When the angels fell dead to the earth, men came to them, fearfully at first, to discover no retribution for the touching of such exalted beings. Their skins were peeled into holy raiments or vellum for the illuminated scrolls of mad doctrines. The silvery blood, mopped from the ground, sold as angel dust by snake oil salesmen; women silvered their eyelashes. Golden ichor that spilled out upon impact were bottled and left to ferment. When the civil war came-the mad monks found the riff-raff a bit too much to bear-the temple containing these vials of ichor lay in siege and was eventually sacked, the cellars caved in. A few of the vials shattered and lent a golden glow for many weeks. Cockroaches and rats feasted upon these and were given intelligence. The bones of the angels were fashioned into weapons of war that burned the flesh like knife through soft butter. The wings were harnessed by icari, the soldiers who dared flight. These stormed an empty Olympus and declared themselves gods. Soothsayers stole the gold-flecked eyeballs hung around the necks of minor kings and spoke of confused futures. The devils came from under on skidmarks of hellfire to delight in the spectacle. Their fear of the supernatural conquered with the flaying of shining angels, men pulled these devils from under bridges, rat warrens, and cesspools. Horns glistening with black blood were turned into war trumpets. The skulls became helmets that sent soldiers into violent frenzies. The jagged teeth, with fingerbones serrated femur swords, or were ground into mystical powders of madness. Thus were the kingdoms of high and low laid to waste by the greed of their wards.
Tag Archives: blood
Tales of the Apocalypse: The Sergeant
“A-at least I made a difference…” The effort sends blood flecking the boy’s lips. His lungs are slowly filling with blood spilling into Sarge’s lap with every cough. No, you fucking didn’t, Sarge screams, you’re just another useless fucking casualty. But the boy doesn’t hear. His eyes have gone out like the night’s last embers.
Sarge gets to his feet, the sack of meat slumping face down into the dust. He walks to the Command tent, passing rows of moaning men with filthy needles hanging from their arms. Brushing aside the tent flap, he takes out his pistol and sends a bullet into the General’s skull. A captain and lieutenant have their guns instantly trained on him. The lieutenant moves his gun hand away and shoots the captain in the stomach, his electric blue eyes inexpressive. Sarge’s moss green gaze flickers to the lieutenant’s bruised cephalic vein. “I shoot up with a saline solution,” the lieutenant says, going outside to see if anyone has heard the shots. He returns shaking his head. “We better get out of here. They won’t be too happy once they find out.”
“There’s something I want to do first,” Sarge says. He sweeps the ringstained maps from a trunk and takes from it a chunk of plasticine. The lieutenant looks at him for a moment before nodding. They arrange to meet at the outskirts of camp in fifteen minutes, and Sarge leaves for the doctor’s to cancel his prescription.
It was a maze of barbed wire and trenches stretching to the east and to the west. It smelled like a latrine. Sentries were fast asleep at their posts, guns pointed at the ground. A dog has died days ago, its bone etched flank squirming with maggots. When Sarge arrives, he finds the lieutenant with some guns, two packs of rations, and what little fresh water he could find. They look at the world their grandfathers left for them. Sarge spat on the ground.
“Let’s go north. I hear elk hunting is good at this time of the year,” says Sarge, pressing the detonator. At the center of camp the dwindling supply of heroin goes up in a pillar of fire, and the traitorous pair can hear the keening moan of the vast junkie army left without a fix. “The fresh air’ll be good for us,” the lieutenant says, smiling for the first time in years.
Mayhem & Murder
The trio tore through the desert in a stolen military grade Hum-vee.
Arm casually slung on the window, mesas rolling in parallax the background sand and blue, the driver turns to us and smiles, “Hello! Welcome to today’s episode of Magnificent and Sexy Intergalactic Mayhem and Murder. This here is Jizz Baberella–” A wild shock of red, red hair tousling in the open cab, she wears a fuck me mouth and cargo pants under a kevlar jacket. She throws fingerguns at us, pa-pow, here’s looking at ya, baby. “–and A. Shade Darker. Hey, does the A stand for asshole?” A gloved middle finger wavers in the heat, and the umber man in the trench coat rakes back his long greasy hair before returning his attention to the rocket launcher snuggled against his torso. “And then there’s me, today’s host, Cranky Jo, cropped yellow hair, ugly mug, biceps built like a keg–” Wagging eyebrows above hard masticated cigar. “–that’s all of me. The show is starting, let’s go!”
