Demonworld

by Kyle B. Stiff

  Wodi thought it was strange that the people were used to the idea of growing up in vats themselves, but were quick to feel horror at the sight of the bovine plant in its own warm, comfortable vat.

  ***

  At the age of seventeen, young Wodi took part in what was called an “act of nerd terrorism,” and would have achieved great notoriety in his homeland if not for the common sense, and fear of shame, of the local representatives.

  The Baiame Wiradjuri Festival, held every year in the underground tunnels of the northern laborers section, was a chaotic mix of market fair, religious celebration, costume parade, public “feats of strength” competition, science and invention exhibit, and outsider art fair with a special emphasis on artists suffering from dementia caused by the advanced stages of Neural Carbon Accretion, a dreadful neurological disease. Its attendees were usually laborers from the north, west and even the far south end of the island. Because of the garish nature of the festival, and the class of those who attended it, the festival was usually ridiculed by any outsider that bothered to notice it.

  So one day Wodi made a poster advertising a fictional scientist showcasing a newly-created airborne strain of SKAD-V, a sexually transmitted, fatal disease usually referred to as the “Skav virus” among laborers. The poster even showcased a doctored photo of Wodi, with a lab coat and fake beard, as he accepted a prize from some suited official, for his alleged role in the previous year’s festival. “Last year I was able to infect over a dozen individuals with the airborne Skav virus!” the poster advertised. “This year, with your help, we’ll try to infect more!” The poster concluded with the comically ominous statement, “Come and see the exhibit next to the air intake chute which leads to an air conditioning plant which will unknowingly take part in my ‘widespread dispersal’ experiment.”

  Quite proud of his poster, Wodi made a few copies, then posted them alongside other garish advertisements for exhibits and stalls and events at the festival. On his walk home, Wodi was again struck by inspiration, ran the rest of the way home, then made a new poster which protested the fictional event in his previous poster. He styled the new poster to read like one of the sensationalist news tabloids so popular in his neighborhood. Beside a picture of a randomly selected politician he printed in bold typeface, “KILLER MAD SCIENCE ON THE LOOSE!” and “SCIENCE RUN AMOK - LETS GET HIM.”

  He returned to the wide, heavily-trafficked tunnel. Many, many people surrounded his “mad scientist” poster. A few Guardians were there as well. Wodi would later wonder why he did not simply drop his new stack of posters in the garbage and continue walking. Instead, he calmly began posting on the other side of the tunnel. Did he want to be caught? Did he want the people he was targeting to see him at work, right under their noses? Of course, within minutes he was picked up by the Guardians and taken in for questioning.

  None could understand why he did what he did, why he wanted to potentially ruin a very important festival, or why he thought the act of terror was humorous. When questioned, Wodi’s defense was that anyone who actually believed that his poster contained a single grain of truth should be taken in for questioning and forced to give an account of their own simple-mindedness. Anyone with any sense, said Wodi, would see the posters for what they were and either laugh or ignore them. Many long-time, battle-tested Guardians felt a chill run through them when dealing with the easy-going sociopath; dealing with bookish youths rebelling against an environment that stifled creativity was not a part of their training.

  Despite his demeanor, Wodi was quite nervous during the questioning. He knew he would face no serious punishment, as the entire affair was too ludicrous to warrant any real justice. But he was afraid that his parents would worry. He did not want to disappoint them by being different, and he certainly did not want his mother to be angry with him.

  In the end, the entire affair was hushed up. Before charges of “terroristic threatening” and “incitement to revolt” were laid on Wodi, several higher-ups within the community heard about the incident and, not wanting to scare away potential tourism dollars, counseled the local Guardians to release Wodi after giving him a good scare.

  The Guardians laughed aloud when Wodi’s mother picked him up and screamed at him like a madwoman, his cool demeanor breaking as he struggled to explain the situation, stuttering and near tears.

  As fate would have it, the next time Wodi was taken in by Guardians, he would be arrested with multiple charges of murder against him.

