From the sunbeam reflection of the dust mote’s rotating nebula, his sense were assaulted by a fast approaching black hole.

“Confess your sins now brother,” the fanatic’s voice graveled from the darkness of his cowl as committed grand larceny with the rules of time and space. “Or forever hold your piece.”

“Get away from me you piece of filth,” Owen snarled at the aberration.  “Burn in hell!”

 Major Drury gulped down the bile that had been building in the back of his throat.. Deterrent justice was often imperfect justice which, in the grand scheme of things carried out by human cockroaches vainly saving their own skins. He wanted to hang his head in shame, but instead he squeezed the trigger.

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing seated at the left hand of the Lord!”

So saying for all to hear the wolf in monk’s sack cloth took a step closer to Owen in one of the dual timelines the condemned soldier was straddling. “We are all sinners in a fallen world.”

Stepping back, he made his confession so boldly it was heard across the void, in every timeline.

“The boy is innocent!” He fulfilled the requirement to confess the harm he was about to visit upon them, couched in such a way that made it seem a joke that wasn’t to be taken seriously. With such flim flam and double speak, he’d fooled the whole world before, and believed he could pull it off again.

The unwashed stench of the filthy monk, sent by Austin to be their so-called spiritual advisor, reached Major Drury’s nostrils and turned his stomach green. If only the false father did not have friends in high places, he’d have just as soon brought the monk up on a Court’s Martial and tied him to the post.

“What about a cigarette?” Diocletian petitioned the major on the boy’s behalf, taken aback by the boy’s silence, knowing more time was necessary for the spell Wallpurgisnacht ritual’s demon from the pit of hell to coalesce. Then it occurred to him that she had fooled him into cutting her in half. His presence was the irritant Owen Brindle used to bite his tongue and let the execution go on ahead without question. One such as Diocletian was too enamored with lust and power. The success of the spell hinged on his willingness to sacrifice himself. He had never had the heart to do that, and he turned his rage on Major Drury.

“When I’m make my next report to headquarters, Major.” He pointed an accusing finger at the man pointing the gun “You’ll never command another post or anything to it close again!”

Despite the repercussions that would inevitably follow such a brazen act of barbarity well above the threshold of anything that might be called insubordination, Major Drury fired three slugs into the chest of Diocletian.

“Traitor!” The monk cried, falling to his knees, trying to stanch the rivers of blood spilling from his chest with both his hands, gasping and wheezing like a steam engine with no water left to boil, before falling onto his face onto the grinder, stone cold dead.

Despite the chaos of the intercession and subsequent execution of Diocletian interspersed with the rabble’s discordant wall of sound, Owen was overjoyed to see Diocletian filthy monks robe black with blood and wrapped around his antagonist bleeding out there on the ground. The words of his long dead father echoed to him through time, this time with no doubt about their veracity. Everyone gets what’s coming to them in the end.

And so would he.

But then to his dismay, the major turned to Cpl. Lochte and ordered Brindle’s once and future antagonist to free him from the post.

“No!” Owen Brindle couldn’t believe his own voice crying out, advocating for his own execution. “You have a duty!”

“After what I just did?” He looked down at the bloody Diocletian and kicked him to make sure that he was dead. “I’m done.”

“Blame them!” Owen glanced at the bleachers.

“Kill him, too!” One of the rabble cried out in favor of Owen’s cause.

They all began to stamp their feet as one, and the bleachers resounded like a tribal drum, keeping time to all their razzing cat calls and hysterical imprecations.

Major Drury stepped back and swiped the sleeve of his dress uniform across his sweaty forehead. The sickening sight of the girl’s slashed open body flashed through his mind again. Private Brindle had been literally caught red handed. Since the world had lost all discipline and the power grid has fallen brutal anarchy had fallen across the land and nobody had been immune to the possibility of mod violence and collective assassination. The bleachers reverberated with the public’s blood lust and will to power. Maybe, if he did their bidding, he could get away with it still…hell the boy was now pleading with him to complete the proper and understood end of the execution before he’d gone and popped off.  

“Right here!”Owen scuffed his toe into the hard pan and pounded his chest. “Pretty please with sugar on top, heart!”

Major Drury shrugged, then pointed and fired. Flame burst from the muzzle of the revolver, along with the bullet spinning out the business end of Major Drury’s gun. The temporal displacement of the in extremis moment could not be overstated.  All the beautiful moments of his idylls with Anna condensed in the rain drops on the window of the guard house the first night he’d come in contact with her specter. A one off image of a blonde goddess hovering above him flashed through his consciousness, as if from another life he otherwise did not remember, sent a bittersweet longing through him multiplied by ineffable mystery, penetrating to his marrow.  He saw the flames over the shoulder of his father who was carrying him from the scene of their burned out home again and the fire reflected in the eyes of the maniacal Diocletian as he cut Anna in half during the Walpurgisnacht rite of world altering black magic eternally repeated. As then, now, it was all the same moment compressed by the gravity of a million suns: the death of his father over an argument to secure some zombie flesh to feed them, and the bullet emerging in waves of force from Major Drury’s gun.

A white sliver of sun glared over the roof of the jail house from where Owen had emerged, throwing shafts of light into the courtyard like righteous spears of liberation or golden bars of a bottomless black prison. The singularity rose above the guard house, its black wings beating with the whoosh of giant blacksmith’s bellows, its body alternating from the abomination of the wheel of grafted body parts of pre-pubescent virgins and the black annihilation of a light negating black hole sun.

Owen Brindle’s eyes snapped shut when he registered the bang of Major Drury’s gun. Plasma shot from the event horizon, a blinding white projection of force extending trillions of light years front to back and back to front. With the physical dissolution of Owen Brindle the circle had been broken and the horror that had just appeared in their world went the way of a terrifying instance of mass hypnosis which all present did their best to forget and keep forgotten.

*

Up from the mud, a minnow hung in the slack water as the river flowed around the rip rap extending from its banks. With a thrust of its tail it swam closer to waterline. The distorted refraction of the girl sitting on the concrete slab swam in waves of light and shadow beyond the water’s surface tension. Aanya drilled herself on the day’s battery of quadratic equations as the rushing river’s aural constant dragged over the land and, synchronizing with her good vibrations, gave her the motivation to complete the work that would allow her dreams of better days to manifest a true reality.