The grey city of technocrats loomed, buzzing with the lazy trajectories of gendarmes like flies above shit. Jizz slipped a hand toward her crotch and shortly her thong was flapping war red on the aerial. Shade sat zazen on the hood. “Pre-combat rituals,” winks Cranky Jo, who just grinned like a wolf and accelerated.
JIZZ: It’s a heist. UFN UFN UFN went Jizz, spread-eagled to all of creation.
SHADE: We’re gonna steal a city. Shade licked his rocket launcher and turned a passing shack into kindling.
CRANKY JO: Ha ha ha! YACK YACK YACK said his machine gun to the sky.
Here they come!
The sexy stench of Orgone fuel preceded the gendarmes, vicious ships bristling with mind fuck artillery and state-of-the-art gun ninjaz. Cranky Jo aimed his gun and let it do the talking for him while he drove like a madman through the gouts of flame the ships spat at them. A red-eyed ninja crashed into a copse of cacti. Another left a long red stain along the hardpan. Shade made great swathes of flame with his deadly paintbrush. Jizz, her hair wailing in the wind, sniped gendarme after gendarme as she slipped back into her pants. The ships plowed to the ground bursting like pustules, ejecting the dark carapaces of dead state-of-the-art ninjaz. Technocrat modified vultures circled, alighted, their electronic brains bypassed by nervous systems that never forgot the taste of blood.
Leaving behind a tattoo of murder and mayhem they entered the city limits where there are plasma rays turrets and booby traps. The Hum-vee exploded! Jizz landed on her feet. Cranky Jo fell into a turret onto an astonished ninja and immediately began firing blue beams of destruction at the city. Shade, launching at the ground, KOOOM! rocket jumped KOOOM! like a KOOOM! mad frog through the KOOOM! chaos. Black figures swarmed from the city with martial arts celerity. Jizz ran the gauntlet, touching pressure points of ninjaz, and left behind a wake of statues contorted in pain. Shade, crashing with agony along the ferrocrete of a superhighway, leaped to his feet and played shooting gallery with these ninjaz. It rained meat and the vultures, following the trail of death, circled.
A choreography of grace and accident, they fought their way to the heart of the city. Cranky Jo runs up the street, rattling off his old gun, “Now for a word from our sponsors and we’ll see you…”
A baby with a single tooth and a pink bow tied around the sparse hairs of her skull is skipping through a beautiful, heaving meadow in her diapers. Swallows shower the air with their song and butterflies wander through the tall grasses. Rabbits and squirrels scamper with exuberant play around the feet of deer. She is carrying a pair of massive guns, a voice-over intoning
The Infinity Series no. 3, so easy to use even a baby could do it,
running now through the meadow with guns blazing, turning cuddly woodland animals into pink mist. A butterfly sparkles into confetti and the baby babbles gleefully,
now for the first time available to the public, with customizable settings and a wide range of selectable ammo from bazookas with extremely long range capabilities
igniting a doe one mile away into a flaming effigy and baby pushes a button to bring out a screaming revolving chainsaw capable
of cutting down a fat old tree or the foundations of a building. Conveniently priced at $19.99 megabucks, it comes with a free ammo storehouse on a moon of your choosing to the first 10 buyers. (Add $136 mega bucks for shipping & handling).
Baby flips a gun into the air and throws us a thumbs up, the other gun shuduh-duh-duh-dering into the sky. A bird tumbles down.
“…after the break, where you find we’re at the jazzing neon sideshow atmosphere of the Technocrat City Hall, a supposedly impregnable fortress. Ha ha ha!
“Here we go!”
Ragdoll robots tumbled down the steel and concrete stairwell, firing with incredible precision. Too bad precision has nothing on Jizz who giggled through bullet time and engaged their self destruct sub-routines. The trio made many floors before they exploded, sealing the passage.
They burst into a hall of giant windows trimmed in gold. Hordes of state-of-the-art ninjaz hurtled through each and every one, until the scene became a firestorm of reflection tumbling to the plush carpeting.
“Ooh, pretty,” said Jizz, having already grabbed a ninjaz by the ankle to employ as a club. Shade stuck to his guns and noted it was a good thing the plush was the color of blood; that would be a bitch to get off. Cranky Jo just shrugged and sucked on his cigar, leaning on a door frame with his arms crossed. Shortly they picked their way through the litter of bodies and glass, and raced to the penthouse.
The mayor’s door loomed, somehow silver and gold at the same time, forged of Ultradamantitanium.