  ***

  At the age of eighteen, Wodi enrolled in a publicly-funded civilian self-defense course that was taught by none other than Sevrik Clash, the Head of Guard of Haven. Sevrik was in charge of two-thirds of Haven’s military police force, the Guardians, and answered only to the senate; not even the Prime Minister himself could command him.

  At the time, Wodi was going quietly insane doing heavy lifting and cleaning for his father in a series of side jobs, and was finally nearing the end of his mandatory public education. He needed something to jar him, to wake him up inside, and so when he heard that such an important man was teaching combat tactics to anyone capable of leaving their couch, he jumped at the offer. He did not care if the event was some sort of ridiculous publicity stunt.

  The class was held in the eastern end of Haven, a wooded and sparsely populated area near the Guardian training grounds. Anyone with a camera was turned away. Wodi and a few others who seemed serious about the class were escorted by a Guardian in uniform. White plastic armor highlighted with deep blue and yellow ochre dust covered his shoulders, chest, and thighs. Wodi could not take his eyes off the heavy handgun that hung at the Guardian’s side. Other Guardians, some helmeted and in full armor, marched by with heavy black rifles slung over their shoulders.

  Wodi gathered with the others in a dimly-lit basement covered with drab military propaganda. One Guardian sat and smoked in the corner; he had orders to shoot anyone who made moves against the Head of Guard.

  Sevrik Clash entered and told everyone to form up into a line. Wodi was not the only one to feel himself shrink when the man strode in. He was a giant, both tall and wide, and his shining white uniform was topped by a wild mane of red hair and beard. The energy radiating from him was palpable. The line had barely formed when he marched up to one stooping male with a caved-in chest. With his head tilted downward and eyes burning fiercely, he said, “Look at me. Look at me. Do you see how my head is tilted? Why am I doing that? Why?”

  “Because... it’s intimidating?” said the youth.

  “No! It’s so you don’t jam the side of your palm into my throat and crush my windpipe!” A few laughed uneasily. “If anyone here finds themselves in a violent situation, I want to read in the paper that you ended the fight quickly by jamming the bottom of your palm into the perpetrator’s throat. LIKE THIS. See? And then I want to be able to turn to the obituary section and read about how the perpetrator didn’t fare so well because his wind pipe was crushed. Understand? Let’s go over it.”

  Wodi was thrilled and returned to the class again and again. Sevrik Clash was filled with a violent charisma, and espoused a philosophy of mystic chivalry meets barbaric pragmatism with dashes of trivia about ancient, dead civilizations that once practiced the art of beating ass. In between showing his students how to snap a kneecap out of place with a swift kick or how to conceal one’s intentions before exploding violently, he often reeled off helpful reminders on how to destroy one’s opponents both in and out of the training room.

  “If you’re smaller than the other guy, don’t let it come down to a grapple. Strike, keep him back! Eyes! Nose! Throat! A guy with raw hamburger for a face won’t want to wrestle with you.”

  “Be mindful of openings. If the fight lasts for longer than a few seconds, find or make faults in the opponent’s rhythm, so you can slip in and disable something vital.”

  “If you’re in a fight, and you’re constantly on the defense, you can never hope to win.”

  “Did you break
your thumb on the opponent’s chin? Don’t let the pain sap your resolve; switch to your elbows. You’d be surprised how much destructive force Mother Nature put in that one joint. It’s almost like she hates your opponent as much as you do!”

  But the man was no drill sergeant. He did not call anyone a maggot or a shit-for-brains. He took an active interest in his students, almost as if he was searching for something among them, and was surprisingly patient for one who bore such authority. If the thing was purely a publicity stunt, it was carried out with exceeding tenderness.

  Once, when Wodi ended up on the mat after an awkward grapple, Sevrik stood over him and spoke directly to him. “Combat is like an entire life squeezed into the span of a few seconds,” said Sevrik, not bothering to help Wodi up. “If you’re not focused, if you’re not fully devoted to victory or to survival, then your first impulse is going to be to run or give up. Because it’s just too painful otherwise. You’re going to be amazed at how quickly you tire, how quickly you run out of air. That means... you have to make your will stronger than your body. If your mind keeps moving ahead, your body will follow.”

