The man’s face is painfully handsome. Rugged, like a model or a baseball pitcher on the edge of retirement. He looks built, too, like he’s hiding an Ah-nold body under that thing. Not much of a neck, but what does show is thick and ripped with muscles.
Blue eyes sit under blond hair held back by a thin gold band. He doesn’t have a lick of facial hair, and one side of his perfect face is black and blue.
“Help you?” Chuzz asks. Voice stupid in his head because the thing on his porch should not be. He has the urge to tug his sweatshirt down again to make sure it covers his erection in case this guy is after his cock. Stupid faggots. Can’t ever tell where they’ll turn up!
“Hello, Chuzz. I got a delivery for you.” The man’s voice is ridiculous. While he speaks slowly with a sense of vibrato that hums across the tiny space, he sounds like he just inhaled a huge hit of helium. He sounds like a fucking chipmunk about to break into a Christmas song.
“You do?”
“Yep. Got a beer?”
“No. And I think you should …”
The massive man shoulders past Chuzz like he isn’t even there. He grabs Chuzz’s hand as he passes and shakes it vigorously. Nathan returns the shake automatically, then wipes his hand on his shirt. The guy with the talon feet has very cold hands. Cold and clammy. Gross.
“I bet you think a bunch of stuff, buddy. I bet you think I’m here to do bad things to you.” He stops and spins around to confront Chuzz, who comes up short. The man’s eyes are wide open like he knows a secret.
“Uh.”
“Whole lot of that today. Whole lot. I’m Gabriel, by the by.”
“Uh.”
“Right. Archangel, warrior, representative of the Almighty hisdamnself. Praise Jesus and shit.” He opens the refrigerator and extracts one of Chuzz’s PBRs. He pokes a hole in the side with one clawed finger. He puts the hole to his mouth and in one smooth motion pops the top and shotguns the entire thing in two point four seconds.
“Uh.”
The man … angel … lets out a loud burp. He wipes the back of his mouth with his hand, leaving black smudge marks behind. A look of discomfort troubles his flawless features, and he reaches in his pocket and pulls out what appears to be a small finger. It wiggles around until he drops it.
Was that a little dick?
“Stupid Cockbugs.” The big man smashes it with his boot and grinds it into a pulp.
“Cockbug? Am I losing it?”
“Probably. I came, well the boys and I did. We came to give battle, to protect the world. Only one problem, bud. Know what that is?”
“Uh.”
“I like you, Chuzz. You’re simple, and I can respect that. Anyway. The problem is simple, like you, as I just mentioned. We got our collective asses kicked six ways from Sunday. Boss man never showed up to help out or to collect for the rapture. All those people sitting around, being good, thinking they were on the way up. They are so screwed.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I bet you don’t, but time is short and you are all I have. Well, you and perhaps one other. I’m leaving you with some gifts. Have a nice life, Chuzz.”
He takes off his overcoat and drops a bunch of doodads and toys on the floor. His skin is covered in feathers that were probably white at one time but have crisped around the edges to a nice golden brown.
“Uh.”
“Not everything is what it seems, and stuff will change out there, which will affect these things. They may be good and they may be evil. I have no control over that. I just grabbed a handful of them on my way down.” Chuzz can’t stop staring at the big wings that bulge up over the guy’s shoulders when he talks. A small pile of feathers is collecting underneath his angelic visitor, and that isn’t good. Chuzz sneezes just looking at them.
“I don’t really …” He wipes his running nose.
“Right. As I was saying. If you try hard enough, you may be able to warp one or two. Just think of what you want them to do and they may do it. It’s not some innate gift you have. It’s the toys. I mean, you are kind of a scumbag, but yours was the closest house to where I crashed.”
“Who are you calling a scumbag, you godless son of a whore?!” Chuzz blurts before he realizes that his lips are forming the shapes for words and his vocal cords are following suit.
“Nice one, buddy! I wish I could stay and hang you by your balls, but I need to run. Need to go find some help or something. Enjoy your last days, or day. Maybe hours. Hard to say at this stage of the Apocalypse.” The man takes another PBR from the fridge and drinks this one more slowly, from the pop top. “You might be able to use some of that shit as weapons. Hard to say. Have fun saving the world. Later.”
