The Damn Disciples

by Craig Sargent

  “I’ve got men coming,” Stone lied. “Fifty of them, and they’re tough as shit. They ain’t going to like it if—”

  “You lie, Stone,” the High Priest barked within the shadows of the hood. “There are no others. You travel alone. We know more than you imagine about you. That is why we have chosen you to be an honored member of our society. I offer you nothing less than total freedom, freedom to soar above the chains of mortal man.”

  “Been fine this way up till now,” Stone interjected. But he barely got the words out when they were pouring more of . the golden liquid down his throat. He tried to shake his head, but with three of them holding him and two pouring it down, it didn’t take long before he had swallowed a pint of the stuff. And just as his brain had been clearing, Stone suddenly felt it clouding up again, all fuzzy and rubbery. And though it took away some of the pain that he had begun feeling again in his leg, it also made him quickly lose track of where he was or what was going on.

  “Over to the door,” the Transformer commanded his underlings. Four of them carried the box with Stone still lying amidst the corpse sludge beneath him, hardly anything left of it now, as they had food-processed it through the night, with Stone as the blade. They came to a black circle in the floor, and the Transformer motioned for some of the robed lackeys to pull back the trapdoor hidden there.

  “When next we meet,” the Transformer hissed with reptilian darkness from the hood, “you shall have had your aura completely and totally cleansed. Of this I have no doubts.”

  “I gotta go,” Stone drunkenly mumbled as he felt the golden liquid filling up his bladder. But apparently they didn’t pay much heed to such requests, for suddenly the whole box was tilted over sideways and Stone felt himself tumbling out with the remains of slime falling all around him. He dropped for about ten feet into the darkness until he felt himself hit liquid, thick and foul-smelling. He gasped for air as some of the muck went into his mouth, but then discovered that though he had sunk in up to his chest he was standing with his feet on the bottom. At least he wasn’t going to drown. The trapdoor overhead was slammed shut again and Stone let out a groan of horror, knowing already he wasn’t ready for whatever was going to happen next.

  The smell was the worst thing. It made him gag, catch his breath. It must have been a sewer, for nothing else could smell quite so thick, so foul. And as his eyes got used to the little bits of light trickling down through the uneven floor-boarding above, where they were chanting, carrying out some sick ceremony or other, what he could see made Stone wish he were blind. For he was in a sewer—there were all kinds of wretched stuff floating around him. But worse than the aesthetics of the place—he wasn’t alone. Spiders rushed up and down the walls, roaches, centipedes, all kinds of ugly little bugs slithering everywhere. There had been some insect buddies in the coffin—but those had been annoyances. There were enough here to eat him alive.

  Though his hands and feet were tied, Stone was able to hobble around a little, careful as he could be. If he slipped and fell under the foul waves, he wasn’t coming up again. And the thought of sucking in the stuff made him alert, his every drugged sense on full charge—or as full as they could get. He backed off to one of the corners of the chamber, where at least a little more of the light was cascading down from above. He squirmed into the corner so he was protected on two sides, and settled into place.

  The additional helping of Golden Nectar they had forced into him was starting to really hit him now. And, Stone had to admit, in a way the stuff wasn’t all that bad. It seemed to put a hazy kind of glow on everything, made him not care quite as much that he was just another turd floating in a sea of them. And he even sort of blissed out, his head half rolling around and nodding like some junkie on an Avenue D street corner. His eyes focused mindlessly on a single funnel of light that ran past him and disappeared like a spear into the black mud that was up to his chest.

  He didn’t know how many minutes he just stood there spaced out, but suddenly his attention was grabbed by splashing sounds. Stone turned his face around, and what-ever pleasure the combination twelve-drug Mickey Finn was giving him vanished in a flash. For he was surrounded by bugs, bugs everywhere. On the mud-caked walls, on the rafters above, coming toward him in the water, scuttling along with multilegs. And the vague softness of the drugs suddenly turned hard and terrible. Stone felt a surge of paranoia sweep over him, making his heart palpitate a few times. It wasn’t just the actual danger of the attack that was hard to judge so far, but the deeper unconscious fears that the drugs brought up in Stone. As they were supposed to do. Brought up his deepest fears, his infantile trembling terrors that had been pushed down for decades.

