SEED OF CAIN - THE IMMORTAL HYDRA
Preserve my soul; for I am holy; O thou my God, save thy servant that trusteth in thee’’. - Psalms 86:2
IV
Location: Joliet, Illinois, USA
Year: 1983 A.D.
Date: December 22 (WARDAY - 48 Hours)
The fear first announced itself by way of subtle indicators. It did not arrive suddenly, punctuated by way of physiological trauma. Nor did it make itself known as a loud psychic intrusion, calling Billy out of the petit death-womb of sleep. Rather, it attacked Bui Fang Wong - condemned inmate # C919034 - by a thousand proverbial cuts.
As had been characteristic of every event in Billy’s life, the circumstances of his condemnation to death by judicial order was markedly unusual and without clear precedent. Apparently impersonal forces (perceived by Billy to represent Providentially fated occurrences) had conspired to posit him where he now found himself situated: Scandal within the State Department of Corrections, a dearth of available corrections staff (owing in part to the calling up of military reserves on grounds of the ongoing global crisis situation), various consolidations of inmate populations as a bureaucratic and executive remedial response to a massive increase in criminal convictions resulting in detention.
These matters, fated or not by the Creator, coupled with an unusually high security risk designation assigned to Billy by his jailers, had resulted Billy being housed in a single cell, far beneath the ground level of Stateville Prison awaiting his own execution date - at which time he would be transported to the ‘’death house’’ of Menard Penitentiary (a sister institution) where 24 hours later, he would be executed on-site by firing squad.
There were of course many in the country who objected to a miscreant such as Billy - condemned as he was not after being determined to be an ordinary murderer but rather, as the assistant State’s Attorney who prosecuted his case had so designated him, ‘’a sexually maniacal ripper’’ - being afforded the same method of execution as would a soldier so condemned by courts martial. However, those dissenting voices were largely drowned out by a competing (and far stronger) tendency in public opinion that equated moral decency with obsequious demurrer to declaratory judgments of State (and especially executive branch) authority.
It had been determined Federally in 1981, as the Sandinista-Cuban War (the Sandinistas and Cubans being allies, not opposing combatants despite the misleading title assigned the conflict by contemporary observers) widened into secondary theatres in Panama, Honduras, Mexico, and Los Angeles, that capital punishment would be implemented for all political offenses involving sedition, espionage, treason and providing aid and comfort to enemy forces by act or omission, but also for all ‘’criminal’’ forms of homicide.
Further, it was declared by executive order that the only acceptable means of carrying out a death sentence - by nominally civilian court, UCMJ courts martial, or Maritime authority - was by way of firing squad. The several states of the Union, although not obligated de jure to implement these measures, quickly followed suit and became lesser, mirror reflections of the Federal executive and penal apparatus.
Thus, it came to pass that Bui Fang Wong, the criminal slayer of women, was to be executed in the means commonly afforded to soldiers, some nine years after his father, a soldier who had killed a score in counterinsurgency actions, was tortured and executed in a manner most often reserved in barbaric societies for the most irredeemable criminal murderers.
When Billy Wong arrived at Stateville, he was initially relieved - although he’d emerged from the very worst of withdrawal sickness, he nevertheless had not yet managed to extricate himself fully from the still crushingly megalithic weight of vestigial symptoms. The evil legacy of the beloved poison had resulted in suicidal ideation and a pathetic desire for death amidst quiet solitude becoming a regular visitor - if not a permanent resident - within the young man's already frail psyche.
This was a blessing that had carried him through his arrest and initial incarceration - too weak to stand nor shield himself from the boots and fists of the homicide detectives and their uniformed subordinates, unable to resist when his fellow detainees in Cook County Jail would set upon him for having disturbed senses by way of his constant retching and vomiting.
The instinct unto death and annihilation had provided him comfort when he endured remorse for what he’d done to Anastasia - despite knowing during both dreams and wakefulness that his destiny, and that of she whom he had so loved, could only resolve in her sacrifice with her blood on his hands. And it had furnished him, finally, cold comfort when the presiding judge to whom State v. Bui Fang Wong had been assigned stated unequivocally, with a typical absence of finesse, lucidity and lyricism, that the Court would accept Billy’s guilty plea but under no circumstances would it refuse State’s demand for capital punishment.
