SEED OF CAIN - THE IMMORTAL HYDRA
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts…’’
-Carl Schmitt, Political Theology
“What's one less person on the face of the Earth, anyways?”’’
-Theodore Robert Bundy
II
Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Year: 1983 AD
Date: September 5 (WARDAY - 110 Days)
‘’Sawbucks’’, croaked Billy weakly, holding up the tobacco stained index and middle fingers of his right hand. Billy had copped from the kid before - rail thin, black-as-night complexion, incongruously narrow nose. The kid’s boom box, perched on the stone steps behind them, wasn’t emitting the familiar strains of Afrika Bambaata or Run-DMC - the President’s, less familiar yet still recognizable, voice was being broadcast instead:
‘’This is not the first time the Soviet Union has shot at and hit a civilian airliner when it over flew its territory...’’
‘’Only dubs, Chinaman’’, the dark youth retorted. Billy was too weak from the sickness to roll the kid - skinny as he was, he was quite likely a game fighter. ‘’Them niggers get down like a pit bull who just sniffed first blood when ya got ‘em cornered’’, a dope-fiend Bridgeport Irishman, who resembled nothing if not a weathered scarecrow, had declared to Billy in muted tones during his last stay in the 26th Street lockup. It was a basically accurate assessment by his own judgment.
In addition, Billy was well known at this dope spot - the corner boys called him ‘’China man’’ because he was the only head who copped there who could accurately be described thusly. The primary deterrent to violence on that day however, emerged from within himself. Billy’s exceedingly sensitive, near-primordial intuitive capability - yet another abnormal feature of his psychic constitution that set him apart from his fellow man - had been wreaking havoc upon his nervous system as well as what remained of his capacity for uncolored reason; like an alarm beacon or emergency broadcast tone (the latter having become ominously familiar to every Chicagoan in preceding weeks on grounds of tests being run on every broadcast network at 72 hour intervals) that could not be turned off.
The last thing he needed at this juncture of fate was to pick up a bounty on his own head for bumping off some cornerboy for a few bags of heroin - Billy discerned almost immediately that the kid was unarmed; it was inconceivable that a kid wouldn’t be strapped while posted to the corner unless he was known by all to be pushing product for a crew that would kill without hesitation - undoubtedly relying on triggermen in their ranks to whom murder was as casual and instinctive as it was to Billy - moreso, perhaps, because to them it was an act entirely bereft of passion.
‘’...we and other civilized countries believe in following procedures to prevent a crisis, not to provoke one...’’
Billy shook his head, exerting what seemed a Herculean effort to will down the nausea overtaking him. ‘’Saw-’’ he coughed and dry heaved, eyes tearing, ‘’sawbucks, motherfucker’’ Billy punctuated the phrase with a hateful glare, convinced as he was that the double bags were lighter than two $10 hits - that may have been true, or it may not have been. Billy’s perceptions, his rages and sorrows, his moment to moment affect were fueled by junk - either basking in the proverbial glow of it or writhing in the pain and torture of its absence. The kid was visibly cowed, for reasons he could not rationally discern. People usually were unable to account for their instinctive reactions to Billy.
‘’...and the heroic sacrifices of our young people serving in the armed forces who are fighting and laying down their lives in Santiago, in Nicaragua and in South Africa; most recently in Mexico City this past November where our embassy staff and their families were brutally attacked by faceless cowards whose stock in trade is terror. And here of course the fight for freedom continues within our own borders in besieged Los Angeles...’’
The kid relented, reached into his sock, and slapped two glassine bags into the palm of Billy’s hand. Billy flicked a twenty dollar bill he’d fashioned into an origami frog at the kid’s Adidas hi-tops. He discerned the youngster furtively bending down to pick it up out of the corner of his left eye as he half-jogged, half staggered back to the main drag of Cicero Avenue. His pace quickened as he attempted to suppress a severe attack of nausea; simultaneously, a sharp spasm seized his guts, forcing him to halt in mid-stride and clench the totality of musculature below his waist lest he involuntarily soil himself.
