by Weston Ochse
He was still smiling as the animal leapt.
* * *
Paradise Valley, Arizona
John the New Baptist turned away from the mountain, the wildness of the cat still flowing through his veins. His eyes glowed feral in the candle light. The coppery taste of blood was a ravenous echo within his mouth. A heavy nothing filled his stomach, a false thing, a lingering memory of the communion with the beast, for it had eaten, not he.
There were always those who disbelieved—those members of the staid community of regulars whose only goal was to continue the status quo and the continued belief in the indefinable. Those who invented the rules as they went along, changing things to cast the best light upon their own petty ambitions. Christians were the worst of them. For a thousand years they’d kept the masses in the dark, the very art of writing a carefully hidden secret. They coded their dogma in a dead language. They killed kings to create kings. None of this was done in the name of God. These things were done in the name of their own quest for power, their politics and their selfishness.
That’s why he had no rules, why he was a church of one.
He’d spent a life discovering the truisms of the world, searching the farthest reaches of the known and the forgotten depths of the lost. He’d discovered and mastered more religions than people knew existed. He, above all, was able to take these political things and break them down to their purest forms. It was he, alone, who could extract the words of God from amidst the rhetoric of man.
An open mind had been his greatest tool—a mind that wasn’t filtered by dogma or ambition or any earthy ties. Like a heretic of old, he’d wandered the world on foot, seeking out the hidden places and counting upon the will of the people for sustenance and haven. He accepted no money and would help no man. He was on a quest from God. From the pueblos of the Native American’s to the yurts of the Mongols, he’d searched, each encounter enriching him, feeding him.
John the New Baptist grinned as he broke the connection with the animal. It would be a while before they found the man again, the greater part of him rent by too-sharp teeth and finger-long claws. From nature to nature, the man would soon fertilize the earth, his death promoting growth and rebirth.
John stepped down the dark hallway, his feet moving automatically towards his destination. His eyes turned inward to where his anger lay smoldering. He’d almost missed the man. Only a passing twinge had alerted him. He needed to strengthen the spell. It wouldn’t do to have people too close.
He descended into the sub-basement and approached a lone door. With a key around his neck, he unlocked it, entered his private cell and removed his clothing. He knelt before the small altar, pausing to replace two candles and to replenish the bowl of blood from his store in the small refrigerator against the back wall. He dipped the large golden crucifix into the bowl, allowing the virginal blood to coat the carved Jesus. He replaced the cross as the centerpiece to the altar. It glowed a wet red upon the mound of myriad symbols, somehow at home with the statue of Kali and the Kachina that appeared to guard it.
John began to pray, his chants rebounding off the earthen walls in a language only a handful still knew.
* * *
Ooltewah, Tennessee
Darkness set quickly in the Eastern woods, the trees and the vines and the ridges of the hills creating a complex puzzle of shadows as the sun skewed them in its descent. When the wind came, the shadows twisted and moved, reaching out to grasp the clapboard house until it was finally trapped in the tight grip of night.
It was Maxom’s time. Vietnam had forever made him a creature of the dark, a Phantom of a Kudzu Opera, a leper that scared children and made even the best Samaritan walk quickly away. Daytime was for real people with real families. Daytime was for normal people. It had been a long time since Maxom had been called normal.
Six-thirty. His shift started at seven and he’d probably be late again. Sometimes he wondered why he even cared. It wasn’t like they’d fire him. After all, no one would ever do what he did. Maggot Man—for this his name was appropriate.
Maxom gave himself a mental shove. It was way past the time he should feel sorry for himself. He wasn’t going to get any better. He’d never grow feet. He’d never get a new hand, unless it was made out of metal or some space age plastic. His scars were as much a part of him as his teeth.
He struggled into his Raynock Chicken windbreaker and zipped it all the way up. Grabbing his Tennessee Vols cap, he pulled it low over his eyes. It took three tries for the truck to start. Finally, with a cough and a rattle, it kicked over. Maxom didn’t mind. The bondo gray, Ford pick-up was almost as old as the house, but dependable. He backed out of the driveway and began the two-mile drive down the dirt road to the highway.