Satisfied with her calculations for the day, the girl walked to water’s edge and spied the minnow. Kneeling, she rippled the water with her finger to scare it away, afraid the careless fish had come too close to the surface and would be eaten by a frog, several of which had begun the sporadic repetition of their constant night time songs.  

Owen Brindle dropped in through the blue sky above the pristine river valley. The tops of the vast pine forest undulated like a green ocean in the wind. Owen closed his eyes for a moment to breathe in the unbelievable freshness of it, inhaling it deep into his lungs.

A grey mist rose on the horizon, obscuring the jagged zigzags of the mountains there. Owen wondered if they stood at the end of the world or were like the mountains he was used to, simply hiding the hills beyond.

From his vantage high above it all, the river rapids were flat streaks of white, contrasted by the dark blue deeps cut into its sharp winding bends. He followed the river for what could have been eternity or just a second, through daylight into the gloaming and the oversaturated color purple.

Then he was standing on the pebbled sand of the river’s shore. A man wading in the current stood with his back to him as the day was quickly fading into night. The boy was filled with the anxiety that if he waited any longer darkness would fall completely and he’d be alone in the night.

“Is that you, champ?”

Owen caught his breath. Was it true?

He took a few steps into the river. The cold water was bracing. The current was strong and the rocks the terrain gave way to beneath the surface were slippery.

The man didn’t turn, extended his arm and opened his hand.

Owen reached out for him as everything faded to black. “Is it really you?”

At first the man was silent and all Owen could hear was the dulcet scrape of the river over the land. He grabbed but all he found was air, and then he started to flounder. The force of the water threw off his equilibrium and he began to lose his balance.

“Dad!”

Before Owen could fall, the man grabbed onto his hand and gently pulled him to his side

“I’ve got you now.” His father put his arm around his shoulder and pulled him close. “Welcome home.”

A monstrous apparition towered over the tree upon which Bud’s body was slumped and contorted. Two columns appeared in the distance, the radial thwop of rotors accompanied the whirling dust devils of churning debris and sand. The vision abruptly ended with a bang, a gunshot or perhaps, a rogue clap of thunder, though the sky was blue from horizon to horizon and the mobs were too obsessed with systematically tearing the next of their number who had the most to lose limb from limb to be interested in them. The unexplained phenomenon—the gun shot and the distinct sound of rotors as well as the rotating towers of san did not, at that moment, mystify him. A pig could have flown by flapping serpent’s wing and he would not have batted an eyelid then. If the sun could rise in the west it logically followed that anything might, could and eventually would happen.  

Despite his acceptance of the impossible in regards to the current scene before him, the next image that appeared at the base of the tree of Bud’s crucifixion made him doubt his sanity.

He looked away and rubbed his eyes with his fists. The golden robe and who might be wearing it ignited a flame of terror in his heart. The sight upset him more than anything the universe could, at that moment, put up against him. Anything:  a pack of grizzlie bears, a headless demon or the Earth going backward around the sun. Anything but Diocletian.  

The memory of that horrific night was a millstone around his neck as he tread water above the deepest ocean. His stomach passed through the top of his head as the ground went out from under his feet and he began falling. Without some immediate intervention he was going to quickly and very soon start drowning.

His mouth filled with cotton and he could barely breathe, but something inside him forced him to keep moving. Even though his knees wouldn’t stop buckling, he put his head down and kept putting one foot in front of the other.  Despite the nightmare visions thrown at him, each one more terrible than the last, he was determined to finish what he had, to his eternal shame, started.

The wind had stopped blowing. The beams began to beat down from the forge of the backward sun. With choppy steps and shallow breaths he slowly approached the torture tree. He glanced up at where he was going, in hopes reality again would slip and change the scene before him, but to no avail. The penitent in the golden robe remained there kneeling beneath General Bud’s blood stained, contorted body. Even though he began to tremble and shake, he trudged forward an already routed combatant whose only asset was his dogged determination to keep moving forward.  

To trick his own mind, he averted his eyes and didn’t acknowledge the person in the golden robe kneeling there beside the tree. He mused that if they would just mutually ignore each other for the entirety of the interaction about to take place then the one with the weakest grasp of reality might fade out so entirely it would be just as if they’d disappeared. But his physical denial of the reality kneeling there didn’t translate to his thoughts and his mind raced with questions. He longed for the possibility that it could be Anna returned to him again, despite the sordid nature of the timing of their affair, but was afraid almost to the point of paralysis that once revealed the person in the golden robe would turn out to be the monster Diocletian?

The hooded figure in the golden robe made no sound, remaining still, delicate hands touched together in an attitude of prayer. Sensing no danger, Jed stepped around the stationary figure and, withholding a nod or a glance or any greeting or gesture that would have acknowledged the person in the golden robe was even there, he unsheathed his knife and raised it up toward General Bud, his crucified body billowed off the the tree like a deflated sail.

“You never stopped to do the math.”  He wedged the steel’s blunt edge beneath the nail piercing the general’s hand. “After you had vanquished all your enemies, who but you would have the most to lose?”

Twisting the knife handle, he leveraged the nail loose enough that he could pull the rest of it out of the tree with his powerful fingers. “In such a system, the killing never ends.”

He repeated the process with the dead man’s right hand, and, finally, the nail piercing his overlapping feet. Standing close enough to press his hand against the general’s torso, Jed carefully cut first one and then the other rope still securing the General’s wrists to the y-shaped boughs of the tree, and the full weight of his body fell across Jed’s Lazari’s shoulders.

“Down.”

  Jed’s Lazari was shocked to hear him speak. He stank of stale dried blood and gangrenous putrefaction.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Put me down!”

The shout startled Jed’s Lazari, causing him to drop the general, his broken body thudding onto the sand like a sack of anthracite.

For a moment, the general couldn’t breathe, unable to suck any oxygen into his paralyzed lungs since the air had burst from him in one explosive gasp when he’d hit the ground. His legs lay at unnatural angles on the ground, all the ligaments in his knees snapped by the torturous posture of crucifixion.

Once he could breathe again, he used his strong arms to push himself into a reclined position. The battered zombie tried to drag himself to where he wanted to be, grunting and gritting his teeth, laboring for breath. Crouching down and hooking one hand under his arm pit, Jed’s Lazari pulled him to where he could lean against the trunk of the pinon tree to which he had been nailed and theretofore been hanging. 