  Wodi remained flat on the mat. Sevrik continued. “Rhythm, momentum, and will are everything in battle. See the enemy’s rhythm, then disrupt it; feel the enemy’s momentum, then redirect it; ignore your enemy’s will, and crush his with your own.”

  “How can I crush another person’s will?” Wodi asked.

  Without missing a beat, Sevrik said, “Show him you don’t fight to lose. Let him know he buried himself when he set his will against yours.”

  Wodi felt that he learned a great deal, but his strength never became very impressive. If he stood at a certain angle in his bathroom and the light hit him just so, then with a little imagination he could almost make out the curves of a few muscles. He decided he was not destined to become Haven’s most dangerous badass. Though the civilian self-defense classes were expanded, Sevrik eventually passed the duties on to other less impressive underlings. Wodi dropped the class around the same time.

  Wodi wondered if Sevrik had been a little disappointed in all of them. No doubt he was a busy man. If he had been searching for something among the citizens of Haven, he had not found it.

  Not yet.

  ***

  At the age of nineteen Wodi attended the University in Central Haven. His long incarceration in public school had been so dull and demeaning and traumatizing that he wanted to take a year off, to be away from people if only for a while. But his father pressured him to immediately enroll, and it was a good thing that he did, for Wodi loved the University. He made no friends, he did not party, and he lived in a small single-room apartment which he rarely left because he took nearly half of his classes on the datanet. Still, his time at the University was the most thrilling in all his short life.

  He took classes on the history of Haven, on post-structural biology, on “remnant philosophies” which was the second-hand record of the ancient philosophies of dead cultures, on psychology and the history of the perverse misuse of sociology, and several classes on literature and film. Wodi was a sponge. He stood out, and for the first time in his life, standing out and being noteworthy were admirable traits. Even in mathematics, which was Wodi’s weakest subject by far, he still outshone his peers because he got a hot tip on an introductory economics course that half-wits and athletes often took because it was exceedingly easy.

  Wodi’s favorite teacher was Professor Korliss Matri, a long-haired, aging firebrand who taught classes on comparative mythology, the literature of Haven, and an advanced class on the philosophies that helped shape the founding of Haven. Professor Matri was obsessed with the subject of heroism: heroic characters in literature, heroic philosophies, heroic decades, heroic historical figures. He also spoke of philosophies which sidetracked nations and mired the intellectual elite in pointless, masturbatory arguments for decades, even centuries; he also gave accounts of history’s little villains, small men who sold what was human in them, or even gave away their humanity, for a goal that was not even worth the advertised price.

  Wodi began to get a real sense of Haven’s Founding Fathers. Some were noblemen, some came from poverty, some were fighters, some were writers and inventors, but all of them were born and lived in the wasteland. They had seen demons, disease, superstition and the cruelty of barbaric kings first-hand. They protested and fought against tyranny, then secretly founded a haven for humanity, the last bastion of reason – Wodi’s homeland. Wodi began to overcome the dull and confining nature of his upbringing as Professor Matri fostered in him a new admiration for the human species. Wodi wondered if he would ever be able to inspire his species in the undertaking of something grand, something heroic, that would change the world.

  So it was that the last paper Wodi wrote for Professor Matri, a short piece which he had greatly enjoyed writing, was titled “Human Potential: The Great Untapped Resource”. He turned it in, Matri greeted him by name and wished him a good winter break, Wodi thanked him nervously, and then he left the University never to return again.

  Wodi learned a great many things in that year and a half, but his time at the University did little to prepare him for the nightmare that followed.

  ***

  At the age of twenty, Wodi woke in a strange forest.

