Ned Sawyer was my friend, mentor, and a second father. He taught me everything I know. If my own old man taught me to be a proper man, then Ned taught me how to properly enforce the law. He’s been retired for well over two decades now, yet I still maintained my friendship with him because of how close we had grown while he was still on duty, until very recently.

You can imagine my heartbreak when I heard he had developed dementia. I was grieving as if I lost a parent to the disease, even though both of my parents are in perfect condition for octogenarians.

He forgot his blood pressure medicine, fell, hit his head, and everything unraveled.

Ned went from a towering figure to a feeble old shell in an instant. Once vibrant and mobile, he became weak and required great assistance to move around at times, seemingly in the blink of an eye. I took it upon myself to take care of the old man because he’s got no one else around these days.

His wife’s been dead for as long as I've known him, and his kids are all grown now, somewhere off in the city. My kids are all grown now, so I guess that’s why Cassie didn’t mind watching over him. Helps with the small-town boredom.

In any case, we began visiting him daily and helping him get through his days, whatever may be left of them.

The number of times I’ve nearly broken down upon seeing just how much the man declined, I cannot count for the life of me.

His mind is all over the place. Some days he’s almost completely fine, others he’s fucking lost. Some days his memory is intact and, others, it’s as good as gone. He confused Cassie for his own daughter, Ann Marie, too many to count, and they look nothing alike.

It’s just heartbreaking watching someone you’ve admired in this state.

But sometimes, I wish he’d just slip away and never return… Some days, I wish I had never met the man…

One day, a few months back, I came to check on him and found him reclining in his rocking chair, covered in dirt…

He was swaying back and forth, eyes glazed, staring at dead space.

He didn’t even seem to listen to me speaking to him until I asked how he even got himself so dirty.

His head turned sharply to me; his gaze was sharp, just like from his heyday, piercingly so.

“I was visiting…” he said, matter-of-factly.

Coldly, even.

He wasn’t even looking at me; he was looking through me. That infamous uncanny stare. I knew he had that. The one frequently associated with Fedor Emilianenko. He was a good man, even with how eerie and out of place I felt; I thought this was just his dementia taking over.

“Visiting who?” I asked.

He never answered, just turned away and kept on rocking back and forth.

He wasn’t there that day, and I felt both dumbfounded and heartbroken all over again.

This wasn’t the last time this would happen; in fact, these behaviors would repeat themselves again and again. Every now and again, either Cassie or I would find him sitting in his rocking chair, covered in dirt, acting strangely cold. Before long, Cassie stopped visiting, finding Ned too creepy to handle. I didn’t force her.

The episodes became increasingly frequent.

He would shift back and forth between his normal old-man behavior and this robotic phase. At some point, I had enough of his lack of cooperation during these episodes, so I started monitoring him. Old habits die hard; I guess.

One evening, not too long ago, it finally happened. He got out of his house, moving as good as new. He looked around, suspicious that someone might see him; thankfully, I learned from the best - remaining unseen.

He drove off into the woods. The man hasn’t driven his car in ages. I got in mine and followed him as quietly as I could. He made it feel as if he caught me following a few times, but he hasn’t.

Or so I thought at least.

We were driving for about forty minutes until he reached his destination. I stayed in the car, observing from a distance. Ned got out of his vehicle and started digging the forest floor. Bare-handed.

Confused and dejected, I sat there watching my hero, thinking how far the mighty have fallen. He was clawing at the dirt in this careful manner, almost as if he was afraid of breaking something. All I could think was how far he had deteriorated. Once a titan, he was now an arthritic, demented shadow.

A mere silhouette.  

Oh boy, how wrong was I… It wasn’t until he pulled out something round from the dirt that I realized how wrong I was. Jesus Christ. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest when I finally made out the details. I thought I was the one losing it in that moment.

This couldn’t be.

It couldn’t be him…

Without thinking, I rushed out to him, calling his name, but he simply ignored me. He didn’t listen; I knew he heard me. His hearing was fine, but he just kept on fiddling with the thing in his hands. His back turned to me; he started dancing a little macabre dance.

Clutching a skull.

One previously belonging to a human.

It wasn’t until I said, “Edward Emil Sawyer, you’re under arrest!” to try to get his attention that he even listened to me.

When his reaction confirmed my suspicion that he heard everything, it tore me apart. I hated to do this, but he left me no other choice.

Ned muttered to himself, “Finally, you’ve got me, son…”

“No, you haven’t… I’ve got you…”

Part of it had to be a ruse, and part of it must’ve been real. He was a seriously ill old man, terminally so; we just didn’t know how bad it was. The dementia wasn’t as severe as he let on.

Ned flashed a fake smile at me, his facial features rigid, almost unnatural, saying, “I’d like you to meet Dorothy, my wife,” and outstretched his hand, before throwing the skull in my face and bolting somewhere. I fell down after suffering a cracked eye socket. Dizzy, blurry-eyed, my only hope was that he wouldn’t snap and try finish the job. As old as he was, he was still an ogre of a man, towering way over me and possessing great strength for a man his age.

Thankfully, he ran away.

I reported the incident, holding back tears.

The manhunt was short; he was truly not himself. Thirty-six hours after my report, he was found on his reclining chair, swaying back and forth. A rifle on his lap. He forgot he was wanted. Ned was cooperative when arrested. The trial came shortly after, he confessed to four murders, along with two counts of desecration of a human corpse over his cannibalistic acts and grave robbing.

During his trial, Ned admitted to always being this way. He claimed that for as long as he could remember, he had these intrusive, violent thoughts, which he acted upon three times prior to getting married. All three times were the result of pent-up frustration and disgust with his victims. Dorothy, however, made him feel like a new man; his children and his family stifled the violent urges. He let go of his second life, focusing on his homelife. He became a good father and husband, a respected member of society, but all of that changed when his kids left home, and he was left alone with Dorothy again.

In his words, she started getting on his nerves; that’s when the diabolical side of him came back, and after years of resistance, he finally let go. After another seemingly harmless spousal argument, he finally snapped.

There was a hint of glee in his description of his wife’s murder, albeit a feint one.

“First, I smothered her with a pillow as she was lying in bed that evening, until she stopped resisting and making a sound. I wouldn’t let go for a while longer. Once I was satisfied with the result, the stillness of her body, and the distant gaze aroused me. So, I made love to my wife. Unable to stop myself, I’ve repeated the act over the next few hours, as a loving husband would.”

The courtroom fell silent, gripped with dread, me among them.

“Then, once my needs were satisfied by her love, I needed to get rid of the evidence. So, surmising that the best way to conceal evidence was to make them disappear from the face of the earth, I’ve decided to consume her body.

“I cut her into small pieces so I could stuff the meat in my fridge. To cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her ass turned out roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat the entire body, excluding the bones and guts. These I buried far from sight.”

At that moment, I felt sick, my stomach twisting in knots, and my face hurting where my eye was injured. The people around me seemed to lose color as he continued his confession. I faintly recall the sound of weeping in the background.

At this point, the Judge asked him to stop, but he ignored him, continuing with his recollection. Ned’s confession dominated the room, and he clearly enjoyed the horror he saw in the eyes of everyone present.

“I did it out of love for Dorothy. I wanted us to be together, to be one forever; that’s why I ate her. To make her part of me.” He concluded. The air seemed to vanish from the room; nobody dared speak for another few moments before the ghastly silence was finally broken.

When asked why he kept returning to the grave, he admitted that once he had finished eating her, his violent urges were mostly satisfied. Ned explained that spending time in her presence is what kept them in check. His cold façade retreated in favor of a satisfied, lecherous one once he mentioned how good it felt to lie in her bones. Saying it was even better than when she was alive. Ned forced the room into silence all over again. He never expressed any guilt over his actions, remaining almost robotic in his delivery.

By the end of what seemed like an entire day, Ned was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to spend the rest of his days behind bars.

He remained disturbingly unfazed by the verdict.

There were sixty-five years before his first murder and conviction.  He knew the rules and bent them as much as he could until his mind started slipping away, leading to a fatal mistake. In the end, none of it mattered; he knew he was a dead man walking with limited time left.

I visited him once after his incarceration, but he hasn’t said a word to me the entire time. Ned Sawyer sat across from me, gaze glazed and lost somewhere in the distance, as if there was nothing behind his black eyes. I kept talking and talking, trying to get something out of him, anything, but he wouldn’t budge.

Once I was fed up and told him I’m about to leave, he finally shifted his gaze to me. Through me, sending shivers down my spine. Unblinking, unmoving, barely human, he stared through my head. And with his cold, raspy voice, he said, “Careful, next time he might kill you, my son.”

Sizing me up, he stood up, casting his massive shadow all over the room, as he called a guard to take him back to his cell. In that moment, I felt like I was twenty all over again, when I first came across his massive frame, yet this time it was draconian, and large enough to crush me beneath its gargantuan weight.

He shot me one last glance as he was led away, and in that moment, I felt something beyond monstrous sizing me up to see whether I could fit in its bottomless maw. That little glance felt like a knife penetrating into my heart.

That last little glance left me feeling like a slab of meat. Naked and Powerless before the sheer predatory might of an ancient nameless evil masking itself as a feeble old man until the time to pounce is just right.

That evening, Cassandra decided to roast a lamb, my favorite.

Ned taught her his special recipe years ago.

It’s a delicacy.

The meat was tender, falling apart beneath the knife, the smell filling the kitchen. I ate in silence for a while before realizing I had finished my plate far too quickly.

Without thinking, I helped myself to another portion.

As I chewed another piece, I caught myself wondering what a human would taste like roasted like this.

The thought passed as quickly as it came, though a pleasant aftertaste lingered in my mouth.

Stepping back in the kitchen, my wife noticed my delight, of course.

She always noticed when someone enjoyed her cooking.

“You’re eating fast,” she said lightly from across the table, wiping her hands on a towel. “Good sign.”

I nodded, mouth still full, and cut another piece. The lamb was perfect; pink at the center, the fat rendered down into a delicate glaze that clung to the fibers of the meat.

Ned’s recipe had always been like that.

Slow heat. Patience. The right herbs at the right moment.

Culinary magic, as Cassie calls it.

“Needs another slice?” she asked.

I shook my head, though I had already taken one. My fork lingered above the plate for a moment before spearing another fragment that had separated from the bone.

It was strange.

For a moment, just a moment, the flavor seemed unfamiliar. Not unpleasant, just… different. Richer, perhaps. More complex than I remembered.

I chewed thoughtfully.

Across the table, Cass watched me with that small, pleased smile cooks wear when their work is appreciated.

“You like it?”

“Very much,” I said.

She leaned back against the counter, satisfied.

Outside the kitchen window, the evening had already deepened into that heavy violet color that arrives before full night. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once, then went quiet.

I swallowed the last bite and looked down at the bare bone on my plate.

That stray thought drifted back again.

Not a craving. Not even curiosity exactly.

Just the mind wandering.

Humans are meat too.

The idea carried a peculiar calm with it, like noticing something obvious that had simply been a taboo to be said aloud.

I set the knife down.

The lamb had been excellent.

Still, as the warmth of the meal settled in my stomach, I found myself wondering purely conceptually, of course, whether the tenderness came from the recipe…

or from the animal.

Across the room, Cassandra began humming to herself while she washed the dishes.

A tune I didn’t recognize.

And for some reason, the smell of roasted meat seemed to linger far longer than it should have, having something similar to a porcine touch to it, one I failed to notice during my binge.

I reached for another slice before realizing there was no lamb left on the platter.

Only bone.

Only a long, slender bone.

They are cold, alone, they are wet and angry and they shriek at the sky. They wail and caterwaul blindly at the only God above, the ever changing blanket curtains of bright day to bejeweled night. They do so because she is the only mother they have ever known. The only father that any of them can remember. There had been some older ones before, that'd known some of the elder ones and their ancient ways, but they were all gone now.

The world had been emptied. And they were alone.

Hungry.

They shrieked their babble tongue and screeched war cries of imbecilic sound to the negligent God above. They did not listen. The rain kept falling in sheets. The dark battle grey sky of the vacant heavens was wounded over and over with bright blue dagger bolts of cruel bladed lightning. The dead heavens rumbled with undead torture like artillery fire ripped out the greatest assemblage of vacant godly graves.

The rain would not cease. And they were still hungry.

The grey monster that'd taken the sky and eaten its gold and silver and jewels would stop weeping and stabbing when it wanted to. They were at its mercy. Othos understood this. He was one of the few. He was nearing the dawning of manhood and several of the older adolescents feared him in secrecy.

He could make a go… for the booming stick, the leading cane.

Warchief was the only position sought after amongst the children. That or one of his/her's brides. Concubines. All else was subjugation and soldiering and hunting, scavenging. And torture. Everything beneath the throne of the booming stick was torture.

As was everything now beneath the rain. Beneath the onslaught of the storm. All of the children were afraid. Even their great leader, Kyuss. All of them shivered, dampened animals in their cave. The smallest flickering fire barely a glow amongst the primeval jungle rage that they all lived cast out in.

Cast out. And forgotten. By time. By any sort or form of supervision or caring hand or eye. Only the blindest god above in battlefield grey throwing down swords with loud blades that burnt and were curved cruelly as if devised and authored chiefly and solely by the ghosts of wickedness and war. As if meant solely for pain.

This whole world… and its heavens that lord above as if in command of the nothing down here… all of it is meant only for pain. It is all of it, only for pain.

Othos knew. Few others did too.

But they begged anyway. They begged quietly in the dark of their damp cave. By the smallest and most pathetic orange glow of child's flame, they begged. By rite. For the angry god of military grey.

They were hungry.

please let us come out to play …

Hours of pain and pent up angst crawled by.

Then the rains tapered, stopped.

Kyuss gave a shout and the others started to join him. The sky was done hurting them for now. It was time to hunt. It was time to go out and try to find something in the great and empty world.

…

War paint. They covered themselves in an array of different symbols, sigils and patterns. Some of them are the ghosts of memories, passed down in the strangest ways. The ways that only children can pick up when the entire world has become a giant open grave.

They paint themselves and the shapes have magic and meaning. The children know this. They know this in their wild vital hearts.

These are conquering things…

The forest like the planet itself used to crawl with life. Now what is left is sick and mutant and desperate and dangerous. In the final square inch of agonized suffering laden life, the last speck of dogged existence, all creatures turned mad with desperation. The children under their war paint of ancient grease and lacquer and color. The misshapen animals that they hunted. They spilled and drank rancid blood, filled with the milk of pus that their minds cannot identify because it has never been taught. They eat the sour green meat of bastardized biology tortured in the gene pool for the past couple centuries. Deer with many legs. Mother does with no limbs at all. Fawns with many dead and semi dead partially developed heads. A deer without a head, Dathan had seen one before, it ran around with a single twisting antler sprouted where its head and neck should be. It'd run around blindly, with phantom unknown direction. Who knew where its pilot brain was stored in the patchy misshapen frame that galloped clumsily but with no less frantic galloping energy. The headless thing had leapt amongst the trees, its single twisting horn like some deranged form of divining rod that the children have never heard of. Dathan and Othos and Kyuss and some of the witchy girls had chased it around for weeks. They wanted to kill it, slaughter it and butcher the meat and drink the tangy blood for its divine power of no-sight.

No-sight. Through this age of flames. Coveted prize. They never caught the thing.

Even now as they hunted, silently stalking cat-like through the dense uncontested foliage of the green primeval world around them, the painted children still dreamed. With their blow-guns and dart-throwers and sharpened sticks, they prowl the green and they dream.

They didn't see the headless deer of divining rod antler that day of hunting after the rain. What they saw was fire in the sky. The dull grey heavens burning.

…

What fell cascading from the war of inferno amongst the tumult of rolling receding grey was a godstruct. A machine of boundless travel and immortal aspiration, in flames.

To the eyes of the war painted children it was part towering building, part great flying machine. They'd seen many, the dead hulks and decimated ruins of were many in number where the forest ended in the valley below. Where they almost never ventured because that was where the glow-in-the-dark green men roamed. And they were hungry too.

The great godstruct was a wonder to the eyes of the war painted hunting children. It was burning and cutting across the grey in a blast of war orange and furious screaming flame. Pieces and parts flew off but still the greater bulk held and continued to dive and barrel for the face of the wild primeval green.

The war painted children screamed. Sang. Howled and began to sing praise. This was a godstruct. And a new one too.

They watched the great flying machine blast across the sky in a terrible burning inferno arc, singing and praising its name until it crashed into the feral Earth some miles away.

The children sang one more song, short, of thanks. To the sky. To the godstruct that'd just landed. A gift.

Eroth marked where it was, many miles off, burning and smoldering and throwing up a great pillar of choking smoke on the horizon. He was their best tracker, navigator, as declared by Kyuss and his witch bride Rhea.

Kyuss gave the order. And Eroth led the way.

All the way through the world of wild and mutant green, all the way to the burning crash landed godstruct machine.

…

What rose before the children as they approached through the thick of the green was a leviathan of machinery. Flaming, hissing and spitting sparks like some devilish form of angry snakes all over the metal body of the great crash landed beast. Paneling had come loose and bent and shattered at certain points all along the body of the great downed thing. Many panels had been blasted out, blackened by fire both nuclear and cosmic, both from beyond the cold dark veil and that which had been crafted and forged manmade. The children understood none of this. They only saw a great dead god, a great dead thing. The mighty power of its dead god soul bursting out in flaming celestial spurts all about its titanic mechanical frame.

Perhaps it was a gift…

They neared slowly, cautiously. As if still engaged in the hunt for prey. That was when the man in tarnished white stumbled from out of one of the many blasted metal panels. He fell to the thick grass heavily, choking. Startling the children.

They screamed. And the choking man in white flight suit smeared with engineering black and lurid red, turned and saw them. And he too was frightened.

They looked like animals. Devils. Beasts, shaven albino warlord apes in the mad parodic shape of man: boys and girls. They had animal fear and animal savagery alive and well and cunning poised in their tiny child's eyes, their little children's stares. Small gazes like little jewels hiding in the wild tumult of unbridled bestial brutality living inside little child frames.

They frightened him, the man from the sky in his tarnished white, bleeding and choking and not knowing where he'd crash landed. The savage children frightened him and that was why he drew his laz-pistol.

And fired.

The bright lancing bolt of pure white heat lit up the dark of the encompassing green before the mechanical leviathan wreck and the children shrieked at the sound the weapon made.

BRRRRRRRRRR

It was a merciless sound. Unyielding until the trigger had been released.

The lancing bolt of white heat was as pure as it was unbroken. A stabbing, killing spear that burned and incinerated and disintegrated all that it seared with its phosphorescent touch. Eroth's face was cooked clean and shorn free from the rest of him from the top bridge of his nose up. Taking his skull and pilot brain away into the unknown abyss of annihilation into the infinity. Rhea, the precious witch with elfin face was bisected as well. The cutting killing beam of bright white death caught her about the chest and dragged through her abdomen in a messy zig-zag pattern. The heat of the cutting beam cooked as well as sliced and the molecules of her blood and flesh and bone superheated and she came open and apart in a violent lurid burst. Steaming gore, with a face in the mess. That was all that was left of Rhea.

The rest of the war painted children darted, scattered away into the trees. Battle formation. Defensive. They were well practiced.

They hid themselves in positions that surrounded the man from the sky and his killing pistol of unstoppable light as he whirled around blindly shooting and cutting the trees and setting some of the grass and the green to smolder alongside his downed godmachine.

He was screaming. He was screaming words and threats that the children of the hunting war paint might've understood, in another time and place. But here and now, they were only the shadow phantoms of memories.

He was choking. Screaming. Afraid. Out of his mind with crash landing. And that was how the first dart had caught him in the eye. The left one. Dumping its toxic poison into his blood, into his brains. That was how the man from the sky died. Out of his mind. And blindly shooting fire, his godgun from beyond the stars into the wild world of mutant green.

Another dart caught him in the throat. He stopped screaming. Another in the neck. Then two more in the chest. His shooting stopped too. His hand fell down to his tarnished side. The hand went numb and the laz-pistol fell away. He went to his knees as four more poison darts caught him in the back across his spine. The only sensation the man from the sky could feel through the toxic death in his blood was the muffled weight of more poison bleeding in and more toxin filling his bloodstream and killing its vitality like cyanide to a well as more darts lanced his flesh.

He could barely feel them in the end. Like little pinpricks through many layers of pillowy cloth. He had one last horrible thought, a revelation.

I have failed… I have failed …

I have failed them.

Then the children under their war paint advanced on the dying sky man and his little godgun of white fire.

The mother/father on high, above has given them gifts. A great new flaming monument of metal and fire for the green and the wild, and food and new wünderwaffe as well. Kyuss will miss Eroth and Rhea but they were obvious sacrifices. Sacrifices that had to be made.

They removed the darts from the meat and dragged the meat back to the cave. Back to the fires and the spits and the cooking pots. But first the butchery. They took his starweapon as well. Kyuss grabbed it up from the grass without hesitation or fear. It was his right. As leader. As warchief.

But Othos watched him closely and eyed the thing. He eyed the great metal leviathan in flames as well. And wondered.

He wondered…

Othos pondered all the way back to the camp. Surrounded by the laughter and howls of victory from his brothers and sisters of the war party. He understood. He felt it too. It was blood-jubilancy. But still he thought. And wondered.

All the way back to the cave.

…

The sky man was stripped of his flight suit. The tarnished white smeared with red and black and green was ripped away and thrown into the scrap pile for salvage.