“Who’s this?” General Bud gestured at the person kneeling there, hiding in the cowl of the golden robe.

Jed’s Lazari looked up at the sky and shook his head. “Have you noticed the sun’s rising in the west?”

Bud tried to glance over his shoulder to see the rising sun, but it was too much effort for his failing body. “What’s it matter?”

“I wasn’t in my right mind...when we did this to you.”

“I brought this on myself.” He raised his bloody face to the prized disciple that had, in no small way, betrayed him, but being so close to death he didn’t have any reason to continue life’s endless cycle of getting over on the next sucker and let him know he didn’t blame him. “You followed my Gospel to a T.”

“It’s even worse now…” Jed’s Lazari fell to his knees and then fell forward onto his face, groveling in the sand. “Now!” He hammered his fist into the ground, crying out in anguish and despair. “Now that I remember who I am!”

Bud felt death’s grip begin to squeeze its icy talons around his laboring heart. Only wished to guide Jed’s Lazari in the paths of righteousness with what little time he had remaining, he focused all the energy he could from his failing body toward putting his mind, the one who he himself had chosen, at ease. “You remember the past?”

“To my horror.” Jed’s Lazari rolled over and sat up again. “Why in God’s name are you smiling!” In a fit of rage, he turned his back to his broken mentor and was confronted by the silent figure kneeling there. The golden robe filled him with disgust and brought back the memory of his past life’s wickedness and despair. He had been a fool to try and ignore it now as well as then. And knowing he had no more to lose he thrust out his arm and pointed his finger at the black hole of the deep cowl. “Who are you?”

For a moment, the figure kneeling made no sound, then she reached up and pulled back her cowl. Hair the same color as the robe fell in thick waves about her shoulders. Throwing back the hood, the girl revealed herself to Jed, the resurrected version of the man she had once known, and she whom he then, miraculously, remembered. Her matted blonde hair caught the sunlight of the impossible dawn, framing her face, the penetrating desperation in her steel blue eyes, like a lion’s mane of golden fire.

A painful laugh was torn from Bud’s parched throat, issuing from his cracked lips, lined with bands of scabbed black blood, as a hoarse whistle.   

Jed’s Lazari dropped to his knees. Relieved and amazed because he had been so certain the person in the golden robe had to have been the diabolical Diocletian, but now remembering a night of heavenly pyrotechnics so profound with her in his arms the Earth itself had moved. “Sarai!” He reached out and lay his hand upon her shoulder, then remembered the last moments they had had together as he lay bleeding out upon the desert floor after General Bud had torn his throat out. “You were there when I died, too.”

“Like both of you.” Sarah nodded. “I have witnessed the new day and come through the fire.”

“What does that mean?”

Ignoring Jed’s Lazari, Sarah looked over at the pile of disconnected and broken bones that used to be the alpha male and kickingest ass zombie that side of the Pecos. “Are you sorry for what has happened?”

“I would have ripped your throat out, too.” Bud heaved in a gasping respiration, then just as shakily exhaled. “Now? Tables turned.”

Bud threw his weight to the side and lurched away from the tree, dragging himself closer to his once and perhaps future protégé, determined to complete his last and final mission to put the new man Jed had become at his ease. “Whatever is bothering you—”

Jed’s Lazari looked into the blinding sun and muttered. “You can’t begin to imagine the evil I have done.”

“Whatever is remembered in that life.” Bud rested his head on Jed Lazari’s shoulder, shaking as he took in another gasping breath. “It doesn’t  stain you…everything is new once gone to ground…and you are born again.”

Jed’s Lazari’s vision was flooded with the black hole afterimages that are all that one is able to see after they’ve looked directly at the sun, but felt the trembling weight of Bud’s forehead burning into his shoulder and understood the great suffering he was abiding then, fighting to his final gasp to keep it all together without complaint or lamentation.

“Forgive me, master, for the evil I have done you.”

“I’m tired…” Bud’s head slid from Jed’s Lazari’s shoulder and collapsed.

Jed’s Lazari gently rolled him over so that he wouldn’t die choking on the sand. Sarah took Bud by the hand and pulled him to her, holding him in her lap as a mother sometimes holds her child. Jed’s Lazari caressed the general’s cheek. “You’re burning up, my friend.”

Bud opened his eyes. “Now do you understand why I smiled?”

“There is hope.”

 “There is for you … and our people.” Bud craned his neck and looked at Sarah. “And me?”

“I’m going back into the light.” Sarah ran her hand over his sweating forehead. “With you.”

Jed’s Lazari reached out to touch Sarah but his hand went through her as if there was nothing there and her image only a projection.  “You’re a ghost.”

“Whatever you think.” Sarah smiled.  

Bud closed his eyes and his chest began to shudder.

Then Jed’s Lazari realized Sarah was holding his dying master in her arms. “But not to him.”

“I am.”

Bud stopped convulsing and reached up, his buck teeth smiling to beat the band, as if he was seeing the gates of some celestial paradise opening up for him in the heavens.

Sarah took his hand and squeezing told him, “No living creature in this world dies alone.”

Dr. Vandyle slid back the curtain, trying not to grimace at the gruesome sight of Sarai’s burned body: a bubbled mass of liquefied char spread across her ribs like slabs of burnt dough, her reproductive organs clearly outlined against the weeping red scrim of tissue-thin skin stretched across her abdomen.

That the poor girl was still alive was the most horrifying thing. If she had the luxury of a few extra seconds time, she would have wept for millennia. The absence of a face or eyes lost in the sheets of melted flesh spread across her skull made the case for mercy killing overwhelmingly compelling. The breathing tube stuck down her throat hooked up to the generator humming at her bedside keeping her alive seemed overtly cruel and unusual, beyond medieval.

Still, there was a practical reason she had come. Dr. Vandyle sighed and looked to the heavens, then bent over Sarai’s body tentatively, guessing where to place her ear onto a belly button that was no longer there, and hoped that finally the price of her parasitic projection would be the one from which she could never return. She didn’t want to come back into a reality she believed could only be a simulation.

