by Steve Vernon
And in the midst of it all stood the red nun.
“Holy shit on a crucifix,” Gerhardt swore. “Just look at the front porch on that one!”
The red nun stood there in a stance that would have made a wanton blush. Her robe was as red as fire, with a cowl that nearly covered her entire face. She wore a yoke that looked like it had been made from human skin. The yoke was adorned with a bright red dagger-style crucifix that dripped a steady stream of blood and something that looked like semen.
The only things that peasant Gerhardt could look at were her tits. They were huge, like two of the largest melons imaginable. And they were moving beneath her habit.
“You scarlet bitch,” I shouted. “What do you know of this?”
Gerhardt said nothing. He stepped forward like a man possessed and tore her habit off. I could see her breasts beneath the fabric. There were slits in them, like a fish’s gills, opening and closing. She was breathing through them, I think. It made a soft sound, like bird calls on the wind. She was where the whistling was coming from.
She looked heavy, like slaughtered pork. Every step she took was meaty and slow. Her flesh looked soft and malleable. She opened her arms towards Gerhardt and he stepped towards her.
I had known Gerhardt since the beginning of the war. I had fought beside him, side by side, standing firm in the onslaught of battle. I would have never dreamed that he would let go so easily.
He stood there, listening to the soft wet cooing of her hellish breath moisting through her gill slits. Like a man entranced he unbuttoned his trousers, letting them flop to his knees. He was hideously erect and hopped towards her with his pants bound about his knees, helplessly spellbound. He walked towards her, as obedient as a school child, embracing her. I watched as the meat of her flesh moved about him.
The windows glinted and I looked up and I could see a face in the windows, flattened like a photograph, yet somehow bulging at the seams. The window-face pushed out and down from the arched windows and I knew it was some kind of god.
What are you, I wondered. A god of rape? Of war? A god of hunger? I fell to my knees, staring helplessly upwards. My ears shivered like wriggles of cold lightning were passing through them. I could hear the wet cooing love sounds of the red nun and Gerhardt’s strangled passion, wet and frantic like a man drowning in a slow red mudslide.
The face in the window glass seemed to shard out, expanding at every sound of the love making, feeding off of it until I could see the frame of a man, standing high above me. A man made of daggers and razor blades, barbed wire and broken glass. Sharded edges, the colors of a dying rainbow pouring out shrapnel high above my head.
I tilted my Schmeisser upwards and emptied my last clip. The painted glass howled into a blizzard of fragments that showered down upon my upturned face. I closed my eyes instinctively and felt red hot pain flensing the skin away from my bones. And the red nun kept singing, like she was having the most wonderful lyrical fuck of her life. Gerhardt lay beneath her, flopping and heaving like a beached flounder.
I turned and ran, leaving Gerhardt lying there beneath that damned red nun, what ever she was.
If he called my name I didn’t hear.
*
I hit the gate shoulder-first. It flew open like a sprung trap.
I kept running until I reached the Russian tank. I fell at its treads, kneeling in the frozen dirt. I wanted to pray but I wasn’t sure who I might call upon. Was there anyone up there listening? There were Russians at the tank. A crew of mechanics intent upon salvage. They kept looking at me, making frightened faces. I wasn’t sure what they were seeing but it didn’t seem pretty.
I heard the nun singing from the heart of the church. Soft wet dove calls. Should I go back to her? Would she have room inside her for both me and Gerhardt? I passed a hand across my brow. It felt wet, like paste. There was something sharp, hidden there. A piece of glass. I plucked it from out of my brow.
One of the Russians spoke, something soft, like a warning, like sympathy.
I looked up at him and he put his hands across his mouth, bowed over and puked.
I looked at the glass in my hand. My blood trickled down and pooled in the glass and I could see myself. I could see what was left of me after the glass rain had flensed the skin from off of my bones.
This is what war does to you. It scars you, irreparably.
I looked up. I knew what I had to do. I climbed into the tank. No one tried to stop me. I believe they were afraid to touch what was left of my skin.