All the truck’s windows had been tinted especially for him, much to the consternation of the local police. It had been another idea of his therapist and she’d somehow managed to get the state Department of Motor Vehicles to sign off on the peculiar request. Because of his skin sensitivity, and because of his phobia, they’d allowed him to double tint. On each side of the glass, dark film had been attached, the windows totally opaque with the exception of a circular hole directly in front of the steering wheel, one directly behind him and smaller ones on either side window. Maxom was lucky he only had to navigate two simple turns to get to work. The way he drove was dangerous, but he’d become such a fixture on the backroads that he automatically got the right of way.
If it hadn’t been for the tinting, he wouldn’t be able to drive even at night. The tinting created a certain tunnel vision that kept him from wrecking like he had so many times before. It was a ridiculous phobia. Other than the vampire of legend, he was probably the only person on the planet who feared the crucifix. In fact, not only was it the crucifix, but any version of a cross could set him off. His home had long been modified, the crosspieces of the windows gone, shelves supported on the ends, not the middle…a hundred small things had been done to alleviate the need to see the symbol that was literally everywhere. No one had thought twice about telephone poles, however. Maxom saw each one as a technological crucifix, a complex net of sacrifice where he and Bernie died and died again, every fifty feet a new death going on forever. The first time he’d driven he’d made it all the way to the main road and turned towards work before he’d finally noticed them. The sight had sent him into immediate and violent convulsions. His breath had doubled and redoubled. His hand had grown numb. His heart had beat so fast, his chest ached with the pounding. He’d lost control of the truck and run off the road. When the police had finally found him two days later, his truck buried in the thick kudzu of a country ditch, he’d had to be admitted into Moccasin Bend Sanitorium for awhile.
But now, if he concentrated on the road just in front of his truck, he could drive almost anywhere, the tint ridding him of his pesky peripheral vision. On this day, he was five minutes late to work, his best time this week. If he kept this up, they might promote him. Maxom smiled at the thought, knowing that was impossible. There was only one job for him at the chicken plant and the job was his only because no one else would take it. Limping past the night foreman, he pulled his card from the slot, slid it into the machine and time-stamped it. He glanced at the man behind the window and saw the distaste, the averted gaze, and the smirk.
Fuck him.
Within minutes Maxom had changed into his hard-rubber uniform. Devised to protect the wearer from hazardous waste, it always reminded him of a space suit. Piss yellow and a quarter of an inch thick, the suit had been especially designed for him and his job. He remembered when he’d been hired how the owner had told him that if it weren’t for the tax write-off for hiring a handicapped nigger, Maxom wouldn’t even have this job.
One arm of the suit ended in a glove. The other ended at his elbow. He removed his arm prosthesis and placed it carefully on the top shelf of his locker. The pants of the jumpsuit ended just below the knees. Later, just before he lowered himself into the tank, he
removed his leg prosthetics and placed them in a special metal box beside the tank. Zippers were at the bottom edges to protect his nubs from the splattering offal. He pulled the rubber hood over his head and donned the gas mask. Once in the tank, he connected the mask to a hose that provided him outside air.
Ten minutes later, he attached himself to the mechanical stirrer and resumed his life’s work.
People didn’t call him Maggot Man because of looks alone.
The tank he was suspended above held six thousand gallons, but was usually only a third full. Even then, the muck was a hard thing to stir, even with the pneumatic rod. Some mornings he was so worn out that he was almost incapable of unhooking himself and going home. Knowing that no one would ever help him, however, he always seemed to make it.
The mechanical stirrer and harness assembly held him ten feet above the offal, his legs, now free of the prosthetics, fit snugly into metal cups that were attached to the overhead bar. A sixteen-foot aluminum rod was attached to the connection of his elbow by a smaller bar. His body’s job was to direct the aluminum rod and keep it steady. This rod continued upwards fitting into a pneumatic motor that powered it through slow circular arcs. From the same overhead bar, his body was connected by a nylon harness.