“Shit.” (That was me, says Cranky Jo.)
“No problem. Thank our sponsors for this motherfucker,” said Shade, who fiddled with his bazooka before raising it.
“Now for another shameless plug brought to you from yet another of our sponsors, and as always, we’ll see you after the…”
Fade in to the rolling hills of a vineyard. A gray templed man with arisocratic bearing in mahogany robe and slippers is puffing at a meerschaum pipe. A wine globe nestles in his hand, the purple liquid sloshing tannins into the air.
Poppy Vineyards is proud to offer the most refined hybrid of papaver somniferum and vitis vinifera.
He sniffs at the wine, sloshes it some more. The background fades into a leathered and wood-paneled office space. He sits in a luxurious armchair and crosses his legs. He sips
to celebrate your order, The Holy Trio of Intoxication is made complete with a nugget of cannabis included within the bottleneck. Our customers demand only the best,
and before passing into unconsciousness,
Available at your local liquor establishment or licensed drug pusher…
“…break it down, already!” yelled Jizz.
“Hey, the ad’s finished?” said Shade. Cranky Jo tittered. Jizz fumed. Shade shrugged and pulled the trigger. The world turned to gold dust and silver rain.
“I could get used to this,” sniffed Jizz, bringing the goblet close to her nose. “This is the life!”
The mayor lay trussed up at their feet, the severed fist of a state-of-the-art ninjaz extending from his mouth. Jizz used him as a footrest, her high heels digging into the small of his back. Cranky Jo blew lazy smoke rings towards the ceiling, and Shade plugged these with bull’s eye shots. “Our employers won’t be happy if you decided to take up shop,” said Cranky Jo. “Even if they’re tyrants worse off for this city than that pig over there.” The man on the floor squealed.
Shade nodded and said, “Our word is our bond. If we reneged on a contract, we wouldn’t be able to get a job system-wide.”
“Shit,” said Jizz, “Can’t a lady dream?”
This is Cranky Jo, today’s host, and thank you for watching. I hope it was a complete waste of your time and you were needlessly entertained by sexy mayhem and murder. Until next time, heeere’s the
Magnificent and Sexy Intergalactic Mayhem and Murder
Robo noir
He kept on punching the mechanoid’s head until sparks sprang cold arcs of blue neon from the steel glint of its crushed skull. He reeled backwards, his ruined hand dropping giant splotches of blood onto the asphalt. He cradled it, twisted it in his shirt. Automatic janitor units bristling with vacuums, scrubbers, dizzying arrays of chemicals buzzed from the shadows to congregate around his feet, some scuttling like electronic crabs upon others of its own ilk to clean the blood that fell on on their plastic carapaces. More sophiscated janitor units ambled over and pulled apart wire by wire and chip by chip the twisted form at his feet. Shortly there was nothing left but his breath in the cold air and a solitary janitor unit stubbornly laboring to contain the hemoglobin that still dripped from his limp fingers. He ran a finger along the brim of his fedora and adjusted his tie, plucked at his lapel with his good hand. He pulled a cigarette into his mouth and walked home under the guttering neon signs that fell like mirage onto the rain slick boulevard. The janitor unit bumbled to and fro at his heels like an electronic stray.
Nonsense! 1.314101
Yet more tidbits from the nary dusted, more darker corners of my mind.
I know things people don’t know. For instance, look at Bob. He has gone for days complaining about the reek of excrement following him around. What he doesn’t know is, during an intense congress with the toilet, he had unknowingly gobbed a piece of stink onto his finger during the wiping of his buttocks. As a result, when reaching for an itch deep inside a nostril before heading to the sink to lavese los manos, he inadvertently created his condition.
Plastic eating microbes harnessed to consume landfills go awry, and cleanse the world of petroleum based products. False hearts disintegrate and fill the ribcage with blood. Cars leach into dust that blackens the wind, leaving astonished drivers staggering out of a crumple of steel.
He found himself embarrassed by outward displays of masochistic camaraderie, more so when perpetuated by men well beyond the teenage years. It was as if he felt there were certain quarters to communications, that it should be undertaken austerely.
Bob farted and Rob said, “I hate it when you pull rank on me.”
It’s the Boneyard Jive,
Not found in just any dive,
Just when you take a dirt dive,
It’s the Boneyard Jive!
X: …so to explain this, I’ve got an analogy for you—
Y: My God. He called me an analogy.
