Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End

by James Curcio

  “We didn't create this thing,” she continued when he just sat there. “This nation was ready to fall. We're God's messengers.”

  “Bullshit. Are are you connected with terrorists?”

  “Please. Protesters will knock down your gates if you lock them away. If you make this happen, you’ll find out you’re outnumbered. You’d have to kill us all.”

  “That might be the outcome, yes,” Trevino said, grimly.

  “I'm not talking about the band...”

  Trevino didn't want to go where she was leading. Leading? He thought. Why in hell was she leading in an interrogation? “There's no way idiots like your friends organized this. Last I dealt with them they were a group of disorganized pranksters. Suddenly it's a fucking insurrection. Who’s backing you?”

  “Hey, could you move the ashtray over here? Thanks. No, you don’t understand. Do you think individuals sculpt history? Everything happens because of something else. It’s only in hindsight that we call out a Hitler or an Einstein and say, ‘There. That’s where that started.’”

  “You're saying–”

  “How did it feel to kill all those kids?”

  Trevino boiled for a moment. He stubbed out his cigarette and reflexively reached for another.

  “Not good, then.”

  “No.”

  “How many more are you willing to kill? You’re bringing the war on terror to the U.S. We’re just the straw men. Newsflash: you are the terrorists.”

  “Not interested. Get to your point, if you have one.”

  She savored the last drag of her smoke before putting it out. “I don’t usually allow myself. Singer, you know. Okay. How's this for a point? I can give you more than information. I can give you the band. On a platter like roast pigs. Apples in their mouths. Actually, no. I'm picturing that, and it's just gross.”

  Trevino scowled, his face crinkling like worn leather. “You mean you intend to, what? Defect?”

  “Something like that. I always thought there was something sexy about double agents. Do you?”

  “I don’t believe you. Why would you do that?”

  “You couldn’t possibly understand. Let’s just leave it at ‘bitches be crazy.’ You’ll buy that, right?”

  Trevino sucked in another breath of burning tobacco and fiberglass and god knows what else. Sometimes, just for a second, he wondered if the entire world, everybody from the cardboard-box, ten-layers-of-clothes, reek-of-cheap-alcohol-and-rotten-meat “go’way tryin’ ta schleep” homeless to Mary fucking Teresa were toys in the attic. God existed, and he was at the tail-end of a seven-billion-year PCP binge.

  He shook away his thoughts. “Guess I’ll have to. But I don’t trust you. If I find them with a goddamn army, we’re going to take them.”

  As Lilith was escorted to a holding cell, Trevino flipped open his cell. His eyebrows knitted together as he stared at the number displayed on the screen. The door slammed, and he was left alone with his thoughts.

  The pieces didn’t fit.

  Finally, he pressed the green button, and waited for the expected voice on the other end.

  “Adam?”

  “Sheila. Yeah, it’s me. I just needed someone to talk to that’s not directly connected to any of this. Someone with a clear head.”

  “You still on that assignment?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I want to talk to you about…”

  “I’m really surprised you got a promotion out of what you did,” she said.

  Her tone caught him off guard. “I’m sorry?”

  “It just pissed me off a little, I thought I’d hone up to it right off the bat. Partners, now you’re gunning to work federally. Whatever.”

  “You sounded pretty fucking...what’s the word...conciliatory with those answering machine messages you left back when I–”

  “–Just forget it, okay? I saw the reports. You caught one of them. Glad to hear it.”

  “Sheila, Listen. The mercenaries blew the op. This is getting really ugly. At this point there’s no option but to blast them off the face of the planet. I get that,” Trevino said.

  “What’s this really about, Adam? You’re not wondering if they’re legit, are you?”

  “I’m wondering if any of this is legit.”

  “Adam. It’s all legal. Repeat after me: these are terrorists.”

  “That’s not what I meant. It was rhetorical in the first place, I was trying to get to a point.”

