Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods (20 page)

A polished stone sphere the size of a golf ball rested on a pronged setting. The dim light struck the rock to reveal thousands of shimmering facets. I seized the stone and scraped its surface with my thumb nail. I turned it over and over, desperate to count the number of angles and faces. There were too many. I stared into the maddening thing and felt its alien geometry swallow my mind.

My consciousness hurtled into space like a meteor. The only solid thought my mind could grasp was that I was not alone. Grotesque, three-lobed eyes burned behind every star and gazed through the cold dead space between.

The eyes reflected an infinite universe fractured into chaos. To think that I could impose order onto anything with my feeble rituals was the true insanity.

The box teetered in my hands as I swooned. I grasped for the shining stone but it hit the floor first. It passed through the wooden floorboards as if the world itself was shadow. A flutter of wings stirred the air and then there was nothing.

I woke up to the glare of a flashlight in my face.

“Wake up, sleepy head!”

Lizzy did a spastic, hopping dance around me with her flashlight.

Leith leaned down and spoke slowly.

“The infidels are gone, no doubt preparing another sacrifice. I know where they’ll be. Help us search for robes. We will infiltrate their rites and then administer Noden’s justice.”

Liz slid the light across the room to reveal a rack of green robes.

“I found them! Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”

Leith helped me to my feet. His face puckered as he inspected me. I couldn’t tell if he was concerned or suspicious. I looked down to the spot where the shining stone had slipped through reality.

We took a van from the parking lot and headed out to the big sacrifice. Leith said it was being held at the Hoover Dam. I’d always wanted to visit someday.

Tariq drove while Leith preached about the gods of earth. I tuned him out and watched the broken world roll by.

We arrived several hours later at the Arizona side of the dam. From a distance, it looked like a castle wall protecting a drowned kingdom. When we got close enough to park, it loomed impossibly high.

A roaring bonfire at the center of the massive structure backlit a throng of people in green robes. Bound captives wriggled along the wall that overlooked the nauseating drop to the Colorado River. Their muffled screams could barely be heard over the howling wind.

You stupid bitch. It’s your fault. You broke it.

We changed into the green robes and approached on foot. We crossed without resistance and tucked ourselves inside the mass of worshippers. Leith had a plan, but Tariq could not contain his bloodlust. He pulled the pruning saw from his robe and ripped into the crowd.

The knives of the cultists were no match for buckshot. Screams and gunfire bounced off the concrete until the top of the dam was stained red.

I dropped my dagger and backed away from the massacre.

It’s your fault.

The last of the cultists died with a piteous moan. Leith pointed to the captives.

“Now, attend to the victims!”

Lizzy pulled the gag off a tall bearded man. He gasped and shook with relief.

“Please help my son, I think he’s over--”

Leith drowned him out with a thunderous command.

“Glorify our gods as I have taught you!”

Lizzy pounced onto the bearded man and punched the steel point of a knife through his ribcage like a jackhammer. His face froze in a silent mask of surprise.

She reached into the steaming red cavity and excavated a fist sized clump of pulpy tissue. She held it aloft and howled.

“Kukulkan!”

Leith smiled and swept his blade cleanly through the neck of a woman. He bowed his head and intoned, “Io! Saturnalia!”

Tariq exploded into giddy laughter and snatched up a boy in red racing car pajamas. He hefted him towards the crackling bonfire, spraying drool as he screamed.

“Moloch! Moloch! Hail Moloch!” 

It’s your fault it’s your fault
it’s your fault it’s your fault…

A teenaged girl with pink hair craned her neck up and implored me with tear filled eyes.

I continued to back pedal until I hit the edge of the side of the dam. I spun around and looked down its colossal face. The river frothed with a whirlpool of massive tree trunks. I wiped the tears from my face and looked closer. The trees emerged from the water, lifting an immense bulk from the muddy rapids. Ebony whale skin stretched taut over spiny segments like a lobster shell.

You broke it you broke it you broke it you broke it…

The Hoover dam towered over the obscene thing but also imparted a terrifying sense of its scale. Thousands of pearlescent eyes breached the surface, reflecting the night sky as fractured galaxies.

Leith grabbed me from behind and hissed in my ear.

“That is what the blasphemers would feed with their sacrifices. Let that mongrel starve while the true gods feast. Join us and honor the ancient host. That is the sacred order of this world.”

You stupid bitch you stupid bitch you stupid bitch…

The Colorado River thundered as it plunged into the nightmarish spider’s open maw. I gazed into the abyss and was sure. This was an odd numbered universe.

I pulled Leith over the edge of the dam. If there was no perfect order, it could not be broken. If I didn’t matter, nothing was my fault. The runaway train of thoughts in my head fell silent as we tumbled past endless rows of odd numbered teeth.

by Gustavo Bondoni

Paulo looked at me and smiled happily. Then he turned, ran for a few steps, skipped for another few steps, and raced headlong off the edge of the cliff. He didn’t scream as he fell.