Heat radiated from the burn victim’s disintegrating core like the steam from the rocks in a sauna, Dr. Vandyle positioned herself upon the trembling body, breathed deeply and closed her eyes. A fleeting memory of her last time with Lt. Langtree made her, despite the dire circumstance, constrict with pleasure as she flashbacked  to the infinity pouring hot strips of molten plasma through her flexing body. Just as quickly as the overwhelming feeling had convulsed her, it was gone. Then the world became an all encompassing drone, like the chorus of 10,000 Buddhist monks: Papa ohmmmm Papa ohmmmmmmmmmm. And then she slipped away.

Though fast fading, the brightness of the trillion stars smudged across the dome of night outshone the black contrast in between. As the twinkling clusters extinguished altogether in the purpling New Mexico sky, a skirmish line of molten steel traced the crags of the western horizon.

Dr. Vandyle stood at the foot of the crucified zombie, his contorted posture and slumped head made it appear that he was certainly dead. The radial chop of turbo props forever approached and receded.  The acrid stench of burnt ozone filled the air.

“Anna!” was screamed in her ear by someone who wasn’t there, causing her to convulse and ball her hands into fists.

The sun, which had been enigmatically rising in the west reversed its course and disappeared back behind the jagged mountains. The dark of night returned with a display of deep space pyrotechnics greater than any firework show’s finale had ever been. The transition back to daylight was gradual only for a second and then a blinding brightness returned again to give way, in the blink of an eye, to night again.

“The boy is innocent!” Someone screamed in her other ear.

The doctor whipped her head around, but nobody was there. By then the transition from light to dark strobed by so fast it made her frantic. Through the disorienting flashing of blurring night and day she registered the corn field stretching over the desert on the side of the path and experienced a strong sense of déjà vu.

“The year is one!”

Another phantom voice was followed by the sound of cymbals crashing and she remembered the breakthrough she’d had had with Anna before the cruel sentence of total sensory deprivation the cosmos had sentenced her to took her gradually until she had simply faded away and disappeared. Distracted by the barrage of stimuli confusing all her senses, that seemed to come at her from everywhere and nowhere, she closed her eyes to concentrate, wondering how many universe’s were merging all around her. Despite the chaos, she had no fear, realizing in her heart that this was the hurly burly that necessarily had to precede a great revelation, the final reckoning that she had been seeking. The promise of an end, and perhaps a new beginning, was what allowed her to keep her head and her wits about her for as long as the world around her continued to twist and swirl ever faster that it was about to rip apart at the seams. Something outside of herself pushed her forward and she found her toes touching the trunk of the pinon tree the poor soul was hanging from.

“Ingrid.”

She opened her eyes again. The frantic strobe from light to dark had stopped. The sky was purple as if dusk was just above or dawn was just below the horizon. There were no more mechanistic sounds to raise her blood pressure to a dangerous degree. Lt. Langtree’s gentle voice had cut through all the noise, but like the rest she believed it had to be an echo from her past reverberating back to her from God’s gold filling, and if she looked in its direction, nobody would be there.

So it was no surprise that she gasped as the visage of her love, Lt. Langtree stared down at her from the tree: not the bubbling mass of blood and liquified skin she’d watched breathe his last hours before in another world, but the splendid specimen of firm flesh and taut sinew tight beneath his tan skin he’d been before the fiery crash had locked him in an anguished world.

“He knows your heart’s true intention.” Lt. Langtree’s voice was placid and his eyes shone bright. Though nailed to a tree, he spoke to her with a calm fondness that belied any inflection that would have given her the impression of great suffering. “Despite Man’s dogma being to the contrary…”

“I can’t believe it.” Dr. Vandyle shook her head, thinking the vision before her a specter her mind had manifested to appease her longing.

“He also saves those who have been fooled into forsaking Him.”

Her skepticism got the better of her and she cried out, “I watched you die!”

“You’re not listening.” Lt. Langtree admonished her, his steely blue glare punctuating the gravity he wished to convey.

She reached out, almost flailing, wishing her touch could heal the gaping holes in his hands and feet, but without very much conviction that she could make it so. But in the motion of her attempt, vain though she believed it would be, she found herself lost inside him in a place that transcended time and space, and once again felt their two hearts beating together as one.

“You came back.” Though in the void she was blind, she seemed to close her eyes and fall into the all encompassing warmth enveloping her disembodied spirit.

“I had to.”

She felt as if she was being held again in his strong arms. All the struggle and the strife melted away then and she simply was exactly where she was supposed to be.

After what may have been an infinity of time, she asked him, “Who is He?”

Though it took millions of light years for them to travel where they were going, his answer seemed to come immediately. “I am.”

Matter began to fill the void with motion and she saw everything, from the quantum to the unfathomably large. Red giants imploded in upon themselves and concentrated into quarks of nearly infinite mass, twinkling in and out of alternate realities like the dying embers of a forgotten fire.

Galaxies formed from star dust of exploded super novae, new planets coalescing from the birth and death of incalculable suns, Though it remained invisible from the outside, each black hole was filled with blinding light.  As they neared the event horizon, light traced the perfect circle of the singularity they were moving toward with a blinding white corona.  Then she was filled with overwhelming anxiety about the total loss of feeling and perception, and still they moved in a straight line toward the event horizon.

He was no longer holding her, nor she him. They had become stardust then, and infinitely intermingled, touched so completely by themselves and everything that even apart, they were together. The vast treasure chest of all her memories burst open and blazed across the heavens. All the moments of wonder and revulsion, innocence lost and heartbreak won, the first time she felt she’d really done something terrible and the world would never be the same and how it all became expunged by her mother’s understanding smile. All of it, everything was dispersed among the heavens.  

After the big bang, like the sound of starter’s gun, plasma jetted out from opposite ends of the singularity and the beginning was the end of everything now. The race was run, the race was just beginning. They raced through deepest space and crossed the threshold and crossed over into the light. Acceptance, ong suffering and infinite gratitude followed past the point of no return.

There’d been no break in his recollection of the night of horror on the hill and by that frame of reference, if he wasn’t totally crazy, it had to be morning…but instead of still being in the shadow of New Bethlehem, the sun was on the western horizon, casting General Bud’s crucifixion in stark silhouette against the backdrop of the silver-rimmed mountains.

The sun’s disc grew more complete with each second. It was morning. But the position of the sun was where it would have usually been setting. He stopped some distance from the tree to ponder the impossibility. He covered his eyes with his hands and fell to his knees, blinded by the light that, had the world been turning in its normal direction, should have been receding instead of growing.