“Uh. Why me?”
“Why not? Do you see anyone else around? Anyone? Besides, I like an underdog, and I don’t think I have ever seen a bigger one in my life.”
“Uh.”
“That’s a good shtick, man. Keep it up. Later, fucker.” The angel sweeps out his wings in an arc that smashes Mother’s clock to pieces. He looks up and raises one hand like he is Superman or some shit. Then he rises from the ground and rockets out of the house with a whoosh that tosses Chuzz on his ass.
“Uh … fuck.”
Chuzz covers his face to protect it from the falling debris, but some hits him anyway. Through the hole in the roof, he sees a missile streaking across the sky and the angel hauling ass to get away from it. Then another streak as one more missile joins the party and the angel disappears in a feathery explosion.
Dirty fallen feathers swirl around the kitchen. This is really going to play hell with his allergies.
Chuzz gets up and brushes himself off. Stares down at the mess and wants to cry. Mom is going to be so pissed! He pulls a curtain back from a side window and gasps because the world is on fire.
“Dammit! I had shit to do today!” He glances back and forth between the fire and his ridiculous hard-on. Now what?
Pestilence Rides a White Pony
Despite the meager shade provided by his gray cowl, the sun burns his eyes. They have grown accustomed to the dark. The desert sun is brutal even with the massive plumes of smoke darkening the sky. He smells thousands of rotting corpses broiling in the sun and flash frying from hellfires below. The stench doesn’t bother him as much as the ride. He rocks back and forth, back and forth, back and fucking forth. His horse moves forward, trudging through deep ruts of tank tread. If it could whistle, he bet it would. Smug motherfucker. But then again, it didn’t need a fix.
Withdrawal tugs at his guts, and the constant rocking motion of his steed forces vomit up his throat. The rider pulls at the reins wrapped around his long slender fingers. The steed rears back on its hind legs, and the rider curses and clutches at its neck. He swings off the horse, his gray cloak billowing, and lands on his knees in the sand.
The notorious Pestilence of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gags and spits out a mouthful of ash and vomit as his horse walks a slow, steady circle around him. He has nothing left in his stomach, but still the need twists and tugs and he dry heaves in response.
“Keeeerist, let me die,” he begs with drool and snot dangling from his slender face.
“Sir?” a frightened voice asks from behind his kneeling form.
Pestilence wonders to himself how long he spent in that last opium den. If people are already calling him “sir,” then War must be riding around on his hard-on raising an army of the dead and loosing the Dark Lord. War is a smug motherfucker too. War would be pissed that Pestilence is so far behind the plan.
As his chest heaves and burns, Pestilence doesn’t feel like hearing about it. It occurs to him somewhere deep in his ancient subconscious that zombies don’t normally talk. And it’s common knowledge that most demons speak with foreign accents. He is supposed to be the first Horseman to hit the scene but, damn it, there is great heroin in San Francisco. If War got impatient and did what Pestilence was supposed to do, then he might be out of a job. Screw it. The jo
b has gone to shit anyway.
Every plan Satan has spent millennia planning has gone to shit.
The Antichrist is dead. Stabbed in the eye by an old lady. What a pussy.
The brilliant aphrodisiac and hallucinogenic Cockbugs Satan and Pestilence created together were too effective. And that was kind of his fault. Pestilence, on a six-decade runner of highballs, speedballs, heroin, meth, and sometimes straight dirty cotton, insisted that they should get people high. They got humans really high. And really horny. The orgy, always intended to be a slaughter, got wayyyyyy out of control. The fucking hole got plugged. Satan himself couldn’t push through all the rotting corpses. The Dark Lord went insane with anger and exploded on Las Vegas, leaving demons from all 147 circles of Hell pushing at the corpse plug for a chance at the Earth.
No word on Jesus.
He hasn’t heard about God.
An angel hasn’t fucked with him for as long as he can remember.
If War doesn’t get here soon, Pestilence will crawl back to an alley in Reno and fill his veins with something. Anything.