There were two others inside the tank. I stared at them hard.
“If you don’t leave right now,” I told them, “I am going to empty this clip. In here, the ricochet ought to work like an automatic meat grinder.”
They couldn’t understand my language any more than I could theirs. I noticed one of the men reaching for a wrench. The other man shifted nervously. They were both thinking about putting up a fight.
I tapped my Schmeisser ominously. “I don’t think I can make much worse of a mess of myself. How much do you think of your chances?”
We communicated. They clambered from the tank.
I fired the ignition, stomping the accelerator pedal, praying that the damned thing would work.
It grumbled into life.
I hadn’t driven a tank since training school. I hadn’t liked it when I did so, which was why I chose to transfer to the infantry but I still remembered how. I drove the tank past the angry mechanics, down through the village and straight through the gate. I was in the town itself. I wanted to bring it down around me but I wasn’t sure about how long I could keep operating this tank.
So I drove it straight into the church, crashing through the dark front doors.
What was left of the red nun stood there waiting for me. She seemed to ooze out towards me, her red skin flowing like a slow river. I couldn’t let her at me, not even through the tank. Not after what she’d done to Gerhardt.
It was hard work loading the cannon by myself. It would have been smarter to load it before I drove the tank. Too bad I hadn’t thought of that. I managed just the same and then I fired, opening my mouth instinctively so that my ear drums wouldn’t rupture. The shell struck the nun square on, smashing her like a fat red bug.
I squeezed the machine gun triggers, turning the tank in a tight circle and letting the machine guns howl. Then, when the gun was emptied I clambered out of the tank, nearly spilling to the ground. I pulled Gerhardt out of what was left of the nun. She’d swallowed him somehow, like some great gelatinous jellyfish.
I dragged what was left of Gerhardt out of the nun and out to the courtyard outside of the church. I wanted to drag him right out of the stinking village but I needed my strength for what came next.
I laid Gerhardt flat out upon the cobblestones. I stared down at what she’d done to him. His skin had softened into a gelatinous mess, poured about his rubbery bones. It was hideous.
I raised my knife up. Gerhardt opened his eyelids. Beneath them, in place of a pair of eyes, were a pair pustulant suckers. I drove the knife straight down into his chest. It took some work but I hacked a hole that seemed large enough.
Then I pushed my hands inside his chest. His entrails were fat and heavy, thick handfuls of warm jellied eels. How can a man who lived off of horsemeat and melted snow grow such fat entrails?
“Second helpings,” I said with a bitter grin. Gerhardt would have wanted to go out with a laugh. “It tastes better the second time around.”
The bastard giggled wetly, thick mucus-like blood oozing from between lips. Even dying hadn’t hurt his sense of humor.
I worked my hands in deeper, feeling the edges of his wound socketing about my wrists. I fingered the brittle rung-work of his rib cage, like a blind musician fumbling a hammer-blow lullaby. I felt his heart floating like a fat stewed dove. I felt it flutter, beating out one last quick march home.
I tore it out of his chest and then it moved in my hand. Thin fine gill slits fluttere
d in rhythmic pulsing, making that soft wet bird song.
“It grows on you, if you give it a chance.”
I was giggling now, losing my grip on sanity. Perhaps I’d lost it some time ago. War can do that to a man.
I was long past reason, operating on some blind primordial instinct. I opened my own stomach with the knife. It only hurt at the first cut. Then the pain dissolved into a grim resolve to get it over with.
I worked my hands into my own evisceration, putting the slit cooing heart inside my own chest. And then I pushed my hands in, clenching the two Russian grenades that Gerhardt had salvaged. I worked the pins loose and squeezed the firing mechanism as hard as I could. They would not detonate so long as I could continue this pressure.
I snugged the grenades up into my chest, as close to the damned heart as I dared.
“Come get your eggs, little nun. Come get your eggs.”
And I sat there in the darkness of the Russian woods waiting for whatever would come crawling out of the wreckage of the church.