He leaned over and pressed his forehead in the sand. The negative disc of the rising sun imprinted on the back of his eyelids, sailing like an armada of perfectly round black holes across the projection screen of his mind.  Then, the inklings he had had of his past life began to come into focus, shuttled through a conduit between multiple worlds’ alternate dimensions.

 Racked by shame by an overwhelming sense of  the monster he had been, not whatever abomination that he’d become, he twisted around and sprawled onto his back, his arms stretched out to each side og his body and squinted up at the light of the impossible morning. Flesh eating zombie, modern day lazari, or, as General Bud had the audacity to call he and the resurrected souls that had helped him build the technological miracle at New Bethlehem, the Chosen; as if the self-appointed tyrant knew the day and the hour and could lead them to the Promised Land from his shining city on the hill.

He closed his eyes and remembered the line from scripture that had been one of the simple precepts he had tried to live by before he had been born again.

All is vanity…

Then he remembered a monster from his past life who’d even surpassed his own iniquity, the wicked charlatan Diocletian, and how he’d turned their zombie rescue mission into a violent cult of esoteric mumbo jumbo and sexual perversion. He felt a twinge of regret he and Sarai had run away then  narrowly escaped being murdered on the train. He remembered wandering alone with her down off the mountain and then through the desert and the tender mercies they had shared as they came down off the mountain and began wandering through the desert. He relived the horrific last moments as Bud ripped his throat out like a savage lion and he died in the dirt, blood spraying from his ruptured jugular in a pulsing flume of black blood.

He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. Now and then…he wasn’t sure anymore if he was coming or going. Existence had become a bad trip: the backward sun, the new memories and the horrible thing that he had done. He raked the sand with his nails, entertaining the possibility of gouging out his own eyes with them, regardless that doing so would not affect the plague of remembrance that was afflicting him. He had talked a good game, done a thousand good deeds and all of it was ruined by one abominable act. All he could do was stammer, unable to justify his action as he pounded his fists into the sand and screamed, his guttural cries more animal than human.

Perhaps some evolutionary fail safe in his hypothalamus switched subjects in his brain, and he wondered if his instigation of Bud’s crucifixion might have been spurred by unconscious memories of the brutal violence that had brought him there now as the new man, Jed’s lazari, or if Bud had so convinced him of the truth of his bloody gospel that he’d become a true believer like those zealots on the hill who solved the problem of cult of personality by killing  and consuming it before it had a chance to consolidate its power .

Did the universe truly require sacrifice of those who had the most to lose?

He’d been so consumed by the position of the sun and the sudden return of the memories of the man he’d been before he’d had his throat ripped out, he’d nearly forgotten what he’d come for. Rolling to his hands and knees, he pushed himself to his feet and began walking into the dawn that had theretofore been the setting sun.  

            His torso had slid down the rough bark so far he was sitting on his ankles, which had been crossed to allow his overlapped feet to be spiked to the tree with one nine-inch nail of the grade A steel of his own making. Under the constancy of weight and the extreme angle that was well beyond the joints normal range of motion, the ligaments tying together his knees had snapped. After what had seemed endless hours of excruciating pain, his legs had finally gone numb and for all intents and purposes were no longer a part of his body, just two doubled-up slabs of meat.

In the long hours of the first night of Bud’s crucifixion, but for the overlapped profusion of twinkling stars, the heavens were still. The mayhem was concentrated on the black monolith of the hill: the sounds of alarm when the Texans realized too late they were under attack and the subsequent fires that razed their compound unfolded before him in a slow motion haze. Blurred to a fuzzy point of in extremis homeostasis, Bud’s pain retreated to his brain stem, exchanging it for a stop-gap interval of dopamine palliation before the final dissociation. Once shock had set in and finally relented to the orderly shutdown of the body’s systems, the deposed General actually had some time to retreat into his mind and, nearly blissfully, think.

The conviction etched into his marrow had burned so hotl he’d vowed if the people truly wanted a Zombie Resurrection, if that was what the they insisted on calling it, then he was going to give them one that lived up to that name in every possible designation. Oh how he’d fantasized about he and his disciples coming down off New Bethlehem hill one day to spread out upon the land and head east toward that hated, vile swamp of Washington, DC, gathering converts of the Chosen as they closed the distance, sweeping in on the unsuspecting pedovores quartered there, overwhelming them with an irresistible tide of resurrected humanity to reap bloody vengeance on those who had treated them no better than lab rats. To slash their throats and taste the hot gobbets of blood and viscera and feed on their internal organs while they yet screamed in anguish as they witnessed their own evisceration so that they might feel the inconceivable pain the cold vivisectionists had theretofore done to them was sweet bliss!

Even as he hung on from the tree, the fantasy sent a soothing burst of cortisone washing through his numb body. Then a shooting star caught his eye, the fiery slash of brightness burned up in the atmosphere just as quickly as it streaked across the sky.

Bud sighed. The omen showed him that his had been an impossible dream. For all his airs of strength and superiority, summed up perfectly in the conceit of his self appointed generalship, he had been susceptible to all the faults and blind spots that man was heir to. For all the labels his kind was subject to: Lazari, Chosen, Zombie, all in all he was just a man who had chosen to become the epitome of what his enemies believed he and his kind, by their unexpected resurrections, had to be, the stuff of fiction and gory late night horror shows featuring flesh-ravaging hordes of living dead. Refusing to defend his humanity but give them everything they wished for sevenfold was a point of pride, though pride was not the only thing that had caused his ruin. His corporealness was another, lesser source of his self-owned dissolution, proving again, as it had throughout time, that becoming a living God was a zero sum game. No matter how free of imperfection, a living, breathing, visible representation of the deity was doomed by the impossibility of sustaining that perception. The flesh was weak, and prone to bleed.

Bud had believed if all there ever had been was the Ten Commandments, etched in stone and mandated by some ethereal ghost man in the sky, the Age of Reason would have never been. As he hung there on the tree dying, it was almost too funny the wisdom came to him too late that made him see where he’d gone wrong. It wasn’t lack of faith that allowed great men like DaVinci, Newton and Galileo to delve deep into the secrets of creation, but a dauntless belief in a Grand Designer and the inevitably fallible institutions of their time that pushed them to heights of truth and beauty that no man had attained before exactly because their belief in something greater were to them suits of impregnable armor.   