With his right hand he reached to the rod and punched the start button. The rod began to move in slow monotonous arcs, his body seeming to fly behind the rod as it made its circles within the tank, stirring the offal beneath him. Maxom watched as the feathers and guts and rotten pieces of chicken were stirred to the surface, the tiny white maggots rising to the top. Heads and beaks, morose glazed eyes rippled as the surface tension of the chicken soup broke. Maxom inhaled the fresh clean air of the outside through his mask as he guided the stirrer, adjusting the circles to better allow the maggots to breathe.
If it weren’t for the fishermen who craved the tiny beasts, Maxom never would have had a job. They paid a premium for the maggots and associated creatures, understanding that it was these plump morsels that the fish truly craved. Most were shocked when they learned that every chicken plant had a Maggot Man. After all, why waste good maggots.
And if it weren’t for the horrid little creatures he’d never make his $9.00 per hour, union wages. And if it weren’t for these nasty things that fed on death, he’d never be called Maggot Man. It was a trade-off of sorts.
He stared at the million undulating forms and was reminded of the rice he’d last eaten in Vietnam.
* * *
Maxom was powerless to stop the dream.
His vision was completely obscured by a thick white fog. More than the mere billowing vagueness of dreams, he recognized the fog as the ever-pervading mist from the mountain village where he’d died and risen again.
Maxom heard the sounds of movement through the vagueness. At first it was only a few disparate voices, tired, yet ready to start a new day. The smell of burning wood drifted to his nostrils. He heard the clanking of metal, evidence of a morning fire and someone’s breakfast. Not his, of course, but someone’s. He’d already eaten twice this week and his rice soup was another few days in coming.
Soon, the sounds were everywhere as the villagers began the mundane tasks of starting their day. As he listened, the mist lightened a little and he could see farther in front of him—something he didn’t want to do. Hearing was enough. Seeing would tear him apart. Maxom tried to close his eyes, but he had no control over his muscles. As was the commandment of all his dreams, his dictatorial Id had deemed Maxom’s interaction unnecessary. He was to be an observer, not a participant. Even if it was his own dream. Even if it was what really happened.
He screamed within his sleeping mind. He wanted to wake now. He’d experienced enough. It was as if he was falling from a great height. It was said that if you ever completed the fall you’d never awake and if you did, it would be as a dead man. Watching the mist unfold the shapes before him was just like falling. He knew that if he waited until it cleared, he would die again. He’d already died so many times.
Please, not again.
For Bernie waited within the fog. Ready to accuse him. Place the blame for the pain. For his death. For his decomposition.
It wasn’t Maxom’s fault that they’d been captured.
Both of them would’ve preferred dying. There was never a moment in their lives when they’d ever contemplated an existence as parodies of Western values. Never once did they believe they’d become living symbols of all that was terrible about America, hanging on the cross like a never-dying Jesus, savior by warning the mountain people not to help, to ignore Samaritanship, to forget the humanness of compassion.
The mist cleared a little more. Maxom begged to wake up. He shrieked for the dream to end.
He’d first met Bernie at Fort Bragg during a bar brawl at the Green Beret Sport Parachute Club. They’d punched each other on their respective chins and admired the way that the other refused to fall. Two more times they’d tried, corded triceps rippling with the effort, and two more times each had stood strong. Then they’d laughed and shaken hands. A strange bond had been born that day as the two had turned, and back to back, cleared the bar, turning vertical combatants into horizontal moaners. In the end, they found themselves the last two standing amidst an unconscious room of America’s best and bravest soldiers.
Bernie was the largest white man Maxom had ever seen. A paradigm of Danish genetics from Wisconsin, the man stood six-foot-six with muscles to spare and a shaggy mane of blonde hair. Bernie sported a great handlebar mustache that he refused to remove regardless of anyone’s tight ass regulations. It was this steadfast refusal to shave that had driven him to join the elite green berets, an organization that prided itself on a man’s prowess rather than a uniform image.
