Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Their music came up to the party now in greeting, a rasping, grating chorus...like the teeth of dreaming giants grinding in their sleep.

  King G. had been foremost in the party, and he posed haughtily at the very lip of the precipice. Like all of his party, he was naked and purified, but there were marks to set him apart. Besides the greater size of his hairless head, twice that of the others, he wore a blue turban tightly wrapped around it, the only garment among them. Also, his skeletal leathery body bore the mark of Yahhew – an X – branded in a raised pattern all across his skull, his face, his torso and limbs.

  Across the Gulf, the procession of the great worm Lalah rose into sight upon the opposite cliff. At its very edge, staring across, stood King S. in his red turban. The two Kings, the two parties, did not yell or gesture across at each other. Despite their seething hatred, they maintained a solemn sense of decorum. This was a holy ritual, enacted every four years. As it had been since even the time of the dead ammonites singing below in the Gulf.

  Spanning the Gulf, high above the heads of both parties, was a horizontal iron bar scabbed in the rust of ages, its ends stabbed deep into the rock of this cavern chamber’s opposing walls. It had been replaced a number of times before, when it had rusted too much to support even the scarecrow weight of Kings past, but never in the lifetime of G.’s Second. He gazed up at it now while unconsciously rubbing at a particularly excruciating point above his right temple.

  He returned his attention to his King. It was time. The two youngest members of the party stepped forward to ceremoniously unwind the blue turban from the head of King G., and as he watched it uncoil, itself like a great worm, the Second knew that soon it would coil anew around his own pulsing cranium.

  Now the King stood exposed in all his glory. Now, sensing its time, the great worm Yahhew began to emerge from the hole it had bored in the very top of King G.’s greatly engorged head.

  The worm avatar was so beautiful, so pale, that the Second caught his breath to admire its glistening length as it poked itself, writhing, out of its lair. He had to remind himself that it was the rear end of the worm he was seeing, not its head, as the puckered tip seemed to sniff at the air.

  Two others of the party, the pole bearers, had been fitting together the segments they had carried with them into one long staff that they struggled to stand on its end, until at last they could lean it against the rusty horizontal bar above them. The King inclined his egg-round head forward slightly, supporting its weight in both his hands, so that the sniffing blind end of the worm could find the pole, and begin to wind itself sinuously around it. As it wound itself higher up the staff, and higher still, pulling itself coil after coil from the nest of King G.’s head, the spiraling white shape reminded the Second of the spiraling fossils that had flanked the path to the Gulf’s edge.

  Looking across the Gulf, he saw that King S. had also had his turban unwrapped, and the great worm Lalah was similarly winding itself up another long pole, so as to reach the horizontal metal bar.

  Yahhew’s pallid avatar had reached the bar first, and its end wrapped around it securely several times. It had uncoiled to its full length, and eased its hold on the staff so that the two pole bearers could withdraw it and again break it down into its several pieces. Across the clattering Gulf, the King-in-Waiting saw that the other pole was being withdrawn as well. The avatar of Lalah had secured the end of its tether-like body to the corroded bar that spanned the maw of the Gulf.

  Now, with the battle moments away, the members of both parties gave voice to the agonies their own, much smaller worms privileged them with. They moaned in unison, some even hugging their own cadaverous forms and rocking as they crooned. Accompanied by this sound, and adding his own long groans to it, the Second approached King G. holding a ceremonial dagger in each hand, their blades curved and made from smoothly polished calcite.

  The King-in-Waiting handed King G. the two curved daggers. King G. turned slightly to nod at him in thanks, as much as he could nod with the body of Yahhew extending upwards from the crown of his head. He then turned the milky glaze of his eyes back to his opponent across the Gulf. While he did so, the Second moved to take his place directly behind him.

  King G.’s Second reached out and placed both hands squarely against the back of his King. And then, with all the strength of his younger body, he shoved the King out over the Gulf.

  Across the intervening space, at the very same instant, and as the moaning reached its crescendo in a screech of wails that filled the vaulted ceiling, King S. was also pushed off the edge of his cliff.