“Sir,” the small voice reminds him, “we are awaiting orders.”
Without standing, Pestilence focuses his sunken bloodshot eyes at the Army captain staring at him. Recognizing the man as living, Pestilence stands straight and notices the line of military vehicles and tanks. Hundreds of soldiers mill about; piled in the shade playing cards, napping, and a few cleaning their weapons.
“Who are you?” Pestilence hisses.
“Captain W.B. Firepot, United States Army,” the captain says with a snappy salute.
“How long have you been out here?”
“A few days. General O’Coddle got his brains splattered, and he never gave us our next orders.”
“Sooooo,” Pestilence says, the throb in his throat nearly choking him, “Where is the junk?”
“Sir?”
“The smack. The crack. The wack. Something to get me high!”
“Sorry, sir,” the captain frowns. “We dumped our supplies of drugs, recreational or otherwise, a few hours ago.”
“Bullshit,” Pestilence says in a terrible booming voice that draws all the soldiers’ attention. He sniffs the air and addresses the lot of them. “I know someone is holding. DO NOT hold out on ME!”
His eyes roll wildly in their sockets, scanning the crowd of frightened sunburned faces and falling at length on the petrified captain.
“You?” Pestilence asks, his hiss shaking with need and his lower jaw moving back and forth.
The soldier shakes his head frantically and realizes too late he should be backing up. Pestilence leans forward and hacks thick orange goo all over Captain Firepot’s face and chest. Huge sizzling blisters rise where the acid hit, and the bubbles swell and convulse on his face as the panicked man runs toward his fellows. The other soldiers take aim at Pestilence, and he smiles, his rotted teeth looking like an ancient graveyard. He mimics a gun with his right hand and points it at the captain.
He pulls his thumb back, and the blisters on the captain’s face and chest pop, spewing putrid acid down the soldier’s body.
Pestilence follows the man, looking down his finger, until his run becomes a stagger. A spilt second before the captain collapses into the crowd of his fellow soldiers, Pestilence slams his thumb forward and says “bang.” Captain Firepot explodes, spewing the orange goo on dozens of soldiers. The soldiers scream as the painful burning blisters rise, and they turn and run at other soldiers. The uninfected open fire on the infected, which only quickens the spray of blood. This helps, because only the initial carrier explodes.
Pestilence doesn’t wait for the screams or gunfire to stop before rifling through the first of the dead soldiers’ uniforms looking for something to get high on. He hears the heavy breathing of two different beasts, and he knows Famine is approaching.
He rolls his red eyes and squints into the morning sun at the fat Horsewoman on her eternally starved horse.
“What the fuck, Pestilence?” she asks in her half-muffled voice, which is very whiney for such a large woman.
“What the fuck yourself, fat ass,” he tells her without looking up from the soldier he is ransacking. She huffs while he digs in the back pockets and comes up empty. Pestilence rolls to his knees and crawls to the next body to continue his search.
“Ummmmmm,” she says, and he does a fine job ignoring her.
“Where is War?” Famine asks as her horse’s legs finally give out, dropping her to the sand with a thud. Pestilence snickers under his hood. She rolls to one knee and stands to face him, face flushed and breathing heavy. “Where is Death?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Pestilence tells her, moving on to the next corpse. His cloak sticks to his slender frame with sweat.
Dark hair clings to Famine’s flabby cheeks, and she peels it off while whining at him, “I can’t believe you are the first Horseman. Once War gets here we can get started, I assume. That is, if you can stop rolling around fondling dead guys long enough.”
“What’s to start?” Pestilence asks, sighing as yet another pocket turns up empty.
“Uh, hello? The Apocalypse.”
“Where have you been? In a fucking cheeseburger cave?” Pestilence pauses his search to look at Famine. His own long greasy hair is plastered to his sweaty face, and his bloodshot eyes squint in the morning sun.
“The Antichrist is dead, you fat twat. An old Betty got him right in the eye.”
He jerks a thumb at the heaving, smoking mass of stinking corpses, “That’s not your Dark Lord down there fighting to get up. Nope, his boy died, and he split to Vegas. That, you stupid fat whore, is all the demons in Hell fighting to get out.”