So it was mandated by the judgment of the court that Bui Fang Wong, on November 9, 1983, was condemned to death for the murders - with specific intent, malice aforethought, and multiple aggravating circumstances demonstrative of gross depravity and contempt for human life - of six women.
The day of the sentencing, Billy’s photo featured prominently on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, situated immediately above a photograph of a Mongolian Peoples’ Republic General who had, one day previously, declared unconditional solidarity with the USSR as Soviet forces clashed openly in the Kashmir with elements of the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army. Adding insult to injury, the Mongol had declared that the battle being waged on the Sub-Continent was indistinguishable, in character and purpose, from that being waged in Panama, Honduras and Los Angeles.
It was fairly clear, as nuance and the subtlety of journalistic propaganda tends to be dispensed with during epidemics of ‘’war fever’’, that an association was intended to be drawn between the ghostly visage of Billy’s face and that of the brazen Mongol field commander. But even seeing himself in the pupil of the, increasingly aroused and enraged, media panopticon had not stimulated the terror that he was now enduring over the rapidly diminishing moments of his remaining life.
It began with a rat - well fed vermin were ubiquitous within the corridors and crevices of Stateville - however, in the lower catacombs where Billy was housed - buried as he perceived it - they were as scarce as fresh air and traces of life but for the footfalls of the corrections officers who delivered his food tray to the door slot three times a day and perfunctorily counted him twice in addition. When the rat emerged, it did not immediately disturb Billy’s repose - it was only when it scurried towards the molded metal sink and toilet combination that abutted the steel bunk in Billy’s isolation cell that he began to endure what was at first a sickly unease which rapidly morphed thereafter into a sharp terror.
Since Billy’s arrival, many weeks ago, he had felt the increasing oppressiveness of the concrete and steel tomb. It seemed a perceptible weight upon his chest, limbs and facial structures. At first, it was only intermittently, vaguely present. As the weeks wore on, the sensation became more and more pronounced. Immediately prior to the emergence of the rat, Billy had begun suffering terrors in his sleep, by which he would wake up struggling for breath and grasping at a desperately unrelenting pressure he felt in the center of his chest. Every muscle in his body would lock with tension as he felt as if his sternum would snap like a wishbone under the weight of thousands and thousands of tons of concrete, iron and steel.
Sometimes he’d let escape a scream in spite of willful exertion to suppress such pathetic vocalizations - but it mattered not. He could not choke off the sound at its source, nor could his jailers hear him.
Witnessing the rat scurrying about, in search of food morsels even when there were none to be had nor discovered, and the resultant inability to deny to himself that he was in fact buried alive within the bowels of the most secure prison then in existence in the country, if not the world, that finally broke Billy’s psychic fortitude, reducing him to a state of childlike terror - yet also (as so often accompanies mortal terror) a concomitant openness and receptivity. In this exhausted and depleted state, buried alive and in thrall to terror, a Devil made fearful of the Hell of his own devising, Bui Fang Wong became both instrumentality and standard bearer of Man’s common destiny.
WARDAY - FIRESTORM
I
Location: Cheyenne Mountain/Alexandria VA/Chicago IL/Joliet IL
Date: December 24
Year: 1983 AD
Harrison Kennelly discerned in the pre-dawn sky, observing as he was from the vantage point of his driveway on North Van Dorn street, what he took to be a meteorite or perhaps a comet - mistaking the exhaust of the missile for an ion tail. He was transfixed momentarily as the warhead (continuing on its purposefully depressed trajectory) detonated while still ascendant in a momentarily brilliant flameout. He made a mental note to describe what he had witnessed to his lady paramour - Treasury Department clerk typist who resided in Pentagon City - that evening when they met for dinner as planned prior to midnight mass that evening.