Pray for the Clockwork Twister
A soft blue angel neoned high above the porno-mall, some trick of wilted sunshine keeping her alight and aloft, her legs parted over the box office entranceway, the useless ticket reel with one last stub poked out like a trick-or-treat tongue. She taunted us, hanging there across the street, suspended in the uneasy heaven like a totem pole’s last wet dream.
Our bus squatted in resignation upon the cracked city pavement. Its four wheels were flattened and it lay there in the street, a perpetual monument to rusted inertia. The blue twisters scudded and fitzed outside of the bus, rattling against the faded metal panels.
I wasn’t alone.
An old woman rocked beside me, forward-back-forward-back, running her dry intricate fingers along the keys of a dead laptop computer cradled in her arms like a baby, whispering a prayer over each key stroke, a trickle of spittle sliding down her cheekbone like a soft chromium wire.
I bowed my head to the cell phone in my hands. Once, twice, amen. A binary incantation, an exercise in divine dualistic repetition, do-over, do-over but nothing worked. God had snuffed our electro-genie with a single divine wet fart.
There was a crack growing in the bus’s window. Each time the electronic blue twisters rasp-banged against the bus the crack widened just a little like a door hung on rusted hinges, slowly creaking open.
They’ll be inside soon.
A large man stood in the center of the aisle, his arms high-nooned towards an unseen paradise. He was as naked as a skinned bear and nearly half as attractive. His wrists were adorned with a dozen glittering wrist-watchers, all tuned to separate cable channels. He shook the useless metal trinkets in a glorious spasm-dance of Vitus-pure devotion. His exhorting shouts were loudly thrown skyward, his over-used voice degenerating into a rasping husked tongue that might have been Russian, might have been Latin, might have been bedlam-babel-drivelled madness.
What the virtual fuck did it matter? We were lost to everything but denial, practicing our three card monte rituals, our severed thumb hand games, inserting brass coin promises into our collective assholes like coins jammed into a gummed up candy floss projector in the hope that something would start again.
The streetlights outside our metal cage taunted us, winking on and off in random sparks as they are touched by the whirling blue electronic twisters. My mouth watered at the sight of such free and easy technology.
I remember a time when the technology belonged to anyone with an opposable thumb and a reasonable set of button-punching fingers. Intelligence was nonessential. We idiot proofed every line of the design into a twice-over redundancy. Now the magic was lost to us, the electricity no longer obeyed. We had forgotten to keep it in prayers. We had taken it for granted until the blue twisters came.
A man in a painted bus driver’s cap, a Bugs Bunny necktie and an I Love Lucy t-shirt lay prostrate upon the floor fervently kissing the accelerator pedal. I bowed my head to the cell phone, one-twice-amen, praying that something would answer. Nothing moved but the twisters outside of the bus and the crack in the window.
I knew there were others out there scuttling in the ruins. Some of them had already degenerated to club carrying primeval status. Building shelters from dead printers and walls of circuit board. Eating and fucking in the untelevised darkness, devotees of their own simplistic hope towards the continuation of our one-track species.
We on the bus refused to yield. We knew there were others who shared our beliefs. There had to be some left. We were the priests of this new powerless age. On the morning when no alarm clocks rang, when the lights faded and died, when the gas flared up in one magnificent pyre-light we did not surrender. We knelt down in defiance and prayed that what ever blind idiot god had turned out our power switches would fumble once more in the darkness to hear our faded prayers and accidentally turn on the heavenly breakers once more.
We kept mouthing our devotions, counting from one to zero, one to zero. Whispering calculus and PIN numbers to the techno-armageddic darkness; exercising our futile useless blind Braille faith. We didn’t count. We were nothing more than a row of naughts wrapped in the ghost of city transport; place holders who could only sit there and remember when we used to mean a little more than nothing.