Famine crosses her chubby arms across her gigantic bosom and tells him, “You are such a rude junkie fuck. I have no idea what you are talking about. Other than that you are a rude junkie fuck!”
She screams the last, and Pestilence whimpers as the sound echoes in his already ringing head. He covers his ears and then looks at her as if to ask if she is done.
“I’m saying Satan rose without us.”
She stares at him with impatient and confused eyes.
“WE were supposed to bring the world to its knees before Satan rose and the great battle, yada, yada, who really gives a shit …” He trails off as the need cracks through him like electricity, making his body twitch. He doesn’t care to wait for her to understand, so he goes back to rifling through pockets. She watches him search the soldiers, and then she watches him curl up in the fetal position for twenty minutes, kicking and screaming at various intervals.
“Soooooo …” she starts, but he interrupts her.
“So fucking nothing, Butterface, waddle off …” he pauses and dry heaves before continuing, “Back to the cheeseburger cave.”
She thunders to his kneeling form and kicks him with her tree trunk of a leg. He doubles over and rolls ass over ankles a full ten feet away. She stomps to him, her entire body jiggling, and wraps her thick hands around his neck.
“Enough fat jokes,” she screams in his face, showering him with warm spittle. “I’ll fucking squash you!”
“Then you stop first,” he wheezes. “Stop threatening me with your fucking fat if you want me to stop making fun of your fat fucking ass!”
She slams his head into the ground, screaming unintelligible curse words and head butting him after every few slams. After a minute, she sobs and stands up, leaving him sprawled and semiconscious. “It’s easy for a junkie to stay so fucking skinny,” she whines.
Pestilence turns his head to the side and spits a mouthful of blood across the sand. “It’s easy for a fat bitch to represent gluttony during the Apocalypse.”
She heaves him up off the ground by the back of his hood and hurls him through the air before he can crack smart again. He flies through the air, propelled by her super strength, past a number of tanks and trucks. He lands with a series of crunches and cracks next to the corpse of a genera
l. He rolls over, realizing he has left one body unchecked. His long, narrow finger disappears into the man’s dirty green slacks, and a smile worms its way across his face.
“Ha!” he shouts through chapped lips. He pulls a tiny baggie from the general’s pocket. The need is warping into anticipation, and his dry mouth begins to salivate. Almost as an afterthought, he leans forward and looks at the general’s nametag. “General O’Coddle. So you’re the reason these boys were just hanging out.” The skin pulled tight on the general’s face is grayish green, and his head is open like a half pipe with chunks of sundried brain caked to the sand above it. “Well, General O’Fondle, time for you to wake up, and time for me to nod out.”
Pestilence spots a Cockbug hiding in the shade of the General’s corpse. He holds his finger down in front of the dick-shaped critter, and it wiggles into his hand. Pestilence leans in as if for a closer look, and with a smirk he exhales a black puff of smoke. The cute little Cockbug twitches and turns gray. The veins that run along it blacken, and it hisses at Pestilence.
He sets the diseased Cockbug on the sand, where it immediately stabs another normal Cockbug. Within seconds, the second Cockbug has taken on the same ashen color. Pestilence points at the general’s open head, and the two bugs crawl through the sand and begin carrying half-decayed brain matter back into the skull. Three more Cockbugs wiggle over to see what’s going on, and all three get pricked and turn gray. One joins his fellows in stuffing General O’Coddle’s brains back in, one scuttles towards the two hundred soldiers Pestilence killed, and the last wiggles into the throbbing corpse hole, where it infects thousands of others.
By the time Pestilence pulls his tightly wrapped kit out of his robes, the corpses are swimming around one another as the diseased Cockbugs reanimate every relatively intact human body they find.
Pestilence unrolls his kit with a grin and removes his needle and spoon. He leans on the general and dumps the entire contents of the baggie onto the well-worn spoon. The Cockbugs tuck all of the general’s brains back in his skull and use strands of his own bushy white hair to sew the wound shut. As Pestilence fills his needle, General O’Coddle begins to twitch.
The Apocalypse and Satan's Glory Hole! (1) Page 12