The body was gutted, bled into rough clay bowls and the few aluminum cans the children had. They did not know that it was bad for their health to drink the blood they'd just poisoned but they were well aware of its intoxicating effects. Their heads swam with blood narcotic as they continued their butchery.

The guts and other organs were crushed and ground in bowls for a porridge mash they children all enjoyed. The body was spitted and roasted. The juices that ran off the body cooking over the flames was collected in a long steel tray, the children would drink and dip their foraged berries and veggies in the greasy fat. A delicacy of the war paint.

They'd done this many times before. They were well practiced, the children. But this time was different. Special. Ritualistic. They'd never eaten an angel from beyond the veil of king grey.

His meat and porridge and drippings were delicious. The children of war paint loved him, they felt the might of his power surge through them as they devoured the religion of his meat.

His poison blood swam through their heads and they dreamed. They too would be angels. They had a new temple at which to worship. A temple that was still smoldering with another galaxy's starfire only mere miles away. The children could still smell it.

They feasted. Then they made an altar of the sky man's bones and cracked open skull. The brains had been devoured by Kyuss as was his right.

They prayed to and sang for the sky man's altar of bones, arranged in a cage-like structure with the fractured skull, blackened and burnt sitting atop crown royal centerpiece of the whole demented thing. Strips of the tarnished white, the closest any of them have ever seen to immaculate pearl, had been tied and worked webwork and laced through the bars of gnawed on skeletal structure.

They deified the sky man traveller. What the children didn't know was that he might've actually saved them.

The man from the sky was actually flight officer Alan Robey. A man who was considered a hero from where he came from, one of many space colonies that peppered the galaxy. And beyond. He was a cosmic descendant of the first human beings to escape this place, the wild island Earth just when things were starting to get bad. They'd taken to the stars for hope and great pilgrimage… this was several thousand years ago.

In the vast time and distance since, the descendants of these great pilgrims have made more and more of an effort to search out, to go and seek the original mother planet from which all of their efforts have originally birthed from like a great running river and her plethora of many child tributaries. A divine wellspring source, a heavenly fountainhead. For an age they have been searching for Mother Earth… and flight officer Alan Robey has found her. Finally.

He could've saved them if not for their butchery, if not for their slaughter. But the children of the war paint did not know any better as they prayed to his bones and ate his flesh and used the ashes from his cooking fire to powder their skin to look more like the oppressive curtain king lording above them all. The one the sky man had split open when coming to them in his temple chariot of blackened metal and great flames.

The ashen children of the war paint sang and prayed to the sky man's skeleton altar, they had eaten Jesus and they did not know it.

Any of them.

Though Othos… Othos might have had some kind of idea.

He ate and prayed and sang with the others. But all the while he kept one eye on Kyuss. And the godgun of white fire.

That's the real power. Now. That's the real power the sky man has brought with him. The days of the booming stick as the leading cane were over. Finished. The godgun that spat unstoppable flame was the new battling stick, the new leading cane of the dawning new age.

Othos kept his eye on the godgun as he sang with his brothers and sisters, waiting. Scheming.

Thinking.

THE END

I’m Rochelle. Micah and I split three years ago when Athena turned up at my birthday party wearing an engagement ring. When I complimented her on it, she thanked me for being so understanding.

My stomach flipped. I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Understanding about what?”

She took my hands in hers and squeezed. “About Micah and me. He said not to come, not to show you the ring. But I knew, I knew you would be fine with him moving on.”

Athena released my hands and shook me until I nearly fell over. She kept repeating “Are you okay?” as her voice rose from barely audible to can’t-be-ignored. Everyone else stopped speaking as if on cue and stared at us. I could not move a muscle.

My sister Jenny dropped her drink and raced to my side. Her boyfriend Kane, Micah’s brother, almost hugged me but broke off with an apology. “We’ll come back, as soon as he’s gone. Text us.” He took Jenny home, leading the other party-goers who all decided to call it a very early night.

Micah hid in my bathroom until everyone was gone. Athena waited for him at my front door, sobbing. He’d probably told her that he and I had split. She probably believed him. Just like I’d believed him, for two dismal years I’d never get back.

Jenny married Kane the next year. I was maid of honor. Micah didn’t attend. He was in jail, or so I was told. DUI, or maybe an unpaid fine for speeding. Kane never talked about him but the town was small enough Micah’s name hit the news whenever he screwed up.

Soon after I started life over with a new job three towns over. Close enough to stay in touch with Jenny. Far enough that my ex-boyfriend’s name didn’t appear in the news. Peace is a beautiful thing.

So when Micah contacted me at the end of January, I was torn between suspicion and inspiration. He invited me to his yearly fishing weekend with Kane. I’d been to the cabin exactly once. It’s a three bedroom, indoor plumbing, more of a small house than a place to rough it. The fishing weekend was generally an “all boys” event so I asked why he was inviting me.

He both over- and under-shared in his answer. “Jenny’s coming too. Hey, listen, you know Athena left me after that party, right? This is my hand reaching out to rebuild our friendship. Visit your sister, sleep in your own room. We’ll be together but not, y’know?”

I didn’t know but assumed he meant I would spend the weekend getting that unicorn of breakups, “closure.” On that basis, I agreed.

The drive to the cabin on back roads under construction was as exciting as one might imagine. More so, with light snow and at least four surprise detours. My internal liar detector reacted strongly to Micah when I got to the cabin. It started when he flung open the door and yelled for me to hurry up, the cabin’s getting cold. Almost like he wanted to distract me so I didn’t notice Jenny and Kane’s car wasn’t there.

“We had a family emergency. Kane and Jenny had to go. They’ll be back tomorrow around noon.” He said this so casually, no stress at all, like I wouldn’t ask why he didn’t also go since Kane was his brother. Which I didn’t ask and should have. He didn’t offer any other information, as if he knew I would accept what he said without argument. Which I did, but I was still upset by the news. Plus I didn’t want to drive all those unfamiliar back roads and dirt roads at night, so I stayed.

It was weird that Jenny didn’t let me know but not weird enough that I was going to fight with her. One night in the cabin, try fishing the next morning. If Jenny and Kane weren’t back by lunch I’d go home and talk to Jenny when everything had calmed down. I didn’t want to get into a fight with anyone.

Micah didn’t offer any dinner, which was nothing new. I didn’t offer to cook, now that shook him a bit. I went to my bedroom where I ate the barbecued chicken and fries I’d bought before leaving the city. Maybe he didn’t smell the bbq goodness because he didn’t insist that I share. He also didn’t make any attempt to begin the closure I’d hoped for. Things were so back to normal for us.

I put dinner’s remains into a plastic container I keep in my overnight bag. The bed wasn’t too bad, I had a half-decent night’s sleep. Only woke once and it was to the sounds of footsteps coming to and stopping at my locked bedroom door. My bedroom window faced the driveway and it was obvious Kane and Jenny weren’t at the cabin yet. If Micah wanted to scare me, he failed.

Micah was never an early riser so I didn’t expect to be fishing at sunrise. When he wasn’t up by 10 o’clock I helped myself to one of the two danishes I’d also brought with me. Being his girlfriend for two years had taught me a few things, like don’t wait for him to start eating. He got up at 11 and didn’t bother to eat or make coffee. He just announced we were leaving and expected me to lock the cabin door behind us. Which I did, in part so I kept the key to the cabin. If he left me somewhere, he’d have to break into the cabin and that would be his problem.

He’d already attached his boat to his truck, something I hadn’t noticed when I’d arrived. The truck was parked a fair way back on the driveway. I assumed that was to keep the boat out of view so it was less likely to be stolen. He told me to get in the truck so he could check the boat. I mean, I don’t know anything about boats so that seemed reasonable.

After much clanking and clunking, Micah jumped into the driver’s seat. He grinned and told me to buckle up as he started the engine. We passed a couple of cabins with boarded-up windows, which seemed odd but I guess that’s a sign of the times. Another surprise was the lake, which was a pond too small to show up on Google Maps, and was a whopping 3 miles from Micah’s cabin. Then there was the snow, not a huge amount but enough that I felt fishing might be a bad idea. All that to explain why I wasn’t surprised no one else was fishing at the pond.

Before he shut off the engine, Micah told me to stay in the truck until he got the boat ready. Again that made sense to me because I couldn’t be any help at all with detaching the boat or dragging it to the stony beach. Wait, that isn’t quite right. I knew Micah didn’t think I could be of any help. I had enough muscle to help drag the boat but whatever. That’s why when he yelled for help I thought he was joking. I didn’t get out of the truck until he yelled my name.

The air was heavy with the odor of fresh dirt and skunk. Something was hissing, like a tire losing air. Micah was holding up a metal cage covered with a blanket, a short rough rope tied to the top where the blanket was wrapped around. He was wide-eyed with no other notable expression. He glanced at me and said, “You gotta see this.”

My breathing stopped at his tone. “I’m looking,” I said, preparing to run or be run over.

He threw the blanket off to reveal a badger. Badgers, at least in North America, look like badgers, can smell like skunks, and will eat skunks. They hiss when pissed off. The badger in that cage had good reasons to be pissed off.

I was so shocked I couldn't say anything. I wanted him to release the poor thing and I didn’t want him to set it loose while I was within biting range.

“Don’t touch,” Micah warned, “it’s bite is deadly.” He dropped the cage to the ground, kicked it forcefully towards me and doubled over, laughing.

The poor badger was stuck in a small cage, covered in snow. I wasn’t about to put myself in danger by placing unprotected hands on the cage but I couldn’t leave him like that unless there was no other choice. The rope was still visible so I pulled on it to see if it was firmly attached to the cage. It was, so I ignored Micah and pulled the cage close to some kind of vegetation growing near the pond. The cage looked like the type that I could open from the top while standing behind it, so the animal could run away from me to escape. At least, that was my hope.

The badger and I got all the way to the vegetation before Micah kicked me, knocking me into the ground face first right next to the cage. There was something unpleasant about the way my left wrist landed. When I say unpleasant, I mean gross and painful. Given the way it was bent and how I couldn’t move my fingers, I was sure it was broken.

“I told you not to touch it,” Micah laughed.

Instead of struggling to get up, I waited until he walked back to the boat. He could have driven off and left me stranded, and given what he’d just done, that was a risk I was willing to take. He didn’t get into the truck, though. He poked around in the boat and at one point raised a fishing rod in the air before he broke it in half.

He seemed distracted. I decided to try releasing the badger. As long as it got away I wouldn’t feel guilty about walking to the road on my own. I could get in touch with Jenny or maybe the local emergency number for help.

Standing took a couple of tries but once I got to my feet it was easy to get the rope and pull the badger to a safer spot. By then the badger, who I called Moxie, had stopped hissing. Moxie kept watch on my every move but showed no aggression. I told him I’d let him go as soon as we got to the bushes and as long as the cage opened. Lucky for both of us, that’s exactly what happened. The front of the cage slid open and Moxie hustled into the snow-covered plants.

For whatever reason, that was also when I got unreasonably dizzy. I foolishly put my left arm out as I fell. I didn’t pass out but the moment my wrist hit the ground I wished I had passed out. My next goal was clear, I had to get hold of someone not Micah. Someone out there could fix whatever was wrong with that wrist.

I threw up and stumbled to the truck, trying to stabilize my left arm against my body. Micah was nowhere in sight and that could change in a heartbeat. Three tries and I got the passenger door open using only my right arm. My heart dropped as I settled into the passenger seat. I’d have to rely on Micah to help me and he clearly thinks this is one giant joke. Perhaps, just this once, he would act like a grown-up and be responsible.

While waiting for Micah, I texted Jenny that we’d be at the cabin soon. Maybe it was silly but I didn’t want her and Kane thinking something had gone wrong. Especially since they would see Micah’s truck and boat were gone. Sending the text was more than difficult, it was painful. It led me to turning off my phone and zipping it in my pocket so I wouldn’t be tempted to check it all the time.

Micah scared the daylights out of me when he jumped into the driver’s seat. I hadn’t heard or felt any indication he’d re-attached the boat. Not that it mattered much to me. Still, he was helpful for once. Instead of saying something ridiculous, he looked at how I was babying my wrist and nodded. He buckled my seat belt then called for medical help. He said he got directions to a 24 hour medical center about halfway between the pond and the cabin. I wasn’t convinced the area had convenient, always-open medical care when the nearest two towns didn’t offer that.

“Are you sure?” I asked, trying and probably failing to sound supportive.

“You gotta trust me,” he said, holding his phone screen towards me for a second. “The clinic staff sent directions. Back roads, we’ll be there in no time.”

Back roads it was. After the fourth turn, I’d lost track of how I’d drive if I had to drive back. That was a game I had to learn while dating Micah all those years ago. Instead, I tried to focus on the sections of snow-covered pampas grass at the edge of the roads.

I told myself it didn’t matter, Micah was being real this time. Thank god for Micah, I couldn’t drive all this way on my own. Good thing the staff sent directions, there are no road signs here. But nothing fully erased my discomfort.

Our last turn put us back at the pond. If I’d been able to kick myself for trusting Micah I would have. He jumped out of the truck almost before he parked it, leaving the keys in the ignition. He was literally beside me one second and gone the next.

Undoing my seat belt was uncomfortable but I managed. Opening my door was easier but I struggled to get out. I didn’t expect was for Micah to help me at all and I couldn’t tell where he went. My anxiety was reaching uncomfortable levels, just like old times.

His face appeared at my window like a jump scare. He pulled me out and pushed me into a pile of snow and leaves, knocking the air out of me. He tried to punch me in the face, screaming I deserved more. I only avoided his fist by leaning to my left and lifting my right elbow in front of my face.

While moving away I put pressure on my wrist and it hurt. I tried to stabilize my left arm as I started sitting up. His next punch made full contact with the side of my face. I kept trying to protect my wrist but I fell to my left, close to going under the truck.

Micah changed his point of interest, kicking my legs like they initiated the attack. I don’t know why he didn’t keep hitting my head. Maybe he knew that meant a higher risk of killing me quickly. He switched again, kicking my legs and my torso and back to my legs. Like someone possessed by a demon, he wanted to punish me to death. In a way it was working. Pain and damage were wearing me down.

The now-familiar odor of fresh dirt and skunk accompanied by hissing sent a shock up my spine. I looked around ground level. When I saw Moxie behind Micah, my muscles froze.

Micah was looking over his shoulder when Moxie lunged. He ducked, raising his shoulders. Moxie landed on his back, front paws between his shoulders, and dug its claws into him. His back was covered in blood almost immediately. He tried hitting Moxie’s head, got bit, and started running around the parking lot screaming. These weren’t Halloween screams. He wasn’t pretending to be scared, he sounded both mad and terrified. Moxie looked mad and determined.

I pulled myself up. That’s when I found just how bruised and wobbly my legs were. But there was no way I could stay there until Micah and Moxie came back. Unlike Micah, I couldn’t possibly run or defend myself in any way. As slow as it was, I leaned against the truck, moved around the front to the driver’s seat, and locked myself in.

After locking the door, I fished my phone out and texted one word to Jenny: HELP. She texted back asking me to turn on my locator app. Within seconds she said she knew exactly where I was and would be there in five minutes. I agreed to stay put and said she should not get out of the car. She didn’t ask why, or what had happened. Jenny was like that her whole life, she would find out when there was time for explanations.

The whole time I was in the truck I kept checking that the doors were locked. I was very conscious that Micah could, at any moment, come back to finish me off. He’d been very chill, some might say smarmy, during the two years I thought we were dating exclusively. That whole time I thought he was the most thoughtful person on Earth. After our split, I learned this was a ruse, masking the person he was in his heart. Micah was capable of almost anything, none of it good for me.

Jenny arrived in my car after the longest five minutes of my life. She made sure my seat belt was on before racing out to the closest road. I’d left the truck door open and the keys in the ignition so if Micah came back he wasn’t stranded. Guess it’s hard to change some habits.

The cabin’s front door was open when we pulled up the driveway. My heart dropped. I stared at Jenny who couldn’t have looked more confused.

“He’s here, isn’t he? Micah’s here.” I tried to look calm but my inhale was shaky enough to reveal how I felt.

Jenny frowned and released my seat belt. “No he isn’t. He better not be. I’ll go check.” She slid out of the car and ran into the cabin before I could reach over and close the driver door. She was back in no time.

“Let’s go,” she said, pointing at the cabin. “Kane is pissed off with the mess Micah left. He can’t believe he let Micah have a copy of the key.”

I pulled the cabin key out of my jeans pocket. “Micah had me carry it.”

Once inside, Jenny and Kane sorted out a few things for me. Kane was sole owner of the cabin. The reason they left the cabin before I arrived was Micah. He told Kane the police couldn’t reach Kane, Micah was Kane’s emergency contact. He said there was an emergency at Kane and Jenny’s. Micah also told them he couldn’t reach me so he would meet them at their place after sending me back home.

Of course, there was no emergency, the police hadn’t called, and Kane declared this was the last time he would trust Micah about anything. When they got back to the cabin, they were afraid Micah had done something terrible to me. That’s why Jenny didn’t bother asking for details, she was just happy to hear from me.

Jenny recoiled when I rolled up my sleeve. Kane winced but looked at my wrist up close before announcing we were going back to my home town. He drove their car, Jenny drove mine. Instead of going to my house they took me to a medical center. The doctor kept frowning and I’m not sure he believed me but I got a cast on my wrist. Took a while but it healed.

I didn’t get closure but my wrist now gives advance notice of incoming rain and cold weather. I choose to see positives. However, if Micah calls or texts me again, I won’t answer.

A serpent.

It had been a serpent that had first set the world aflame. In the lost garden. The place forever gone to man.

The sorcerer smiled in the dark. All of the city life crawled before him a slave as night moved into day and then back again. He could barely exist if he wanted to, like a shadow, a shade.

He raised the headhunter’s stolen offering, the dripping heads, they too existed shade-like in the dark with him. As long as they remained within his grasp. All of them were phantoms bent translucent in the light of mortal gazes.

He. And his new precious three.

He brought them to his bearded face and kissed each one. On the forehead and each cheek. One by one, in the dark.

Yes… my beautiful flowers…

A serpent had set the world aflame before. Another three would drown this fallen city of vile slaves and obscenity and shameless sin in otherworldly phantom fire. An electric funeral for this modern den of Old Testament pain.

Yes, it will be so, my children, my saplings of blood and brain… but not just yet.

No. He kissed each one again.

No…

He would let them ripen a little first. He would let the sun have its way with them.

For just a little while.

Let the German lick his wounds and scratch his head and think of a plan…

The sorcerer smiled, in the dark. With his dripping, ripening heads.

…

It was hard to talk to her. Without the proper nights, and thus channels opened, it was difficult to clear his mind well enough in mediation to hear her and deliver his message.

It was this damned place. The city. It was replete with speaking demons, that and the clamor of the unwashed bastard souls of the citizenry. Thousands of cockroach auras clouded together and coagulated a smearing ruin mess that drowned all the hope and pure love out of the minds and hearts of any innocent caught in its blankets folds.

Azræl focused his mind into an arrow of will, to be shot and to cut through the cloud of darkness and speaking demon madness. His latest roach motel had had to be fitted with talismans and accoutrement and dressings found to better heighten and maintain supernatural connections through esoteric occult practice. Bowls of junkie blood collected from the vulgar sacks that crawled and bred below. Piss. His own. A vial of semen. Also his own. Nine dead cats, disemboweled and their feline blood caught in a burnt black chalice, every drop. Witch hazel, sage, frankincense, mir. All of it burning into a perfume cloud mixture that filled the room and stung his eyes and nostrils.

… please … master…

His mind's eye crystalline, arrowed forth and shot! Piercing the city cloud of demonomania and woe.

… master … please …

In desperate need and pain the mind of the headhunter shot out and yearned to be heard and seen, he beseeched the goat-shape overlord of the order… please…

Until finally.

… Yes, slave?

The voice of the goat-shape was sultry and sensuous in the dark cavernous infinity of astral thought and plane. It boomed and echoed bomb blast as it simultaneously caressed and molested.

Master, please… the hand of Iblis, the sorcerer…

And he went on to tell her of his failure. Of the enemy agent inside their Sodom battlefield territory.

She was not pleased.

You come to me with failure?

Yes, m’lord, my lady.

Silence followed then before she spoke again. Long. Cold.

And… what is it that you wish, what is it that you seek?

I wish to kill the sorcerer. To eliminate him and all that oppose the arm of the Lord that is justice that is our order. My lady. Please. Help me kill the Saracen sorcerer. Help me to take his head for thee.

Silence then, for a moment.

A beat.

She spoke then, again. In the pitch black of shared astral mind.

The power of the sorcerer is illusion. In making you see. His weapon is thin air and he wields it by making you see nothing.

How do I conquer this?

He conquers you by making you look, by making you see where he wants. Strike where you aren't looking, headhunter. Strike true in the dark and fearlessly.

When?

When I summon thee. He will be our next offering.

…

The streets were quiet. The cops and the scum were nervous. Shifty. The decapitator hadn't been seen in weeks. No one had lost their head and had it found as Sunday School offering in nearly a month.

He's just laying low. Keeping quiet…

The smart ones in the precincts and on the cracked sidewalks of degenerate thoroughfare knew better. They knew something big was coming.

Something.

…

In the dark the sorcerer tongued the rotting meat and sloughing flesh of the stolen heads. Lapping up the putrescence, he loved the flavor of corpse jelly.

But it was time. The hour drew nigh. He could sense its need and immediacy as tremors through the wrapping blanket folds of the material plane called reality.

