leak. The pregnant naked human body is huge and swollen with exudate and bacteria. Blackening blood vessels lace its patchy maroon-greenish skin. Cadaverine leaks from its anus and periodically it is expelled with a wet sputter as gas escapes from the decaying carcass.
Dover cringes.
Suddenly, from the female zombie’s vagina, a half meter long segmented insect antennae comes poking out. Then there are two. The antennas flicker, sense the air and detect a bombarding vibrational flow. In the next second, a whirling cloud of flies attack the staggering pregnant zombie, covering it in a blurry mound. Sensing the barrage, the mutant fetus sends out a protective electrical charge like a moray eel. The lethal current circulates the host’s decomposing dermis with a lightning-quick blue flash. Popping and sizzling sounds fill the air and the assaulting flies instantly fall to the ground in a dead heap. There is the stench of burning rancid flesh and ozone.
It’s like a fucking bug zapper! Dover exclaims to himself in astonishment.
Fresh shrieks of terror erupt from some of the new girls as they peek out from the flaps in the tattered tents and witness the zombie monstrosity walking on past. Dover witnesses another malformation scurry by one of the fetid open latrines. It is the size of a small dog with six human toddler legs, an elongated fleshy pink torso with no visual head. Something else is inching nearby with a humanoid infant skull and a long grayish slug-like body. Watching in disgust, Dover sees the slimy worm-thing slither down into the shit-pit to feed.
In the next second, cries of fright turn into bellows of crazed pain as some of the girls start to have hideous spontaneous abortions. First it is only six. Then twenty die. Then seventy. Bellies explode open with various malformed fetuses spilling out and croaking after a fleeting attempt to breathe the earth’s atmosphere. Tents collapse as many the girls thrash about, go into convulsions and crash into the poles. Dover sees one naked female run out into the open in a panic, her extended belly bouncing. She vomits an arching stream of bright red blood then trips, falling head first into the open latrine. The midwives run about trying to control the chaos.
One of the old ladies stops and looks up into the sky in bewilderment. Her wrinkled tattooed face is a mask of despair. The brown raggedly robe that she wears is soaked with blood and embryotic fluid. Wringing out one of the sleeves of her saturated garb, she calls out, “Gulla again has rejected these young mothers! They must all be unfit! Will we ever have our prince on earth?”
Hundreds of the females are now in their death throes. A chorus of moaning and gurgling mixes with the loud buzzing of new massive swarms of ravenous flies. Doggedly, the guards start the removal of the corpses. Umbilical cords are cut and the dead fetuses are stuffed back into the body cavities of the deceased mothers. Two men at a time start to carry the departed up the stone stairs of the inner city wall. The flies are relentless as they pester and bite the dead and living alike. Reaching the top of the parapet, the guards swing and toss the first corpse over the side. The dead girl’s naked body falls and lands on top of a large pile of skeletal remains. The impact causes a thud and crunching sound. The bones belong to the many past maidens of Sodom. From high above there comes the shriek of the encircling vultures. The birds swoop down in a frenzy.
More corpses are thrown over the city wall. The guard’s muscular bodies are soon glistening with sweat and dotted with hundreds of insect bites as they proceed with their work. They are also slick with the nasty drippings of the dead.
Dover sobs to himself, this is fucking genocide.
The hellish scene is unexpectedly disrupted as the head midwife shouts, “WAIT! BEHOLD!” She had just seen one of the young mothers emerge from a tent in the rear. “THIS ONE IS STILL ALIVE!” the old woman hollers. Suddenly, the mid-wife’s voice box becomes paralyzed in mid-sentence.
What is happening?! Dover yells to himself.
The young girl is calm and appears not to be in distress as she confidently walks barefoot on the filthy ground. The buzzing flies instantly freeze and hang suspended in mid-air. She is naked and her pregnant belly appears normal and healthy. Her amber skin is smooth and her young breasts are swollen with milk. A placid smile emerges on her sweet, angelic face. Her dark hair hangs in ringlets down to her shoulders. As she continues to move forward, the guards and midwives quickly kneel in reverence.
Dover notices that the vultures, overhead, are stuck in mid-flight. The laws of gravity have been broken. Spontaneously, the atmosphere takes on a dreamy yellow haze.
I feel her consciousness, Dover thinks. She is aware of me.
Tilting her head upward to the sky, she looks directing at spot where Dover’s invisible presence floats. She caresses her pregnant belly and says with a cooing voice, “The son of Gulla is in my womb. It is the son of God. He will be the king of all mankind.”
She then tweaks her left perky nipple with two fingertips. A droplet of black milk appears. The fluid leaks and runs down the curve of her belly. Dover observes that her irises are pure red. She smiles at him with a pure evil smile. Dover screams in terror in his own mind, DON’T LOOK AT ME!
Mercifully, another presence intervenes and pulls Dover away in a crackle of flashing white light.
CHAPTER 8
6,000 BC
Plains of Mamre
Moments before midnight
THE BOILING HEAT OF THE DAY HAS LONG BEEN REPLACED WITH THE FRIGID COLD OF THE NIGHT. A vast dome of stars fills the sky. Out in the middle of the lonely desert there is a caravan encamped for the evening. A single fire burns while a solitary figure sits and stokes the embers. The old man is keeping watch while the others of his clan sleep soundly in their tents. He clutches his crude blanket of goatskins tighter around his body to fight off the chill.
Dover’s invisible presence is transported to the scene. He was on the verge of having an emotional aneurysm after witnessing the horrors of Sodom and Gomorrah but presently feels inexplicitly safe and secure. He thinks, Gulla does not want me to see this part of the story. Someone, something else brought me here. Why do I feel rescued?
On the horizon, a meteor streaks the starry sky and falls to earth with a white flash. Time passes and the night carries on while the sentinel at the camp fire continues with his lonely vigilance. The camels and donkeys do not stir but appear to be in a trance-like slumber.
Far in the distance, three black robed figures appear. They are slowly approaching. The old man at the fire immediately tenses up and peers outward across the dark wasteland. In the next moment, the three strangers instantly mate
rialize before him. Paralyzed with fear, the old man remains sitting on the ground. He is unable to shout. His jaw is locked. The intruders stand motionless and silent. Their faces are hidden by the hoods of their black robes.
Suddenly, the one looming in the middle speaks with a clear yet quiet voice, “We wish you no harm. Be not afraid.”
The old man feels the muscles of his jaw relax. Stammering, he asks in astonishment, “Are you angels?”
There is a pause of silence and the middle figure ignores the old man’s question and instead asks, “What is your name?”
“A-Abraham,” says the old man with a stutter as he nervously runs his trembling fingers through the wiry hairs of his long grey beard.
“What tribe are you from?” inquires the middle stranger.
“We are the dusty ones out here in the wilderness,” replies Abraham.
“What do you know of Sodom and Gomorrah?”
Abraham cringes and spats, “They are places ruled by a god of death.”
“What happens there?”
“Sickness.”
“What is the sickness?”
“It is a filthy ailment that inflicts the genitals and makes one go mad. The sickness lives in the foreskins. I have commanded that the young males in our tribe be circumcised. But still many are lured away to those horrible places. The witches call to the young while they sleep at night. Sneaking into their dreams like scorpions. They become intoxicated with thoughts of lust and run off. Recently, I lost a grandson to such evilness.”
“Are there any inhabitants in the two cities that are not inflicted with the sickness?
Abraham replies, “I don’t know how many. But there are some.”