‘’...as were our forebears. An American president who is unwilling to defend the American people and the American way of life by whatever means available, including nuclear weapons, is a President who is not fit for the office - Show me a…’’
As he willed his body into manageably compliant stasis, Billy staggered purposefully onward - his singular objective being to reach the cloistered safety of the Pulaski Street transit platform and a toilet stall in which to fix the shot that he desperately required.
‘’...these technologies are the instruments of peace, as they deter by rendering impossible the gravest ambitions of an enemy empire that is singularly responsible for virtually every act of evil committed within the political realm…’’
Something transformative was taking place - forces entirely outside of himself, yet intractably and intimately tethered to what he interpreted as his fated role within Providential revelation, had asserted dominion over his thoughts and actions. Billy had been aware of this process for many months prior, yet his awareness was obscured by the winnowing effect upon conscious reflection wrought by the self absorption and petit narcissism that is characteristic of the insane.
What was in fact underway, although he lacked both the insight and conscience to identify it thusly, was an awakening. Bui Fang Wong - more precisely, the version of him that had come to exist from the moment of his emergence from the womb of his peasant mother and that would continue to survive until WARDAY; the vicious youth, as peculiar in genius as savagery, was becoming more human. This transformative process would be interpreted centuries subsequent - by God-fearing men and apostates alike.
‘’...and first among these defensive measures is the Peacekeeper missile system commonly spoken of as the ‘MX’. The first of which has already been deployed. These defensive weapons are capable of neutralizing even the most super-hardened structures and can provide the…’’
Congruous with this burgeoning awareness, Billy had endured true existential terror for the first time in his life, 19 hours and 33 minutes previously. Not a simple, limbic response - the sort of fear that facilitates practical survival by acting as a biologic warning mechanism - Billy was well acquainted with fear of that sort; requiring as it did nothing more than a reptilian brain-stem structure and an intact nervous system to register such reactive sensations. What he’d experienced the preceding day was nothing like that. It was an all consuming, mortal terror - made devastating to the malevolent youth’s tortured mind and blackened spirit due in part to its unfamiliarity.
‘’...allows me to state with absolute confidence that the window of vulnerability that so profoundly threatened our country, our future, and our childrens’ future is at an end…’’
Like a virginal girl-child, ignorant of both the intimacy and the, equally primitive, brutality of human life due to tender years and purposeful sheltering, made instantly aware of such matters for the first time by way of violent rape. The combination of strange and terrifying emotional responses, coupled with an incongruous excitement that attends traumatic personal revelations had rendered Billy vulnerable. Had he not found himself enduring such psychic injury, he might have escaped the grip of fate on that day.
***
The months immediately preceding the winter of 1983 in Chicago were characterized by autumnal Indian summer - it was well over 75 degrees in the hours past high noon, the only indicators of the true season being a low orange sun, a ubiquitous gallery of pumpkin faces situated atop porch rail balconies and poorly kept brickwork stoops, and a brilliantly colored patchwork of leaves mere days away from falling to reveal the skeletal arboretum that stands year, after decade after century as a sentry corps of winter.
Billy set eyes upon her for the first time at the Pal-Waukee - it was rare to witness anyone else at early weekday matinees, least of all an unaccompanied young woman. Thus, initially inspired by the novelty of her (almost spectral) emergence, and regarding her as Billy did through the thick, languorous haze of intoxication, the contrast between the woman-child’s stygian pallor, impossibly red and luxuriant mane, and spectral eyes that flashed hazel and yellow when the rhythmic points of artificial light, emanating from the SPACE INVADERS pinball machine and the always lit, yet perpetually empty, popcorn cart danced across the mirror of her wetly glazed corneas seemed sharply, supernaturally contrasting - the effect being jarring yet ultimately harmonious.
Her dress was slightly too formal and impractical for the grimy movie house yet at the same time suggestively provocative - deep red turtleneck sweater, knee length skirt, high faux leather boots of the sort that women on the covers of fashion magazines seemed to wear as of late.