  Swinging forward at the ends of their elastic tethers, the two Kings raised their daggers in each hand and spread them out like glittering wings.

  On the first swing, the two Kings didn’t achieve quite enough momentum to meet in the center, above the Gulf’s gorge. When King G. swung back to the cliff, his Second lunged forward again and gave him another mighty shove. King S.’s King-in-Waiting did the same; he nearly lost his footing, in fact, and stumbled over the cliff’s edge before catching himself. A Third would have had to step up to replace him, had he been lost below. The ammonites spinning and clashing down there would have ground him to pulp as if between the gears of some gigantic mechanism.

  Again, the two Kings swung toward each other, living pendulums, and this time they even swung past each other. As they did so, they both slashed wildly with their calcite daggers, though both were forbidden from any attempt to slice at the avatar which suspended them from the iron bar.

  King G.’s Second winced as he saw one of King S.’s blades hack his master across the wrist. One of King G.’s hands flopped half-severed, and the knife it had held spun away into the gloomy void below. But King G. had also opened a slice across his opponent’s bony chest. Both howling from their wounds, and in their fever, the two rulers swung back toward their respective cliff tops again, and their parties raised a loud moan of sympathetic pain, inspired by their own constant suffering.

  The Second felt his master’s body thump into his waiting hands again, and again he gave him a push out over the chasm. In that moment of contact a fling of King G.’s pink, watery blood had sprinkled over his face. He licked it from his gnarled upper lip, honored to ingest it.

  For a third time, the two rulers arced toward each other, one King flailing with two knives, the other with just one...King S. with his body entirely covered in brands of Lalah’s mark – the O – as King G.’s figure was covered in the mark of Yahhew, the X.

  Both rulers inflicted dramatic wounds upon the other. King G. had one thigh opened up so that the thin bone gleamed within the brown folds of meat. King S. was slashed across the lower face so that the ends of his mouth extended back to his small withered ears, and his tongue lolled out of his now unhinged jaw.

  Jarred as he caught the body of his King once more, G.’s Second opened his mouth to catch another spray of blood. King G.’s song was a wheeze and a gurgle that caused a shared glory to surge in the bony breast of the King-in-Waiting. The lesser avatar of Yahhew in his own skull writhed in its sleep, sensing its own time was near. With a bark of effort and of pain, the Second shoved yet again.

  Blurred in flight, both trailing blood like the tails of comets, the Kings flew at each other. And this time they collided with a loud smack, maybe the crack of broken bones. Then the knives themselves were blurs.

  The Kings wrapped their legs around each other, entwined directly above the center of the Gulf, from this distance impossible for G.’s Second to distinguish from each other. They seemed to be one conjoined entity stabbing at itself. He saw an arm, lopped off at the elbow, drop into the chasm. Blood rained like the trickling of the stalactites overhead. Then, a string of entrails unfurled, swayed. The howling of the two Kings had also entwined into one voice, which the parties on both cliffs echoed in an ecstacy of agony.

  The savagery began to slow. Arms and knives less frenzied. And now the arms, the knives, did not rise and fall any longer. No
w King G.’s Second, the King-in-Waiting, could distinguish the two more easily. Both branded bodies were going still in their embrace, knives buried to their hilts. The two worms had become twirled together in the struggles of the Kings...who now only twitched in their death throes. Their sound had died away, and so did that of the two opposing parties. The cavern chamber went reverentially still.

  All moans having ceased, all breaths being held, as the parties watched the distant dead faces of their Kings.

  The lids of one of G.’s closed eyes began to be pressed apart. A gush of tears down his cheek, and then a white head probed free into the air. A second later, a similar white head pushed itself free from the socket of King S.’s eye. These glistening heads wavered in the air, and opened mouths with several sets of black thorn-like hooks. The heads of Yahhew and Lalah wavered toward each other, sniffing blindly.