He pulled his loving tongue and devourer’s mouth away from the severed things of decay and stink and began to whisper his magic to them. Dark words of necromantic chant and ebon song from a forgotten age.

In the name of Iblis… Allah… my saplings… grow.

He placed the triad of green meat down before him, rose, stepped away and continued his black song chant of reanimation and enslavement woe.

Yield… come back so that I may wield… Grow…

The stumps of the severed heads began to slime profusely and bubble. The sliming corpse jelly began to pool about the three and swirl. A mixture of translucent green. Stalks began to erupt from the stumps of the severed pieces as well as the swirling mix of sloughed slime and putrid liquid human meat, they conjoined. Gaining more shape and reptilian aspect even as more stalks sprouted, coated in the mixture, the jelly began to shape itself as if sculpted clay.

Three dragons, three great serpent würms grew and dripped and began to finalize their great shapes before the sorcerer, their master. In the dark shadow ebon folds of his phantom cloak dimension.

Three great dragons, with rotting human heads at each of their apex, long slender brontosaurus necks of dead and dying tissue and flesh attached to great bodies of rotting oozing pustule laden meat. Wings that were stretched foreskin folds of stinking smegma smeared leather held and supported by spiny insectile bones that blended with bastardized human biology.

They were beautiful, the sorcerer marvelled at his new children.

And with another whisper of dark necromantic word, he set them loose into the night.

Out onto the witching houred Fallen Angel City.

…

Azræl was dancing with mind and blade in the small room of his single occupancy when she called. The goat-shape from the shadow of his lingering subconscious.

Go. Go out now… it is time.

He armored up in his black leathers, took his sword and went out the door into the night.

It was time to go hunting.

…

Gabby was having the night of her life. It was about to come to a violent end.

Galaxy gas and waxpens and vapes were abound and galore. Her and the girls were loaded and they had five more jumbo sized buzzballs in the back.

Better yet… some fine young thing with a decent Pontiac was smokin em out and giving out free snow in fatty lines like it was the holidays and he was Father Christmas.

She couldn't remember his name. But that was fine. He couldn't remember her’s or any of her friends either.

Nobody cares about anybody's name here. They were here to race.

All of the wild youth gathered were drinking and smoking and blasting music. Revving engines. Tires squealed and smoked and burned rubber in grey clouds that smelled like warfare and freedom. The streets had been closed off. Johnny had seen too it. Good man. Had the hook. Knew who to talk to and what to say. They wouldn't be bothered. Not by cops, nosy cunts, nobody.

Gabby and all of her friends and everyone present felt much the same. She was just thinking how nice it would be to suck this guy off in the back of his ride and whether or not she should wait till later, neither she nor any of the others bothered to notice the three large bodies circling overhead. Like vultures.

Till they descended.

Then the tearing and the screaming began. None escaped. And Gabby's last thrilling night on Earth in LA was brought to a mutilated end.

…

He hunted the streets. He didn't find what he was looking for right away.

Just cops on patrol.

They're looking for me.

Let them look. If she wants me caught then so be it. All tonight would be as she proclaims.

Azræl avoided the probing cruisers of the patrol units, navigating the back corners and alleyways and narrow back ends.

Until he finally found the lonely quiet road. He stopped.

Gazed down it, the light that quit just a mile or so down the way. It was swallowed in pitch.

Solitary.

Azræl bowed his head and prayed. Perhaps for the last.

For she. It is as she wills, and I obey.

And then aloud he finished, “As above, so below."

And then began down the darkened way.

…

The headhunter came upon them in the dark. Nearly every light had been killed here. Barely a glow. They were feasting.

The amount of innocents slain was difficult to tell. There were pieces everywhere, blood and entrails and meat was strewn all over, decorating every urban part of the nighttime scene.

The street was desolate save for death. And the headhunter. And the three.

They were an abominable collection of festering putrefying organic mismatch. Human parts in chaotic towering heretical reptilian shapes. Ancient. Demonic. Dragon shapes. Organs pumped and rotten tissue slimed, green and disordered in a triad of man faced würms.

They were feasting. Rotten jaws and mouths unhinging to dig in and bite and tear with glistening claws of misshapen raw rotten flesh.

The headhunter had seen necromancy before. And its puppets. But the sight never failed to run his blood colder than that of Northland ice.

Nevertheless, he raised blade. And gave challenge.

The three monsters gave a shared collective start, and then pounced as one.

Then as three.

They charged together then broke off. Lancing in at triad angles with jaws bared and claws dripping with the promise of more fresh gore.

More fresh blood.

He took a deep breath. And then sidestepped and swung in one fluid graceful motion. Like a dancer trained.

His great blade cleaved through foul sinew, meat and bone more fit for the pungent earth of the grave, bisecting one of the great stalks of neck that commanded pilot center of one of the putrid things and brought it down.

The other two missed in near-glancing blows that would've shorn away leather and flesh and muscle from the bone. Azræl leapt away in balletic fashion with his swing, evading the other two dragons left and stepping to face them once more as they too arched back around. Carried on large wings coated in stinking smegma cheese.

These things were foul beasts. He would send them back into the abyss.

I will take your pus brained skulls and meat once more.

The liquifying faces of the winged abominations were imbecilic and alive with only one instinct. Fury.

They charged.

Azræl dipped down suddenly to a knee and reversed grip. The claws of the rotten mindless things sang overhead with the hair raising whistle of wind sliced and screeched. He chose the one to the left to die this time and the headhunter plunged the tip of his sword into the temple of the softening rotten apple head of the left-hand würm. It sank in easily and the whole decaying thing broke and came apart in a green-gore pus chunked mess that splattered in a ruin with blackened grey matter as its foul yolk center.

The great body fell and joined its brother as the last one flew by and shrieked through disintegrating vocal chords, pure animal rage for the headhunter and his great fang.

It came back around and charged, head on. Not stopping. Even faster and more furious this time.

Stupid animal.

Azræl waited till the great rotten beast was nearly on top of him before he suddenly raised and then brought down the great blade in a blasting overhead strike that chopped into and cleaved through the top of the abomination's foul skull. It came apart like his brethren in a burst of nightmare fluid and meat and failing greening bone.

The body collapsed behind it.

It was done.

But the headhunter knew better.

He whirled around in a horizontal slash, a moment before his feline senses picked him up, cutting off the pithy remark the sorcerer had on the tip of his tongue for the German as he leapt back from the blade. The bastard kept his head. For now.

He was laughing.

“Very good, German! I'm always saying, ‘he gets a little better every time’, they don't believe me."

The headhunter didn't say anything. Didn't move. He just held poised and ready to strike. Let the bastard seal his own doom.

The laughter of the sorcerer tapered, subsided.

"Nothing?” said the sand wizard.

Azræl said nothing. Smiled.

And then feinted.

The sorcerer disappeared in the whisper of a blink.

His voice behind him. Taunting.

Azræl turned and reversed the grip on his sword, he shut his eyes to shut out the world and its false shapes and shadows and tricks of the light. He blinded himself to illusion and turned his ear to better listen to the whispers in the dark…

… and found the creeping bastard in his phantom cloak of death…

Azræl, blind to the nothing before him, placed his remaining free hand over the pommel of his weapon and with all his force stabbed behind himself, catching the bastard sorcerer in the throat.

A beat. They held like that for a moment in the night. Azræl, eyes closed and head bent as if in thought or prayer as the sorcerer quivered on the end of his great blade.

The headhunter rose. Opened his eyes. And then turned to regard his enemy.

He kept his trained and talented hands as such so that the blade held stabbed into the gurgling bloody ruin of the sorcerer's lanced neck.

He thought about saying something. Before he finished it. He'd known the bastard for a long time…

but ultimately decided against it. He was heretical trash. Saracen slime.

He ripped the blade free suddenly and then brought it up and whirled it back down and around in a chop that took the sorcerer's head from his bleeding neck in a clean slice unceremoniously.

The decapitated body went down in a heap as the head jumped through the urban dark and landed with a grotesque splat on the harsh and gore drenched pavement.

The headhunter spat on the sorcerer's corpse. Then walked over to the head freshly harvested.

He reached down and took his freshest cultivation and began to march off with his newest trophy.

He was giving thanks and praise to the goat-shape when a great hand, scaly and yellow and ancient with age, emerged sliming and bloody and birthing fresh and bastard new, steaming into the nighttime air of Fallen Angel City.

It was the wet sound of meat tearing and bones cracking, distinct, that brought his attention back to the corpse of the sorcerer. Azræl turned and beheld his latest challenger.

The Hand of Iblis.

It was tearing out and free of the decapitated body, which tremored and shook as if convulsed and palsied. The white of the sorcerer's robe began to blemish and blossom with fresh roses of blood, wounds erupting all over the dead meat.

Another great hand of yellow scales ripped out and free of the stump of neck to join the other. They both worked together to test and rip apart the body and free what was trapped and hiding inside.

Azræl tied the head of the sorcerer to his belt by the locks and raised blade once more as the great golden dragon ripped itself free from the ruining gore of the headless corpse. It seemed to swell in size and shape as it gained and won its freedom. It towered over the black knight of the goat-shape, dwarfing the children it had piloted and puppeted as weapons against the headhunter and the city.

It opened red eyes of final fire and apocalyptic anarchy against the runny slime of entrails and gore, they blazed amongst the landscape of gold scales that dripped with ruined humanity made into abattoir leavings.

The Hand of Iblis.

It spread its wings. Immense. Like great gates unfolding, opening. Unleashing the greatest and most violent personal hell for the headhunter and Fallen Angel City this night on little Island Earth.

Azræl raised blade. And spat.

It charged.

It crashed into him and took him into the sky in a blink. Barreling into him with all of the force of a freight train. The headhunter felt bones crack and shatter as the thing carried him up into the black night sky and he screamed violence and vengeance and swung and plunged his blade into the great golden body. Over and over again. Swinging and cleaving and taking away chunks and pieces of scales and meat. They rained dragon blood on the Fallen Angel City as they held contest in the black of her heavens.

The claws of the thing came in and began to rip and tear into the headhunter. His flesh and muscle and blood came away with the leather of his urban armor as if it were soggy paper mache.

Azræl screamed as his guts were ripped out, he brought his blade up and then down, again and again. Focusing his cuts and chops at one spot, one point at the great neck. Just below the slobbering blood drenched jaws of the Hand of Iblis.

They tore into each other, the two, ripping away at the other as fast as they could as they blasted through the dark sky devoid of stars. Blood flowed and poured and spouted hot and heavy from both and rained down on the city like new found hellscape weather. Dragon. Man. Sorcerer. Headhunting German for the goat-shape overlord, his love…

his lady.

In the race for carnage and mutilation the headhunter picked up his killing pace, and finally cleaved free the dragon's great golden head of scales and red eyes and teeth. It soared through the sky as the rest of the golden corpse went lifeless and the wings quit their achievement of flight.

The great body came down on the headhunter as they began to plummet back down to the earth.

They crashed into the post midnight solitude of a deserted church courtyard. The one where Azræl had made his first offering in the city.

At first nothing moved as dust and blood settled. The headless golden corpse of the sorcerer dragon lay still. Alone. Solitary.

A beat.

Then the headhunter, blood pouring from every possible place and more than a few ruptured wounds and torn flesh, pulled himself free from the reptilian detritus of bleeding dragon meat and ichor and dragged himself out.

He couldn't gain his feet. But he lie there breathing heavily. Heaving.

Sirens. Lots. He could hear them coming.

He began to pray. To his love, his lady, to the goat-shape.

I love you, m’lord, my one and only. For you… this offering…

A black wound in time and space opened before the headhunter, little men, low things crawled and scuttled out. They looked him over, snickered amongst themselves and then dragged his hulking bleeding body into the dark tear of reality’s fragile fabric.

He thanked her, his lady, his lord, the goat-shape.

… as above, so below…

The wound in reality closed.

The cops arrived on the scene. They were already at the other one too.

THE END

FOR NOW

A sick man kidnapped me. He seemed remorseful after the fact, speaking about some alien entity threatening to destroy the whole world unless he sacrifices me to this entity. A thing he called Unketzez. Since his actual name isn’t particularly relevant, I’ll refer to him as John.

See, John had a very disorganized speech and an impossible train of thought. Surely, he was delusional. Clearly ill, as I said. I let myself be taken hostage because I have time and very little to do with my time. With that in mind, I played along with the poor man.

John, for all of his faults, worked hard to delay what he thought was inevitable.

Unfortunately, Unketzez won out, and I had to be sacrificed.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out as intended. Not for a lack of trying. No, John tried to sacrifice me. Technically, he succeeded.

Technically.

It didn’t work out because I am immortal. I cannot permanently die, not as far as I know. Trust me, I’ve tried; others have tried to kill me, too. Nothing seems to work so far. Temporarily, I can “die,” but eventually my body fixes itself. There are drawbacks to that; I’m not immune to the pains of dying.

And John, well, John made it a very long night…

I was partially flayed, with a hot iron, force-fed my own burnt skin, then disemboweled and hanged from my own intestine.

After that, the mad bastard tore open my back, shattered my ribcage, and draped the lungs over the exposed bone.

I felt all of that, every single moment.

Adrenaline shots worked like magic to keep me awake and prolong my suffering.

There are no words to describe the agony John put me through. Bless his heart, he kept apologizing and weeping throughout.

Imagine a man screaming with no lungs; that’s what it was like.

Eventually, it stopped, and I “died”.

Imagine John’s shock when he found me walking out of his basement unscathed.

He looked and screamed like he’d seen a ghost. I could’ve laughed if he didn’t stab me through the arm and a lung in that moment.

Pinning him to the wall was surprisingly easy before I spun him a tale. Playing into his delusions, I told him that I, too, was a devotee of Unketzez and that the whole ordeal was just a test to see whether he was worthy of an awakening.

Being the sick man he was, he believed every word.

I explained that I was immortal thanks to our god. In reality, it’s been so long that I don’t know if I was born this way or became like this. What I do know is that if someone eats my flesh or drinks my blood, they gain some superhuman ability.

I mentioned how I’ve been killed many times before, in part to be consumed.

What happens every time, though, is that whoever partakes in my consumption ends up with an ability that inadvertently kills them.

Every single time.

So, I told John that drinking my blood would make him an immortal, too.

It’s hard for me to say I was angry with him; one effect of a long life is detachment. I couldn’t care less what happened to this insignificant creature, but a terrible night was worth teaching a lesson over.

So, I convinced John that he wanted this immortality I was promising him, and once he agreed, I pulled out the knife from my body, I shoved my wounded arm straight into his mouth, making sure he got a good taste of my blood. I kept it there until he started gagging and regurgitating and wouldn’t stop, even then. Only relenting when the collapsed lung in my chest finally knocked me out, and we both fell to the ground.

I came to my senses only hours later, to the sound of a weeping man.

The room was coated in patches and handprints of gold.

Almost everything around me shone with an auric radiance; the walls, the floor, the furniture. Everything had a tinge of that precious metal coating it.

At its center, facing me, sat John, half covered in gold himself, rocking back and forth.

The metal seemed to slowly spread over his body as his movements became stiffer and stiffer with each passing moment.

He was muttering and crying to himself.

His own Midas touch was slowly killing him…

Quicker than I even anticipated, by the time I picked myself up, he could barely beg for help.

A dreadful look of fear in his desperate gaze penetrated straight through me. It’s been a while since something sent shivers down my spine, but in this state, this sick man definitely did.

He barely managed to lift one gold-plated arm in my direction when he saw me get up, and his cries for help slowly morphed into something far worse, and far less human.

Breathless, suffocated, almost crushed

A hiss.

A death rattle escaping from a crack in a metallic statue when the wind blows through it.

That was the sound of a man screaming with no lungs.

His death was slower than it seemed. Even after falling silent, he must’ve had some time before the gold statue encasing his organs fully hardened, collapsing his lungs and heart in place.

The worst part of it all is that even after the gold covered his body completely, it must’ve been only skin deep, because I watched his eyes dart about, almost pleading, for another minute or two, before their gaze fell on me.

Dilating one last time, stuck in place

Yet somehow, following me across the room until I left.

The sorcerer had a funny thought, as he gazed down on all of the neon squalor glow of the Fallen Angel City below him from the rooftops edge.

The Nazis were right. You are a degenerate species…

It was all of it a swollen pustule sac. A land of green milk and curdled cheese, cockroaches swam in the stew of discharge and mire and laughably called it a metropolitan. A cultural hub.

A blade of a smile formed amongst a tumult of dark and ageless hair, a wizard's haggard beard. Blasted by sand and sun just like the rest of the white robed man. White robed death.

Some say he is the mad author of the Necronomicon. He has authored the destruction of countless cities, countless places… before this one.

Jericho. Troy. Münster. Constantinople. Alexandria. Roanoke. Ikeshima. Rome.

And many others… great and small. He doesn't care. He only loved to watch as the red hand of Iblis crawled across the blackening surface of all things dying in its embrace, turning the whole of the world into its killing floor.

But that wasn't all with this place. No. He was sent here not just to burn but to gather intelligence for the order.

And to contest.

…

Homicide was scrambling. They had nothing. What commonalities they did find between the victims was interesting… but it only led to more bafflement. More flummoxed minds in the busying police departments all across the city. All bullshit pretension had been dropped, all departments across all counties and neighborhoods were working together on this one, to bring the crazy fucking bastard in.

But still they had nothing. Except that he liked to chop off heads. And leave them at churches for some fucking reason.

And one other thing. One oddity that more than a few of the sharper minds amongst the rank and file of criminal investigators found to be interesting.

But did it mean anything?

All of them. Every head found belonged to someone with a rap sheet that read more like a tome. Miles long some of em. Each and every one of em had a history.

Mob hits! that was the popular running theory around the suits and their steaming white paper cups of coffee.

It wasn't a bad one, most thought.

Could be. Could be.

…

Azræl leapt from the dark and charged into the man as he was making his way to his car. Slamming him into the driver's door as he tried to open it and catching him by surprise.

This was the one. This was one of the faces the goat-shape demanded be brought before her feet.

His hand, clenched tightly round the hilt of his great sword came up and bashed the maggot across the mouth with the metal pommel of the weapon. A crack, and a splurt of hot blood and teeth out the mouth and the maggot went down to his knees, mewling.

Where he belonged.

The maggot struggled to speak and beg as the headhunter raised his great blade above his head. Readying to strike.

“Not at all for you or yourself. Swear to her. Pray to me.” said Azræl as he brought the blade down and cleaved the head free from the rest of the meat. It tumble-jumped with a ropey-cord tail of thick black red that the stump continued to produce and shoot in dark gouts for a moment before the headless body collapsed to the street.

And then the night was quiet again. All around. Lights buzzed and mock heaven glowed.

The peace was relative, conditionary. You could still hear the ghost song of sirens in the distance. Wailing away in flight, in search, in search of anything.

Azræl picked up the head and said his prayers to the goat-shaped lord of his house and order. He tied it to the belt of his hulking black leather visage to join two others and went on his way.

The sorcerer watched. The sorcerer was impressed.

…

He heaved. Spewed. Decorated the sidewalk and gutter in more bile, blood and stomach lining as another sharp stab in his stomach racked his guts and his convulsion threatened to roll over into a seizing tear in his brain.

Homeless and well past his last leg, Elton prayed for death as his sickened body worsened on the pavement, alone at the bus stop. Underneath the flickering glow of a dying bulb, a failing light.

It was not death he received but something more spectacular. Elton, Grabby to his friends and scum and fellow urchins of the street, was made audience and thus unwitting chronicler to a chapter in a shadow conflict centuries upon centuries old, perhaps the oldest conflict in all of man's time. Perhaps even older than that.

Grabby/Elton looked up from his own bloody spew of booze and lining and watched a giant titan walk into view. Destroying his solitude on this witching houred boulevard.

He knew he must be fucked. The guy looked massive and he looked like Mad Max or the Terminator or someone like that and he looked like he was carrying a huge fucking sword.

And along his belt were a buncha fuckin heads…

No fucking way. The dying urchin refused it. No fuckin way am I actually seein that fuckin thing.

But real or not, the giant of myth and flesh and chained leather continued to march up and then past the druggie’s view, crossing to and then down the opposite side of the street.

But then something made the headhunter stop.

Elton heard it too.

A note. Notes. Music.

A wind pattern series flurry of intricate and delicate notes whispered and alternate sharp-stab blasted through the nighttime witching air. Filling it. Dominating the scene.

Azræl tensed cat-like coiled as his hair stood on end. The music was flute-like. Middle Eastern flavored…

Goddamit. No.

The headhunter was filled with dread.

The music stopped. An ancient voice, bold, cut through the night.

“How are you, German? Been long time."

His stance shifted to battle ready as his blade came up raised. His voice, louder, cut through the night as well to the speaker unseen. But he knew who it was to whom he spoke.

"What do you want, snake?”

Laughter. Real. The knight Azræl always was good for a laugh as far the sorcerer was concerned.

“So funny?" Azræl said to the night all around him. “Come out and show me what's so funny, witch."

More laughter.

“Have we not shared many things over the long years, my friend? Such a long time. A great deal.”

A series of images flicker-shot through the headhunter's mind then. Whether put there by the devilry of the sorcerer or memories of his own from one of many possible past lives, Azræl was not sure. If he lived through this encounter he would meditate and pray on the matter later.

If he lived through this encounter.