Moments later, Harrison Kennelly discerned - for a fraction of the time it might constitute for the blink of one’s eye - an indescribably powerful source of heat and explosive energy. It was the last sensation his mind would ever register, as he ceased to exist entirely, vaporized as he was as multi-megaton detonations, originating from high above - the weapons’ delivery vehicles situated as they were in fractional orbit of the Earth, annihilated the world for miles around ground zero, including where Kennelly had stood. Harrison Kennelly, his lady paramour who lived in Pentagon City, the President of the United States (his entire cabinet) and every other civilian designated as a National Command Authority had all ceased to exist at that moment.
There were no early warning mechanisms nor alarms sounded to warn the Mega-Dead in their last moments of life. At least not preceding the First Strike salvo. The SLBMs (launched from the Eastern seaboard, course targeted for depressed trajectory) did not trigger NORAD early warning systems. Command and Control had failed in one, singularly essential, component of its core mission - that of early warning - yet the surviving forces, the super-hardened silos housing the instruments of apocalypse having held fast, performed as intended and within the hour subsequently reached their targets in retaliation.
Strategic Air Command - having become, in fact, the command element of the United States of America, such that abstractions of the sort could still be said to exist - implemented an order to reconstitute forces for ‘’counter-offensive’’ posture and attack, which was in fact launched 178 minutes after the first Soviet missiles had reached their targets. At 1307 hours, December 24, 1983, Strategic Air Command general officer Howard Lister, from aboard ABNCP, issued the statement to the battle staff under his command, as well as to any surviving government, military or civilian listeners via TACMO, that the United States had survived the ‘’unprovoked, murderous, ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ assault carried out by the USSR and allies and had not surrendered. In fact, Strategic forces had performed admirably and heroically in the face of the enemy, and were presently constituted to continue to wage war as needed if the enemy in fact were not vanquished and was committed to perpetuating aggressive war against the United States and her Allies’’.
The Third World War had in fact resolved in America’s ‘’favor’’ - Soviet command and control had failed under counter-attack - they had been unable to reconstitute strategic nuclear forces necessary to issue the coup d’grace. Although its mortal enemy had also ceased to exist outside the minds of a handful of airborne war planners whom upon landing would have all remaining delusions shattered.
ROBOTA - SHEDDING SKIN
(REDUX)
Location: Trappist 1b
Date: February 15
Year: 1071 AWD/3054 AD
For the first time in what seemed close to a score of years - Zartax’s internal timekeeping mechanisms (in addition to many other systems) having been rendered unreliable in the absence of regular maintenance and the effect of prolonged radiation exposure - the being that was once Victor - then Zartax - looked upon himself in the reflected plasticene shield of a laborers Off-World helmet.
clear that the remains before him had been in situ for at least 60 years and quite possibly closer to a full century. The skull within the bulbous helmet had been bleached a dazzling white, and the once black spacesuit of vintage Terran Imperium manufacture had been transformed into a matted, pale grey by the giant, red Trappist sun. Even without drawing upon his - still extensive - data reserves, Zartax recognized immediately that the corpse was very, very old. The black, general service off world uniforms had been phased out for every vocation but that of Zone Assault Executioner, decades before Victor/Zartax had entered SECE service - let alone even been born.
The seeming incongruousness of this understanding of the object before him and what his data reserves (albeit not updated properly for years) had revealed: Trappist 1b was not in fact colonized - nor even explored until twenty two years prior to the Zone Assault which had brought him there - which is why it was, to much fanfare, slated for colonization by the first settler population of Spaceborne whom had left their deep space arcology in order to live on an Off-World planet.
He was however shocked out of the semi repose that facilitated rapid analytical protocol - a modality only available when combat functions were not being actively prioritized by a combination of superior orders and environmental-sensory indicators - as his optical sensors for the first time in close to fifteen years perceived his own visage.
The vision not only shocked the cyborg out of the primitive repose his vestigial human brain always resorted to when the machine functions spontaneously engaged - during the time on Trappist 1b, there had been multiple occasions when, seemingly, Zartax’s organic mind was clearly, unmistakably, asserting itself in priority over the CLEP - in the splendidly compensatory manner not unlike a man who - upon being robbed of his sight - develops a remarkably keen ear, yet altogether much more profound. The human within the steel, titanium, kevlar, and plasticine prison that housed the mortal remains of Victor von Leers was breaking the capability of the machine and its suppressive processes to subdue and suppress its will.