The Pleiades sent him another shooting star and another revelation. The verse that had been the pebble in his shoe, the irritation that led him to create his own blasphemous gospel predicated on unwilling sacrifice had been formulated as a direct refutation to it. He’d scoffed at the notion that wisdom had anything to do with fearing God, too blind to see that it was the thing that would ultimately set him free.

All of mankind was summoned to a higher calling, but only a small cadre of the wise understood sacrifice’s true nature, and willingly took up their cross in its name. This knowledge was the crux of Bud’s bloody gospel’s failure: unwilling sacrifice was nothing but murder. Who but God could come back from hell to love those who would torture him to death again and again? Bud’s system’s logical conclusion was a loop of barbarity repeating without end. The meekest and least deserving among them might inherit the Earth, but after the unstoppable chain reaction of serial mass murder, there would be nobody left with whom to share it. 

He understood what a pity it was that wisdom had come to him too late. As it was, he would be dead, mercifully so, before the Earth span one more revolution. The morning light had been giving greater detail to New Bethlehem hill. Once the sun breached the wall of the mountains behind him, Bud recollected the particular Chosen coming toward him, he whom he’d brutally murdered so that he might rise again and become the successor to the monster Bud himself had become. He had only acted by the letter of Bud’s gospel’s flawed law.

Behind the approaching figure, the ravages of the night’s mayhem loomed across the face of New Bethlehem hill: the smoking ashes of the Texas compound and what appeared like ants swarming around the smoking bloomeries halfway up the hill, which he realized were the remnants of his people still in the throes of the berserker blood lust that he’d drilled into them so well. They had only done what he had wanted them to do. In that respect he wasn’t any different than Jesus Christ himself, though the analogy gave him little comfort if it gave him any comfort at all. He buried his chin in the crux of his collar bone and prepared to die.

Just before his eyes closed, something trotted to the foot of the cross, and Bud thought it was a coyote come to gnaw his feet off as he’d predicted, but then instead of howling to call its mates to the unexpected feast, it raised itself on its hind hooves and bleated.

“The year is one!” The golden robed Diocletion smashed the cymbals of his completion as Anna lie breathing her last, nearly cut in half at his feet.

              Sparks from the bonfire flew into space, stretching out like neon spaghetti, a continuous sliver of fire never ending until the light goes black and collapses on itself again, reclaiming the heat that previously had been hurled into the cold vacuum of space to dissipate and be lost forever. Back to the time that mattered most to the world that had accidentally come to be; the world where Owen Brindle at last knew he had to die to, maybe live again (regardless of his secret knowledge he still could not ever be certain).

He remembered his father telling him once when he was very young that everybody gets what’s coming to them in the end. But then the question became, what exactly was the end?

Concurrent with his reverie, Owen Brindle’s consciousness tuned into the rhythm of the jangling chains as they frog marched him toward the thick, wooden post sticking up from the dirt in front of the rubble of what was of left of the infirmary

“Filthy murderer!”

“Ought to be drawn and quartered!”

“Burn out his intestines with a blow torch!”

“We are not barbarians!” Major Drury drew his Colt .45 and fired into the air above the heads of the rabble rousers sitting in the bleachers. “There will be no mob justice here!”

Their taunting screams didn’t touch him. Moving closer to the crescendo of the soundtrack of that life in a serene dream of softly clanging metal and dazzling light, Owen Brindle’s merging life path’s synced with the simultaneity of his perception as the most destructive man in every one of his worlds swam into sight.

“Confess your sins now brother,” the fanatic’s voice graveled from the darkness of his cowl as he reached down with one hand to grab his crotch through his brown woolen monk’s robe. “Or forever hold your piece.”

“Get away from me you piece of filth,” he snarled across the universes as he came abreast of Major Drury.  “Burn in hell!”

Instead of putting a bullet in the condemned soldier’s brain with the Colt.45, Major Drury gulped down the bile that had been building in the back of his throat and hung his head in shame. Deterrent justice was often imperfect justice which, in the grand scheme of things, had to be completed.

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing seated at the left hand of the Lord!”

So saying for all to hear the wolf in monk’s sack cloth took a step closer to Owen in one of the dual timelines the condemned soldier was straddling. “We are all sinners in a fallen world.”

Stepping back, he made his confession so boldly it was heard across the void of space and time.

“The boy is innocent!”

In this way he fulfilled the requirement levied upon all those who walked the Laft Hand Path, to confess the harm he was about to put upon those before him. Usually couched in a such a way that made it seem a joke or a roundabout conundrum that almost had to be decoded. With such flim flam and double speak, he’d fooled the whole world before, and believed he could pull it off again.

No one knows the day, nor the hour. Blaming others for the crimes you’d already committed had been the preferred mental mindfuck to befuddle the masses since God had given the mark to Cain. The fact that it never did end well for the practitioners of such a master class in the ins-and-outs of ancient skullduggery rarely, if ever, lit up the recognition centers of the false Father’s brain.

            Though it did not stop him from abusing him, the dissembling clergyman held an uncanny affinity for the boy. Abandoned at the compound by his starving mother years before, Diocletian looked on it as his duty to hold the vulnerable young man to the same account as he had been subjected when he’d been abandoned to the Jesuits a generation before. Not denying the twisted pleasure it gave him, he operated under the clerical, not to mention governmental, authority that recommended forced sodomy as a tool to build character, foster discipline and  lock in iron-clad fealty to the prevailing powers that be.

To prove the notion that Déjà vu was just a glitch in the Matrix and not a sleight of hand of cosmology, Diocletion repeated his prayer. “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing seated at the left hand of the Lord!” So saying for all to hear, the wolf in monk’s clothing took a step closer to Owen and said in a stage whisper. “I know you didn’t do it.”

            “Head or heart?”

            Owen looked quizzically at his commander.

            “Head or heart, son?” the Major repeated as if he was asking Owen which flavor of ice cream he preferred.