  “Get there. I want lunch and I know you hate it when I chew on the phone.”

  Trevino reflected on what Lilith had said a moment earlier. “I’m going to have to call in the guard, or we need to outsource this to people who aren’t...Look. I’ll have no trouble sleeping if I put a bullet in the heads of the initial targets. What is eating at me is that there’s a really thin line between civilian and combatant, here.”

  “These are terrorists.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at. Do you have any idea how many fans they have? What happened at that concert was a fucking bloodbath. This story is going to out, and we don’t even have our damn suspects. Where does it end?”

  “Oh. Okay, I get it now. You called me up right before my lunch break to try to assuage your conscience. Then you can go in there and make a dirty job seem patriotic somehow. I won’t do it.”

  “I wouldn’t–”

  “Adam. You’re so naïve sometimes.”

  “These are people’s children.”

  “So are Iraqis. They don’t pay me to sort this out. I’m hungry. You want the job? Do it. Your job is to catch them, not worry about PR fallout, or your damn conscience. It’s too late for any of that now, Adam. I’m just being straight with you. Will you listen to what I say very carefully?”

  “Why do you think I called? We worked together for years Sheila. I trust you.”

  “This has to look like a war, or else you’re fucked.”

  The phone went dead.

  Well. This was definitely the most bizarre case he had ever worked. He sat down and lit another cigarette. He’d smoked a lot more and slept a lot less, these past few months.

  Chapter Eight

  How long have I been dreaming? Am I awake?

  They gave me something – some pharmaceuticals, a long time ago. Though they were meant to help with my burden, instead, these poison tablets shattered my world, leaving me in endless gray hallways.

  The smell of mold tells me I’m back at Pennhurst. They must have caught me, somehow. The underground labyrinth beckons, calling out from an unseen center. Fascinated and horrified, I drift through the catacombs towards this center, following the etchings on the walls like a spool of thread, winding in, and down.

  The walls are adorned with murals gouged with bleeding fingernails and sharp sticks, children’s paintings and graffiti. Stuffed animals. Broken umbrellas. There are boxes full of trinkets, probably deeply meaningful to some person at another place, in another time. Letters written in graphite and crayon. Old bottles of perfume. Rusted keys. A beat-up tricycle. The memories and scattered possessions of the fallen, the neglected, and the abused.

  It – whatever it is that draws me here – directs my attention to a room numbered 333. I press my face up to a smeared window and look inside. I can make out the figure of a young man bathed in seductively flickering blue light.

  He is completely naked but for the restraints binding him to an upright table. His eyes stare lidlessly at images on a screen before him: mother, father and child, clasped together in a blurry family portrait, over-saturated and scratched, like a distant memory; a boy and girl holding hands, there and then gone, a flicker of hope in black and white; banners and flags; girls dancing in sequined dresses as fireworks erupt behind them; the quivering, painted lips of a girl, naked, vulnerable, in ecstasy; the glint of a wedding ring, parents in the background, pantomiming happiness as they feel their own end moving inexorably nearer; computer screens, printouts, spreadsheets, gray slacks, then a fading image of wrinkled arms,
wreathed in medical tubing, and the lonely darkness, as the words “Happily Ever After” take the screen, and remain.

  With a start, I realize this boy is me.

  I am stuck, trapped in the underworld. Trapped in a labyrinth I can’t escape.

  “And how are we feeling?” the doctor asks. He is an older man, built like a bear. His breath wheezes as he stares me down.

  I look down at my hands. Wrapped in bandages. I remembered staring at myself in the mirror, my face distorted by rage. What I saw there was unfamiliar, though I recognize it as my own. The mirror shattered. Silver splinters float around me.

  “How are you doing today?” My eyes don't raise in response to the voice. Gauging by the lattice work of angry gashes. I wasn’t doing so well. I am tied to a wheelchair. Not well at all.