  And suddenly the charging ranks of insects, spiders, centipedes, beetles, larvae, and things never catalogued by scientists appeared superhuge, immense, to Stone. Their jaws and claws and antennae looked like the appendages of monsters. In spite of himself, Stone let out a piercing scream as his heart seemed to turn to ice in his chest. Ten feet above, the Transformer allowed a razor smile to crease along his decomposing face. The “tough one” was losing his toughness fast.

  Stone pulled himself farther back into the corner, rising up on his toes though his legs were getting that rubbery feeling, as if they might just go out from under him at any moment. He raised his bound hands up out of the slime, splashing a whole load of it over his face, though he hardly noticed. He just didn’t want the bugs, swimming through the sludge ocean by the thousands, to get him. He splashed wildly in front of him, driving them back, sending them catapulting off onto the walls, where they slid back down into the foul waters and started back toward him once again. And Stone was right about one thing—he was being at-tacked. They hadn’t seen such a meal as this for months. From every crevice, every little crack they poured, curious about all the splashing, the commotion, smelling food.

  Stone had no idea how long he had been splashing away when he heard the door open above him and some objects were thrown down. They landed just feet from him, and as they bobbed to the surface, Stone’s puffed eyes opened a notch wider. They were heads. Human heads, three of them, freshly chopped, for their flesh wasn’t rotted at all, and their necks still oozed with the blood of the freshly killed. And under the weight of the drugs coursing through his system, Stone swore they were moving through the water, were coming at him, all of them, like demonic fish. And as they came, their eyes focused on him and their lips moved.

  “Good day to you, sir. A fine morning it is indeed,” said a bearded head with thick red lips.

  “I think not,” Stone whispered back. “I think it is an ugly, foul, shit-covered morning. And perhaps it is not even morning.”

  “Ah, Charles, I do believe he does not trust us,” said another head, this one an old man with wrinkles covering every inch of his face, bobbing just inches to Stone’s right.

  “Goddamn right I don’t trust you,” Stone screamed out, starting to splash his hands again so that he forced the three heads back by the forces of the little waves he created. “You need a whole body for me to trust you,” Stone exclaimed, which somehow in his drugged state made sense to him. A whole body. He sure as hell wasn’t trusting just heads. It wasn’t right. Though he wasn’t quite sure why.

  Then every fucking thing was coming at him—heads, centipedes, rats, spiders dangling down from above. And as they came they all spoke and argued, and it was as if he was in a madhouse. The madhouse of his own brain.

  “Good day to you, sir,” a black spider said as it landed on his forehead, took a big bite out of his scalp, and then quickly jumped off before he could react.

  “Afternoon, mate,” an English-accented waterbug whistled as it sidestroked through the black shitmud straight to-ward his lip. It tried to bite him, but Stone bit it first, cracking it in half and spitting out both pieces, which landed a few feet off in the water and were quickly gobbled down by hidden mouths from beneath the scummy surface.

  “Like to get my teeth around that tail,�
�� said one of the bobbing heads, this one a female with lipstick still smeared on, as she spotted a rat coming toward Stone. She began snapping at it like a girl bobbing for apples at a Halloween party.

  “You ass,” the rat screamed back at the skull. “I’ll rip out your mouth before you can bite me.” Then the whole scene was melting and it all fell into complete madness. Every-thing was yelling and he was arguing about the nature of man and the universe with the skull of a week-old corpse and two rats who tore away at its rotted brain matter. If they couldn’t win the argument with words, why, they’d just do it with teeth.

  FIFTEEN

  Stone didn’t know where he was after that. It could have been hell for all he knew. Just stink and slime and things clawing and biting and his body shaking, his mind melting. Voices, screams. Then there was at last—light. And he was being hauled up out of the wretched place. He was put on the floor and buckets of water were splashed over him, cleaning off the slime, the filth that coated him. Then a brown robe was handed him to cover his nakedness. The Transformer stood before him.

