65) Super Sunday, February 19th:
5:40 – 5:45 AM – “By the Light of a Red, Mutant
Rat…!”
“The way out of Hell… through its center...”
Climbing up the blistering-hot yellow rungs from the crawlspace
above the toxic inferno that had Oil Change Charlie’s had become, prodding
Kristi Chaine ahead of him despite the darkness and
the pain shooting through his bleeding, dogmauled
foot, David Lee was reminded of Dante’s descriptive poetry of the Inferno – a burning
darkness, the incongruous depiction of stinking black fire looping through his
mind like an asinine popsong equation…
“I can’t
breathe…” Kristi jerked him back to reality…
“Keep going,” he
urged. “There’s a door up there,
somewhere, there has to be…”
“I can’t see…”
Something ran
across David’s mangled ankle in the smoke, something that stopped, extended a
tongue, began to lick at his blood.
Something red, glowing… one of Petworld’s
escaped fluorodents…
He reached down,
gathered it in his palm. The rat was
tame, bred down through dozens of generations not to feel danger or alarm when
grasped by human beings. Bred to accept
deceit.
The fluorescence
barely permitted David Lee to see the hot, yellow rung at eye-level; he knew,
instinctively, that he must not look down.
He called out…
“Kristi… take
this. Don’t be afraid, and don’t drop
it. It’ll move around a little, but it
won’t bite, and it gives off light…”
The Research Manager
bent to take the animal from David… and shrieked…
“It’s alive!
It’s… it’s a fuckin’ rat!…”
“Don’t throw
it. Use it to see…”
“But what if… I
mean, I’m not squeamish, really, but this…” and David saw a faint, red glow
circling upwards, “oh, wait! I think I
see a door. It’s a door!”
The boss lady
advanced, rattled the door. “David! Open it!”
“It’s locked,
no…” and Kristi changed her mind as she transferred the rat from her right hand
to her left, held it up against the doorknob, vowing resolutely through gritted
teeth: “…I can handle this…”
The door was
merely locked from the inside… once she unlocked by turning a little halfmoon knob, it creaked open – by ratlight,
she saw that it held another staircase, but a conventional one, this time;
concrete steps, limned with steel. Then,
swirling clouds of smoke enveloped the passage, leaving her at the bottom of
the threshold, holding a dull, red glow…
“There’s another
stairway…” she informed her subordinate, “I think it leads to another door.”
“Well, go on!”
David called up, impatiently. “My foot
is killing me – I need a rabies shot and drugs.
Lots of drugs. And beer. And a shower.
If that door opens, it’s got to lead to the roof…”
“And if it
doesn’t, we’re fried…”
But she forced
herself to think positively, climb the staircase and try the second door, which
wouldn’t budge. David limped up to join
her and they both rammed it with their shoulders, coughing in the thickening
smoke.
“Does metal
expand or contract when it’s heated?” he said, after trying the knob which was
locked. Warm, but not hot yet.
“I think it
expands…”
But she wasn’t
sure. David rammed it again, to no
effect.
“Let me try
something...”
Then, Kristi lowered
her left hand, still holding the drowsy rodent – rapidly overcome with smoke –
reaching up to the sill to snatch the tiny key Providence had hidden there
which fit the keyhole – twisting it ninety degrees until the door opened with a
theatrical creak and an exodus of spiders.
Before them lay
spread before their aching, blistered eyes, the vast roof of the One World
Mall; above, the night sky with its thousand thousand
stars brilliant in the darkness but gradually winking out behind the smoke
billing through half a dozen apertures – then, as a Cadillac-sized expanse of
roofing tar and weak concrete collapsed, an unlucky seven. The rain was gone. The clouds were scudding away to the
north. The mottled roof was empty, the
throttling smoke drifting away. The Metroplex… as far as their eyes could see… was dark save
for numerous organic, flickering glimmerings, like the campfires of a great,
daemonic army. The moon… almost full…
revealed the skeleton of the huge blue globe and clasped hands over to their
left; the One World Sign was dark and dead – its glass panels shattered by
multicultural rocks hurled from beneath by the damned, the despised and
betrayed. Their lungs gratefully filled
with city air before more smoke from the flames inside the mall whooshed out
behind them as an eighth perforation erupted/
“What now?” Kristi
wondered.