I wondered if any of us were going to reach the temple alive. We were losing two or three people every hour. Battle-hardened veterans were dropping just as quickly as everyone else – and all of them had been screened by our psych people to be resistant to mental assault. Those too weak to resist were already gone, and had long since become part of the horde we were up against.

The problem was that if we kept losing people at the same rate, there wouldn’t be anyone left when we got there. “Everyone come here!”

There were eight of us, probably the most pathetic excuse for a fighting force ever seen on the face of the planet — three former soldiers, a couple of Sem Terras, some civilians that had drifted in, and me. Some of my troops probably still believed that I was glad the madness had arrived in Sao Paulo.

“Concentrate on the plan. Go over every detail of the mission in your head, over and over again. Concentrate! It’s the only way to keep the buzzing out, the only way to hold the voices at bay.”

They nodded. “Whatever you say, Maria. We’re with you till the end,” one of them said. I thought it might have been Felipe, but it sounded a little hollow, a little forced – as if he was more than convinced that there was no way ahead, and no way back.

“Will the Americanos come help us?”

That was Flavia. Her voice was strong and steady, but if she was pinning her hopes on rescue by a major power, she was headed towards bitter disappointment. “Of course they will. They always help people in trouble. They know how to deal with these outbreaks.”

Sometimes I hated myself, but it wasn’t my job to tell them the truth – my job was to get them into the compound and plant the bombs. If that meant lying to a country girl who believed that the Americans would be dumb enough to send men and material into a madness zone, then I would lie to her.

“We also have to help ourselves. Once we get inside, we’ll have a much better chance of getting help.” If we made it inside, and if the horde of mad people wasn’t waiting to tear us apart once we did. But I didn’t say that. I just looked them all in the eye, one by one. “Do you have your explosives?”

They checked, and nodded – some firm, others doubtful. It would have appalled any military strategist to see that every one of my soldiers had a large explosive device in his or her pack. He would have thought it inefficient and unsound. But there were reasons: we didn’t know which one of the soldiers would be strong enough to make it. And we also had more bombs than people.

Our objective was less than five kilometers away, but I was certain that almost none of us would see it. As we started walking again, the buzzing of a million insects began to sound in my ears. It alternated with the whispers of a million corpses telling me that madness would be a welcome relief.

I put one foot in front of the other, trying to concentrate on the plan.

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It was called the compound, but it was really not much more than a large house in a small valley. The central structure was surrounded by walls, but they were meant to keep Brazil’s formerly enterprising criminal classes from gaining easy entry, and were only about ten feet high. The current occupants had no need for such things. Criminals would never be a problem for them… for him. The defenses had been abandoned, and the jungle had grown all over the walls.

It’s much too soon for this, I thought, looking at the overgrown masonry. Less than two months ago, that very wall had been lovingly tended by a battalion of care-takers and maintenance men. There shouldn’t be anything growing in them yet. The jungle should still be miles away. It wasn’t natural.

But in natural times, there would have been cars running along the road – now completely covered by dense undergrowth – which we were standing on. In natural times, I wouldn’t hear the sound of a million hungry souls tearing each other to shreds in the crawling chaos. In natural times, more than three of us would have survived a walk of a few kilometers across a deserted meadow.

Bettina crouched on the opposite side of the open gate. If I’d been giving odds, I would have pegged her as the first to succumb to the madness. She looked ragged, her hands were shaking, and her blonde hair covered most of her face, but she was still there when so many others had gone.

Felipe was right behind me, large and reassuring, but still behind me, letting me enter first. Well, I had wanted to lead the team personally.

One deep breath was all I allowed myself before plunging through the opening. I half expected to be cut down as soon as I cleared the gap in the wall, but nothing happened. I ran halfway across what had once been the lawn before realizing that Bettina and Felipe weren’t near me – or even a few yards behind. I turned to look.

The sight I saw would have haunted me forever, had I not already borne witness to too much horror over the past few weeks.

Felipe, an expression of rapturous delight on his face, had driven his fingers into Bettina’s neck, right under her chin. He was slowly, methodically and happily pulling her head off, ignoring the woman’s feeble attempts to dislodge him. I could do nothing but watch, rooted to the spot, as blood gushed onto the knee-height emerald grass until, with a loud pop, something in Bettina’s vertebrae gave way.

Felipe lost interest and wandered back towards the gate, singing an old football song at the top of his lungs.

Now alone, I turned back to the house, thinking I might be able to do it. But then it hit me. The wailing of the millions, the anguish of lonely souls and, in my mind, the death throes of a million maggots gorging on their abandoned corpses.

Within the mental onslaught, there was one single moment of clarity when everything I’d been seeing and hearing, the essence of madness and horror, coalesced into a single clear and ringing sound.

Something enormous, ancient and incredibly evil laughed at my sheer inconsequentiality.

Then all was dark.