  “You are one of us now, aren’t you?” the black-robed figure asked, the eyes glowing ruby-red within the hood.

  “Yes—I—am one of you,” Stone’s lips replied slowly, though he didn’t even know what the lips were saying. Somewhere inside Stone there was a sliver of his self left. A voice that screamed out that this was all a lie, that every-thing was wrong. But that voice was swallowed up, blanketed, buried, by the “cleansed” portion of his brain, the part that through shock, dehydration, and continuous doses of the Nectar had made Stone a mindless zombie.

  “You took a long time, Stone,” the High Priest said as he stood before the barely-able-to-stand brown-robed Stone. “An amazingly long time, far more than the others. But that is only because your mind was so cancer-ridden. Now you are free.”

  “Now I am free,” Stone dumbly echoed. It was as if he had no will. How a bug or goldfish might have felt. The Transformer’s words and face loomed in his mind like a god. And everything just drained away inside him when he tried to get up even the slightest mental resistance. He was at the bottom of a golden swamp, and for the life of him he was sinking deeper into it every second.

  “Yes, now you are free,” the Transformer said as he walked around Stone inspecting the man closely, looking into his eyes, then walking behind him and suddenly grabbing at his neck. Searching for a reaction, any quick or defensive motion. But there was none. Stone had been cleansed. It had taken five days down there in that filth, with constant dosings of the Elixir. The Transformer had thought he might just have to kill him after all—the first total failure. But Stone had started to succumb on the fifth day after he’d taken in quarts of the drug—enough to kill most men. Still, the High Priest made a mental note to keep the man heavily drugged at all times.

  “Welcome to the Perfect Aura,” the High Priest said, the rotted face within twisted in something approaching a smile. “Your new designation is Pod number 47. You are a brown robe of the fourth rank,” the Transformer said, standing back and putting a golden chain around Stone’s neck. At the end of the chain was a round locket with some symbols and the Guru’s face carved into it.

  “My name is Pod number 47,” Stone repeated. “I am a brown robe of the fourth order.”

  “Yes, very good. Very, very good,” the Transformer said approvingly as he stopped his close inspection, satisfied that Stone was in fact “cleansed.” It was not something that could be easily faked. None had succeeded so far. The Transformer was a man of penetrating observation. Even the dilations of the pupils could betray a man. Stone was under. The glassy-eyed, lip-drooping expression that was on all his followers.

  “Now, repeat after me,” the Transformer said. “I, Pod number 47—”

  “I, Pod number 47,” Stone said, slurring his words, his lips hardly moving. He was so drugged out that his cheeks were hanging down the side of his face.

  “Promise with my life and my blood—”

  “Promise with my wife and my blud,” Stone said, having trouble even following the words as he spun around some-where inside his brain.

  “To obey the Guru, the High Priest, and all the laws of the Perfect Aura.”

  “Obey my High Priest, the Guru, and all claws of Perfect Order,” Stone echoed.

  “And give my life to defend it.”

  “And give my wife to defend it,” Stone said.

  “You are now a full member of the Perfect Aura. And lucky for you, as so many out there in this barbarous land would give their right arm for such an honor.”

  “So lucky,” Stone said as drool came down the corner of his mouth and dribbled down his chin and onto his nice new brown robe.

  “Take him to the pod barracks,” the Transformer commanded, and several of his robed underlings stepped forward and took Stone by each arm and toward the door. When he hit the light outside, Stone reeled back for a moment. He had been so used to the darkness, the slime, that the purity of a day with fresh sun streaming down was jarring, unpleasant to his drug-saturated system.

  “Come,” the two guards said. They pulled harder, and Stone was half dragged along the street and toward the far end of town. There were only other cultees here, as outsiders were confined to the commercial section of town. Each one that they passed bowed his or her head and said, “Good day. May the Perfect Aura shine down upon you.” Which phrase was repeated by the two guards, and by Stone as well, who had trouble getting the words out. He imitated as well their mouth-stretching smiles, though his lips kept quivering and threatening to fall off his mouth. Gee, everybody was so nice. Everyone’s halo was so golden. This was a really nice place, and Stone was glad he had found it. He had been looking so long.