Billy didn’t believe in harbingers or spirits, yet he was not entirely immune to the inherited superstition of his mother’s lineage; he found the girl’s emergence altogether upsetting in a way that was sharply felt but difficult to articulate in terms that could be readily grasped. He felt magnetically - irresistibly - drawn to her yet at the same time repelled at the prospect of abiding his usual habits of predation and simply forcing himself rudely inside of her and then destroying her upon climax. For the first time, he felt a peculiar shame that was so pronounced as to be almost tangible.
Never in his life had Billy felt as exposed as at that moment - in his mind’s eye, he saw his skin flayed off, having been sheared from his body, thereby the slightest breeze causing a cold wetness to envelop him that rapidly became intolerably painful. He reached into the front pocket of his jeans before recalling, in anxious desperation, that he’d consumed his last Valium tablet the night before last when the nightmares had been particularly unrelenting. He experienced a sudden urge to leave the Pal-Waukee and run to his mother’s deteriorating flat, the shame of the impulse prompting a brutal wave of nausea as he smelled/felt/saw his long hair, dust particles illuminated in slivers of artificial light, and all manner of microbial ephemera envelop his skinless body, coating the raw and bloody sarcomere.
Just as rapidly, the dust morphed before his eyes into tiny crystalline shards - shards becoming salt, salt becoming glass. Sweat, mingled with blood coated him, gluing his shirt to his heaving back generating pure agony.
As his panic reached the crescendo of intensity, he registered something fragrant and intoxicating - lilac, subtle but pronounced, cinnamon, and the unmistakable scent of a woman - exuding fertility, opening as a garden does to a rainstorm, revealing its sensory delights. Billy focused his gaze; she was now mere inches away from him, her yellow-hazel dancing eyes seeking his own. He’d been weeping, silently, unconsciously.
He broke away from her gaze; looking into her eyes tore him to pieces, his chest ached sharply, violently.
‘’I - I saw…’’, Billy fully intended to explain to this dark angel - this night creature that somehow through her emergence had allowed him to have the dreams that had been stolen from him all his life, the ones that had been cruelly replaced with nightmares both waking and sleeping. She put her finger to his lips - it was splendidly manicured and smelled intoxicating. Billy struggled with all the might he could muster to retain what little composure dignity allowed.
‘’Would you like to sit with me?’’ she whispered, vermillion fire dancing behind her eyes once again. She turned away, somehow beckoning without a gesture. He followed her into the darkness.
‘’Beauty always destroys’’, said a poet once, Billy recalled. He was devastated.
Her name was Anastasia Eastridge. She was twenty one years old and, like Billy, a harbinger of death. Anastasia drank the essence of those she destroyed, yet she was a stationary murderer. Her victims approached her, intoxicated as they were upon discovering her in the night - she remained convinced that they destroyed themselves, as a hummingbird who drinks the nectar of a poisonous blossom. In contrast to Billy whose totem was the cobra.
Billy had discerned early on, after coming to know Anastasia Eastridge, that something profound was underway within himself. She had offered herself to him with resignation - like an ancient supplicant, slated for sacrifice under the ceremonial knife of a temple priest to placate or assuage an insatiably sanguinary terror-god - that was simultaneously, and incongruously, desperately fervent.
When he’d first taken her, the night that they had met, she’d wrapped her limbs around him such that made him feel like a captured prey animal - her lips locked onto his, creating a wet seal; Billy felt as if she were depleting the oxygen from his lungs, diminishing his life essence. He daydreamed as their bodies were entwined that a bluish lightning was being extracted from him (he’d witnessed such a scenario in a Giallo film about vampires that he’d taken in at the Pal-Waukee one afternoon months prior). Billy feared, in spite of his consuming desire - during these moments of their bodies finding union - that this sorceress-harlot was strengthening herself as she drank of his vitality while he was rendered immutably frail by the same process.