¾ ¾ ¾
In the Promenade, just past the fire door from Giga-Plex, Rifleman Stu rolled defensively and bounced to his
feet; rifle poised, eyes scanning the dark smoky passage in either direction
for potential enemies. A couple of
zombies, stumbling out of Giga-Mart with armsful of
toothpaste and sanitary napkins; all the good stuff was long gone… though much
of it had been abandoned elsewhere in the mall, or in the parking lot… grinned
weakly and slithered alongside the Mart, hoping that Stu had better things to
do than to shoot them. Which he did…
counting his ammo and reminding himself…
Extrication!
By the weak light
of the fires in various stores, he discerned the nearest large object to be a
banged-up Hummer, finally dead… a puddle of oil beneath it and a distinct odor
of leaking gasoline. Stu glanced through
the window… a dead man was slumped over the steering wheel, his face under
assault by multicoloured rats and a few incongruous
but hungry canaries. Rifle at the ready,
he proceeded towards the western portal…
“Shit!” he
exclaimed.
The gates were
wholly blocked by the gigantic head of Ghede…upside
down now… the batteries fueling its demonic laughter running down, reducing the
orisha’s rebellious humour
to a soft, wry basso profundo
cackle. As if recognizing that the
Screaming Eagle’s helpless bewilderment lessened his own chance of getting
shot, a black man in soiled clothes and a clerical collar… Reverend Ellsworth
Godwin hisownself!… ambled out from Liquors-2-Go,
holding a long, red candle and a bottle half-filled with syrupy orange
emulsion, peering and squinting at the bizarre, plastic obstacle as it exuded a
tired and morose “hee-hee-hee”…
“Symbolic, I
should say, but of what?” he asked, lifting his lamp.
“It’s blocking
the way, idiot, get it out of here,” ordered Rifleman Stu.
Godwin blinked
and smiled – Ghede’s head, even upside down, was a
good fifteen feet high and the damned thing probably weighed a ton. The clergyman hoisted himself up into an
aperture formed by the orisha’s left eye, raising the
bottle…
“Interesting. S’peach sh… sh… shpap…
some kind of peach brandy? I never knew
such a vintage existed…” and he let some of the foul ichor trickle down his
throat… “but it does…”
“Yeah, I know, I
know… Bobby DeNiro poured it all over his cornflakes
for breakfast before he’d go out and shoot up a whole lotta
people. Get offa that head and push…”
He raised his rifle…
the candle giving him an approximate location of the Reverend’s broken,
bleeding heart, but either Godwin didn’t perceive, or he no longer cared. Instead, he bent his head over… looking
upward from an odd angle.
“Big ol’ black
head, upside down… kinda looks the way my father did when he was mad, see? ‘Cause a smile, upside down – that’s just a
big ol’ frown. Never did think much of li’l ol’ Elly, no sir, he did
not. Couldn’t measure up. Guess he was right…”
“Oh hell, you’re
drunk. Fuckin’ world comin’
to an end and what do God’s own do, they crawl into a bottle, and then into a
pagan head,” Stu shook his head in disgust.
“Man, what I’m gonna do to you ain’t murder,
it’s a kindness…”
But as he raised
his rifle to blast the damn preacher off his black, round, plastic pulpit,
something also round, but compact and heavily muscled, charged down the
corridor and vaulted towards his throat.
Rifle lost, Stu gurgled and flailed as Brunhilde
shook his neck like a rag toy until blood spurted out.
“Now, you see…”
the Reverend admonished from his Caribbean perch: “if you’d paid attention and
thought to climb to a safe place like this, that dog...” he pointed... “might not have had
the chance to take you down the way he did.
Personally, I have always been on good terms with dogs. Maybe not all people, but dogs… good doggie…”
Godwin looked
down at the dog, and Brunhilde looked back up at the
minister. With a sigh and a nod, Godwin
tossed the bottle aside and it shattered on the floor… the pitbull
sniffed its contents, then backed away.
“Dog smarter than
a man,” Godwin realized. “So… time to
get to work!”
Holding the red
candle between his ring and middle finger, Reverend Godwin began climbing the
inverted Ghede. Standing just beneath
the left eyebrow, he took a leap of faith and grasped the statue’s nostrils
with both hands, pulling himself up and scrunching towards his next objective –
Ghede’s mouth, while the inverted effigy gave another
weak chuckle.
Brunhilde wagged her tail and barked twice.
¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
VISIT THESE OTHER
GENERISIS SERIAL ABOMINATIONS…
THE GOLDEN DAWN BLACK HELICOPTERS
THE INSURGENCE
of CHAN SANTA CRUZ!