  As they walked along, Stone’s eyes were drawn by the sound of barking, and he looked over to the left. Dogs, about two dozen of them held in pens just inside a barnlike structure. One dog looked familiar. As if it was buried some—where in his mind. And as Stone focused, the dog, too, seemed to stare back at him, though it made no sound. The two mindless creatures stared hard for several seconds, and then Stone was dragged off. Funny, something about the dog made him- But the moment he began trying to remember where he had seen it, a splitting headache roared through his skull. So he stopped. And just let the golden haze drip back over everything.

  The two led him about six blocks and then turned down a side street to a long log building.

  “This is where all the new pods are brought,” one of the gray robes said. “Here you will be shown the ways of the Perfect Order.”

  “Thank you,” Stone said, grateful that they would be so kind as to give him anything. A worthless piece of garbage like him—Pod #47. Inside the place there were long rows of bunkbeds, about twenty on a side, for a total of nearly forty men in a room only about fifty feet long by twelve wide. So that when men on each side had their legs extended out, it was impossible to walk down the middle without going through a tangle of feet and toes.

  “This is Pod number 47,” the guards said as they walked Stone into the room. “Where is there a free bed?”

  “Here,” one of them spoke up, apparently the Group Leader, as he wore a gray robe while Stone and all the other new inductees, the lowest of the pecking order, wore brown.

  “You will come here,” the Group Leader leader said, taking Stone by the ear, squeezing hard and pulling him down the middle aisle all the way to the back. “The top bed is yours,” he said, releasing Stone’s ear. Stone stood in front of him, not moving, having a hard time focusing his eyes on one spot long enough to see anything. “You are Pod number 47. You will do nothing without being told to do it by me. I am Group Leader. You will not shit, sleep, or eat without command. Do you understand all this, Pod number 47?”

  “Yes, Group Leader,” Stone said, sorry that he had angered the Group Leader, though he did not quite know how he had done so. “I will do nothing without your permission.”

  “Now, climb up on your bed a
nd sit there. Do not move,” the Group Leader said as he turned and walked back up to the front of the room. Stone somehow dragged himself up the side of the bunk, where there was a small but rickety ladder. His hands and legs weren’t working too well. The drugs, aside from affecting his brain, also didn’t do wonders for his whole nervous and muscular system. Everything felt as if it was out of sync, like if he told his body to move his right hand it might just as easily twitch his left big toe. His signals, to say the least, were crossed up.

  They sat there on the sides of their beds, their legs dangling over for nearly an hour, though none of them had much concept of time. Under the brainwashing and the constant stream of drugs into their bodies, time was nonexistent. For they had no pasts—or futures. Only the dreamy, fog-enshrouded eternal now. After an indeterminate time, the Group Leader paraded up and down the rows cracking them each on the head with a long stick.

  “Move, you worthless pods,” he screamed as he smashed at them, though none could really feel all that much pain with all the junk in their bloodstreams. Still, like frightened dogs, they scurried along down the center aisle and out of the building. Stone was the last and took a good shot on the back of the head that he felt even through the golden he. The Group Leader led them down a street, where they passed the late-afternoon workers coming in from the surrounding forests. A whole line of elephants, a dozen or more, were hauling forty-foot logs as the construction around the place continued. Somewhere inside Stone’s rational self, a spark the size of a pinhead wondered where all the fucking elephants were coming from. But the question wasn’t even acknowledged by the “cleansed” portion.

  The Group Leader led them to a dining building where other cultees were already sitting, these all of higher ranks, with gray, even a few black, robes. The pods were all taken to one side of the long mess hall. Their section was screened off, as the highest ranks didn’t like having to see the slobberings of the newest recruits. The Group Leader marched them around the table and then commanded them all to sit. They sat down, facing one another from a few feet across the table. Not a face showed any friendship, or fear. Nothing. They were like mirrors facing one another, each reflecting the other but offering nothing of its own.