They’d been friends for three years when the shit had finally hit the fan, and it was this old friend who waited for him, now—only a thin veil of mist holding off condemnation. A breeze slipped into the clearing, causing the dreamy mists to swirl in ovoid patterns.
Maxom was staring at the dreamscape ground as the thick bamboo base of the cross became clear. Bernie had been virtually unhurt in the battle. Other than an AK round through the meaty part of his shoulder, it was the concussive blast from a grenade that had allowed him to be captured.
The mist cleared a little more. Maxom stared at the thick iron spike that had been hammered through Bernie’s feet—back when his friend had feet. Now only gristle and bone shards stuck to the bamboo where the spike entered the wood. Bernie’s feet would have been fine had the VC not coated them with boiled pig fat and unleashed the dogs. Maxom could still remember his friend’s screams as the animals chewed at all they could reach, consuming the great man’s feet and ankles in large canine gulps. The cracking of the bones as the larger mongrels gripped Bernie’s flesh-stripped legs in their jaws and wrenched, their mangy heads shaking back and forth like his friend was a caught rabbit.
Maxom remembered himself, unable to shut his eyes at the gory scene, alternately agonizing with his friend and terrified he’d be next. A small shame-filled part of him had even been grateful that it had been Bernie.
The rising sun crested the trees, its rays penetrating the triple canopy jungle. The mist evaporated and Maxom screamed. In both dream and reality, his throat grew raw as scream after scream after scream parched his throat and exhausted his lungs.
Maxom watched as the scorched and blackened nubs of the man’s legs were revealed. The VC had applied torches to cauterize the raw meaty ends and Maxom relived the sounds of the skin burning, the blood boiling and the fat bubbling and dripping to the ground. Maxom remembered the tiny wide-eyed child that had sat at the base of the pole, silently dipping her fingers into the fat that slid down like melting wax. He remembered her bringing her tiny fingers to her lips…
…tasting.
He saw the arms that had been flayed, bones stripped of meat shooting from the fleshy body of his friend as if they were branches and he was a snowman. Several lar
ge crows sat upon these, their talons gripping the bone as they picked the tiny residues of flesh clean. Maxom tried to will them away, to send his hate across the space like sling shot rocks.
Bernie hadn’t survived the flaying, his dying curses so loud they probably still echoed through the mountains. Maxom wouldn’t be surprised that even now, somewhere in a Tibetan Monastery, a hermetic monk heard the forever echoes of Motherfuckingcocksucker believing it to be the voice of Buddha and the pay-off for weeks of fasting.
He saw the holes where Bernie’s eyes had been, glowbugs and bees making their nests within his skull. Bernie stared directly at him. Then, unable to avert his gaze, Maxom watched as Bernie’s mouth bulged, his lips turning up into a rictis smile as a green python exited through where the great man’s teeth had once flashed dazzling smiles to Saigon hookers.
Maxom awoke screaming, soaring above a sea of rot. The maggots undulated beneath him.
CHAPTER 2
Saturday—June 9th
Chattanooga, Tennessee
The sky was a burnished gray. Low-slung clouds threatened rain. The noonday sun was an opaque orb of lighter gray and its greatest effect on the weather was to lower the temperature to a manageable seventy-five degrees. Even with the impending storm and chill, the boys were at the lake, cavorting among the pilings of their favorite dock, deeply involved in their game of Marco Polo.
The community dock lay at the head of a shallow inlet on Chicamauga Reservoir. The inlet was just over two hundred yards long, ending on muddy clay banks where a small sailboat was perennially tied to a short well-maintained dock. Other docks continued around both sides of the water. Great homes boasting five and six bedrooms as well as impeccably well-cared-for lawns reached to the cool water of the lake. The neighborhood was considered affluent by most of Chattanooga, boasting doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and even a state politician.