Anastasia was the only woman Billy had ever had whom he’d not paid for use of her body nor taken by force, she was the only woman Billy had ever kissed, and most remarkably, Anastasia was the only woman Billy had ever had more than a single time. Every other one he’d known had been strangled or slashed to death at the approximate moment when Billy released his seed deep within them. Anastasia enjoyed the distinction of having survived Billy’s climax dozens of times. She’d taken his seed deep inside of her and been permitted to retain her life - sighing, barely audibly, and delicately, gracefully collapsing her own body into his; deliberately co-mingling their essences as he remained inside her long after their shared release.
Billy did not fully understand why he’d continued to spare her. He’d suggested to himself in the course of his endless inner monologues that he had no choice but to let her live - civilian that she was. The apparent violation and subsequent murder of a North Shore college girl, and a painfully beautiful specimen at that, would not go unavenged. The police would never stop hunting him - retribution of the sort was the raison d’etre of 20th century lawmen.
Destroying whores for sporting gratification or reasons of social hygiene was tolerated, if not welcomed, by the collective subconscious of the commons and that of sovereign officialdom; in contrasting relief - a lumpen, junkie Chinaman who had the audacious gumption to slaughter a coed, after having availed himself to the delights of her body,, was as born for the gallows as Anastasia was born for sensual experience.
Billy discerned however that he was lying to himself - the reason it had been so difficult to kill Anastasia was not anything as prosaic as practical self-interest. He’d become as addicted to her as he was the heroin that he slammed into his veins at every opportunity. He was destined to murder her but he couldn’t bring himself to destroy this beautiful bitch - this baroness of the darkness whose silent dialect was pure, diabolical and overpowering, and only discernible under cover of night - unless it was the only way to truly have her.
‘’You’ll never have me, Billy…’’. She’d torture him with these assertions as she dared him with her eyes, with her upper lip curled into a feral snarl of contempt. She’d struggle under his weight, refuse to give into him - to open up to his intrusion as a defeated invader capitulates lest the adversary scorch the Earth. She’d mocked him in death as she had in life - her eyes aflame, loosely focused and glazed in the ecstatic terror of death throes, pursing her smiling lips in final purposeful effort - effervescent lifeblood steadily pouring forth out of the gash inflicted upon her soft yet taut flesh.
It was in the final months preceding WAR DAY in the course of Billy’s and Anastasia’s last fervently combative couplings that Billy’s greatest desire and most desperate, consuming fear was realized. It culminated in an orgiastic catharsis of purely erotic violence. It was the moment Billy had always been seeking, emergent before his rational mind could apprehend what he had done.
On the verge of climax, he’d felt Anastasia’s resistance begin to abate, almost imperceptibly, her labored breathing as she approached release softening the feral expression and affect that cloaked her delicate, consummately feminine beauty whenever she approached peak arousal. Her capacity to resist weakened, her soft lips gave way to Billy’s desperately hungry tongue.
Overwhelmed with desire, feeling his own being becoming absorbed into this virgin-harlot goddess his knife hand slid the faux ivory handle of the straight razor that he’d procured for this sublime occasion from underneath the bundled pillows of the bedroll upon which Anastasia writhed underneath his own sweat slicked body. With the finesse unique to the knife artist, Billy’s deployed the blade with a furtive flick of his dainty wrist, and with a splendid economy of motion befitting a matador, the blade slashed Anastasia’s flesh down to the bone, where the narrow blade embedded in her upper vertebrae.
A stream of blackest lifeblood, rhythmically synchronized with the final contractions of her heart and the ecstatically painful spasms of Billy’s ejaculation, emergent from the cut in Anastasia’s alabaster neck that had nearly decapitated her, splattered across Billy’s face, chin and tautly muscular chest.