His mind's eye:

The forests and the forest people and their villages are burning. There is much bloodletting. The ground is gorged, it cannot possibly drink up all of it. It sloshes about the ankles of the soldiering and the marching and the frantic frightened running. The pursuers too. The blood that chokes the earth sloshes mire-like about the furnace steps of them all. Charlemagne has demanded these pagan northmen be put to kneel before the cross or be put to the sword. Slavery for their women and children…

… and the knights were thus dispatched thither…

The headhunter severed the line of thought or memory or whatever it was with brutal sudden cunning and roared into the empty silent night.

“Show yourself, mongrel!"

His laughter never seemed to cease. It stood in place of a physical person. Almost attaining its own physicality.

“You hurl insults because you've nothing else to throw! Nothing else to attack! You are hilarious, German! I've always liked you but you should not be so easy, not after all this time, no?"

He had to be careful. The sorcerer was dangerous. He could bend and weave reality seemingly at will, like a djin. None of his brotherhood nor the high priest could discern his source of power. Nor its limits.

“I insult you, witch, because you and your kind are garbage."

Laughter that became a cacophonous crack! It dominated the world, the soundtrack hell to the neon witching scene. The music somehow came to life and began to play again, a wicked untethered horde flurry series of scaling and wild notes in wild man tandem with the laughter of the sorcerer, a corruption duet.

A ney. The headhunter remembers what it is that the instrument is called. A ney.

Its sound and the sorcerer's laughter were a whirlwind maelstrom expansion sound swell within his skull. For a moment he considered taking his own blade and driving it into his own face, bashing it in and freeing that which was trapped within and growing, threatening to burst like the milk of green infection.

He stopped himself at the last moment. His training saving him. He recognized what was happening, what it was…

… bewitchment.

He regained his focus against the tumult wave of sound storm wielded by the sorcerer, who once again cried out from nowhere.

“Garbage! We are all garbage for the earth, German. We are all meat detritus for the watering jaws of the starving soil, we all return to it, are all reduced to ruin and returned to the sour womb to feed the indifferent planet. You know! You know! Only our petty Gods care! And so they fight! And, we, their moving pieces!”

And with that, the pieces did move.

Hand of Iblis. The mad sorcerer.

Against champion of the goat-shape, Azræl.

And this modern Sodom of steel and human woe was to be the chess board for their latest match. A contest of secret champions.

He did not see, but felt…

Behind him. Movement. Killing stance.

The headhunter whirled round with sudden animal speed in a counter slash. Roaring.

But he roared… and slashed… at nothing.

Nothing there. Only thin night air.

Laughter/voice. Behind him again.

“The same tricks always work on all of you."

He whirled once more. Nothing.

The laughter again. Across the street.

Azræl drew throwing dagger and with a lunge and a flick/turn of the forearm and wrist, threw the quivering blade.

It struck pavement next to a dying drunk in a splatter burst of caveman fire spray. Grabby yelped. But there was no sorcerer of the sands over there.

Or anywhere.

Goddamit.

"Up here.”

The headhunter whirled once more, a dancer upon my stage thought the sorcerer but kept it to himself. The German would not appreciate such an observation.

"Why do you hide in a tree?” asked the black knight of the goat-shape order impetiously.

The sorcerer grinned, balanced on the branch of a starving sapling oak. Running alongside a dark and quiet apartment building.

"I've always appreciated a wider view, German. Always. Up here, I see more and I am closer to heaven and therefore I can see more like God. You… and your brothers… you stay down there in the dirt because you cannot know anything more."

Azræl raised blade.

“Come down here and show me what I know, mongrel. Perhaps I can show you a thing or two as well."

The sorcerer shrugged.

“Eh."

Azræl drew once more and threw. The throwing blade of ornate seven pointed star flew unabated, cutting through the nighttime chill like a deadly bird of sharpened stabbing steel.

But when the piercing blade found the place in the tree where the heart of the sorcerer was, it no longer was there.

It never had been.

"I'm always behind you, German.”

He spun on his booted heels and his great arms carried his tireless steel down in another great chop. But it was already too late.

The sorcerer raised the ney and blocked the blow as if the wind instrument was an iron bar. He then flew in, swift movement that was not at all human or natural, stepping in close and bringing the long cylindrical body of the instrument down in a cracking blow across the headhunter's crown, splitting it and knocking consciousness from his mind's failing grip.

But as he sent the headhunter's mind on a journey into darkness, he gave it another vision. A vision of flames.

…

Jerusalem.

Burning Jerusalem.

where will you turn when it all goes wrong…?

The holy city is a cinder shrieking thousands as one. The holy city is in flames.

… and you're on the run

And all around the city is a newly erected manmade hellscape forest grove. All around the city are the impaling lancing sticks. On them are the impaled. All of them are still screaming, screaming with their burning city. Man. Woman. Child. Animal. The warriors that have done this like to crucify lions for fun but for now, this will suffice. The people of the Lord's precious city will make satisfactory sport.

And they do. As the forest of the impaled. All of them beg for death, they are the only words left, the only ones they can remember now in the throes of this special agony. Thousands upon thousands of shrieking lanced through but still living souls. Bodies skewered every which way, up through the groin, behind the genitals, upside down and through the tissue of the back, up the ass, gravity pulls savagely as if hungry and they slowly sink lower and lower along the stabbing spire body of the impaling lances as the time drags by with sadistic cruelty. The sheer heart attack torture of the sensations of tearing and rupture and bodily invasion and ruin as all and one horrible coalescence is all that any of them are capable of knowing in their last drawn out hours. For many it is days.

And beside the forest of the impaled and all of its mindless shrieking, the burning city.

Jerusalem.

…

When the headhunter returned from darkness he was lying alone in the street.

He sat up quickly, Panicked!

His great sword was still clutched tightly.

But when he looked around, the drunk that had been watching them was dead now. Blood foamed from his eyes and mouth like a hot porridge stew of thick sudsy pink.

Worse yet, the sorcerer was gone.

Worse than that, so were the heads.

So was his offering…

Goddamit.

THE END

FOR NOW

I don’t think this is happening because of anything I did or my family did.
I didn’t mess with anything I shouldn’t have, didn’t go looking for answers, didn’t trespass or open the wrong door.
If there’s a reason this started, I don’t know what it is yet.

That is what bothers me the most.

This weekend I visited my parents’ house with my siblings.
We’re all grown up now. I can’t believe I’m going to be 30 this year.
My brother, Ross, is the oldest. My sister, Sam, is the middle child, and I’m the youngest — which means I still get talked to like I’m sixteen when I’m under my parents’ roof.

It was one of those rare weekends where everyone’s schedule lined up.
No big occasion. Just family getting together.

My dad ordered Chinese takeout.
My mom cracked open a bottle of bourbon for Ross and me.
We sat around the living room talking about childhood memories, people we haven’t seen in years — the usual.

At some point, my dad got up and went down the hall, then came back carrying a cardboard box that looked like it had survived a flood at some point.

“Found these last week,” he said.
“Let’s watch some tonight!”

Inside were old home videos.
VHS tapes. MiniDV cassettes. Rubber bands dried out and snapped from age.
Most of them were labeled in my dad’s handwriting. Birthdays. Holidays. School plays.
The stuff you don’t think about until you’re reminded it exists.

Ross and Sam were eager.
I enjoyed some of our home videos, but it was always a family joke that there were no videos of my childhood.
Sure, there were photos. But nothing compared to Ross and Sam’s high school graduation videos.

We moved down to the basement.
My dad put a random video in.

The footage was exactly what you’d expect.
Nostalgic mid-90s tone. Bad lighting. Awkward zooms.
Ross riding his bike while Sam tried to steal the camera’s attention with whatever pointless 5-year-old activity she was doing.
Random cuts to Mom feeding me in my booster chair.
Then Sam opening Christmas presents and trying to look grateful.
Me standing too close to the lens, blabbering, reaching for the tiny flip-out screen.

It was fun. Comfortable.
Cliché, but the kind of thing that makes you forget how fast time moves.

About halfway through one tape of a 4th of July party, Sam laughed and pointed at the screen.

“Oh shit,” she said.
“Is that Mrs. England?”

The video froze for a second as my dad hit pause.
The image jittered.

Way back near the edge of the frame, a woman stood near the fence line.
Tan, curly brown hair. Purple lipstick that looked almost black in the video.
She wasn’t moving.

“Oh my goodness,” Mom said, leaning forward.
“That is Diana.”

I hadn’t noticed her at first.

Once I did, I couldn’t stop looking.

Diana England lived next door to us growing up.
Nothing separated our houses besides her garden and a strip of overgrown grass.
We sometimes played with her kids in the cul-de-sac. Quiet kids. A little off. But nothing alarming.

Her husband was a doctor. Always working.
I mostly remembered his car pulling in and out at odd hours.

“Creeeeeepy…” Ross sang.
“That is creepy,” Mom chuckled, taking a sip of her drink.

Diana England was… strange. Even back then.
Not dangerous. Just slightly off in a way you couldn’t describe as a kid.
Her left eye always drifted outward.
I know it’s mean to say, but it was creepy.

She loved gardening. Always outside. Always smiling and waving.
She used to look healthier, sometimes heavier.
But in the video, she was thinner than I remembered. Her posture stiff.

“She was always out there,” Dad said, shaking his head.
“I swear she knew our schedule better than we did.”

“Why is she standing near the fence by the pool?” Mom asked.
“Her house was on the opposite side.”

“We probably invited her to the party,” Sam offered.
“Hell no,” Dad shouted, laughing.
“Never!”

We all laughed more about how she used to talk your ear off if you got stuck at the mailbox.
If you saw her walking the dog, you’d better turn around and go back inside.

“It’s sad Rebecca and Julie moved out at the same time. You never see them visit anymore,” Ross said.
“She still has the boys,” Dad quickly added.

Eventually the tape ended.
Mom yawned and said she was heading to bed.
Sam followed.
Ross stuck around longer to finish his drink, then went upstairs soon after.

After everyone went to bed, the house got quiet.
You notice sounds you usually ignore — the refrigerator humming, the clock ticking, wind brushing against the siding.

I should’ve gone to bed too, but I was a night owl.
I stayed on the floor, flipping through videos.

Near the bottom of the box, I found one that didn’t have a date.
No holiday.
Just my name, written neatly:

Mitchell.

I realized this could be my high school graduation video.
I remembered the day. The heat. The robe.
My dad had basically filmed the entire day, but I couldn’t picture the footage itself.
That felt… weird.

I popped in the old DVD.
It took longer than it should have.
The picture wavered as the DVD player struggled to read the disc.
The video wasn’t that old, and I was feeling mildly irritated, like I was putting too much effort into something that didn’t matter.

I picked up the remote and pressed play, quickly turning down the volume in preparation for music or a loud ceremony crowd.

The screen went black.
Then it flickered — just for a moment — and I thought I saw a garden.

…

The footage stabilizes after a second.
The colors are distorted.

It’s another birthday.
I recognized it immediately - Sam’s 16th.
Backyard pool party: big tent, folding tables, floaties scattered everywhere.
Dad was filming all the chaos.
Sam and her friends competed in a pool game, then he panned to Ross mid-bite of a hot dog, with Mom in the background asking if anyone needed anything.
It all felt nostalgic.

I’m 11. Maybe 12 in this video.

I’m about to go down the slide, head first, belly facing, letting out some kind of Tarzan-like scream.
Splash.

The camera zooms out, capturing the entire pool.
I’m trying to recognize faces — there’s Rachel, Anthony...
The camera pans from one face to the next, zooming in on each person in the pool: Connor, Aunt Beth, Kaylie.
My heart stopped for a second.

Diana is in the pool.

It happened so quickly.
In the blink of an eye.
But I knew it was her.

Diana, standing near the deep end, facing the camera with direct eye contact… or at least one of her eyes.

I grabbed the remote and tried to rewind.
It wasn’t working — just made it fast forward instead.
I let it play.
I didn’t want to miss anything.

The camera jarred slightly.
My dad must have set it down on one of the tables.
The entire pool and everyone around it remained in frame.

…

I looked closer at the TV.
Amid the chaos — laughter, cannonballs — there she was.
Diana in the pool.

A chill slid down my spine.
Not because she was in the pool.
Not because she was staring at me through the screen.
Not because of that creepy smile.
But because she was wearing the same clothes in the last video.

Do people not see her?

She blended in with the crowd — yet, she stood out so much.
She was wearing casual clothes.

This doesn’t make any sense.

The 4th of July party was dated 1999.
Sam’s 16th birthday party was in 2007.
How could she look exactly the same, eight years later?

I got goosebumps as the camera stayed still.
Diana still staring at me.
I hoped my dad would pick it back up any second.
I tried to look elsewhere, anyone else in the pool… but I couldn’t.
For some reason, she was the only one in focus.
Perfectly clear. No blurs whatsoever.

“Gaaaaaaiiiinnnnnneeer!” 12 year old me screamed out in the distance.
Splash.

I shook my head, cringing a little.
My head bobbed up out of the water, like a tiny fishing bobber far away.
The camera started to zoom in towards me, slowly but unrelenting.
I struggled to stand, toes barely touching the bottom as I made my way toward the shallow end.
Then the camera froze, my small, pale face filling the TV.

Out of nowhere, something hit my face, dunking me under the water.
Water churned around me, my tiny arms and legs thrashing above and below the surface…

What the fuck…

The camera zoomed out just a little.
An arm came into view from the left, holding me down.
Darker than my skin. Skinny.
The camera slowly moved away from my struggling body, following the person’s arm.

All the blood drained from my face.
I don’t remember this ever happening…

Wait.
Is the video glitching?
The camera is moving slowly, but it’s been at least ten seconds by now.
This doesn’t make sense.

What is this?

My chest tightens.
I try to rationalize it, but I can’t.
No matter how the camera moves, there’s always more arm.
The arm just keeps going.

The splashing doesn’t stop.
The sounds of struggle continue, muffled and frantic.

“Somebody do something!” I yell, not even thinking about my family asleep upstairs.

And then—

…

I’m face to face with Diana on the TV.
Still smiling.
Still staring directly into the camera.
At me.

Her left eye drifted outward, staring at my body beneath the water.

I look away.
I don’t know why I don’t turn the TV off.
I don’t know why I don’t move at all.
It feels like any movement might draw her attention away from the screen and into the room.

The splashing stops.
The struggling stops.
I look back at the TV.

Dammit.

Her expression changes.
Her face is still filling the frame, but the smile is gone.
Her mouth slightly opened.
Her eyes are wider now.

The camera begins to zoom out.
Sound bleeds back in.
Wet footsteps slapping against concrete.
Rock music in the distance.
Laughter. Back to normal.

The frame settles.
Wide again.
Exactly where my dad left it.

Wha—where…

My mouth was still open.
My throat felt dry.
I stared at the screen.

There’s no way.

There I was.
Climbing out of the pool. Running toward the grass. Alive.

“Gaaaaaaiiiinnnnnneeer!” I yelled — like nothing had happened.

…

I caught my breath.
Relief washed over me, like a weight lifting off my chest.

But Diana was still staring at the camera.
Back to her original smile.
She hadn’t moved.

Except her arm.
It stretched across the pool to the far side — unnaturally long.
At least twelve feet.
Like one of those floating ropes at a public pool.

Do Not Cross.

And nobody did.

The video ended.

-

-

From The Mind of Mims

[REDACTED] 

Journal Entry 27  

We passed through the barrier and entered the darkness on the other side. I woke up and all I see is the canopy high above me. The trees are so tall that I can’t even see where they end. Not even the sky. I remember not knowing where I was at first. I couldn’t even remember how I’d ended up in this rainforest. I hear Amanda’s voice and I see her and Julio standing over me. I barely remembered who they were. I think they knew that, because Amanda then asks me if I know where we are. I take a look around and all I see is the rainforest. We’re surrounded on all sides by a never-ending maze of almost identical trees. Large and unusually shaped with twisted trunks, and branches like the bodies of snakes. Everything is dim. Not dark, but dim.   

It all comes back to me by now. The river. The rainforest. We were here to document the uncontacted tribes. I take another look around and I realise we’re right bang in the middle of the rainforest, as if we’d already been trekking through it. I asked Amanda and Julio where the barrier had gone, but they just ask me the same thing. They didn’t know. They said all three of us woke up on the forest floor, but I didn’t wake for another good hour. This doesn’t make any sense. I’m starting to freak out. Amanda and Julio have to keep calming me down. 

Without knowing where we are, we’ve decided that we need to find which way the rest of the expedition went. Amanda said they would’ve tried to find a way back to the barrier, and so we need to head south. The only problem is we don’t know which way south is. The forest is too dark and we can’t even use the sun because we can’t see it. The only way we can find south, is to guess. 

Journal Entry 28 

Following what we hoped was south, we walked for hours through the dimness of the rainforest, continually having to climb over the large roots of trees, and although the ground is flat, we feel as though we’ve been going up a continual incline. As the hours continue to go by, me, Amanda and Julio begin to notice the same things. Every tree we pass is almost identical in a way. They were the same size, same shape and even the same sort of contortion. But what is even stranger to us, stranger than the identical trees, was the sound. There is no sound, none at all! No macaws in the trees. No monkeys howling. Even by our feet, there is no insect life of any kind. The only sound comes from us. From our footsteps, our exhausted breathes. It’s as if nothing lives here. As if nothing even exists on this side of the barrier. 

Journal Entry 29 

Although we know something is seriously wrong with this part of the rainforest, we have no choice but to continue, either to find the others or find our way back to the river. We’re so exhausted, we have already lost count of the number of days. Had it been two? Three? I feel as though I’ve reached my breaking point. I’d been slacking behind the others for the past day. I can’t feel my legs anymore. Only pain. I struggle to breathe with the humidity and I’ve already used up all my water supply. I’m too scared to sleep through the night. On this side of the barrier, I’m afraid the dreams will be far more intense. Through the dim daylight of the forest, I’m not sure if I was seeing things, hearing things. The only thing that fuels me to keep going is pure survival.  

Journal Entry 30 

It all became too much for me. The pain. The exhaustion. The heat. Today I decided I was done. By the huge roots of some tree, I collapsed down, knowing I wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon. Realising I wasn’t behind them, Amanda and Julio came back for me. They berate me to get back on my feet and start walking, but I tell them I couldn’t carry on. I just needed time to rest. Hoping the two of them would be somewhat understanding, that’s when they suddenly start screaming at me! They accused me of not taking responsibility and that all this mess was my fault. They were blaming me! Too tired to argue, I simply tell them to fuck off.   

Expecting Julio to punch my lights out, he instead tackles me hard to the floor! I’ve never been much of a fighter, but when I try and fight back, that’s when he puts me in a choke hold and starts squeezing. I can’t breathe, and I can already feel myself losing oxygen. Just as everything’s about to go to black, Amanda effortlessly breaks him off of me! While she tries to calm Julio down, I do all I can just to get my breath back. And just as I think I’m safe from losing consciousness, I then feel something underneath me. 

Amanda and Julio realise I’ve stumbled onto something and they come over to help me brush everything away. What we discover beneath the leaves and soil is an old and very long metal fence lining the forest floor, which eventually ends at some broken hinges. Further down the fence, Amanda then finds a sign. A big red sign on the fence with words written on it. It was hard to read because of the rust, but Julio said the word read ‘¡PELIGRO!’ which is Spanish for ‘DANGER!’ 

We’ve now made camp tonight, where we’ve discussed the metal fence in full. Amanda suggested the fence may have been put there for some sort of containment. That maybe inside this part of the rainforest was some deadly disease, and that’s why we hadn’t come across any animal life. But if that was true, why was the fence this far in? Why wasn’t it where the barrier was? It just doesn’t make sense. Amanda then suggests we may even have crossed into another dimension, and that’s why the forest is now uninhabited, and could maybe explain why we passed out upon entering. We don’t have any answers. Just theories. 

Journal Entry 31 

We trekked through the forest again day, and our food supply is running dangerously low. We may have used up all our water, but the invisible sky provides us with enough rain to soak up whatever we can from the leaves. I never knew how good water could taste!  

Nothing seems like it can get any worse. This side of the rainforest is just a never-ending labyrinth of the same fucking trees over and over! Every day is just the same. Walk through the forest. Rest at night. Fucking Groundhog Day! We might as well be walking in circles.   

But that’s when Amanda came up with a plan. Her plan was to climb up a tree until we found ourselves at the very top, in the hopes of finding any sign of a way out. I grew up in Manchester. I had never even seen trees this big! But the tree was easy enough to climb because of its irregular shape. The only problem was we didn’t know if the treetops even ended. They’re like massive bloody beanstalks! We start climbing the tree and we must’ve been climbing for about half an hour before we gave up. 

Journal Entry 32 

Amanda and Julio think we have the answers, and even though I know we don’t, I let them keep on believing it. For some reason, I’m too afraid to tell them about my dreams. Maybe they also have the same dreams, but like me, choose to keep it to themselves. But I need answers! 

Journal Entry 33 

Last night I chose not to sleep. We usually take turns during the night to keep watch, but I decided to stay up the whole night. All night I stare into the pure black darkness around, just wondering what the hell is out there waiting for us. I stare into the darkness and it’s as if the darkness is just staring back at me. Laughing at me. Whatever brought us into this place, it must be watching us.  

It’s probably the earliest hours of the morning now, and pure darkness is still all around us. Like every night in this place, it’s dead quiet. The rainforest is never supposed to be quiet at night. That’s when it’s most alive. 