  The King-in-Waiting, now the King, did not remove his eyes from the spectacle even as the two youngest members of his party began to wind the blue cloth of his turban around his pulsating skull. Soon he would turn back down the fossil-lined path, toward his people, where his body would be branded all over with the holy mark of the X.

  But for now, tears of pride and love and pain in his milky eyes, he watched as the avatars of the two great worms, Yahhew and Lalah, locked their thorned mouths in a kiss. This was how they reached each other, with the weight of the Kings to bring their bodies together.

  This was how they mated, and kept their species eternally alive.

  The End

  Working Stiffs

  "I always wonder how these scabs ever found a place like Bossier City," Nate muttered around a wad of masticated sandwich. Nate often referred to the Haitians as “scabs,” though the shop was not union. In principle, he contended, they were scab labor; they must have been making all of minimal wage, and by working so cheap they kept American-born workers from finding employment.

  "They must have sailed right up into the Gulf of Mexico," Ray replied, "into the Mississippi, then the Red River, right up to Bossier City, Louisiana just to piss off their friend Nate Skate, originally from Philly and not a Louisiana native himself."

  "Well I think that someone should sail their illegal black asses back down to Haiti."

  "For a black dude, you sure do hate these guys," Ray whispered. The Haitians filled two long tables across the grimy cafeteria from them.

  Nate's lowered voice was a grumble like an animal's warning growl. "I ain't from Haiti, am I? I'm an American just like you; why shouldn't I be pissed off? And maybe I'm more mad about it than you 'cause I am black. Y'know? 'Cause this company be using these guys for slave labor instead of paying American guys a decent human paycheck."

  "So get mad at the company, not these dudes. They just wanna eat, like you and me."

  "They don't eat," mumbled George, the third man at their table. He was reading a spread newspaper around the tin ashtray resting in the middle of it.

  "What?" said Ray. Ray was the new guy. He knew what Nate meant about slave labor; he had been appalled to learn what the plant was offering for starting pay, but what was he to do when his unemployment had been drying up fast?

  "They don't eat," George repeated blandly, not looking up from the paper. He squinted at the type through the further impediment of his cigarette smoke. "Look at 'em."

  Ray stole a surreptitious prolonged glance. He hadn't noticed it before, but none of the men were eating lunch, though this was lunch break. He supposed he hadn't looked more closely before, afraid to stare openly at the tables crowded with solemn black men.

  The men didn't smile. None had coffee. Newspapers covered the tables like tablecloths and half of them seemed to be reading them; at least they were hunched forward over them. Ray thought he heard a very low somnolent conversation amongst several of them but he wasn't sure that he saw lips moving. They all seemed so tired, burnt out. Maybe they had day jobs also, in addition to working third shift. Third shift was a funny one to grow accustomed to; he had worked it before, and had never quite figured out when to sleep. That had to be why they weren't eating “lunch,” either; it was, after all, quarter past three in the morning.

  The flesh of most of the Haitians was a ghostly blue color. Even their hair, and clothing. They were sanders, who worked on the third floor, sanding the injection-molded plastic computer housings the molders -- Nate, George and Ray included -- produced on the first floor. Some of the sanders wore surgical masks around their necks, but others didn't. Ray couldn't imagine that any of them would be ignorant enough to sand without masks, and coat their lungs in that blue chalk. It was the dust on the men which accounted for their eerie coloring, particularly disturbing since their skin should normally be so dark. But even the molders amongst them appeared anemic and unhealthy.

  "They don't eat," George droned on, " 'cause they're all too sick. Look at 'em. They all have AIDS; they're from Haiti, right? If one of 'em ever gets himself cut I won't go near him to put a Band-Aid on him. Let him bleed to death."

  "They just look tired," Ray said, "like we do. And I wouldn't feel too healthy breathing in that crap, either. You complain, Nate, but would you want to do what they're doing?"

  "Some of them are molders, dude, and two of them are painters. Look, you and Georgie and me...we're it. There's more of them! That doesn't bother you? I have a son, Ray. What's it gonna be like someday when he goes hunting for a job? Damn...I've been meaning to call the immigration people down here to look at these scabs...I mean it. I worked for a shoe factory in Philly once, and a couple times those immigration boys came in and took out these Hispanic dudes, whatever they were."