At that moment, a world – the only world in which he had ever truly existed – exploded behind Billy’s eyes, and he experienced the final visionary journey he would endure prior to WARDAY. Vestiges of prescience would remain well beyond, but it would never be as it was – the pure and uncolored intensity of the experience was not to return. In the familiar fugue, he was delivered to a hellscape of permanent midnight, kneeling upon black granular sand, beset by an impossibly constructed machine. An infernal thing, singularly terrifying as it was ludicrously structured as complex war implements are, with a death mask in lieu of a face dominated by gaping ovals that surrounded unbearably bright green pinpoints. The non-face of the monster framed by an enormous tangled mane of blonde and silver hair the incongruousness of which inspired Billy to wretch.
In the wake of this visionary, birth-death waking dream, Billy’s mind collapsed as he experienced, in equally desperate measure, love and terror for the first time in his young life. The no-face demon thing, its filthy and matted mane whipping wildly about the ganglia of wires and fibreoptic tangles sprouting from a small patch of grey-blue flesh upon its neck, raised an an obscenely engineered saw blade of a sort that it had produced by rapid conjuring – its At that moment, a world – the only world in which he had ever truly existed – exploded behind Billy’s eyes, and he experienced the final visionary journey he would endure prior to WARDAY.
Vestiges of prescience would remain well beyond, but it would never be as it was – the pure and uncolored intensity of the experience was not to return. In the familiar fugue, he was delivered to a hellscape of permanent midnight, kneeling upon black granular sand, beset by an impossibly constructed machine. An infernal thing, singularly terrifying as it was ludicrously structured as complex war implements are, with a death mask in lieu of a face dominated by gaping ovals that surrounded unbearably bright green pinpoints. The non-face of the monster framed by an enormous tangled mane of blonde and silver hair the incongruousness of which inspired Billy to wretch.
In the wake of this visionary, birth-death waking dream, Billy’s mind collapsed as he experienced, in equally desperate measure, love and terror for the first time in his young life. The no-face demon thing, its filthy and matted mane whipping wildly about the ganglia of wires and fibreoptic tangles sprouting from a small patch of grey-blue flesh upon its neck, raised an an obscenely engineered saw blade of a sort that it had produced by rapid conjuring, its movement so fluid and swift as to be undetectable - and braced Billy’s head with its free hand in clear preparation to saw through his slim neck and remove his head from his body.
Billy ached for Anastasia in that moment more than he had ever ached for anything, including the heroin which therefore had been his only means of emotional sensation. So unendurable was the pain of this loss, magnified by the novelty of the experience, that he’d not even perceived that his final view of the horizon was unnaturally skewed upward: his vision being that of eyes deeply set within a head no longer tethered to a body. He lost consciousness as the slaughter-machine emitted an artificially generated, mechanical shriek at a decibel level comparable to the whirring scream of a jet engine.
ROBOTA - SHEDDING SKIN
‘’The problem with historical memory - the memories held in common by peoples over generations - is that it is essential to preserve the superstructure of these aggregate experiences, contained within interstitial proteins of human genomes and to draw upon this common memorial structure to generate ANY meaningful prime symbols of State, of Authority, of Government, of God to say nothing of the required rituals necessary to facilitate veneration and observance of worship of such Totems…rituals that often require even DEEPER appeals to ancestral memory.
Yet at the same time, a people must not be afforded an enduring conceptual horizon that transcends not merely individual lives but millennia! Even tens and dozens of millennia! Even the most iron-hearted, duty-bound Patriot willing to sacrifice however many billions of lives merely to sustain the Executioner’s ABSOLUTE and necessary mandate could never overcome the internal ‘‘witness’’ present within a people of common heritage who could see beyond the black abyss of death, the impenetrable fugue of astronomical time and whom upon return from these psychic vistas wherein they’d endured terrifying initiation into knowledge of ETERNITY would mock with a superhuman contempt any attempt at imposition of mortal terror within their hearts by a pathetically mortal tyrant!’’ - The Journals of LeMay Alexis Huber 3023-3039 AD/1040-1056 AWD
V
Location: FOA-DZAC ‘‘Villainous Redeemer’’, in Orbit of TRAPPIST 1b (39.6 Light Years from Earth)
Date: November 9
Year: 1056AWD/3039AD
Zartax initiated CLEP (Cognitive Linguistic Executive-Functionary Processor) protocol as he retrieved a thick ampule of synthetic beta-endorphin from a housing chamber in his prosthetic right forearm - he inserted it purposefully into the medication chamber on the right hand side of his neck, just below where his ear had been when he was a man. He felt the hot euphoria of the narcotic flood his neural ganglia - steadying himself against the wall of the armory abutting the pre-deployment repository.