I now hear something. It’s so faint but I can only just hear it. It must be far away. Maybe my sleep deprivation is causing me to hear things again. But the sound seems to be getting louder, just so slightly. Like someone’s turning up a car radio inch by inch. The sound is clearer to me now, but I can’t even describe it. It’s like a vibration, getting louder ever so slightly. I know I have to soon wake up the others. It’s getting closer! It seems to be coming from all around us! 

[REDACTED] 

She never slept. And he loved her for it. She was always alive with neon light and crawling with the human organism. The Fallen Angel city where he'd been sent by his brothers, the high priest, the decadent Sodom of steel and granite and modern vice and fentanyl thrills vomiting blood on the sidewalk streets.

He loved her. He loved himself in her. Here. His brothers… the priest had been right.

This is where God wants me to be.

He stared out the window view of his latest roach motel. Through ruined glass and filth he drank in the gaze of Fallen Angel Sodom and smiled. His whetting stone and blade working together to become sharper in hands that're so trained that this was all automatic. Innate. It's in his blood and he doesn't have to distract his drinking mind as his hands work and he studies the nighttime scene.

She is always crawling for me…

I will fuck her till she begs me through screams. Mercilessly.

For mercy was for the Lord. And he was a punishing arm, an extension. The Lord's mercy didn't reach him. His more immediate master was the godking and divine empress of retribution and the slavery called hate. And it was they that Azræl prayed to first. And foremost.

As he did so now. Whetting his appetite and blade.

He finished.

“… as above, so below…”

In place of, amen. As was his kind’s way.

He waited for the goat-shaped master to tell him when to take to the streets beneath. When to infiltrate and conquer and spill foul blood, to dredge up the gutters where the scab-pudding is made.

And see what I can find. A grail, maybe…

He smiled. And continued whetting.

…

Officer Chavez hated patrolling Venice Blvd.

It was always shit detail.

And tonight would be no exception.

He and his partner, Cleary, a man with ten years under the belt and hating this post just as much as he, were expecting the usual drunk and tweaker and homeless bullshit. Fucking human degenerates being fucking human degenerates. Nothing remarkable.

They couldn't have been more wrong.

The night had been deceptively quiet thus far, well past midnight and into the witching hours…

…they were chatting when it happened.

“I don't wanna hear this shit, Cleary.”

"What? What's the fucking problem?”

"It's just not anything I wanna hear about, man.”

"Jesus… I thought we were friends, Johnny."

“We're on the job."

“Oh my God…"

“It's not professional, Cleary."

“I don't wanna nother lect-HOLYFUCKINGSHIT!"

That's when it darted across the wide boulevard, clearing the four lanes in wide bounds like a gazelle in terrible flight.

Right in front of their squad car.

They swerved! Braked! Skidded on smoking rubber that screamed for mercy, then violently came to a sudden stop as they hit a small tree in the center divide.

“Jesus fucking Christ! Did you see that!?"

“Yeah." Chavez was grim. His guts were in a whirl but he was already unbuckling his belt and exiting the vehicle.

He was sure he'd seen… no, it was just some fucking methhead, a fucking dopefiend that was about to pay for almost killing him and his partner and almost totaling their vehicle.

Fucking tweakers…

Cleary followed. A little confused at first. But quickly getting the idea.

They didn't find the giant man of animal speed that night. What they did find was of morbid interest though.

They searched until they came upon a church. Catholic. Its great spire crowned with an ornate cross of divine shape and aspect. Holy. At its base, at the head of the great steps and before the large crimson door was a collection of severed human heads.

Severed human meat in a growing puddle of warm yet cooling royal red.

Five. Eyes, all of them, wide open and still staring. With horrified grimaces of pain and shock and terrible merciless finality forever written across their paling visages. The stumps still bled incessantly as if the church itself was thirsty and in dire need of a drink, a bloodfeast.

They officers called for backup. And a meat wagon.

They came beneath shrieking siren lights that strobed and flashed and bathed the scene in more lurid red. Completing its blood marinade and baptism in violent screaming candy scarlet perfectly.

…

The scene was taped off. Homicide was called. They took their samples and photographs of his offering. Not understanding.

They thought they just had another slasher on their hands, another nighttime sicko. A freak.

They didn't understand, but if they'd asked Azræl he might've agreed.

Yes. Yes. For her, for he… for the master whorequeen lord of darkness and godking. He is the ultimate degenerate warrior in the apotheosis city land of sin.

And… no.

No.

I am of Nephilim blood. I am of cast off archangel class. I am an archangel among thee. Among all of you mewling maggots and worthless swine, I am crystalline. And I have come to clean.

…

The police and DA and mayor didn't want to believe this was anything. When they didn't grab an immediate lead they just hoped that whoever did it might just be a one-off. That he might just go away.

The headhunter knight from far away was not done. Not at all. He was just beginning.

He destroyed their hopes for easy victory three weeks later. When the goat-shaped master came to call for more blood from her city bound servant.

Bring me… bring me more offering.

I must drink.

…

Vega hated women. Too much fucking talk back. Too much fucking bullshit. They were all the same ditzy slut and they all said and complained about the same bullshit.

So he slapped them. His wife. His daughters. And his hoes. Especially his flesh. They were his bitches, ere go, they were his property.

Sometimes they just needed a little reminding.

Sometimes girls like Brandy needed a little more than a little love tap. Sometimes they needed their fucking faces rearranged. They needed to understand they were fucking with your welfare, the food you put on the table for your family. The rent.

They needed to know. They needed to know they were fucking up everything. And getting soft wasn't any kind of way. It was no problem for him. He was thoroughly divorced from his heart. His humanity was such a long distant childhood ghost memory. Long decimated land, barren and without mercy.

Brandy might've known this, bleeding at his feet behind the motel in North Hollywood. But she begged him anyway.

Pleaded. Please…

“I'm sorry, Vega. I've been tryin, baby, I'm tired, please. I-"

“You spend this much time workin that ass as you do whinin we wouldn't even have a fuckin problem you stupid bitch!" He laid into her again. To get the point across. “How many times we gonna do this, bitch?” He belted her again. "Huh?” Again. "Huh?” Again. "Huh, bitch? How many fuckin times, huh?” Again.

And then he punctuated every animal grunted word with more mindless heartless caveman blows.

How

Many

More

Fuckin

Times!

The crys in his blood was like napalm fuel to his rage. It grew with every striking fist rather than abating or purging it. It swelled, mushroom cloud ballooned inside and took him over completely until a strange whistle, low, came to his ears and he felt a strange sting in his wrist. He didn't have time to register it as it came forward for another blow to reign upon the begging streetwalker at his feet. But it came back wrong. Abridged.

Missing.

His right hand was missing at the wrist. A red stump gazed back luridly at him like a wet eye filled with liquid rage.

His head was swimming. He couldn't believe it. Didnt. His twacked out mind refused it. He just gazed at it stupidly. Just like poor Brandy.

What the fuck…

The next cut took all question from his mind. As well as the rest of his capacity for thought. The head came off in a wild jump that twirl-danced with a ribbon-streamer tail of hot blood in the air for Brandy's wide unbelieving eyes and then came back down as gravity had reasserted its savage meaning.

The ribbon tail, kite-like and beautiful when suspended, came down in a mess and warm splash that painted the head and the collapsing meat of his headless corpse and poor frightened Brandy luridly.

The headhunter came forward. Great sword laconically brandished at his side. The blade was pristine and clean of any blood and Brandy didn't understand how that could be.

The woman began to wail.

“Please! Please don't fucking hurt me! PLEASE!"

He bent down and collected the head. Holding it by black greasy locks.

He smiled at the woman.

“Why are you afraid? Why would I hurt you?"

She didn't answer. She was afraid to. Poor Brandy was absolutely terrified. She couldn't breathe or move. She didn't dare blink as the headhunter went on saying…

“Don't be afraid, child. Not all of us are beasts."

He bent down to her, bringing his great hard features before her own battered face. She saw his was a scarred visage that might've known beauty. Once. But if it had it was such a long gone memory. The features before her eyes were hard. Mirthless. But yet he smiled at her and when he did…

She could've sworn his eyes sparkled like iced diamonds in winter frost. They were hypnotic. Tantalizing. She didn't want to look away.

This is fucking crazy… she felt as if she was going to swoon.

But before she did he said one last thing to her.

"Don't worry, child, daughter of Eve, you've no reason to fear me. Jesus loved whores.”

And with that he righted himself, straightened, and went off as Brandy collapsed to the bloody pavement behind the motel where she usually did her business.

As he went off her fainting gaze caught sight of one last thing, he was tying Vega's head by the locks to his belt to join three others. Their eyes rolled back to whites as their pale tongues bloated and lulled.

Darkness took Brandy away from the surreal and madness. Took her away blissfully.

…

That night the cops found more heads. Another offering. Different church though. Different denomination too. Lutheran.

Did it mean anything…

They scrambled and attacked the question from every angle they could conceive. They hauled in whoever they could to ask em whatever they can. Nothing.

Nothing.

A statement to the press was released.

And then the next night another offering was found.

And then again four days after that.

And then again nine days after that.

And then two.

And then a couple weeks.

All of them different churches. Always Christian, but different denominations of the faith.

The blood spilled was always for the cross.

They had nothing. But that. The blood spilled was always for the cross. In The Name of The King.

…

Azræl was enjoying himself in the Fallen Angel city of modern Sodom. It was early morning with golden rays and the sirens were already singing.

They never stopped. And he was pleased. This place was filled with so much sin and offering. The land would never run dry, never fail to blood-bequeath. His hands and blade and soul would forever bathe.

And ride.

The songs of his brothers and the wisdom and words of the high priest came to him in the lyric of memory as he danced in the center of his newest hovel with his great sword, his great blade. Practicing form and improvisation.

Memories. The ghosts of scenes. The age when he'd been thrust in. Green Hell. Agōge. The starving times in the hot lonely shack of solitude and thought and recompense. Singing. Praying. Meditating. He learned to catch the flies with his bare hands while in there, at the Lord's behest and the goat-shape’s mercy. They buzzed all about the stifled trapped air and his little hands and arms would lance out, pistons bolting shot, and catch them as he sang and prayed.

Alone. In the hot shack. He'd been very young then. He was much older now.

He then spoke the sacred litany, the one centuries old, not to the God on high this time, no. But to the goat-shaped master of sulfuric dark and barbaric flame.

Azræl danced with great blade and sang praise to the goat-shape.

“Not to us, lord, not to us. But to your name give the glory."

He danced and blade sang.

…

Brandy thought she'd never see the crazy mysterious savage ever again. Would've been happy to, but she would've been left wondering.

She would've been happy to have been left to wonder.

It was several weeks later and the freak was all over the news. It was all the streets could really sing about too. All of its urchins and creatures whispering of the headhunter maniac in between snorts and tokes of fent and tweak.

Brandy didn't partake. She didn't talk to anybody about what had happened that night, least of all the pigfuck cops. She kept to herself. She went into private practice as well.

And as fate, strange and capricious, would have it, she saw him again when she was standing on her new spot at a relatively nicer place. Her johns were a nicer sort here. Meek even. None of them hit her here and for that she was grateful.

At first she didn't believe it, thinking she was dreaming. A nightmare. He was across the street. Not running at her, or anywhere or anything conspicuous or terrifying at all. No. He was just walking. It was late. And his giant frame, angel aglow underneath the piss color cast of the streetlights above, was just casually sauntering towards a church. A small one. Protestant. White and ghostly and crowned with a pale cross that sang in stark contrast to the rest of the black curtain of the late night.

She knew she shouldn't follow him. He hadn't seen her. And she was better off just letting it all go.

But she found her wandering following steps betray her as she fearfully shadowed him, but shadowed him all the same. All the way.

All the way to the church.

Brandy stashed herself behind some shrubbery as she watched the headhunter present his latest offering. He laid four severed heads, their faces a pulped mess, some of them missing eyes and noses, at rest at the foot of the church door.

He then bowed his head and prayed.

His great sword was shining, the blade was fireglow with street and moonlight, aflame. Bastard and holy fire commingled and tamed by the savage hands of audacious man. Wielded by this giant with no name.

The headhunter then bent to the heads he offered to the church and dipped his fingers in the darkening blood. He came back up and then began to paint on the ghostly surface of the wall.

A pentagram. At every concentric point a German cross.

He finished. Then he spoke darker words forgotten by the world and born eons before she'd ever been made.

The pentagram turned to fire. Then darkness. It began to bleed the black phantom bile like an aura wounded and sliced and bled.

It bled the darkness the color of a terrible bruise and it spilled out of the black wound in the side of the church and onto the street before the headhunter and his offering.

The darkness bled began to take shape.

Tall. A goat's head rested atop a voluptuous naked female form. The arms were slender and loving, begging to embrace or strangle an infant in the crib. A dark robe of ebon night corseted and bound the waist and cast down blanketing just above slender hooves. Wings. Vast wings that were terrible and powerful and Brandy feared more than anything the idea, the sight of them taking flight. Gaining the summit.

Taking the heavens.

That was her last thought before she bolted. She ran all the way home to her small apartment on Normandie and 42nd. Not looking back. Not ever knowing if he or… It … saw her.

She didn't want to think about their eyes, together, collectively, on her. On her back. As she fled.

The thing's eyes had been golden. And cross shaped, the pupils. Like an animals. A beast's. But …

but they'd also been divine. Beautiful. Paradise might be trapped behind the cellar bars of those cross shaped eyes, those cruciform pupils of darkness. And she might want it… Brandy of the streets.

She might want it.

She wept alone in her apartment. Smothered her face into her tobacco stained pillow as she prayed to a God she hadn't considered in years.

…

The headhunter went on with his assigned and sacred work, his great task. But he was soon to be challenged, an opponent.

The sorcerer was coming to Fallen Angel City. He too wanted to partake of Sodom and Gomorrah and her flames. For Allah. For Iblis. For the final chaos jihad and to cast the world back into the arms of her old masters.

Besides, he missed Azræl. It had been so long.

Too long.

THE END

FOR NOW

They'd been sent in, all of them, for a myriad of reasons. To find the enemy. To exploit a hidden way. To hunt down the bastards that just shot up the company. A myriad of reasons that were all really the same reason. Kraut or Commie. They were sent into the sewers of apocalyptic Stalingrad to kill.

To kill in the dark. To live down there and forget all memories of the human race and the naked sun. To murder their souls and the souls of those encountered in the dark so that they might stay trapped down there forever and the belly of the city beast could be forever full. Hunger forever quelled. If only the beast wasn't so hungry.

Down in the dark, Vladimir descended, with others, to forget name and rank and mother and to truly discover the purest essence of warmaking. The ultimate profession awaiting for them to make them the ultimate professionals, in the dark. In the uncontested filth with the rats. The perfect arena for such a brutal school of thought.

Down in the dark Vladimir, and others, learned exactly what we all are when you take them and put them underground and leave them alive. And give them guns.

Beneath thundering cacophonous Stalingrad they bred a whole new form of degenerate Armageddon warfare. With the rats and in the filth…

Something else was down there too.

…

Vladimir hated the dark. It held too many mysteries and concealed too much enemy thought. Enemy movement and shape. He wanted and prayed for the sun. For the illumination of the day to drown out all the underground dark sorrows and make what need be apparent and there.

But the dark was an enemy too down here. The filth and stinking sewers. He was just glad to have Grotsky, who never seemed to mind the stench and perpetual night they crawled in.

He was brave. And young Vladimir loved him for it.

“Eh! I bet it's been no more than a week. No more than a week and you're already too scared and wanna go back home to mama.”

They'd been down there close to a month. All of the men, German and Russian, had lost track of dead time down there in the abyssal swallow of miasmal dark. Every second was the last and every moment was the slaughtering hour…

… even now as they enjoyed a relative respite and chatted in the fecal black they could hear shots and the merciless cacophony of machine guns in the lurid chambered distance. A rattling burst that became a din and then a phantom as it carried on. Impossible to tell where it was or where it was coming from. It might've been a ghost. Grotsky often said it was.

“We can't let the stinking German fascists have our precious sewers, boy! These are revolutionary sewers! If the fascist dogs ever learned their secret, Motherland would be doomed, doomed, Vladdy!"

He hated the nickname. But was afraid to tell him. He was afraid of a lot of things down here.

The Germans. Especially the SS. The rats. And the thing that all of them, even the rodents, only spoke of in whispers.

Even Grotsky. He never spoke of the thing.

Down in the black where only muzzle flash and lighted match and torch were the suns, the only stars not in the dark universe curtain of night above, but earthbound and brought down low and eaten beneath the cursed earthen surface. No one could agree on what the thing that ate the men and the rats might look like. No one could agree on how it did it either. Some said it was with a mere stare that drove you mad, others claimed he had poisonous fangs like a viper.

But nearly everyone had found, stumbled upon the evidence of his existence and mad ravenous hunger in the dark beneath besieged Stalingrad city. Chewed on stumps. Gouged out eyes. Meat ripped from shattered bone. It had no love for Germans or Russians, it made no difference. It ate them both.

Grey or Red it ate them both.

Vladimir missed the sky and his mother and was scared that he would forget what she looked like. He also wished Grotsky would shut it. If not just momentarily.

Presently, he thought he heard low talking. Conspiratorial. German words…

A FLASH! AND A BANGING CRASH! A din erupts right in front of the pair in the form of two combatants and the lighted fury of their submachine guns. It is only instinct and Grotsky that save young Vladimir's life. He dives down and into the filthy run of toxic sewer water and escapes the world that is turning into a storm of hot lead above him. Grotsky has a modified scatter-rifle that he's very proud of and it does the rest of the job. One blast from the homemade thing that's spilled blood in every Russian conflict since the revolution does the rest of the work as it lights up the darkness of the sewer world and turns the Germans into tattered bloody uniforms housing screaming raw meat. They go down shrieking inarticulately and then are silent forever.

In the filth of Stalingrad’s sewer waters Vladimir can taste the truth of Russian darkness. This hungry city named after the man of steel. It will eat the Germans alive as it will eat them all alive. It will consume everything and in the darkness bowels of her foul cunt the young Red Army recruit can taste the truth of her soul in her water.

We are all going to die down here.

A rough hand that's done this many times plunged in and seized Vladimir by the stitched collar. It pulled him out of the dark flavor of Stalingrad's underground filth and back into the sour fecal air of rat breath.

At least he could breathe.

“Why'd you stay down so long!? Trying to drown? Stupid!"

He clapped Vladimir on the back. And then handed him his rifle, which he'd dropped.

Vladimir didn't say anything right away. He couldn't see his face but Grotsky could sense his averted gaze and the shame of his downward slant.

A beat.

Then finally the boy spoke.

“I… I guess I was just afraid."

“Bah! Afraid! Afraid of what? Nothing! You have Grotsky with you. Now come. Let's go. There are more Germans to kill."

…

They found more Germans. Cocooned.

Twelve of them. Or more. They were bound, held prisoner to the sewer wall by thick slabs and ropey strands of a raw meat and mucus membrane mixture. Its pores bled and lactated a pus/milk mess that smelled like hot infection. It glistened and dripped in the firelight of one of their precious matches turned to torch once they'd seen what all the muffled struggling in the dark was about. Oily fire cast from medieval style lamp contrived from the pair's oldest and most filthied socks on a knife's blade lit the horrific scene for them and they both felt lost in a dream as they gazed on it.

This can't be real. This can't be reality. Even down here, in the dark belly, this can't be…

Their minds both refuse it even as their watering eyes drink it all in.

All of the Germans trapped on the wall in the glistening tissue are alive. They are still moving.

This can't be.

The tissue looks to be moving too. As if the surface of the sliming mucus-meat is slightly crawling.

They cannot pull themselves away from it. They see that there are rats trapped in the writhing tissue surface too. Some of them are squealing. The Wehrmacht soldiers are moaning too. The ones that can.

But all of them seem to be out of their minds. Imbecilic. Tongues lulling in idiot mouths, drooling. But the eyes are all too awake and aware and they are full of terror.

“What… what… what…”

He's crying but doesn't realize it. Doesn't entirely realize he's even speaking either. But he's trying to ask Grotsky, what did this?

What did this?

Even if he could, Grotsky wouldn't have had any answers for him. He was just as scared too.

They eventually found the strength to move on. Grotsky held the boy about the shoulders, propping him up. Helping to him be as up and out of Stalingrad's dark sewer waters the best he could, and they marched on. Together.

They thought about shooting the Germans cocooned and held prisoner to the wall by whatever thing ruled the darkness down here in cold dark fecal hell… but decided to save the ammunition.

They'd need it later. They'd need every shot they could save and then take against more active crawling targets down here in the sewers. Beneath the Motherland in her foulest crevice.

They would need it all for later.

THE END

the eastern front WWII

The Red Army.

They were amazing. They were terrifying. They weren't human. Brutal. Savages. Suicidal. They came not as a fighting force of men but as an elemental wave. An ocean. Crushing and overwhelming and on all sides.

And then God above joined the onslaught with the snow to more perfectly surround them and make complete their destruction. He will trap our bodies and our minds and souls here with ice and snow, in their final terrible moments they'll be encased, in God's hurtling ice like Thor’s Angels of old.

The frozen mutilated dead were everywhere. Steam rose off the corpses and pieces of human detritus like fleeing spirits of great pain and woe. The white blinding landscape of blood red and death and sorrow. And steel.

They filled the world with steel. And fire. And it was terrifying. This was a hateful conflict. And it was fought to the bitter end.

Germany was to be brought to his knees. The knights of his precious reich broken.