  I could feel his eyes searching for something. My face was a mask, a dead weight fashioned of heavy and soggy clay, so it was unsurprising that he should be stonewalled. I still haven't moved, or met his prying gaze.

  Instead of replying, I turn to find bubbling and cracked paint. Columns of mold. Shelves of rat-gnawed feces. “Where am I?”

  “Unit A, Modular 3. Pennhurst.”

  This was unlike the sessions I recalled. I had been facile, detached. Safe in the knowledge that I could run circles around the doctors and cage them in a prison of words. No, it was different. I am exposed. Naked.

  I look down at my arms again. The slashes are puffy and oozing in the first stages of healing. Why am I here? The answer is in that web of dried blood and new skin. Who am I now? That question hangs around me like smoke. It chokes my vision, steals my breath.

  With great effort, I peer up at the impenetrable eyes of the doctor. “What year is it?”

  “I’m supposed to ask you that.” But then he shrugs. “It’s 1972.”

  “’72? I wasn’t born yet.”

  His fingers absently drum on his desk. “Who do you think you are?”

  I hear footsteps behind me. Orderlies cart me away into cavernous, dark tunnels.

  I’m flocked by a procession of ghosts. They are dressed in rags, their stained underwear wedged between chicken legs, their eyes black and glassy. It’s hard to believe these creatures were ever human. One of them pushes past the orderly long enough to lay a hand on my forehead.

  “Coram sanctissimi Sacramento, sive in tabernaculo asservato sive publicae adorationi exposito, unico genu–” she says, before being elbowed in the ribs and pushed aside. The orderlies have to use more force to keep the gibbering masses back, as they scramble to touch me, begging for me to release them from the prison of their atrophying flesh and bone. Their hell is all around them. Only death brings serenity, in forgetfulness.

  Their faces remain serene as their bodies sustain crippling blows, cushioned by religious ecstasy. I am their Jesus.

  The room the orderlies leave me in is truly a hole. It is too dark to see anything, aside from the lights of the hall reflecting in the stagnant water that pools on the floor, but I can tell there is something dead in here with me. It drives me a little mad – being unable to see it, unable to know what is rotting, possibly feet from the wheelchair I’m strapped to.

  An indeterminable time later, I am carted out to see the doctor again.

  His eyes meet mine with indifference. I peer over his clipboard, and notice that it is just a series of check boxes. The details of our lives reduced to multiple choice questions.

  “Why do they think I can save them?” I ask.

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “The other patients. They think I can save them.”

  “Do you?”

  Before I can answer, I’m wheeled out of the room again, as the doctor nonchalantly makes a couple tick marks on his psychological tic-tac-toe board.

  “We’re all just being processed,” I say to the orderly, as he leaves me in the cell with my invisible, dead friend. “Ground to cement.”

  The orderly doesn’t make any sign he’s heard me. Now that I think of it, I’ve never seen their faces.

  We’re all alone here. Truly and utterly alone.

  Without an identity or a past to hide behind, all I have is words. As this asylum sands me down, even they begin to falter, clicking and whirring like rusted, purposeless machines. Empty shells, the Qlippoth. Still, my mind manufactures an endless supply of words that – barely – blots out the annihilation of everything unique or meaningful. Empty shells, maybe, but they are keeping me alive.

  These monsters may have broken the other inmates, but I feel something inside me that can’t be chewed up and homogenized. I focus on that part of me, feel it grow stronger. I feed it everything else in me, cannibalize myself. Focus on that center, the center of the labyrinth. Find it.

  –

  Again, I face the doctor. “I'm on to you,” I say.

  “What?” he says. His face, usually devoid of human emotion, shows the slightest sliver of concern.

  “I had a dream the other night that I woke up, dizzy and nauseous. You see, in the dream I woke up. So I was confused. I thought that the dream was my waking life, and my waking life was the dream.”

  “Have you been taking your medication?”