The fantastic idylls he’d shared with Anna that had led directly to this penultimate test of fortitude returned to him. Beneath an unblemished New Mexican sky, Owen Brindle pressed his spine against the post. He then realized he’d been here before and, though the natural fear of death surged through his system like a shot of sodium pentathol, he resisted the urge to stall out the inevitable. Somewhere inside he knew his sacrifice was for the greater good. Perhaps it was true that if it was his turn to die, it was his turn to live again. If he was convicted, he had been chosen. Still only in the realm of theory, to find out if the conviction was more than mere platitudes he had to go through with it all the way—not to mention past and, hopefully through—to the bitter end.  

Owen glanced back at the sky and blinked away the unbearable brightness of the morning, thinking briefly on the illegitimacy of the justice about to be handed down and how he was going to die for others sins. But, too, he understood how his judge, the Major, had to believe his senses even though, in his case, they were not to be trusted. There was no rational explanation for why he had been found with Anna’s mangled corpse. Oftentimes misunderstanding had to be met with the unconditional acceptance of a sacrifice of any kind—willing or unwilling, false or true. More times than not it was innocent blood that greased the gears of an indifferent, mechanistic and, all too often, monstrous world. 

Meeting the Major’s gaze with his own dilated pupils, Owen Brindle said, “Heart” and glanced back down at the dust, suffering in the anticipation of that final moment, knowing that, owing to the reaction time of the auditory nerve and the velocity of Major Drury’s bullet,  by the time he heard the gun shot he would already be dead. 

The split pinon tree they’d nailed him to was a rough approximation of the Christian cross. The rope they’d used to tie his wrists to the tree limbs so his body wouldn’t rip away the meat of his hands was slick with the blood of the Texan’s from whom they’d received it. Even from the opposite side of New Bethlehem hill, he could hear the Texan’s cries of agony. He imagined the tortures his merciless followers had concocted to make it sound like the damned, howling from the lake of fire. He wanted to laugh, but hung his head instead because it was all he could do with the little strength still left him. The heat radiated up from the ground rising in the sanguine gloaming from the desert floor.

The jack rabbit below his feet looked up at him, its twitching nose constant as a heartbeat, its hunched shoulders ready to bolt at the slightest provocation, its erect ears at high alert.

The coyote closed in, trotting toward him with its pink tongue lolling from the side of its open mouth, seeming to smile. He’d read how packs of wild dogs would gnaw the feet off the crucified criminals of Rome before they had expired, and imagined that it would not be pleasant. Blood from the single spike running through the tops of both of his feet that were wedged into the crux of the V ran like sap down the trunk of the Y-shaped pinon.

   He had to give it to them. They’d done exactly what it was they were supposed to do. The successful fury he’d fought them off with, having whooped them one by one before being overwhelmed by the mob that was led by his protégé and own creation, Jed’s Lazari, was proof of his sacrifice being the most pleasing to their God.

Indeed, he had proved he had the most to lose.

Despite the pain, he had to laugh to keep from crying. He’d set himself up by the logic of his own dogma. His sacrifice would be the most difficult to secure because only those who had the most to live for were the most pleasing flesh to the zombie god. His failure to recognize this glitch in the system testified to his lack of guile in knowing that to lead, one also had to deceive his own people even more so than the enemies gathering their forces outside their gates.

Pain wracked his extremities, but was nothing to the pain of knowing his agenda had been a recipe for self sabotage and ultimate destruction. The entire premise upon which he’d directed the construction of New Bethlehem had worked against him and got him here, nailed to a tree. He hadn’t even been given the opportunity to rout the hated Texans. His crucifixion had been their affirmation to kick off the clandestine operation that would confirm the truth of his Bloody Gospel.

The infiltration of the Texas compound was accomplished in stages. To begin, the first line of defenses had been neutralized by zombies who’d been trained to be as stealthy and efficient as any special operations detachment of womb-born men. The steady flow of working zombies, even at night, had allowed them to get close enough to immobilize the guards under cover of darkness. Posing as anthracite runners, their carefully coordinated attack went off with precision. The soldiers standing duty inside the fence of the Texas compound were brought down almost immediately with poison-tipped blow darts. They barely had time to yelp before the black widow venom pickled their brains and made them fall unconscious. 

After that, the problem was how to bring the fire to the Texans without the spectacle of flaming brands descending the hill in a conspicuous parade of lights. The solution was nearly laughable in its primitive simplicity.

Once those at the iron works heard the owl hoot three times (Cotton Jr.’s prescribed signal), they filled the deep sand mold with molten steel and lowered the trolly that the mold had been set in down the hill using the ropes they’d been given by the Texans. The trolly was a low-differential lattice of iron bars clasped to axels with sand-coated rubber wheels they salvaged from the hulk of the helicopter that had been their providential entrée into the promised land all those years before. The front wheels of the helo had buried in the sand on impact and had not burned in the subsequent conflagration. They were able to dig them out of the desert and repurpose the rubber for their sneak attack. The bracket that held the mold of molten steel had been soldered to the crisscrossing bars. They greased the axels with coyote fat to keep the wheels from squeaking so they would converge upon their enemies as silent and unexpected as grim death.

A cohort of zombies followed, as closely as they dared, carrying miniature faggots of spear-like staves of dried pinon. The  trolly sloshed molten steel as it rolled over the uneven ground. They had to be quick enough so the liquid metal did not cool too much in the chill New Mexican air, yet controlled enough so the trolly did not flip over or spill. The discipline General Bud had instilled in all the soldiers of the zombie God served them well. Through his unexpected sacrifice, the zombie God had become invincible. His own teachings had convinced them of that. It had been his nonconsensual sacrifice that had given them the blood lust and indomitable spirit to undertake such a perfect massacre. By his own teachings, he had convinced them of the absolute necessity of an unwilling blood sacrifice to redeem all zombiekind.  

The chemically-sealed wood went up like dry hay as the flaming brands rained down upon the roofs of the Texan’s Qounset huts. In their haste to save space the Texans had left little room between the pre-fab structures they’d airlifted in. The first one went up and the conflagration spread quickly. Smoked out, the Texans were easy targets for the third and final phase of the massacre. The zombies waiting at the fence with the weapons they’d got from their secret magazine, picked off the Texans as they ran out of their burning buildings easy targets as the proverbial fish in barrels.