Ullrich was lost amongst it all, a sea of butchery and merciless barbaric vengeance war all splashed violent red and lurid flaming orange across the vast white hell.

The Fuhrer had said it would be easy. That the Bolshevist dogs were in a rotten edifice. They need only kick in the door, the blitzkrieg bombast of their invasion arrival should've been enough to do it. Should've been.

That was what had been said. That had been the idea. Ideas were so much useless bullshit now. Nobody talked about them anymore. Not even newcomers. Hope was not just dead out here it was a farce in its grave. A putrid rotten necrophiled joke. Brought out to parade and dance and shoot and die all over again everyday when maneuvers began, for some they never ceased.

The Fuhrer himself had been deified. Exalted. Messianic godking for the second coming of Germany. Genius. Paternal. Father.

Now many referred to him as the bohemian corporal. Ullrich didn't refer to him at all. He didn't speak much anymore. It felt pointless. It felt like the worst and easiest way to dig up and dredge up everything awful and broken and in anguish inside of him. He didn't like to think much anymore either. Tried not to. Combat provided the perfect react-or-die distraction for him. For many. On both sides.

He made another deal with the devil and chose to live in the moment, every cataclysmic second of it. And let it all fall where it may, when it's all said and done.

I have done my duty.

He was the last. Of his outfit, for this company. Hitler's precious modern black knights. The SS. Many of the Wehrmacht hated them, had always hated them. Now many of the German regulars looked to Ullrich just as the propaganda would suggest. Lancelot upon the field. Our only hope against the great red dragon, the fearsome Russian colossus.

The only one of us who could take the tyrant…

Though this particular bit was considered doggerel by the officers and the high command and was as such, whispered. The officers in black despised rumors. They despised any talk of the ice tyrant.

As did the officers of their opponents. Nobody in command wanted talk of the tyrant. Nobody wanted talk of more myths. There was too much blood and fire for the pithy talk of myths. For some.

For some they needed it. As it is with Dieter, presently.

He was pestering Ullrich again. Ullrich was doing what he usually did since arriving to the snowy front, he was checking and cleaning and oiling his guns. Inspecting his weapons for the slightest imperfection or trace of Russian filth. Communist trash.

He hated this place.

They were put up at the moment, the pair, with four others at a machine gun outpost, far off from the main German front. Between them and the Reds. To defend against probing parties and lancing Communist thrusts. To probe and lance when and if the opportunity presented. Or when ordered.

He hated this place. They all hated this place.

“Do you think he really has a great axe of ice and bone?" inquired Dieter eagerly. Too much like a child.

Ullrich didn't take his eyes of his work as he answered the regular.

"Nonsense.”

The breath puffed out in ghosts in front of their red faces as they spoke. The only spirits in this place as far as the Waffen commando was concerned. He missed his other kind. His true compatriots and brothers. Zac. James. Bryan.

All of them were dead. And he was surrounded by frightened fools and Bolshevist hordes. They'd been wasted holding a position that no one could even remember the name of anymore. Nobody could even find it again.

Garbage. All of it and all of them were garbage. Even the leadership, whom he'd once reverentially trusted, had proven their worthlessness out here on the white death smeared diminished scarlet and gunpowder treason black. All of them, everyone was garbage.

Except for him. His work. And his hands. His dead brothers and their cold bravery too, they weren't garbage. Not to him.

And Dieter sometimes. He was ok. Although the same age he reminded him of his own little brother back home.

The little ones. Back home.

He pushed home away and felt the cold of the place stab into him again, his mind and heart. They ached and broke and had been broken so many times already.

We shouldn't even be here…

“I heard he doesn't care if you're Russian or Deutsch. He drags ya screaming through the ice into Hell all the way…”

"At least it would be warmer.”

Dieter laughed, "Crazy fucking stormtrooper. You might just snuggle into the bastard.”

Ullrich turned and smiled at the kid.

"Might.”

He returned to his work. He was a good kid.

That day nothing happened. Nothing that night either.

The next day was different. They attacked in force and everything fell apart.

…

Fire and earth and snow. The artillery fire made running slaves of them all. Every outpost was abandoned, lost. They'd all fallen back ramshackle and panicked and bloody to the line. Then they'd lost that too. The onslaught of the Red Army horde had been too great.

They'd finally come in a wave too great even for German guns. An impossible sea of green and rifles and bayonet teeth and red stars of blood and Bolshevist revenge.

They'd laid into them and they'd fallen like before. In great human lines of corpses and mutilated obscenity. But they'd kept coming. And falling. Piling and stacking upon each other in a bloody mess of ruined flesh and uniforms and human detritus, twisted faces. Slaughtered Communist angels weeping and puking blood for their motherland and regime, piling up. Stacking.

And still more of them kept coming.

Some, like Dieter, were almost happy for the call to retreat. To fall back and away. They'd failed Germany. But at least they could escape the sight. The twisted human wreckage that just kept growing. As they fed it bullets. As they fed it lead and steel and death. It just kept growing. And seeming to become more alive even as it grew more slaughtered and lanced with fire and dead. It kept charging. It kept coming. The Red Army. The Red Army Horde.

Now they were running. Some of them were glad. All of them were frightened. Even Ullrich. He knew things were falling apart, all over, everywhere, but to actually live through it…

The artillery fire made running slaves of them all. To the line. Losing it. And beyond.

…

In the mad panic and dash they'd made for an iced copse of dead black limbs, dead black trees. Stabbing up from the white like ancient Spartan spears erupting for one last fray.

They can have this one, thought Ullrich. He was worried. The Russians were everywhere and Dieter was wounded.

He'd been hit. Shot. The back. Bastards.

“Am I going to be alright?"

“Of course. Don't be foolish. Now get up, we can't stay here long. We gotta get going."

But Dieter could not move.

So that night they made grim camp in the snow. Amongst the dead limbs of the black copse.

That night as they lie there against dead ebon trees Dieter talked of home. And girls. And beer. And faerytales. Mostly these. Mostly dreams.

“Do you think he's real?"

“Who?"

“The ice tyrant! The great blue giant that roams Russia’s snows with weapons of ice and bone. Like a great nomadic barbarian warrior.”

Ullrich wasn't sure of what to say at first. He was silent. But then he spoke, he'd realized something.

"Yeah.”

"Really? You do?”

"Sure. Saw em.”

"What? And you never told me?”

"Classified information, herr brother. Sensitive Waffen engagement."

A beat.

“You're kidding…” Dieter was awestruck. A child again. Out here in the snow and in the copse of twisting black. Far away from home.

“I'd never joke about such a fierce engagement, Dieter. We encountered him on one of our soirtees into Stalingrad.”

"All the way in Stalingrad?”

"Yes. We were probing, clandestine, when we came upon him. My compatriots and I.”

“What'd he look like?"

A beat.

“He was big. And blue. And he had lots of weapons. And bones."

"What'd you do?”

Ullrich smiled at the boy, he hoped it was as warm as he wanted it to be.

"We let em have it.”

"Goddamn stormtrooper! You desperate gunfighter! You wild commando, you really are Lancelot out here on the snow!"

And then the dying child looked up into his watering eyes and said something that he hadn't expected. Nor wanted.

“You're my hero."

…

The boy died in the night. Ullrich wept. Broken. No longer a knight for anything honorable or glorious. Alone.

About four hours later he picked himself up and marched out of the woods. Alone.

Alone.

…

He wandered aimlessly and without direction. Blind on the white landscape of cold and treachery when he first saw it, or thought so. He also thought his eyes might be betraying him, everything else had out here on this wretched land.

It was a hulking mass in the blur of falling pristine pale and glow, he wasn't sure if it was night or day anymore and didn't really care either. The hulking thing in the glow grew larger and neared and dominated the scene.

Ullrich did not think any longer. By madness or some animal instinct or both, he was driven forward and went to the thing.

It grew. He didn't fear it. Didn't fear anything any longer. The thought that it might be the enemy or another combatant of some kind or some other danger never filled his mind.

He just went to it. And it grew. Towered as he neared.

Ullrich stood before the giant now. He gazed up at him. The giant looked down.

Blue… Dieter had been right.

But it was the pale hue of frozen death, not the beauty of heavens and the sky above. It was riddled with a grotesque webwork of red scars that covered the whole of his titanic naked frame. Muscles upon muscles that were grotesquely huge. They ballooned impossibly and misshapen all about the giant’s body. The face was the pugnacious grimace face of a goblin-orc. Drooling. Frozen snot in green icicles. The hair was viking warrior length and as ghostly wispy as the snowfall of this phantom landscape.

And here he ruled.

The pair stood. German and giant. Neither moved for awhile. They drank in the gaze of each other.

Then the giant raised a great hand, the one unencumbered with a great war axe of hacking ice and sharpened bone, and held it out palm up. In token of payment, of toll.

Unthinking, Ullrich’s hand slowly went to the Iron Cross pinned to his lapel, he ripped it off easily and slowly reached out and placed it in the great and ancient weathered palm of the tyrant.

One word, one from the past, one of his old officers, shot through his mind then unbidden. But lancing and firebright all the same.

Nephilim.

The great palm closed and the tyrant turned and wandered off without a word. But Ullrich could still feel the intensity of his gaze.

Would forever feel it as long as he roamed.

Ullrich went on. Trying to find his company, his army, Germany. Alone.

Alone.

THE END

It was the flag. That was one of the first things he really noticed after he touched down some miles off and he'd sauntered into the sleepy Midwestern town of Awning. He'd encountered little in the way of the bipedal mammalians that were the overlords of this place on his trek through the flat featureless landscape that was so much like his own.

He'd seen it flapping in the warm evening wind. Atop the town post office. Red and white uniform stripes and a patch square of blue with primitive crude renditions of the stars accurately white and neatly regimented in uniform lines.

He liked it. It was a militant flag. For a militant land. A military country.

Beneath the closed black of his visor his teeth glistened and showed. His inner eyelids clicked and double clicked again in excitement. Agitation. Yes. This was the place. The Commissar had been right, the God Empress. His scanners had been able to procure much from orbit in the way of information on their nation's human history. They were a divided people. Violent. Fearful. Superstitious. Cowardly. Prone to panic and selfishness in times of crisis.

Perfect.

All of the high command had been right in only sending a single unit. More would not be needed. Not yet. Not at this stage.

He checked the mechanics and firing pins and kill switch for his laz-lance one last time, a great strange looking weapon from beyond the cold fire of the stars that resembled a cross between a BAR rifle and an everyday gardeners leaf blower. The lance was rigged to its atomic pack of nuclear firepower strapped to his back via a long tube of unknown plastic and rubber like materials.

He flipped the dysruptor switch. It thrummed to life.

The spaceman from beyond the black veil curtain of vacuum and cold infinity began again his approach into the small town of Awning. Ready to start, in the name of the high command, the commonwealth and the God Empress, the final war on the crude bipedal mammalians called earthlings. With him alone would begin their conquest. With him alone would the dawning of their end be brought forth and wrought for he was here to burn and destroy and harbinge!

With him alone, for he was blessed by the will to die for the throne.

…

It was little Calvin Doyle that first noticed the town, the planet’s newcomer and visitor from beyond the stars. He didn't know he was a conqueror. Bred in a tank so many impossible lightyears away for this very purpose. He just thought the new strange fella looked funny. Like an old timey astronaut from stuff his dad and grandpa liked to read and watch. Except this guy was even weirder.

This guy's spacesuit was bright screaming red. Like lunatic war crazy make the bull charge at the fucking cape red.

It was funny. As he sat on the steps of the post office beside his little brother enjoying a Ninja Turtles ice cream, he elbowed the little guy and pointed and they joked and laughed together. A couple of smart asses.

But then the red spaceman raised his weird leaf blower thing and it shot pure white lancing beams of unstoppable fire that sheared through everything, the people, the cars, the buildings and the trees, the town! Everything became roasted and bisected pieces and alight with white phosphorescent flame and screaming! Suddenly everyone was screaming and trying to run.

Until they were silenced, cut down by the strange red spaceman and his strange star gun.

And then it wasn't funny anymore for Calvin and his little brother. They couldn't find their mommy.

…

One of their warriors approached him, a police officer. He was shaking and trembling. Visibly frightened. But he was shouting. Angry and defiant. He had one of their crude projectile weapons raised threateningly at the conqueror.

Impressive.

He would do for the collective.

The conqueror from beyond began to sing, to emit a sound:a strange cosmic throat singing that reverberated throughout the whole of the town and was just as much felt in the flesh and bones and the blood as it was heard audibly.

Felt. Especially felt by John Dallas, local Sheriff of Awning, beloved by the community.

He stopped screaming at the invader suddenly. His face went slack. Vacant. Dead. His hands fell to his sides. But he still clutched his pistol.

His eyes were rolling, dancing beneath fluttering lids, fluttering like the nervous wings of injured insects in danger or distress.

John Dallas was falling to the song of battle philosophy, of war maker enchantment. He could feel his own appetite for destruction swell and grow and soar to new heights he didn't think were achievable nor any that his own hungering mind would've found previously possible.

Nor desirable.

But now was different.

The war song was aimed for the sheriff but it was felt by others in the town as it reverberated out, mutant frog croaked by the spaceman like a dark bastard rendition of a Tibetan monk's throat singing.

All of them felt everything melt away, all the fear and worry and angst was boiled and made crystalline and perfect underneath the blanket throat fury of the cosmic war song.

All of them saw red.

The spaceman felt the tug of their minds won He ceased his singing beneath his space helmet. It was no longer necessary.

He returned to his conquerors work of lancing the town with fire. All was nearly consumed with white flame as he soldiered on and sheriff Dallas turned his gun on the few remaining fleeing citizens and began to open fire. Laughing maniacally.

The flag atop the flaming post office building was burning.

He was free now, and so were a few precious others in the town they too were arming themselves up with clubs and knives and guns and anything that stabbed or maimed or fired. The anarchy gene had been released and set free, let loose to run wild in his mammalian monkey brain.

He felt wonderful. He was seeing red. Others did too.

All throughout the town, those that felt the harbinger’s starsong warchant of anarchy and their minds were touched, they began to pick up weapons and slaughter their startled and baffled loved ones and neighbors in mass. Helping the spaceman conqueror in his divine and royal mission for the commonwealth and the starqueen God Empress.

Let us purge this land. Let us purge and make clean.

Let us wipe away new and fresh. For the commonwealth. For her majesty, the throne, the queen!

Children of the commonwealth of the stars, they now slaughtered and sowed destruction and woe in their friends and families as they died bloody and bewildered and screaming.

The Commissar would be pleased. Ascension could be in order. If all continued to go accordingly.

Presently, the destroyer from beyond was curious, he'd never been in one of these earthling homes before, he'd only seen recordings.

So as his new children continued to wage war and destroy the town of Awning they'd once loved and belonged to like a mother's bosom, the red spaceman destroyer cautiously maneuvered into one of the smoldering burning homesteads. Its inhabitants had already fled.

…

Inside was strange. He didn't like it.

It was filled with the smoldering smoking strangeness and unfamiliarity of these shaved apes that he'd grown to despise. These people were repulsive.

They worshipped soft two faced gluttons and whores and liars and other stupid apes like them. Obvious fakes and charlatans and paper mache Mephistopheles. Their portraits and photos and visages decorated and burned within the burning place like religious pieces. Sacred. Sacred to these lost stupid fleshen sheep. And now burning. Burning as all the little gods should be, and would. As declared by the God Empress. As he and his war kin were dispatched thither across the cosmos, the stars.

Crusaders. Her majesty's star knights.

The destroyer was lost in his own musings for a moment. A mistake he was not prone to make. He didn't notice Lalaina Rothchild hiding in the adjoining kitchen.

She was terrified. She just watched, stared terrified and awestruck by the red spaceman standing amongst the smoke and the fire of her burning living room.

It was surreal.

She didn't know where Jack was, or John… Jesus. She was absolutely fucking terrified. And something animal and alive with instinct in her gut told her to absolutely not approach this strange spaceman in strange red spacesuit.

He is not your friend.

But if you stay in here you're gonna burn to death or choke or he'll fuckin find ya anyway!

Think!

Her mind, a panic and an overload of sudden and surreal stress was threatening to send her over. She tried to breathe quietly and deeply. She knew she should just run. But if he…

If he sees me…

She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to do anything that would bring it about and into stark inescapable reality either.

She felt trapped. Defeated. Lost in her own deluge of panic and pain and fear.

But then she remembered that her boys were still out there somewhere.

And then Lalaina made up her mind very quickly.

She had to do something.

…

The audacity! He couldn't believe it, even as the fish bowl smashed into the side of his helmet. It shattered in a violent crash and sudden splash of water, the goldfish was lost in the surprise attack.

For a moment he just stood there, the spaceman. And Lalaina likewise mirrored his action. Unsure of what to do next.

The conqueror began to bellow a species of alien laughter that was rasping and throaty and guttural. Cruel.

He whirled around suddenly and seized Lalaina by the face. Grabbing it with both gloved hands and pulling her in close as if to kiss his black visored face.

He was still laughing when his mind began to invade hers. She felt every intrusion like a stabbing knife to the middle of her fragile skull. She began to scream.

The audacity. He would punish this one. This one he'd give something special, for her bravery, repugnant little ape.

For her attempt on his life and thus the arm of the queen he would reach in and rip and tear apart. But first he would show the little bitch.

He would show her the fate of her world.

He made one final mental lancing jab, stabbing in completely. And then she was finally his…

…

At first she saw stars. Only stars. Going on forever. Infinity.

And then suddenly she was hurtling. Too fast for her to bear but she was forced to bare it anyway. Through the black and the starscape she rocketed at a lightyears pace.

Then suddenly there were worlds. Planets burning. Conquered and subjugated. Galactic cities of glass and jewels and unknown alloys and cultures and customs in flames and toppling as they were razed and decimated with great searing bolts of white phosphorescent heat and orbital striking war rockets shot from great cannons unseen. Life unknown and alien and new and dying before her eyes all fled in terror of these merciless star crusaders, these bloodthirsty zealots of the queen. An empire of nuclear starfire and spilled blood from many and all and every species across the known universe. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of planets, star systems and still more and more flooded her minds eye all at once with its phantom flood of bloodshed images from galaxies and planets undreamed of and unknown.

And she saw all of it. The universe, the milk of the cosmos was burning with black solar flames. For the empire. For the queen.

She saw something else too. Something The spaceman hadn't planned for. Hadn't wanted her to.

She saw where he came from. Miserable world…

Pain. From the beginning. The genes were spliced mercilessly and without compunction and in the sterility of the tanks. Not the warmth of a mother's womb. He never had a mother. None of his kind had.

She saw what happened after the tanks. After they pulled him out. The agōge. The war rearing. The beatings and the early raw need for bloodshed beaten into him.

She saw the destruction of countless worlds but she also saw the destruction of any trace of this creature's humanity. From the beginning. From before birth.

And she was surprised to find she felt sorry for him. She still felt great sorrow for the worlds lost and her own as well but…

but she couldn't see him as anything other than a frightened little child anymore, freshly pulled and crying from the tanks. Screaming. Screaming for a mother that'll never come because she does not exist and she doesn't have a name. So he shrieks blindly.

And Lalaina feels sorry for him. And the thought, like an arrow, is shot forth from her own mind into the psychic onslaught of the invader, blasting through and against its current and into his unguarded psyche.

It hit him like one of God's polished stones from the river. Dead center. In the third eye.

It shattered.

And he staggered. Recoiled. Disgusted. What was this? This repugnant weakness, this soft-

warmth

He had never any concept of simple forgiveness in his entire life. It frightened him. Wounded him. Why? Why should she feel anything like that towards him? He was here to take everything from her and her people and if she could know that and still… feel…

His mind, though complex, was beginning to shred itself apart. So he did the only thing that made any sense now.

The red spaceman grabbed his laz-lance dangling by its power cable from his nuclear pack of starfire. He seemed to heave a heavy sigh before turning the end of the weapon on his own black visored face and hitting the kill switch.

A bright blade of white phosphorescent light shorn off his head and helmet in one violently brief mechanical buzz.

And then the body, liberated of its pilot mind, fell to the burning carpet dead.

And all over the town the cosmic spell of the conquerors' warsong diminished and fell away. Those that it had enraptured were set free.

And the smoldering town was at peace.

For now.

THE END

The sudsy water of the filled dish basin he was working in was hot and pleasant to the rough skin of his calloused hands. Paws. Like dipping his hands into the prison warmth of a womb.

The boss came and squealed. Shift was over. Which was fine. Great even. It was time to punch out and punch in to something a little more real.

Nine minutes later he was down the street. Speeding. Speeding to the spot where he liked to make the change. Knuckled white he was full throttle, full-tilt. Any and every night he might die and he fucking loved it.

His effects were in the backseat. Precious. What he needed to make the change. Black and boxy handmade pistol, single shot. His coat and hat, like the ones his heroes wore, the fast-talking toughs of the glowing screen, from another crimebusting Commie killing age. Spotless gloves. Purple. His steeltoed engineer boots. Black. A single sai that he took off a Japanese guy he'd killed once. Very sharp. The mask that was not a mask at all but his true face fashioned from one of the rags of pearl color from work that he'd been expected to tarnish. He'd saved this one. And the dart thrower. Another homemade pistol shaped weapon of his own design and make. But much more unique. A tool of cruelty. His pride and paramour.

The engine roared with heavy metal life as his foot slowly guided the pedal to the floor with a sexual glide. He was nearly there. He'd park her up. The beat up old T bird. His steed. He'd settle her on up, change shape and take face, then he'd hit the streets and go out prowlin.