Zartax-Victor could sense a dozen, a score, a hundred, a thousand permutations of thought of emotion of pre-rational feeling cascading through the CLEP firewall as flood water crashing against a dam that has been irreparably compromised. The memory flood crashing against Victor’s defensive programming structure - the Central Processing Computer issuing command after command to the CLEP, the vestigial organic brain sabotaging execution - finally, the cybernetic features of Victor’s central nervous system - interstitially woven throughout his ganglia - implemented the final fail safe protocol: Victor felt his brain being rapidly drained of endorphins.
He fell to his knees, still viewing his horrific visage in the plasticine visor of the ancient corpse. It was at that moment he looked upon the jawbones woven with a necklace of rawhide human flesh into a totem necklace draped around his own neck - in agony he recognized the Stygian visage in the reflection - it was the face of Huber, yet also his own. Huber had created Victor - no - had killed Victor and then resurrected him in his own image, right down to his insatiable bloodlust. For the third time since mortal death and rebirth, Victor endured abject terror - but this time he did not scream silently within the echoing chasm of his ruined mind. This time he thought only of murdering Huber and harvesting his endorphins.
SEED OF CAIN - THE GREAT KAHN/ THE BATTLE OF ST LOUIS
I
Billy discerned that something unusual was underway even before he picked up the faint, but distinctively vigorous, sound of harried activity several feet from his cell door, originating somewhere beyond the short hallway leading to the tiny chamber that housed him abutting his jailers’ command post. Billy had always been attuned to occurrences within his environment - like a predatory fish might detect slight disturbances in the surrounding water -often before others realized anything was occurring.
This, among other things, had contributed to his mother’s superstitious, and conflicted, feelings towards him that had originated in his early childhood and endured to the present. Something was afoot, he could feel deep within his sensory ganglia - within his cells - that was both unprecedented in his short time in captivity and strikingly emergent.
What first jostled Billy out of his meditative, near stuporous, concentration was the echoing report of gunfire. He discerned the single, muffled, crack of small arms discharge - followed some dozen seconds later by the more proximate, and punctuated, audio signature of shotgun fire. The guard or guards in the central interior control tower must be firing, Billy thought to himself - they were the only corrections officers so armed. The repeating staccato continued for another several instants, ceasing as abruptly as it had begun. Then there was stillness - a virtually tangible absence of any sound nor movement, so complete and enveloping that Billy momentarily considered that he had imagined the unmistakable report of gunfire and the frenzied disturbance in the stale air of his living tomb.
Billy was not certain how much time had passed when they arrived. Two dark skinned, Black youths and a middle aged, slight, yet muscular White man. Muffled voices - punctuated in their unfamiliarity (Billy had not heard another human voice, save for the dull, almost imperceptible droning voice that emerged over the PA system at interval, for months):
‘‘Don’t let that muthafucka loose man!’’
And in apparent direct response: ‘‘Ain’t your call - its LaGrone’s. LaGrone said to snag the Chink outta here, ‘long with everyone else’’.
‘‘Who the fuck made him warlord? I say we bust the fuck outta this muthafucka’’.
‘‘And where the fuck you gonna go? Who the fuck knows what’s even left?’’
‘‘Man, I don’t know shit ‘bout all that - I don’t give a fuck neither. Them Russians ain’t shit to me muthafucka.’’
“Just open the God-damned inner door - you want to take it up with LaGrone?’’
Billy leaped to his feet and stood at what would have appeared not unlike military drill attention, had an observer been before him. Resisting the irrational urge to straighten his state-issued shirt and denim pants, he compromised by flattening his shoulder length hair along his scalp with the heels of both palms. It was a reaction inspired neither by vanity nor decorum - rather, this occasion clearly was ordained, as far as Billy could discern.
The prescience that had loomed so very large, had been so terrifyingly consuming in the months and days prior to the murder of Anastasia, and then been so conspicuously absent since his incarceration, seemed to have returned in an overwhelming, orgiastic catharsis. Billy’s knees weakened, he felt a hot tension, desperate for release, between his legs, he felt his intestines contract in a single sharp spasm. He did not breathe as he heard the key-card mechanism drive home in the electronic lock and the first of three dead bolts retract rapidly from the secure position.