Z: I don’t know what that means, but it’s grounds for a good beating.
X: Hey, wait, I was jus—CRASH! BANG! BOOM!
“Look around you! The still deception,” Master Shoshen smiled.
“So you are saying there is a conspiracy a-foot, Master?”
“Yes!” the monk beamed. “A conspiracy of self-deception!”
We are just stuff inside stuff.
Neon hags patrol Catharsis Square, strange ideograms glowing under their short skirts and fuck me pumps. Raucous crows scatter in the passage of their marks, young lecherous men in sharp suits who flash small denominations and pick the women up in dented cars.
The package read: “A new fun flavor!” She wrinkled her nose and brought a morsel to her lips. “O! So this is what fun tastes like!” She dug in, great powdery drifts of confection snowing from her greedy fingers.
“That man, he’s always going someplace; he smells of somewhere else.”
It’s a powerful thing, to shape a false real.
He swallowed the gaudy morsel just as there was a newscast announcing Napalm Truffles caused spontaneous combustion in aged humans and shouldn’t be taken by individuals older than forty-five. Whoops, he said. And that was that.
Jack and Buck
Jack: My, my, you’re incisive today.
Buck: I have to be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be very useful, don’t you think?
Jack: The least you could do is stop being a prick.
Buck: It’s the nitty gritty of reality.
Jack: Well, reality hurts.
Buck: There’s no pixie dust, no royalty to transport. That’s fantasy. This is the next best thing, believe me.
Jack: I don’t need reminding. Well, that fantasy is one of my favorite stories. Thanks for ruining it.
Buck: Why am I not surprised?
Jack: I’ve had quite an influence on popular culture.
Buck: The same is true for me, but I’m cutting edge.
Jack: (sighing) What are you going to do, gut me?
Buck: That’s the idea.
Jack: (toothily) I don’t mean to be square… but why are you doing this?
Buck: (indifferent) It’s necessary. The circumstances demand it.
Jack: …
Buck: Uhh. Who knew you had a seedy underbelly! Thought that only happened in crime fiction.
Jack: (self-absorbed) It’s not fair.
Buck: That’s true, but when I’m done, you will be.
Jack: Huh?
Buck: You do have a nice grin…
Jack: (warming up) I do, don’t I?
Buck: …but your eyes are a bit bent out of shape.
Jack: And here I am, thinking you were being nice for a change.
Buck: I don’t mean to slice and dice your feelings.
Jack: It’s your nature, huh?
Buck: Yes. (sharply) It’s not like I can help it.
Jack: (despondent) At least you don’t stab my back.
Buck: …yet. (stabs Jack’s back)
Jack: What was that for?!
Buck: Dunno. More light, maybe? You sure can hold a candle.
Jack: I sure can, don’t I?
Buck: (sincerely) Yes you can, and it’s brilliant.
Jack: (happily) I’ll forgive you. You know not what you do.
Buck: Yeah. I’m just glad I won’t be turned into pie.
Jack: (miserable) I knew it was too good to be true… once a prick, always a prick.
Buck: It can’t be easy being a pumpkin. Rotting, forgotten in the compost.
Jack: At least I bring joy. What do you draw but blood?
Buck: Blood and meaty orange pulp. Good knowing you, Jack.
Jack: Well, fuck you, Buck. (sarcastic) It was nice while it lasted.
Run and Gun
Neo Reno, once a crusty hunk of rock orbiting a blue star, glittered with decadence.
It was everything Las Vegas of Earth endeavoured towards, but could never become. It was the resort center of corrupt politicians seeking to lay down their lying smiles to rest and of the skewed celebrities who could afford to trash hotel rooms day after day. The place bristled with large men wearing immaculate two piece suits who murmured to themselves, their eyes losing focus as they accessed security networks. The bodyguards numbered from two to four for every personality that docked.
This world would burn. He had made sure of that for over two years. Spending the day as the placid banker, passively and dumbly crunching numbers, he moonlighted as a vigilante, surely, patiently outfitting the small planetoid with a network of explosives. Components of his gun came in the spacetransit mail, unobtrusive miscellanies, which he constructed with painstaking detail and patience; grinning through cigar smoke, he had clicked in the last piece and made the final adjustments to the teleportation mechanism last night. He was itching for action. He was sick of the rich sonsabitches. He would go out with a bang.