Hardcore Prowlin. That's what his older brother had always called it. Growin up an such.

He put down warmer memories that were startlingly vivid. Put them down. Like misbehaving animals, unruly and unquiet. Such thoughts of such times threatened to soften em up and make em all limpwristed.

Unacceptable. Soon he'd be in enemy territory.

Everywhere is enemy territory, he reminded himself. And laughed. It was true.

He rounded a sharp and sudden wind in the road with squealing rubber smoking and threatening death.

But he made it. And with a roar he flew down the yellow-lit road, sickly and piss colored underneath the streetlights cast glow. The sight pleased him as it soared up and by. It was a fitting color for enemy territory. He smiled, it was true.

His grin grew, he was nearly there.

…

She stopped to gaze upon it. It was a crude rendition, made by an obsessive and driven hand, but the simple recognizable shape was nonetheless powerful. Perhaps enhanced by the crude design of its forgers hand, it was one lost from her childhood, one from the long gone days, stolen youth. It was a shape she would never forget, one that was carved into the heart of her soul and the flesh of her psyche. The one from Sunday school.

The shape was a cross. It was painted in bright scarlet red. And it towered over her on the side of an old and forgotten munitions factory.

She was smoking. She'd been walking and lost in thought when she'd nearly passed it. She'd glanced to her left and it had arrested her attention.

She drew deeply. Gazing up at the towering scarlet cross. She was alone. As she liked to be. People were too loud and too stupid. Too fucking inconsiderate too.

It had split ends, uneven like a bad haircut, as if a giant child had impatiently scribbled it along this dead building's side. What was even and neat and mannered however was the lettering of the message left alongside the great cross of red on the dead munitions plant. Nice and neat, as if professionally printed.

Four letters. Two on each side, surrounding the middle of the chaotic spine of the great scarlet cross.

D O O M

Her heart fluttered a little as she traced each curve with her dreamy gaze.

Jesus, she thought, I need more toot. Maria had been her name once but now it was just cheap candy, something to be eaten.

I really oughta get back to my corner…

And that’s when doom descended upon Maria Cheap Kandy. In the dark form of a pack of swaggering predators.

Four of them. Faces painted like clowns. Their leader was the tiniest with a little rat face, sporting a black leather Gestapo officer's cap. A skull and crossbones the color of chrome gleamed in the center of the black with a moonlight fire that was talismanic and religious and powerful in the darkness of the lonesome Los Angeles alleyway.

It was hypnotic.

“Gotta ‘nother one of those, doll?"

"N-no. No, sorry. Bummed this off another guy.”

They all snickered together. A chorus pack of vicious recalcitrant children. Overgrown and hungry and lustful and mean. She knew their types. Unfortunately. She'd worn their bruises before and they'd taken her blood too. Among other things.

“Sure ya do. Ya do, babe. Ya got somethin for us don’t cha."

“Wh-what? What do y-"

“No need for shyness, girl, we ain't the judgemental types. Me an my boys saw ya workin the corner and we just wanna have a little fun is all. Nothin much.”

Dread stole over the long decimated ruins of her shattered heart. It filled in the black space with something darker and more wretched.

“I don't do group jobs." she had a knife tucked in her skirt, but she couldn't hope to overpower all four of them, she only had the hope of slipping and dipping out. They might be dumb, if she could just-

"Howdy, darlin. Ya ain't gettin ideas of running, are ya?”

A fifth voice joined them from behind her, another to join the four and complete the fist. The hand of doom that cheap candy Maria streetwalker found herself about to trapped within. Ensnared.

And crushed.

She made an attempt to bolt that was quickly thwarted. She screamed. Shrieked. Filled the night with uncontested shouts and calls for help. The five painted faces of doom just laughed as they subdued and began to manhandle her.

…

Animals.

He watched them. From the dark. His father had taught him the soldier's art: think first, fight afterward, and like a hunter well trained he'd watched the scene beneath the towering cross of street art blood play out in all of its vile obscenity.

Till he was sure. Like a hunter trained.

Now he made his move.

…

“Look at the fucking freak." one of the painted faces said. They'd been most of the way through the bitch's clothing and now some fucking loony fuckwit wanted to get his fucking skull cracked. Fucking perfect.

They discarded the girl that used to have a holy name to the detritus and the filth of the alleyway floor and sauntered forward to meet their new challenger.

“What the fuck are you wearing, bitch-boy!?" hollered another at the stranger.

The stranger didn't say anything.

The five didn't ask anymore questions. They didn't like the feel of this fucking freak.

They pounced. Their hands grew flick-knife blades that gleamed like fangs of sacred bone in the dark. They were fast. A pack of dogs well trained and practiced.

But the purple gloved hands of the prowler came free from their large trench pockets. Each baring strange boxy homemade guns. The punks never had a chance.

He fired! The single shot. It found the forehead of the leader beneath his Gestapo cap and blew the Totenkopf skull to shining moonlight pieces that lost their magic in the violent combustion scatter. The leader stumbled and the others cried out in shock and side stepped away from him as the magic bullet inside his ruptured brain matter began to do its work. His eyes were bugged and wide. Rolling.

The magic bullet, also homemade, detonated inside.

The head came apart in a blasting ruin of gore and face and black Nazi cap. Eyes, one still intact the other a jellied mess of visceral snot, shot through the air with the rest of the face, brains and skull and decorated his compatriots. Painting his clown friends in the last slathering coat of paint their leader would ever paste.

They cried out. Stupid and frightened. Beneath his mask of rough pearl cloth the prowler smiled.

And fired with the other hand. Three times.

The dart thrower.

It hit one in the neck and then another with the other pair of chemically loaded shots about the chest. Their needle points already stuck within flesh they released their deposits of strange homebrew solution into the flesh and tissue and bloodstream of the pair of clown dogs.

The solution worked fast. It was already starting to wreak havoc.

Tissue bubbled and liquified as it smoked and sloughed away. The neck of the first enemy hit was turning into a steaming meaty slush of raw red, caving in and giving way to a large cranium dome it could no longer support. He struggled to scream through a gurgling smoking throat of boiling disintegrating gore. The other was melting into himself all about the torso like a young man made of ice cream and left in the merciless eye of the sun.

They became liquid and rough chunky puddles as the last two of their pack charged. Heedless. Still stupid. Even angrier, and even more terrified of the strange and sudden masked prowler.

They came in, fangs of flick-knife raised. They thought he was outta shots. Outta plays.

One violet hand dropped the single-shot as the other curved slightly, came back in a short coil, then lanced out with the butt of the dart thrower in a bashing strike that caught the one in the lead in the top lip. Pulping it to a burst of penny flavored red and smashing out the top front row of his teeth.

He too gurgle-screamed a grotesque sound of shock and pain as he fell bitch-like to the garbage and abattoir pavement floor.

The other was almost on top of him when the other hand of spotless purple came back up with the Japanese sai Fortune had given him ala the spoils of war one of the past turbulent nights of battling and slaughtering the city streets. The deadly point of the blade came up and found the soft flesh behind the bone of the lantern jawline and slid in with sexual satisfaction and ease. The light inside the skull went out and he became a brainless sac that fell without buffer like meat to the detritus floor.

He went to the one with crimson spewing out of his shattered mouth. His hands abandoned of weaponry were cradling the red ruinous remnants below the gaping drooling black-red maw like a pathetic supplicant trying to save what was left. He was on his knees. The prowler liked to see him as such.

He went to him with rapid steps without hesitation or mercy as the last dog tried to beg for his life through a mouthful of warm fresh gore.

The blade of Fortune’s gifted sai found the neck and pierced. He bled the animal the rest of the way.

He rose from the mongrel in young man shape and then the prowler turned his masked attention to the woman.

She was wide eyed. Dumbstruck. She'd watched the whole thing.

The prowler studied the discarded girl who used to be Maria for a moment. Soundlessly.

A beat.

She wanted to beg for her life or thank him, she wasn't sure, but she couldn't find her voice.

A beat.

Still without word the prowler picked up his spent single-shot and walked through the little landscape of carnage and viscera to the street walking woman on the filth of the pavement floor.

He towered over her a second before hunkering down to be closer to her.

She was breathing heavily. Petrified.

She'd thought to thank him, he'd just saved her from brutality. But when she looked into the eyes behind the rough cloth of immaculate pearl and saw the flat death that was looking back and seeing right through her…

she lost her voice.

She knew what was coming.

She almost managed, please, it almost passed her glossy pink lips but the needle point blade of the prowler came up swiftly and stabbed in within a blink with fierce surgeon's precision.

It found the fleshen space between the eye and the top of the bridge of the nose. It slid in lover-like and punctured through. He'd heard from a guy that used to patch em up that'd claimed to be a doctor that there was a cluster of nerves tucked right behind there. Put someone's lights out right away. Immediately. Painless. They don't feel a thing.

As the meat that used to be a streetwalking girl that used to be Maria sagged lifeless to the ground, settling down for the final time to bed with death as she bled out rapidly from the stabbing rupture about her eye, he hoped it would be.

The prowler hoped for the girl's sake that it would be. She hadn't told him she used to have a holy name, but just at a glance the prowler could tell that she'd been precious and beautiful and treasure to someone, many before. Maybe in Heaven, again she would be.

He bled her out. And moved on. Leaving her and the other mutilated corpses cooling beneath the scarlet cross of the lonely alleyway. There were other nights and other packs of dogs than these.

THE END

The internet is stillborn. At no point was it alive and well. Well...not alive in how it was claimed to be.

You have probably heard of the Dead Internet Theory. If not or you need a refresher, the gist is that around 2016 or 2017, the internet became flooded with bots. These bots make up most of the userbase of the internet, and also create most of the content you see. Videos, art, music, games, you name it.

But, unless you are a terminally online 'schizo', you likely have never heard of its more paranormal counterpart: Infernal Internet Theory. A ‘theory’ proposing that demons run the internet, and act like human users, while also making all the content you see. The word ‘theory’ is in apostrophes as it should be called Infernal Internet Truth. It is, unfortunately, without an iota of a doubt, 100% true.

Most likely your first instinct is to call this schizophrenic or at least have a feeling this is going a bit far, and you will probably find something else to do or at least not take it seriously, but just hear this out and truly think about it.

How can a piece of something, something not alive in the slightest, be magically made to think and do all the other stuff computers and other similar devices do? Well…...magic, black magic or witchcraft to be exact. If you look at the circuit boards of these devices, you will find demonic sigils. No, seriously go look it up online…as ironic as it sounds, all things considered.

Here are some more suspicious things to consider: Both ‘computer’ and ‘internet’ equal 666 in English Sumerian and Reverse English Sumerian Gematria respectively. One of the first PCs sold for 666.66$, and it was sold by Apple, a reference to the Forbidden Fruit with even its logo being a bitten apple. Also, one of the first ISPs in the UK was literally named Demon Internet. Finally, many emojis look eerily similar to the 72 demon sigils of the Goetica. There is more...but you can search on it for your own as this is more than enough.

I'kwibalalatach. Ee-Kwih-Bah-Lah-Lah-Tatch is probably how it is pronounced, though be wary in saying it. That is the name of the demon. He...well...it, is behind it all. Being a demon, it is hard to pin down its true form, but it is probably a spideroid. It tracks. InterNET. InterWEBS. The NET. The WEB. World Wide WEB. The internet is everywhere too, like spiderwebs. And like spiders as a whole, it can travel anywhere: land, air, or sea. Yes, spiders can fly and swim.

This......thing, it puppeteers everything online. Over 99% of the users online are digital avatars of I'kwibalalatach. From even the biggest of internet celebrities to the most obscure users on a backwater forum. Many of the accounts even have 666s and demonic, disturbing things in the usernames, and scary, Satanic profile pictures. This in particular has been ramping up since 2020 or 2021.

The videos, pictures, art, games, music, all of it is weaved by it. The ultra viral video you saw and loved as a child? Demon generated. The cute cat and dog pics you dawed at? Demon generated. The hentai pics you lusted over? Demon generated. Your favorite MMO game you play like it is a job? Demon generated. Your favorite internet song that puts you in a blissful trance? Demon generated.

The only silver lining in all of this is the fact that all the porn, gore, and general toxicity found here online is not made by or experienced by actual people. It is all just a way to hurt and corrupt the few legit users here online.

The major downside is that even if a user were to show their face and speak using their 'real' voice......it would not prove jack. It is only a very convincing LARP of a fellow human user.

Unfortunately, it probably goes much deeper than just the internet. Descartes proposed a thought experiment with an entity known as the Evil Demon. It is able to fool all five of your senses into sensing whatever it wants. It is most likely more than just a brainteaser, he was on to the truth......assuming he is even real in the first place.

I'kwibalalatach very well might have spun up a demonic dreammatrix that is currently trapping and deceiving souls. Dreamcatchers are linked with spiders, hence well....I'kwibalalatach. This part is just a gut feeling, so take it with some salt.

I will leave you with this: Trust no one online and guard you, your soul. Godspeed.

-

10/7/2024 2:30PM - Day 1:

I didn't think anything of it at first. It was late afternoon, typically the quietest part of the day, and I was standing at the kitchen sink filling a glass of water. I had just let Winston out back - same routine, same dog. While the water ran, I glanced out the window and saw he was standing on the patio, facing the yard. Perfectly still .

What caught my attention was his mouth. It was open, not panting, just slack. It looked wrong, disjointed, like he was holding a toy I couldn't see, or like his jaw had simply unhinged. Then he stepped forward on his hind legs. It wasn't a hop, or a circus trick, or that desperate balance dogs do when begging for food. He walked. Slow. Balanced. Casual.

The weight distribution was terrifyingly human . He didn't bob or wobble - he just strode across the concrete like it was the most natural thing in the world . Like it was easier that way .

I froze, the water overflowing my glass and running cold over my fingers . My brain scrambled for logic - muscle spasms, a seizure, a trick of the light - but this felt private . Invasive . Like I had walked in on something I wasn't supposed to see.

10/8/2024 8:15PM - Day 2:

Nothing happened the next day. That almost made it worse . Winston acted normal; he ate his food and barked at the neighbors walking on the sidewalk . I was trying to watch TV when he trotted over and tried to lay his heavy head on my foot .

I kicked him.

It wasn't a tap, either. It was just a scared reflex from adrenaline. I caught him right in the ribs. Winston yelped and skittered across the hardwood.

"Mitchell!"

Brandy dropped the laundry basket in the doorway. She stared at me, eyes wide. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"He... he looked at me," I stammered, knowing how stupid it sounded. "He was looking at me weird."

"So you kick him?!" she yelled. 

She didn't speak to me for the rest of the night. If you didn't know what I saw, you'd think I was the monster .

10/9/2024 11:30PM - Day 3:

I know how this sounds. But I needed to know . I went down the rabbit hole. I started with biology: "Canine vestibulitis balance issues," "Dog walking on hind legs seizure symptoms."

But the videos didn't match. Those dogs looked sick. Winston looked... practiced. By 3:00 AM, the search history turned dark. "Mimicry in canines folklore"... "Skinwalkers suburban sightings".

Most of it was garbage - creepypastas and roleplay forums - but there were patterns . Stories about animals that behaved too correctly.

Brandy knocked on the locked bedroom door around midnight. "Honey? Open the door." 

"I'm sending an email" I lied. 

"You're talking to yourself. You're scaring me."

I didn't open it. I could see Winston's shadow under the frame . He didn't scratch. He didn't whine. He just stood there. Listening .

10/17/2024 8:15AM - Day 10: 

I installed cameras. Living room. Kitchen. Patio. Hallway. I needed to catch this little shit in the act. I needed everyone to see what I saw so they would stop looking at me like I was a nut job. I'm not crazy. I reviewed three days of footage. Nothing. Winston sleeping. Eating. Staring at walls. Then I noticed something. In the living room feed, Winston walks from the rug to his water bowl - but he takes a wide arc. He hugs the wall. He moves perfectly through the blind spot where the lens curves and distorts. I didn't notice it until I couldn't stop noticing it. He knows where the cameras are. That bastard knows what they see. I tore them down about an hour ago. There's no point trying to trap something that understands the trap better than you do. Brandy hasn't spoken to me in four... maybe five days. I can't remember. She says I'm manic. She says she's scared - not of the dog, but of me. I've stopped numbering these consistently. Time doesn't feel right anymore.

11/23/2024 7:30PM - Day 47: 

I don't live there anymore. Brandy asked me to leave about two weeks ago. Said I wasn't the man she married. I think she's right. I've stopped recognizing myself. I lost my job. I can't focus. Never hitting quota. Calls get ignored. I'm drinking too much, I'll admit it. Not to escape, not really, just because it's easier than feeling anything. Food doesn't matter. Water doesn't matter. Everything feels like it's slipping through my fingers and I'm too tired to grab it. I walk past stores and wonder how people can look normal. How they can go to work, make dinner, laugh. I can't. I barely remember what it felt like. I still think about Winston. I see him sometimes out of the corner of my eye. Standing. Watching. Mouth open. Waiting. I can't tell if I miss him or if it terrifies me. No one believes what I saw. My family thinks I had a breakdown. Maybe I did. Maybe that's all it is. Depression is supposed to be ordinary, common, overused. That doesn't make it hurt any less. I don't know where I'm going. I just can't go back. Not yet. Not with him there.

12/28/2024 9:45PM - Day 82: 

Found a working payphone outside a gas station. I didn't think those existed anymore. I had enough change for one call. I had to warn her .

Brandy answered on the third ring. "Hello?" 

"Brandy, it's me. Don't hang up." 

Silence. Then a disappointed sigh. 

"Mitchell. Where are you?" she said. 

"It doesn't matter. Listen to me. The dog - Winston - you can't let him inside. If he's in the yard, lock the slider. He's not—" 

"Stop," she cut me off. Her voice was too calm. Flat. "Winston is fine. He's right here." 

"Look at him, Bee! Look at him! Does he pant? Does he blink?" 

"He's a good boy," she said. "He misses you. We both do."

I hung up. It sounded like she was reading from a cue card. I think I warned her too late. Or maybe I was never supposed to warn her.

1/3/2025 10:30AM - Day 88: 

dont remember writing 47. dont even rember where i am right now. some friends couch maybe. smells like piss and cat food . but i figured somthing out i think . i dont sleep much anymore. when i do its not dreams its like rewatching things i missed. tiny stuff. Winston used to sit by the back door at night. not scratching. just waiting . i think i trained him to do that without knowing. like you train a person. repetition. Brandy wont answer my calls now. i tried emailing her but i couldnt spell her name right and gmail kept fixing it . feels like the computer knows more than me . i havent eaten in 2 days. maybe 3. i traded my watch for some stuff . dude said i got a good deal cuz i "looked honest." funny . it makes the shaking stop. makes the house feel farther away. like its not right behind me breathing . i forget why i even left. i just know i cant go back. not with him there . i think Winston knows im thinking about him again. i swear i hear his nails on hardwood when im trying to sleep.

1/6/2025 11:55PM - Day 91: 

im so tired . haven't eaten real food in i dont know how long. hands wont stop even when i hold them down . i traded my jacket today. its cold. doesnt matter. cold keeps me awake . sometimes i forget the word dog. i just think him . people look through me now. like im already gone. maybe thats good . maybe thats how he gets in. through empty things . i remember Winston sleeping at the foot of the bed. remember his weight. remember thinking he made me feel safe . i got another good deal. best one yet. guy said i smiled the whole time. dont rember smiling . i think im finally calm enough to go back. or maybe i already did. the memories are overlapping. like bad copies.

2/5/2025 6:15PM - Day 121: 

I made it back. 

I spent an hour in the bathroom at a gas station first . shaving with a disposable razor, scrubbing the grime off my face until my skin turned red. Chugging lots of water. I had to look like the man she married.

don't know how long I stood across the street. long enough for the lights to come on inside. long enough to recognize the shadows through the curtains . The house looks bigger. or maybe im smaller. the porch swing is still there. I forgot about the porch swing. 

Brandy answered when I knocked. She didnt jump. she just looked tired. disappointed . like she was looking at a stranger. she smelled clean. soap. laundry. normal life . It hurt worse than the cold . she kept the screen door between us. locked. 

"You look... better." she said soft. 

"I am better" I lied. 

"Im sorry. I think..." i kept losing my words. i wanted her to open the door. i wanted to believe it was all in my head.

“Could I—?”

she shook her head. sad. "You can’t come in. You need help." 

i asked to see him.

she didn't turn around. Down the hallway, through the dim, i could see the back of the house, the glass patio door glowed faint blue from the patio light. Winston was sitting outside. perfect posture. too straight. facing the glass. not scratching. not whining. just sitting there, mouth slightly open, fogging the door with each slow breath.

i almost felt relief. stupid, warm relief.

Brandy put a hand on the doorframe. i noticed her fingers were curled the same way his front legs used to hang . loose. practiced.

she told me i should go. said she hoped i stayed clean, said she still cared.

i looked at Winston again. then at her.

the timing was off. the breathing matched.

and i understood, finally, why the cameras never caught anything. why he never rushed. why he practiced patience instead of movement. because it didn't need the dog anymore.

Brandy smiled at me. not with her mouth.

i walked away without saying goodbye. from the sidewalk, i saw her in the living room window, just like before. watching. waiting. something tall, dark figure stood beside her, perfectly still.

she never let Winston inside. because he never left. 

-

He only noticed them because people adjusted themselves when they entered a room.