  With cold earth against his back, he stared through a jagged canopy of black branches and tried to reconstruct the tattered web of his memory. It was nighttime, his blanket and backpack were nowhere in sight, and even though he had come into the forest just to see what it was like to sleep under the stars, something deep inside told him that this was not the forest he had originally entered.

  Wodi propped himself up and swallowed his rising panic. He planned to get his bearings as soon as the sun rose, head northwest, take the rail back to his University apartment near Central Haven, fix something hot to eat, forget about ever going on hikes without good reason, and then he would -

  A bushel of flowers caught Wodi’s eye. In the deep blue of early morning he could clearly make out white petals against black tree bark. The flowers were strange; some of their whiteness had splashed onto the black tree bark, as if they were thickly painted and then clumsily handled. Wodi carefully crawled over to the bushel, peered inside the flowers, and saw something like purple spirals nestled against fleshy pink folds. He pulled away quickly.

  The alien flowers were not native to Haven.

  Wodi rose and looked around. Though the idea was difficult to grasp, he was truly beginning to believe that he was no longer in Haven. In the growing light he could dimly make out a complicated spiderweb high in a tree, looping from branch to branch, patterns repeating like some kind of equation. He saw a cluster of white trees with holes gnawed through their centers, with thick syrup the color of blood running down to the forest floor.

  Wodi had heard of such places before. Though most of the world was baked dry and hostile to life, this place was an oasis - a dreadful and forbidding place deep in the wasteland. If he was correct, then he was nowhere near Haven. An oasis was a place of genetic wildness, a dark land where life was crowded and hemmed in on all sides. A place of vicious and unending competition where living things developed savage defenses, facing a grim choice between death and an unhappy existence.

  And oases were always, always inhabited by flesh demons.

  ***

  Wodi waited on the edge of a nearby clearing and watched the sky unravel into white and pink. The stars grew dim. As long as he stood still, he could almost imagine that he was the first man in an alien world, standing by as the first garden gave birth to itself. Eventually he could make out black leaves against twisted trunks, then he could see that the forest stretched in all directions. When he got a hint of where the sun would rise, he knew that soon the day would begin and he would have to bottle up the chaos in his heart and come up with a plan.

  He checked his pockets for anything that might help. All of his usual possessions were gone; they had been rep
laced by a small, folded, hand-drawn map.

  Surely he was dreaming. The map was drawn with a spidery thin script, more representative than practical. There were hints of imagination in the controlled flourishes of the pen.

  The Island of Haven was at the top, in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility, with Sunport on the far shore south of Haven. Below that lay hundreds of miles of arid wasteland, home to lone demons and the burning sun. At the bottom of the map Wodi could see a horseshoe formation of mountains that enclosed a forest. A prominent X was placed in the middle of the forest. A river ran through the forest, disappeared under the mountains, wound through more arid waste, and cut through the center of the city of Pontius far to the west. Wodi could only assume that he was standing on the X, thousands of miles from Haven, trapped in a world he was not equipped to deal with.

  As confusing as it was, the existence of the map confirmed that he was a fly trapped in the web of a sadist with access to resources. The situation was not as dreamlike and nonsensical when he reasoned that someone, a person, a human like himself, was behind it all.

  Had he pissed off someone dangerous? Or been mistaken for the child of someone important, kidnapped for ransom, and then dumped far away when the deal fell through? Neither option seemed likely. All the same, here he was.

  Because the map was nothing but confusing, he put it away, climbed a low-hanging branch, and watched the sun rise. The sky was pale and blue, the same blue he had known his whole life. He could now orient himself north. Again and again he swallowed the fear that he would soon be eaten alive by monstrous gods. Again and again he told himself that if he was going to die anyway, then he could at least die on the long walk home.

  ***

  Deep, deep underground, Sevrik Clash, Head of Guard in Haven, stalked down the dark halls underneath the Department of Science. His massive frame nearly filled the hall. A grizzled red beard, streaked with gray, shot out from his face and covered his chest. His heavy footfalls echoed against the hum of distant generators. He came to a black door, said, “Potential,” and the door hissed and swung open mechanically.