The door to his cell-tomb activated with a loud mechanical whir. Billy bent his knees slightly, in crouched attack posture - although this effort was in fact driven by a perceived need to maintain appearances. He knew that he would not be challenged by his liberators. In fact, he knew with the full certainty of self-directed persuasion that his powerful intellect could muster that whom and what lay immediately beyond the doorway would worship him with the same crude, but zealous, reverence that all primitive men offer to their betters. Bui Fang Wong felt a single tear cut a path down his Stygian face - Providence had not merely rescued him from damnation but had in fact anointed him as one would a favored sorcerer. It was glorious.
***
‘‘My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth.” - Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg
‘‘Its not for me - nor any other man - to deign to decipher why any man is chosen by the Creator to advance or create history. What exactly constitutes a ‘historical’ act you ask? The foreknowledge and contemporaneous understanding - within the moment and at the point of key decision - by, and within the contemplation of, the Man in question an understanding of both the gravity of his action and the fact that the Creator, and not the Man himself, is the ultimate author of the decision to act, the ‘great Man’ being merely a vessel”. - Thorpe Kilgallen, Retrospectives After WARDAY (Date UNKOWN)
I
Location: St Louis, Missouri, North America (formerly United States)
Date: October 21
Year: 1985 AD/2 AWD
‘‘I don’t like the idea of waiting beyond dusk - they could reinforce by then”.
Billy remained silent - not acknowledging the declarant. Harris was a valuable man - the most valuable in some ways. Unfailingly loyal, not a coward, yet also a hard realist - Harris retained an intact impulse to self-preservation, and this tempered his zealousness in ways that rendered a consistent cold sobriety in his analyses of battlefield challenges as well as political situations. Billy never gave away any indications of how much he relied upon Harris’ counsel, but he was certain Harris understood his privileged role within the inner circle of the de facto command staff.
Billy’s affection for the man transcended appreciation for the mere fact of his pragmatic aptitude for battle and subverting those whom opposed Billy’s mandate to rule. It was Harris whom had granted him life by releasing him from the Cell-Tomb of Stateville - it was Harris whom had saved his life in the earliest days of their association as the survivors outside of the penitentiary walls, as they soon discovered, had transformed into something so horrifying that their savage regression shocked even the most hardened killers among Billy and Harris war party out of the dazed stupor in which they had found themselves mired in the first weeks after WARDAY.
Finally, it was Harris - the pale Shaman - who had conveyed to Billy, in his own taciturn way, that Billy was the standard bearer of something ordained by a power so awesome, so remote, so unknowable that one could only prostrate himself before it and silently accept his crushing mortality and comparative powerlessness. Harris in these ways, and others, exhibited a splendid balance of absolute fealty, unshakable faith in the mission at hand, a battlefield commander’s esteem for nuance and instinct for self-preservation that categorically precluded abject recklessness even the heat of passion or frenzy of bloodlust.
Billy had contemplated in quiet moments what exactly motivated the individual men (and it was exclusively men) who had arrayed themselves to oppose him as the nascent War Band he commanded made its way across the blighted landscape, holding more in common with a feature of the newly corrupted (and volatile) landscape than a willful organization of human beings pursuing a mission oriented mandate.
He had concluded, based upon his own inner musings and monologues as well as his regular - though brief - discussions with Harris on the topic of Providence and motivations therein - that the majority of those whom opposed him were doing so out of the most banal of habits, first among these vestigial practices being an irrational fealty to order for its own sake and a belief that they were in fact carrying out the orders of an Officialdom that had ceased to exist within 45 minutes of the onset of hostilities on WARDAY.
It was as if these small minded, frightened men believed that if they were to maintain something approaching an order of battle, retained their tattered uniforms bearing the obsolescent standards and awards of an extinct modality of social organization and riled their troops with appeals to these abstractions that somehow these things might re-emerge.