The old woman beside me nodded off. I jabbed her with my elbow to try and awaken her but it was too late. Her thoughts drifted towards the darkness. Sleep swallowed her. Oblivion took the wheel and the vital electricity inside her disconnected. In the space of time it took her to slip away, she forgot how to breathe, her heart forgot how to beat and her spark clicked out of existence.
She leaned forward, an inevitable yielding to gravity. I caught her, dropping my cell phone to the floor at my feet. The cell phone shattered. I didn’t care. I needed something other than the act of wandering my fingertips across its unfeeling circuitry. I needed feedback of any kind.
The man in the bus driver’s cap looked up from his pedal-obsessed osculations. The naked wrist-watcher dervish dancer looked down at me, agog that I’d dared risk stopping my techno-devotions.
“Help me, damn it!” I shouted.
I loosened the woman’s collar and checked for a pulse. I felt it flutter once, like a butterfly trapped in a black pudding. I remembered how to do this. Kneeling over her, my fists overlapped into a pliable plunger, working the still meat memory of her heart muscle. Again, again.
The man wearing the wrist-watchers knelt beside us.
“Can you save her?” He asked, his voice harshened with concern and misuse.
Can I save her? Save her for what? Save her for another few days until the whirling blue electronic twisters that were all that was left of our civilization’s shining power came crashing through the bus’s windows and tore us down into the stone age of silence?
“Do you see what I’m doing?” I asked, nodding towards my hands.
He showed me he did.
“Do it. Gently. Don’t crack her bones. Move your hands up an inch. You’re too close to the ribs. There, that’s it, find the rhythm. There.”
I bent over her face and pressed my lips into a vital seal about her mouth. I breathed, once, twice, again, filling her lungs and letting them fall. Her mouth was dank. Her lips were dry. It didn’t matter. I kept breathing into them, not pausing for a beat.
Now the man in the bus driver’s cap and the I Love Lucy t-shirt was kneeling on the other side of her, his Bugs Bunny necktie puddling foolishly upon her right shoulder. There were grease stains about his lips from kissing the accelerator pedal.
“What can I do?” he asked.
I looked up at him.
“Pray.”
His lips began to move, reciting the theme song from the old Banana Splits show. It didn’t matter what he was saying. We prayed to what ever god we remembered. And then, like a tidal flow I felt her breath begin to work on its own. I touched the wrist-watcher man’s wrist, feeling the soft grit of his skin, the bristle wire of his b
lack arm hair.
“Wait,” I whispered.
For a moment nothing seemed to move. Then her eyes opened and she looked up at me with a cool electric blue gaze.
I couldn’t hear anything beyond the soft in and out wind of her aged lungs, the butterfly thunder of her heart. The old magic had worked. I’d saved her.
She reached for the keyboard.
I picked up the remains of my cell phone. I fingered each number.
The man in the bus driver’s hat crawled back to the gas pedal; while the wrist-watcher dervish stood and resumed his shaking adulations.
One-twice-amen.
One-twice-amen.
The soft blue angel continued to neon blindly.
The twisters outside began to howl and whirl again, circles spinning into themselves and the dance against the darkness moved slowly and stiffly onwards, and nobody moved at all.
Death Rides a Quartered Horse
Now what would C.S.I. make of this? The vermilion pattern, splashed across the canvas of the immaculate snow. The salt of the blood already eating and etching into the crust of the three day snowfall, leaving a strange sort of hook mark that echoed both scythe and horse’s head like a question mark without a point. It stretched across the snow, vivid and stark, reminding the Reaper of the quirky backsplash of an incontinent St. Bernard with a bad case of chronic hematurial porphyria.
“Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that blood red snow.” The Reaper quipped.
He almost laughed at that, but training forbade it. From his early beginnings he’d been taught to suppress all light spirits. It was bad form to grin at the grave. Who would hire a giddy undertaker?
Besides, there wasn’t that much to be happy about. Here he was - Death, the Grim Reaper, a kind of cosmic janitor harvesting the detritus of a race of beings that were created by the Old Great Ones during a heated heavenly bout of Truth or Dare.