The first dosage after a period of repose. Zartax only ‘‘slept’’ for 4 hours every 24 hour cycle, yet his systems required twice that in repose mode every 72 hours. Prior to zone assault, the repose period was extended to 12 hours. Lately, he had emerged from repose on the cusp of catastrophic withdrawal. He understood this was by design, and not merely a cruel accident of biochemistry - having come to associate relief from withdrawal sickness in absolutely inextricable terms with homicide (and the subsequent harvesting of organic beta endorphin from human victims) Zartax was becoming more and more murderous by impulse.
In the hours prior to Zone Assault, the synthetic variant of the drug that he was administered in purposefully nearly-adequate dosages barely lifted the sickness any longer. Rather, it only served to render him functional enough for battle effectiveness - his efficiency increasing exponentially as the took down OpFor enemies and hapless bystanders and tore them to pieces to access the glands deep within their brains for harvest.
That day, as had occurred on numerous other occasions when the old man was shipboard, LeMay Alexis Huber had sought out Zartax in the repository chamber. As the cyborg sat immobilized in repose, but fully aware, Huber had taken a knee in front of him - and placed both of his hands on either side of Zartax’s unmasked head.
Softly, barely discernibly, Huber would caress Zartax, as a woman might her paramour or a son that she loved vigorously. It was not lost on Zartax as his optic circuits perceived the senior man’s face mere inches from his own that to stare into Huber’s visage was to stare into a mirror - Zartax’s ruined face, sans battle armor mask, was virtually identical to Huber’s in appearance.
Sometimes in these moments when Huber’s ambiguous, and bizarre sentimentality had taken hold of him, he would produce vials of synthetic beta-endorphin (beyond Zartax’s meager ration) and delicately insert them into the medicinal chamber of Zartax’s head. The old man seemed somehow able to perceive when the cyborg was most in need of relief from the constant agony of withdrawal - and in spite of himself, and his programming, Zartax had come to love the old man, as much as he was still able to register genuine emotions in lieu of mere limbic responses of fear and directed fury.
The old man’s visiting but not bearing narcotic gifts prior to this Zone Assault presaged something - Zartax had not had a keen perception for his fellow man when he had lived as Victor - to immerse himself in such contemplation was not only unbecoming a Martyr Caste Executioner but it was distracting in ways that could have compromised his instincts and those of his comrades in the heat of battle. Yet since is resurrection he had what seemed to be a wealth of time to sit idly when not deployed and contemplate the humans within his orbit.
He appreciated the obvious humanity of Husseini. The sad, Arab surgeon in the early days had even gone as far to apologize to the cyborg when repairing and refitting him after Zone Assault operations in which he had been damaged. There was a female temple steward who was a Master Weapons Technician - on one occasion she had silently crept into the repository chamber and looked upon him, then kissed his skeletal visage while a single tear cut a path down her painted face. Zartax felt no such warmth towards Huber, but he had come to desire the old man’s company in spite of himself due to the chemical reward that was furnished by him when he would visit.
It was by way of vestigial intellect coupled with this newfound insight he had gained since leaving the living and the lives and affairs of men behind by which he realized that the Zone Assault on Trappist 1b was not an ordinary deployment. Huber was nowhere to be found, Zartax was on the cusp of full withdrawal with no synthetic relief to be had, and on grounds of these things an overwhelming homicidal impulse was developing. At that moment, he’d have slaughtered entire legions and their wives and children if necessary in a berzerker’s rage, directed by a superhuman singular mission oriented focus. This was entirely purposeful, by design of his masters. Zartax screamed silently for the first time since he had awakened on a mortuary slab, so many years before.