The policeman, the constable, the middling Army captain lacked ashen lyricism in his words, lacked impassioned zeal in his actions, lacked deeper contemplation in his thoughts so he chose to stand on ceremony by professing fealty to an abstraction that had never truly existed in concrete terms even in the days, months and years prior to WARDAY when such things appeared to be singularly powerful.
It was by splendid accident of fate - a convergence of circumstances, each discretely considered having no causal significance, yet temporally entwined generated an inevitable momentum towards a punctuated, ultimately immutable event. In the case of the hapless survivors of WARDAY who were making fortress within St Louis on October 22, having been spared either by fact of residence prior to (and thus during) onset and duration of hostilities or had managed to make their way to the city in the days and weeks subsequent owing to its sanctuary status, their fortunes were decided months previously when thereof Earthly life had not come to pass - as the vociferous enemies of the Atom age had so zealously claimed would occur if Man, in his hubris, were to opt for war in lieu of ‘‘peace’’. What was however emergent, from cessation of hostilities on WARDAY until the present, was the black rain.
When the ashen raindrops fell, it wreaked a profound effect upon the survivors. Some had been so moved as to commit suicide out of despair (despite having stubbornly resorted to zealous survival measures during unrestrained nuclear combat) when it became clear that the rain was in all probability a permanent feature of the new Earth. Something deeply insinuated in the subconscious mind - pre-rational and symbolic - had catalyzed the despair of the unlikely survivors of WARDAY upon the first instance of the black raindrops.
They’d streamed out of their shelters - those barely alive from radiation burns and sickness, the young and old, the despondent and those ecstatic with the giddiness that accompanies punctuated horror and shock - pleased beyond reason at the prospect of being washed clean by the rain, rinsed of odiferous excreta, of encrusted blood and scabs, filth, and dirt. When what fell from the sky was not a Godly cleansing element, but was instead yet another iteration of filthy corruption - a literal hard rain that further saturated the body with a grime that seemed rinsed from sulfuric brimstone, it was simply too much for many of them to tolerate.
The first had been one of the guards - Billy had not known him in that reality - that now extinct version of the world that had, within minutes - seconds even, if not fractions of seconds - ceased to exist entirely. Billy had only recognized him from his Illinois Department of Corrections uniform - an older man, Sergeant. Undoubtedly close to retirement. The guard had taken to carrying a .45 automatic - not a weapon of issue, quite obviously a personally held armament - un-holstered.
The weapon appeared over-sized in the short, gracile man’s hand. He gripped it tightly - as a child might a security blanket, or an illiterate savage might a totem amulet. The guard had emerged from a poorly - and hastily - constructed lean-to as the first crack of thunder registered. The shattered man looked skyward, mouth agape. And what filled his maw was ashen droplets of tar. Billy was intrigued by the depth of despair that became obvious on the man’s contorted face - remarkable, Billy considered, how an abject simpleton could be so very capable of transmitting such profound, if uncomplicated, sorrow to one beholding his pathetic visage.
The twisted mask of agony gave way slowly, almost languidly, to a blank expression of thoughtless acceptance. An unmistakably human gesture, primitive and instinctive as it was. Billy contemplated the peculiar irony that the most poignant of human non-verbal expression was ordinarily conveyed without benefit of an audience - he felt privileged and bemused as the Sergeant slowly, and again languidly, raised the .45 and placed it under his chin, pausing momentarily - making peace with his God, Billy mused, in all probability - before annihilating the primitive visage into devastated pulp and fluid.
The aftermath of WARDAY had caused - facilitated really - Billy’s first experience of empathy. Not in a way that was sympathetic to his fellow man, nor that could overcome the veritable chasm between the psychic vistas that constituted Billy’s primary mode of existence (both conscious and subliminal) and the banal, largely instinctive and symbolically populated, inner lives of those around him - both in the war band he commanded and the victims that those he commanded set upon on sight. In more reflective moments, and they were many - Billy having taken to meditation out of survival necessity during his tenure in his Condemned Row cell-tomb - he realized that his own familiarity with death, his cultivated mastery over it, had been ordained so that he could transition to the world of the apocalypse with what appeared to be supernatural ease to his acolytes and soldiers.