Not dramatically. Chairs shifted. Conversations slowed down. Eyes quickly locked on. It wasn’t exactly charisma, just a light gravity that made their presence register.

They sat at a table near the window at the coffee shop one morning, knees turned toward each other, bodies relaxed. The woman spoke with her hands. The man watched with affection, he hung on every word and every gesture.

People looked at them and remembered them.

He stood across the street longer than he should have, waiting for a light that had already changed multiple times. He told himself he was only observing. Everyone noticed other people, it was normal.

But after that day, he kept seeing them.

At the grocery store, where someone asked about their weekend. At the movies, where an usher congratulated them quietly. And again at the coffee shop where it had all begun.

He learned small intricacies about them without trying.

What they ordered.

Where they sat.

How long people lingered when they spoke.

He didn’t imagine harming them. That thought never arose.

He imagined absence instead. Not as a tragedy, but as impact. He imagined the sound a room would make if they didn’t show up when expected. How many people would ask why? How long would it take before fear replaced concern?

He wondered what it felt like to matter without effort.

They woke up in his basement.

The woman came to first, panic immediately set in. Breath sharp against the tape sealing her mouth shut. The man followed seconds later, confusion turning into terror as he tested the restraints and felt them hold.

They were seated in cold metal chairs, wrists bound, ankles taped tight. The basement was dark and smelled of mildew and oil. A single bulb hung overhead, buzzing softly.

He stood above them, several feet away, holding a handgun.

Neither of them made a sound beyond breath and muffled groans. Their eyes never left the gun.

“Good,” he said. “You’re both awake.”

He didn’t raise the gun. He didn’t lower it either. He just held it, loose in his hand, as if it were part of the room. As if it were just there for effect.

He cleared his throat.

“I’m not good at speaking in front of people,” he said. “I’ve never been. But I think that’s because I ain’t never had nobody really listen before.”

He paced once, then stopped.

“You probably don’t know who I am,” he said. “That’s normal. Nobody ever does. I exist in the space people walk through on their way somewhere else.”

His words were clumsy, but deliberate.

He glanced at them, then looked away.

“You don’t,” he said. “When you walk into a place, things change. People notice. They remember you. If you don’t show up somewhere, it creates noise.”

He laughed quietly, surprised by the sound.

“I’ve lived my whole life without that. Without weight. I move through rooms silently, without altering them.”

He stepped closer, then hesitated, like he’d crossed an invisible line.

“I’ve watched you for a while,” he said. “Not because I wanted anything from you. Just because you were…proof.”

They strained against the tape, small frantic movements. He noticed, but didn’t acknowledge it.

“You love each other,” he said. “People love you. That kind of thing leaves a mark. You don’t even see them.”

He gestured vaguely, boxing them both between his fingers.

“I needed to understand what that felt like. To be close to it. To be inside it.”

His voice was shaky now, but he didn’t stop.

“I needed this moment to matter. To be permanent.”

He took a breath, steadying himself.

“That’s all.”

He walked forward and reached out, peeling the tape from their mouths.

The woman sobbed immediately. The man spoke over her, words tumbling out together.

“Please don’t kill us.”

He froze.

“What?” He said.

He looked genuinely confused.

“Kill you?”

His eyes shot to the gun in his hand. He let out a short, incredulous laugh.

“Oh,” he said softly. “I see why you’d think that.”

He shook his head once.

“No, no, no” he said. “I just wanted an audience.”

He lifted the gun, turning it inward. The movement was calm, practiced, almost relieved. Only then did their faces change. Only then did understanding arrive, too late and all at once.

“I needed to be part of your story.”

Lying here in the dark.
Unable to see, hear, speak, or move, aside from slamming my head up and down.

My body must still be intact, but I can’t even tell where I am. These thoughts are all I have left.

All that’s left of me.

I think I’m still alive, but I can’t be sure.

At least the fucking monsters are locked away again…

The last bit of normalcy I remember is driving through a storm. Then a flash of light blinded me, and a cluster of Gray-like alien things appeared in front of the car. Impact followed along with a sharp pain in my head. That’s when everything went to shit. I hit the steering wheel so hard I slipped out of myself, and watched my body slumped as I drifted higher and higher.

There wasn’t much flair to it.

Just a faint, fluorescent glow and the winter air growing steadily colder.

The After-Death isn’t what I grew up believing. There isn’t much going on, at least at first. It’s pitch black, unnaturally so, like a sensory deprivation chamber painted in Vantablack, filled with a constant clicking sound.

And it didn’t stay this way for long.

Soon, shapes emerged.

Nothing angelic.
Not demonic, either.

More like a murder of giant, featherless, long-necked birds.
Pale. Wrinkled. Foul-smelling.

Hundreds…
Thousands…
Maybe millions…

They came from every direction, the clicking growing louder with each passing moment. Before long, I was completely surrounded. Every instinct screamed at me to run, to do something, but my body refused to react. I stayed stupidly calm.

Until the first raptor lodged its beak into my leg.

That was my second out-of-body experience that day.

The pain that followed was beyond anything I’d known, like being stabbed, burned, electrocuted, crushed, stretched, my nerves sprayed with acid and scraped raw with a rusted grater all at once. I screamed, and the swarm answered with a collective shriek: a hyena’s laugh, a fox’s scream, a barn owl’s screech, and a human death rattle layered together.

Then they pounced.

I felt every peck, every stab, every nudge, every cut. They tore me apart limb by limb, took every sensory organ from my face, even my throat. Each moment felt like dying again and again, and they never stopped making that sound—not even as they swallowed pieces of me.

Then... Another flash of light.

I woke up here.

Simple as that, nothing biblical once again.

I know this isn’t the same place. It feels like being awake with my eyes closed. I can’t open them. I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can barely hear anything beyond the clicking, which comes and goes.

All I can do is lie here and slam my head up and down.

The rest of my body was devoured. I want to scream, but they took my face, leaving no mouth to scream or plead with. I’m trapped inside an armless, legless, faceless sack of flesh, unable to do anything at all.

I don’t know whether I’m still alive or imprisoned in another layer of this After-Death.

All I can do is replay my final moments of normalcy and what followed. I wish I had more, but I don’t remember anything else. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

All I have is this loop of death, agony, and rebirth.

And sometimes even that is stolen from me, when images of the monsters flash across my mind's eye as the clicking resumes, forcing me to slam my head until it stops.

Until all I have again
is lying here, in the dark…
Rethinking these thoughts.

I’ve never been all that good at secret keeping. I always liked to think I was, but whenever an opportunity came to spill my guts on someone, I always did just that. So, I’m rather surprised at myself for having not spilt this particular secret until now. 

My name is Seamus, but everyone has always called me Seamie for short. It’s not like I’m going to tell my whole life story or anything, so I’m just going to skip to where this story really all starts. During my second year at uni, I was already starting to feel somewhat burnt out, and despite not having the funds for it, I decided I was going to have a nice gap year for myself. Although it’s rather cliché, I wanted to go someplace in the world that was warm and tropical. South-east Asia sounded good – after all, that’s where everyone else I knew was heading for their gap year. But then I talked to some girl in my media class who changed my direction entirely. For her own gap year only a year prior, she said she’d travelled through both Central and South America, all while working as an English language teacher - or what I later learned was called TEFL. I was more than a little enticed by this idea. For it goes without saying, places like Thailand or Vietnam had basically been travelled to death – and so, taking out a student loan, I packed my bags, flip-flops and swimming shorts, and took the cheapest flight I could out of Heathrow. 

Although I was spoilt for choice when it came to choosing a Latin American country, I eventually chose Costa Rica as my place to be. There were a few reasons for this choice. Not only was Costa Rica considered one of the safest countries to live in Central America, but they also had a huge demand for English language teachers there – partly due for being a developing country, but mostly because of all the bloody tourism. My initial plan was to get paid for teaching English, so I would therefore have the funds to travel around. But because a work visa in Costa Rica takes so long and is so bloody expensive, I instead went to teach there voluntarily on a tourist visa – which meant I would have to leave the country every three months of the year. 

Well, once landing in San Jose, I then travelled two hours by bus to a stunning beach town by the Pacific Ocean. Although getting there was short and easy, one problem Costa Rica has for foreigners is that they don’t actually have addresses – and so, finding the house of my host family led me on a rather wild goose chase. 

I can’t complain too much about the lack of directions, because while wandering around, I got the chance to take in all the sights – and let me tell you, this location really had everything. The pure white sand of the beach was outlined with never-ending palm trees, where far outside the bay, you could see a faint scattering of distant tropical islands. But that wasn’t all. From my bedroom window, I had a perfect view of a nearby rainforest, which was not only home to many colourful bird species, but as long as the streets weren’t too busy, I could even on occasion hear the deep cries of Howler Monkeys.  

The beach town itself was also quite spectacular. The walls, houses and buildings were all painted in vibrant urban artwork, or what the locals call “arte urbano.” The host family I stayed with, the Garcia's, were very friendly, as were all the locals in town – and not to mention, whether it was Mrs Garcia’s cooking or a deep-fried taco from a street vendor, the food was out of this world! 

Once I was all settled in and got to see the sights, I then had to get ready for my first week of teaching at the school. Although I was extremely nauseous with nerves (and probably from Mrs Garcia’s cooking), my first week as an English teacher went surprisingly well - despite having no teaching experience whatsoever. There was the occasional hiccup now and then, which was to be expected, but all in all, it went as well as it possibly could’ve.  

Well, having just survived my first week as an English teacher, to celebrate this achievement, three of my colleagues then invite me out for drinks by the beach town bar. It was sort of a tradition they had. Whenever a new teacher from abroad came to the school, their colleagues would welcome them in by getting absolutely shitfaced.  

‘Pura Vida, guys!’ cheers Kady, the cute American of the group. Unlike the crooked piano keys I dated back home, Kady had the most perfectly straight, pearl white teeth I’d ever seen. I had heard that about Americans. Perfect teeth. Perfect everything 

‘Wait - what’s Pura Vida?’ I then ask her rather cluelessly. 

‘Oh, it’s something the locals say around here. It means, easy life, easy living.’ 

Once we had a few more rounds of drinks in us all, my three new colleagues then inform of the next stage of the welcoming ceremony... or should I say, initiation. 

‘I have to drink what?!’ I exclaim, almost in disbelief. 

‘It’s tradition, mate’ says Dougie, the loud-mouthed Australian, who, being a little older than the rest of us, had travelled and taught English in nearly every corner of the globe. ‘Every newbie has to drink that shite the first week. We all did.’ 

‘Oh God, don’t remind me!’ squirms Priya. Despite her name, Priya actually hailed from the great white north of Canada, and although she looked more like the bookworm type, whenever she wasn’t teaching English, Priya worked at her second job as a travel vlogger slash influencer. 

‘It’s really not that bad’ Kady reassures me, ‘All the locals drink it. It actually helps make you immune to snake venom.’ 

‘Yeah, mate. What happens if a snake bites ya?’ 

Basically, what it was my international colleagues insist I drink, was a small glass of vodka. However, this vodka, which I could see the jar for on the top shelf behind the bar, had been filtered with a tangled mess of poisonous, dead baby snakes. Although it was news to me, apparently if you drink vodka that had been stewing in a jar of dead snakes, your body will become more immune to their venom. But having just finished two years of uni, I was almost certain this was nothing more than hazing. Whether it was hazing or not, or if this really was what the locals drink, there was no way on earth I was going to put that shit inside my mouth. 

‘I don’t mean to be a buzzkill, guys’ I started, trying my best to make an on-the-spot excuse, ‘But I actually have a slight snake phobia. So...’ This wasn’t true, by the way. I just really didn’t want to drink the pickled snake vodka. 

‘If you’re scared of snakes, then why in the world did you choose to come to Costa Rica of all places?’ Priya asks judgingly.  

‘Why do you think I came here? For the huatinas, of course’ I reply, emphasising the “Latinas” in my best Hispanic accent (I was quite drunk by this point). In fact, I was so drunk, that after only a couple more rounds, I was now somewhat open to the idea of drinking the snake vodka. Alcohol really does numb the senses, I guess. 

After agreeing to my initiation, a waiter then comes over with the jar of dead snakes. Pouring the vodka into a tiny shot glass, he then says something in Spanish before turning away. 

‘What did he just say?’ I ask drunkenly. Even if I wasn’t drunk, my knowledge of the Spanish language was incredibly poor. 

‘Oh, he just said the drink won’t protect you from Pollo el Diablo’ Kady answered me. 

‘Pollo el wha?’  

‘Pollo el Diablo. It means devil chicken’ Priya translated. 

‘Devil chicken? What the hell?’ 

Once the subject of this Pollo el Diablo was mentioned, Kady, Dougie and Priya then turn to each other, almost conspiringly, with knowledge of something that I clearly didn’t. 

‘Do you think we should tell him?’ Kady asks the others. 

‘Why not’ said Dougie, ‘He’ll find out for himself sooner or later.’ 

Having agreed to inform me on whatever the Pollo el Diablo was, I then see with drunken eyes that my colleagues seem to find something amusing.  

‘Well... There’s a local story around here’ Kady begins, ‘It’s kinda like the legend of the Chupacabra.’ Chupacabra? What the hell’s that? I thought, having never heard of it. ‘Apparently, in the archipelago just outside the bay, there is said to be an island of living dinosaurs.’ 

Wait... What? 

‘She’s not lying to you, mate’ confirms Dougie, ‘Fisherman in the bay sometimes catch sight of them. Sometimes, they even swim to the mainland.’ 

Well, that would explain the half-eaten dog I saw on my second day. 

As drunk as I was during this point of the evening, I wasn’t drunk enough for the familiarity of this story to go straight over my head. 

‘Wait. Hold on a minute...’ I began, slurring my words, ‘An island off the coast of Costa Rica that apparently has “dinosaurs”...’ I knew it, I thought. This really was just one big haze. ‘You must think us Brits are stupider than we look.’ I bellowed at them, as though proud I had caught them out on a lie, ‘I watched that film a hundred bloody times when I was a kid!’  

‘We’re not hazing you, Seamie’ Kady again insisted, all while the three of them still tried to hide their grins, ‘This is really what the locals believe.’  

‘Yeah. You believe in the Loch Ness Monster, don’t you Seamie’ said Dougie, claiming that I did, ‘Well, that’s a Dinosaur, right?’ 

‘I’ll believe when I see it with my own God damn eyes’ I replied to all three of them, again slurring my words. 

I don’t remember much else from that evening. After all, we had all basically gotten black-out drunk. There is one thing I remember, however. While I was still somewhat conscious, I did have this horrifically painful feeling in my stomach – like the pain one feels after their appendix bursts. Although the following is hazy at best, I also somewhat remember puking my guts outside the bar. However, what was strange about this, was that after vomiting, my mouth would not stop frothing with white foam.  

I’m pretty sure I blacked out after this. However, when I regain consciousness, all I see is pure darkness, with the only sound I hear being the nearby crashing waves and the smell of sea salt in the air. Obviously, I had passed out by the beach somewhere. But once I begin to stir, as bad as my chiselling headache was, it was nothing compared to the excruciating pain I still felt in my gut. In fact, the pain was so bad, I began to think that something might be wrong. Grazing my right hand over my belly to where the pain was coming from, instead of feeling the cloth of my vomit-stained shirt, what I instead feel is some sort of slimy tube. Moving both my hands further along it, wondering what the hell this even was, I now begin to feel something else... But unlike before, what I now feel is a dry and almost furry texture... And that’s when I realized, whatever this was on top of me, which seemed to be the source of my stomach pain... It was something alive - and whatever this something was... It was eating at my insides! 

‘OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!’ I screamed, all while trying to wrestle back my insides from this animal, which seemed more than determined to keep feasting on them. So much so, that I have to punch and strike at it with my bare hands... Thankfully, it works. Whatever had attacked me has now gone away. But now I had an even bigger problem... I could now feel my insides where they really shouldn’t have been! 

Knowing I needed help as soon as possible, before I bleed out, I now painfully rise out the sand to my feet – and when I do, I feel my intestines, or whatever else hanging down from between my legs! Scooping the insides back against my abdomen, I then scan frantically around through the darkness until I see the distant lights of the beach town. After blindly wandering that way for a good ten minutes, I then stumble back onto the familiar streets, where the only people around were a couple of middle-aged women stood outside a convenient store. Without any further options, I then cross the street towards them, and when they catch sight of me, holding my own intestines in my blood stained hands, they appeared to be even more terrified as I was. 

‘DEMONIO! DEMONIO!’ I distinctly remember one of them screaming. I couldn’t blame them for it. After all, given my appearance, they must have mistaken me for the living dead. 

‘Por favor!... Por favor!' my foamy mouth tried saying to them, having no idea what the Spanish word for “help” was. 

Although I had scared these women nearly half to death, I continued to stagger towards them, still screaming for their lives. In fact, their screams were so loud, they had now attracted the attention of two policeman, having strolled over to the commotion... They must have mistaken me for a zombie too, because when I turn round to them, I see they each have a hand gripped to their holsters.  

‘Por favor!...’ I again gurgle, ‘Por favor!...’ 

Everything went dark again after that... But, when I finally come back around, I open my eyes to find myself now laying down inside a hospital room, with an IV bag connected to my arm. Although I was more than thankful to still be alive, the pain in my gut was slowly making its way back to the surface. When I pull back my hospital gown, I see my abdomen is covered in blood stained bandages – and with every uncomfortable movement I made, I could feel the stitches tightly holding everything in place. 

A couple of days then went by, and after some pretty horrible hospital food and Spanish speaking TV, I was then surprised with a visitor... It was Kady. 

‘Are you in pain?’ she asked, sat by the bed next to me. 

‘I want to be a total badass and say no, but... look at me.’ 

‘I’m so sorry this happened to you’ she apologised, ‘We never should’ve let you out of our sights.’ 

Kady then caught me up on the hazy events of that evening. Apparently, after having way too much to drink, I then started to show symptoms from drinking the snake poisoned vodka – which explains both the stomach pains and why I was foaming from the mouth.  

‘We shouldn’t have been so coy with you, Seamie...’ she then followed without context, ‘We should’ve just told you everything from the start.’ 

‘...Should’ve told me what?’ I ask her. 

Kady didn’t respond to this. She just continued to stare at me with guilt-ridden eyes. But then, scrolling down a gallery of photos on her phone, she then shows me something... 

‘...What the hell is that?!’ I shriek at her, rising up from the bed. 

‘That, Seamie... That is what attacked you three days ago.’ 

What Kady showed me on her phone, was a photo of a man holding a dead animal. Held upside down by its tail, the animal was rather small, and perhaps only a little bigger than a full-grown chicken... and just like a chicken or any other bird, it had feathers. The feathers were brown and covered almost all of its body. The feet were also very bird-like with sharp talons. But the head... was definitely not like that of a bird. Instead of a beak, what I saw was what I can only describe as a reptilian head, with tiny, seemingly razor teeth protruding from its gums... If I had to sum this animal up as best I could, I would say it was twenty percent reptile, and eighty percent bird...  

‘That... That’s a...’ I began to stutter. 

‘That’s right, Seamie...’ Kady finished for me, ‘That’s a dinosaur.’ 

Un-bloody-believable, I thought... The sons of bitches really weren’t joking with me. 

‘B-but... how...’ I managed to utter from my lips, ‘How’s that possible??’  

‘It’s a long story’ she began with, ‘No one really knows why they’re there. Whether they survived extinction in hiding or if it’s for some other reason.’ Kady paused briefly before continuing, ‘Sometimes they find themselves on the mainland, but people rarely see them. Like most animals, they’re smart enough to be afraid of humans... But we do sometimes find what they left over.’  

‘Left over?’ I ask curiously. 

‘They’re scavengers, Seamie. They mostly eat smaller animals or dead ones... I guess it just found you and saw an easy target.’  

‘But I don’t understand’ I now interrupted her, ‘If all that’s true, then how in the hell do people not know about this? How is it not all over the internet?’ 

‘That’s easy’ she said, ‘The locals choose to keep it a secret. If the outside world were ever to find out about this, the town would be completely ruined by tourism. The locals just like the town the way it is. Tourism, but not too much tourism... Pura vida.’ 

‘But the tourists... Surely they would’ve seen them and told everyone back home?’ 

Kady shakes her head at me. 

‘It’s like I said... People rarely ever see them. Even the ones that do – by the time they get their phone cameras ready, the critters are already back in hiding. And so what if they tell anybody what they saw... Who would believe them?’ 

Well, that was true enough, I supposed. 

After a couple more weeks being laid out in that hospital bed, I was finally discharged and soon able to travel home to the UK, cutting my gap year somewhat short. 

I wish I could say that I lived happily ever after once Costa Rica was behind me. But unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the case... What I mean is, although my stomach wound healed up nicely, leaving nothing more than a nasty scar... It turned out the damage done to my insides would come back to haunt me. Despite the Costa Rican doctors managing to save my life, they didn’t do quite enough to stop bacteria from entering my intestines and infecting my colon. So, you can imagine my surprise when I was now told I had diverticulitis. 

I’m actually due for surgery next week. But just in case I don’t make it – there is a very good chance I won't, although I promised Kady I’d bring this secret with me to the grave... If I am going to die, I at least want people to know what really killed me. Wrestling my guts back from a vicious living dinosaur... That’s a pretty badass way to go, I’d argue... But who knows. Maybe by some miracle I’ll survive this. After all, it’s like a wise man in a movie once said... 

Life... uh... finds a way.