  "But do you resent them because they're foreign, or because they work cheap? I work cheap, same as them. Aren't I keeping out other workers, too, by undercutting them?"

  "You were born here, right? Your country owes you a job, right?"

  "Come on, it's xenophobia, man. The problem isn't them; it's the company. It's all the big businesses. Building American cars in Mexico. They're the ones hurting the country...waiting for the other guy to give us jobs, while they take their act to Taiwan. They're traitors to us and their country. But don't blame these poor guys. Everbody started out in America the same way they're doing."

  "Xeno-what?" said George, not looking up from the paper.

  "Whatever you say, man," Nate sighed. "But I think you're just mouthin' your guilty white boy's politically correct bullshit. We'll see what you say the next time you go for a job and can't get in past guys like these here. Then we'll know if you really mean it or if you're just talkin' out your ass." Nate had been balling up his grease-stained paper lunch sack, now tossed it in an arc for the barrel, missed. "Hey, check it out."

  Nate had nodded toward the Haitians but Ray had already turned his head at the sound of their chairs scraping back, almost in perfect unison. The men were rising to return to work, break over.

  "What?" whispered Ray, turning back, afraid to gawk.

  "No clock in here, right?"

  "Company's too cheap," George commented.

  "Yeah?" Ray said.

  "Look at their wrists. None of my boys here have a watch. But they always know when break's over. Always. Like clockwork."

  Ray had to laugh at this complaint. "So what? Hey, they saw you toss your bag, or they saw you peek at your watch a second ago, like I did..."

  "They never look over here. You notice that? Snotty assholes act like we're not even here."

  "They saw you peripherally. They don't look at you 'cause they know you hate them. What do you think...that they're robots, or something?"

  Nate glared openly at the men as they filed out into the plant, shuffling their dusty sneakers and boots. He waited, however, until the last man had passed through the door, before he said, "I don't know what to think. They're somebody's victims, like you say. But they're evil, Ray. They're evil as hell."

  Ray could only chuckle and wag his head, gathering up the debris of his own lunch. "I don't k
now about you guys, I really don't..."

  "You got hired by the personnel director. You know what he is."

  "Yeah...a black guy. Accent. So he's Haitian, too. He's hiring his cousin. Nepotism sucks, but everybody does it."

  "They ain't his cousins. But he does go out of his way to get them in here." Nate rose from the table, his tall and wide body a suitable vessel for his great anger. "Something's not right. Some day I'll find out what." Then Nate trudged out of the room, also.

  Ray glanced to George. "What's he mean?"

  At last George lifted his head. "Know what I think? Nate never believed me, but I think he's starting to..."

  "What?"

  "They're Haitians, right?"

  "Right; so?"

  "Voodoo, pal." Without waiting to watch Ray's reaction, George got up, stretched, and strolled out of the cafeteria after his friend.

  Alone, Ray slid George's paper toward him. "What is this," he murmured to himself, "The Enquirer?"

  * * *

  Ray had been “foamed.” The bulky hose head he inserted into his molds had not coupled properly, and hot yellow plastic had spewed back onto his shirt front and forearm. It would harden to a crust like an alien fungus on his clothing, but he had rushed to the men's room to insure that it did not harden on his bare arm. He washed the hot plastic off as best he could, but still ended up losing a painful amount of arm hair.

  "Great," he muttered, having noticed one expensive sneaker had got hit, too. The shiny yellow foam was everywhere out in the molding area; spattered on the floors, the ceiling supports, the bases of the molds...sometimes it overflowed and piled up into considerable heaps, like great cancerous masses. The workers used iron pikes to chip it away when it solidified.

  Frowning down at his arm, red from burns and abrasion, Ray turned out of the men's room and skidded to a halt as he nearly collided with another man who was passing by the door. "Oops," he said automatically, looking up into the other man's eyes.