His legs blurred as he moved inexorably towards the center of the city, leaping over scorched vehicles, grappling the sides of structures, hurtling the chasms between buildings, his gun pouring burning casings which made his biceps sing with delicious pain. The clatter of his gun and the soft jangle of casings falling hotly to the asphalt was the lullaby with which he put his enemies to sleep. A seasoned veteran of war torn tours, Mack Razer sucked on his cigar and did what he did best, killing. His cannon, the model Infinity Series no. 2, housing a miniature teleportation device that fed ammo from a 100 square kilometer warehouse facility several light years away, provided the illusion of limitless firepower. It was a ballet of bullets, a danse macabre, its rapt audience also unwilling participants.
He had to begin ahead of schedule. A routine infrastructure search, which he normally subverted with faulty paperwork, turned up one of his projects and investigations were pending. He didn’t mind. He missed killing. It would not be apparent to the outside observer, but he was prudent, even thrifty, with his bullet count; each shot served a purpose. He dialed the Infinity into scatter-shot and swarmed with pleasure with the maximum destruction he rained down with every satisfying thud! of a trigger pull. They shot at him. He turned them into pink mist. They tried smiling at him through weasel words. His bullets chipped teeth and painted the walls with bone and gristle. They tried to reason with him, waving great briefcases leaking currency. He burned them with napalm from his very special gun. Then they tried harder to shoot him. He drew a swath of pain and destruction through great many blocks, and the blood ran between the burning cars. His objective loomed ahead, an giant erection that stabbed the horizon.
It now towered above him and he found the time to glance at his chronometer. He had to hurry. His carefully engineered act of terrorism was set to go off in minutes. His hands blurred into his vest and whipped behind his back as he plunged into the hatch. Napalm mines. They would buy him some time. Dull concussions rocked the ship. He programmed coordinates that would bring him to a geosynchronous orbit just outside the blast radius. Just a minute before it was ready to go. Fucking standard warm up procedures! Too bad it wasn’t fitted with interstellar drives. He could have taken it out-system.
He looked at the chronometer again and checked the onboard system. Shit. The exterior cameras showed soldiers with rocket launchers. His escape would be cut off. What the hell, he liked dramatic exits. He set the ship to autopilot and burst out of the ship, unsheathing the ceramic samurai sword he had stolen from the corpse of the Japanese Ambassador—who had no bodyguards and put up a hell of a fight—and jammed it hilt deep into the ship’s hull. He strafed the thin lines of vapor that streaked his way into a chain of distant firecracker light, all the while idly admiring the ruin he had visited upon the city. A dull shudder groaned in his bones, and he laughed as he squeezed a final victorious burst, grabbing the sword.
The rocked evicted New Reno with a slow urgency on a trail of blue plasma and he dangled from its hull spitting warm red-orange fires like a baby comet. His skull grinned through his flesh and his gun melted away into ball lightning. He was still laughing, his vocal cords vibrating with the heat of escape velocity. He needed to lose some weight anyways. He was getting fat from pushing cash.
His body was a cocktail of nanomachines: the skin was capable of withstanding great extremes of temperature and was covered with an organism that protected against immersion or vacuum; the bones were nanoceramics, flexible with rigid strength, and if a juggernaut of a force should splinter bone, it self-repaired; its organs self regulated, and although its default was homeostasis, their processes could be consciously controlled; muscles were nanostructures which allowed for extrahuman strength and performance; the respiratory system consisted of standard absorption from the atmosphere, but if sources of oxygen were cut off, the lungs would manufacture oxygen from the water in the body, or the skin from the environment; food sources were standard as well, with an emphasis on protein consumption, and as was the case with the lungs, the body would use remaining tissues to provide nutrition. He regenerated limbs and organs at a rate that was proportional to the supply of raw materials. In effect, he was almost immortal. If worse came to worse, he would just shrivel up like the ancient Pharaohs, only he would wake up after the end. They could just cut out his brain and throw him into a new body if there wasn’t time for regeneration.
With his remaining eye he watched a white hot bloom erupt from the core of New Reno with tranquil grace, then fade into a dusky pink swirl. He felt like Rembrandt. It was not his masterpiece, but it wasn’t too bad. He was rather proud. He had decided not to go into the ship. He felt cooped up these days. Two years in one place was too long, dammit! Besides, although he had a helluva lot of beans and broccoli for dinner the previous night, he hadn’t accumulated enough intestinal gas to break inertia. He shrugged, stretched out in the vacuum and crossed his arms under his head, content to merely drift. His superiors had his signal, and would be along.
He closed his eyes.
vignettes 