  “No, listen. You’ll like this. I felt something inside of me that was indigestible. Indestructible. Timeless. But it was inside me, I mean literally inside of me. I had swallowed it. My stomach...it ballooned out like a condom bloated with cocaine.”

  My stomach began to bulge and contort. I took my hand and raised it over my head dramatically. The doctor writhed in fear.

  “I shoved my hand down my throat...my whole hand...and vomited up an iridescent rainbow. It shredded my insides as it lurched out of me, a hailstorm of diamonds and esophagus. And so–”

  With a sound like a cat hacking up a hairball, thousands of diamonds poured from my mouth, clattering wetly to the ground all around me. The doctor ducked behind his desk.

  “I woke up laughing. You can’t digest me. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. Coming for me? I’m coming for you. Do you hear me? I’M COMING FOR YOU.”

  I grabbed the doctor and began cramming diamonds down his throat.

  Dionysus woke up in his bunk, laughing hysterically. “I am coming for you!”

  He rolled over, his hand naturally finding the spot where Ariadne normally slept. All he found was her favorite T-shirt. He blinked, and then frowned before he balled it up and held it close to his face.

  Loki pushed back the curtains. “What are you going on about?”

  Dionysus shook his head. “Dream. But listen. In the hotel...the night we met Ariadne. She told me...She said Lilith told her something about all of us being forgetful Demigods.”

  “All of us? Like, everyone?”

  “Well, no. But you, me, Ariadne, Lilith...She brushed it off, but I could tell something happened in that bathroom that really got into her.”

  “Just Lilith’s magical mystery pillow talk. And possibly her tongue,” Loki tried to smile, but it broke. “Look, she’s gone. They both are.”

  “No. Listen. I remember. The men that put us in the asylum in the first place, the men that are hunting us now: they are agents of the same...entity. I think I just called it out.” Dionysus lay down and stared at the ceiling. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

  Loki thought. On the one hand, it was possible his best friend was losing his mind. On the other...No, he was probably losing his mind. “This is where I’m supposed to call you crazy and get back to work, but...look. Is this revelation going to help you fight a war against the flesh and blood agents that are likely hunting for us right now?”

  “Probably not,” Dionysus said.

  “Then it changes nothing, so...Shut up. Win today. Play demigod tomorrow.”

  Dionysus nodded. “I miss her already.”

  “I know.”

  They headed for the desert. The most desolate, empty badlands they could find. And there
, in the shadows cast from the Martian plateau landscape, they buried her. Everything around them was silent, implacable. Hungry and patient. Nothing would be spared the thirst of the howling wind. The lizards sat and waited for carrion. They had time.

  Dionysus cleared his throat, and spoke after they had interred her body.

  “I remember something Ariadne said to me once. She had been looking into the myths around the name that she took, and discovered that in Greek myth Ariadne and Dionysus were married. That she died...” He looked off for a long moment before he could bring himself to continue. “...and that, later, Dionysus went all the way to the underworld to recover her and his dead mother. Ariadne took it seriously, she told me I had to promise her that I would always come after her, always find her. I thought it was...I thought it was both sweet and kind of foolish. But it was how she was, and I loved her for it. I made the promise, for what it’s worth. I said ‘always will I search for you, always will I find you.’ Cheesy. I thought it was silly, but I meant what I said. Right before she died, she said she’d see me again. This is what she was talking about. She died believing it. I guess I’m going to have to, as well.”

  Dionysus tried to say something more, but his voice broke, and they could only stand in awkward silence, eyes downcast.

  They went back into the Behemoth. Plan was to get a good night’s sleep and then fuck off to whatever hole they could hide in.

  The survivors mourned in their own ways. Dionysus sorted through Ariadne’s few belongings. Cody played his guitar obsessively. Jesus was meditating, occasionally taking hits off of a glass pipe. Loki lay on the floor, stiff as a board and snoring, softly.

  “Uh oh. You want to see this,” Artemis said, looking out the window.