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Birds were singing. They sang tunes of joy and tunes of sorrow. Of carefree times and of abject terror. They sang of life. And I realized that, somehow, I’d woken sane. I remembered the horror clearly, but the sound seemed to have vanished.

I hadn’t heard birds for weeks – perhaps not since the madness had come to Brazil. Perhaps even since before that, since it wasn’t something I normally would have noticed in my day-to day existence. I sat up and looked around, scanning the trees, trying to locate the bird.

There were no birds in the trees. There were no leaves in the trees – in fact, the trees themselves looked like the skeletal apparitions that I used to see on my trips to New York in the winter, back when that was an option. But what remained weren’t the thin twigs of northern climes, but the plump branches of the tropics. Seeing them bared to the elements was grotesque, an insult to the natural order.

Worse still was the figure from which the birdsong emanated. Dressed like a carnival sideshow, a dark, sinister-looking man leered in my direction. I got off the ground, came unsteadily to my feet and walked towards the man, all the while convinced that I didn’t want to do it. My feet moved of their own accord and, despite the screaming of my consciousness, brought me face to face with the singing man.

A glance at his visage would have weakened my knees had they been under my own control – but in this tropical winter, that certainly didn’t seem to be the case. Deep lines cleaved into the brown skin, thin and packed, but seemingly bottomless, becoming even more pronounced around his lips.

And they became even deeper when his mouth closed.

Suddenly, the singing stopped, and I forgot about his mouth and remembered my body. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through it, the thumping of my heart as it attempted to escape my chest.

The man chuckled and I had to fight to control my bladder.

“It seems you arrived just in time, doesn’t it?” he said. His voice was like the rustle of dying locusts as they fell from the sky.

I couldn’t find my voice, but he didn’t seem to notice as he went on.

“The land you knew is gone forever. I can feel your disbelief, but trust me.” The old thing smiled and shook its head. “This land, with its ancient traditions lost deep in the jungle will return to what it once was: a land without the interference of you pale modern interlopers. Yes, a land in touch with its old gods, and one that I will enjoy visiting every so often.”

I tried to get up, to scream, to run, but was rooted to the ground.

“So, you wish to go elsewhere? Perhaps you might prefer to return to a more civilized land?” He paused. “Very well, if that is what you wish…”

The landscape, the barren trees, the wasted ground, disappeared, and I was in London. I recognized it immediately because of the slight wisps of fog on the ground and the large bullet-shaped building to my right. I’d been in London before, and knew the building well, having walked past it about a hundred times when doing the obligatory touristy things. I found myself leaning on a pole beneath one of the city’s ubiquitous security cameras. I wondered what the camera operators would have thought of my torn, tattered shorts and stained shirt. They were probably mobilizing some kind of response team even as I stood there.

It seemed to be early morning, and a small girl walked towards me, tears flowing from her eyes. She was dressed in a dark blue school uniform, and must have been about seven or eight.

“Excuse me, miss,” she stammered through the tears. “Have you seen my mother?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but my mouth wouldn’t open. Instead, my hand shot out of its own accord, and a sharp blade that I hadn’t realized I was still carrying sliced through her throat like lightning.

Blood spurted onto my hand, but the little girl didn’t scream or thrash or make any sort of commotion. Her gaze simply held my own for a second, then two, and she crumpled to the sidewalk in a heap.

The body I inhabited moved its gaze from the girl on the ground and stared straight into the lens of one of the cameras as London dissolved around me.

“Did you enjoy your trip?” the creature asked me. Its aspect had changed, and somehow it seemed thinner, less substantial – although younger. “Your actions leave you with little choice, I think. If you stay here, the new masters of your old country will probably have very graphic ways of reasserting their dominance over you. And if you leave, if you run back to what you so laughingly call civilization, I suppose you’re strong enough to survive in prison. Although most people who murder children don’t do well in jail.”

And suddenly I could speak. “Do you really expect me to believe that it was real? It’s just another one of your mind tricks. Your mind tricks did nothing to keep me from reaching you, and they won’t work now.”

The chuckle reached me again, but this time, I felt strong. I could defeat him.

“Perhaps I misjudged you. Perhaps you will find a way to survive in spite of everything. If that is so, then are you certain that you won’t live every day in remorse for what you’ve done, for the innocent blood you spilled? Living like that would be torture.”

“I did nothing.”

“Your body did… and who commands it?”

“It was all in my head. You know it as well as I do!”

“Was it?” The creature – nearly translucent now, looked down at my hand, and I followed its gaze. The blade was still bright and clean, but my wrist was wet with dark red blood. My heart sank as I watched a single drop fall to the grey earth.

When I looked up again, my tormentor was gone, as though he’d never been there, and the silence of this new, cold Brazil which wasn’t Brazil any more echoed around me. I knew what the future held – he’d told me precisely what it held.

The silence was broken by my scream. I screamed hard, and for a long time, but the sound was a weak thing in the enormity of the land.