The day of reckoning had kicked off when they’d nailed General Bud to the low-lying pinon tree on the other side of the hill to give them courage to carry out the attack upon the womb-born interlopers, just as Bud had intended and had not foreseen.                                                                                                                                                         

Standing on the wall of the open air ironworks in desert khakis, Will Cotton kept vigil as the smoke rose like a fog from the ruins of the burned out buildings in the Texas compound below. The crucified Texans flailed in agony, their blood combining with the those alredy dead to run down the path to the entrance of the Texas compound at the bottom of the hill, its inhabitants burned alive, or staked to the ground through their extremities like beetles on a science project board. The Quonset huts were reduced to piles of ashes bordering once-vibrant thoroughfares transformed to conduits of death. Motivated by the blood frenzy triggered of their new war leader, the seeds Will Cotton had planted had finally and irrevocably blossomed into chaos and brutality, and he was resurrected as the mythical patriarch who had come back to deliver them from the bondage they had found in that new land. If anything had been written in the stars, it was the age-old treachery of the enemy within, whose quest for vengeance began the moment he had accidentally stumbled on the cannibalistic mauling of the innocent pilot the first day in. Witness then to the wholesale slaughter of the Texans, it dawned on him he may have unleashed a monster he would not be able to easily bring back to heel. What womb-born man could safely stand in ranks with such savages? He nervously wondered. Could this short term gain translate into long term goals? The Texas alliance was irrevocably broken. To keep it a secret long enough to plan their next defense meant they had to kill them all. It only stood to reason. His day had finally come, the progeny and 2^nd coming of Samuel Cotton had become the de facto usurper of zombie hill.

The ritually sacrificed Texans writhed in agony, staked to the ground by the steel the zombies forged into spikes, their pierced flesh and crushed ankle bones the pivot points of their immobilization. As night fell over the high desert, their screams and strangled cries conjured visions of crowded medieval torture chambers or renderings in oil paint of the brutality of hell.

“They thought they could get away with it forever!” Cotton Jr. cried from his perch on the wall as he took potshots from distance into the burning compound far below.

The swirling cosmos above his head ignited with the collision of collapsing stars and luminous space junk shooting out the myriad ends of wormholes. The galactic displays of universes colliding, a return to the harbinger of global chaos. He was lost, but then he was thrilled to be able to, perhaps, after all, allow himself to tear down what his own earlier decisions had helped bring into the world. To hell with the general and his damned zombies!

“All dead,” called Jed’s Lazari to the unhinged leader that had stumbled into his authoritarianism but had not hesitated to abuse the unlimited power he had been temporarily granted. “Waste of bullets.”

Will glared down at Jed’s Lazari, the one who had failed to leave his side after they’d crucified Bud between the iron mine and the hill. As if, but then perhaps it was true, he needed a go-between to control the blood thirsty zombies he’d persuaded to rebel against their former commander. But still, he felt like he deserved more formal recognition. Hadn’t he, Will Cotton, done all the heavy lifting before this new zombie ever came upon the scene?

The recoil of the rifle on this shoulder was physical reminder of the power of life and death he could multiply to the 3^rd power with a word and depending on how many troops he commanded. Being zombie-adjacent during the massacre, he succumbed to their blood lust just like any other man consumed with the delusion of unlimited power. He realized he would not be satisfied with just the zombies and the miners. The limited reach and influence with so few to command was stifling his ambition, but if they could just pull off several more such stealth attacks and clandestine operations…he gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.

He rode down the street of a city astride an M1 tank, manning the turret mounted 50 caliber machine gun, laying waste to the cheap façade of the building and cutting people unlucky enough to be in range in half, their splattered guts exploding in showers of gore. Victorious and exalted, they would each of them ride down through the heart of Broadway, by the burned out buildings where the In-n-Out Burger used to be; slowly passing the wreckage of the outlet mall that had been razed some 20 years prior  due to the zombie resurrection,  the subsequent worldwide recession and outbreaks of disease. His was the Earth and everything in it, the moon and the sun and the stars above yielded to his prerogative, his lineage traceable to the thunder bolt-wielding immortals that, for eons of antiquity, were the absolute rulers of all that they surveyed.

The adrenalin coursing through his crooked body had let him, for a time, forget that he was old. It was time to come down, though, he felt it in his bones, the creak and snap of exertion was a deficit young men could easily recover from in hours but an older man had to buy back in weeks.

The starry sky was brighter for the addition of the deep-space explosions that had been absent for so long. Indirectly, he saw the light in his periphery but dare not stare into the disorienting orbits of the heavens vertiginous rotation, their signatures the refracted shards of broken light the candle power of three or more full moons. Distracted by his manic delusions of grandeur he had forgotten or overlooked the fact that strict adherence to the tenets of Bud’s Bloody Gospel was a lesson in self annihilation; a snake that would continue to eat its own tail until it was zapped out of existence.

            Turning to get a bead on Jed’s Lazari—the resurrection case Bud had staked his life on— who stood between his own hold on absolute power and the savage zombie horde he’d unleashed, Supreme Leader Will Cotton knelt down and then balanced on his belly on the adobe wall and carefully slid down, back onto the sandy sloping ground.

He reached out and touched Jed’s Lazari’s shoulder. “Today we have made the Blood God proud.”  

            Jed’s Lazari shook his head. “I’m afraid He may not yet have been satisfied.”

            “What are you talking about?” Will Cotton met Jed’s Lazari’s shaking head with a head shaking of his own, “The earth is drunk on the tyrants’ blood.”

            “Once something like this gets started, it might not stop, but just keep on going.”

            The zombie hordes had begun to walk back up the hill toward the steel works where Will Cotton and Jed’s Lazari had viewed the carnage, and heard the wails of excruciation still. The fire of the bloomeries reflected the lust for murder in their eyes.

            “The land is drunk on the tyrants’ blood!”Will Cotton raised his arms as if preaching another sermon at the bottom of the arroyo, having to believe the advantage of the high ground would matter to him then.

            “We impaled them like dogs!” One of the more vocal zombies declared, screaming right in Cotton’s face, his nose flaring like a blood hound taking up the scent on the trail.

            Cotton took a step back, shocked by the crass familiarity. Surely, that was not how you addressed your king? The entire mob had arrived and Cotton realized his grip on power might be as fleeting a cloud’s silver lining as the sun was going down.

            “Back up, brothers!” He turned and pulled himself back up onto the adobe wall, to gain a perch from which he could stand above them from which to address them all. Getting his feet beneath him, he stood up on the wall again, holding out his arms for balance. After he found his equilibrium, he began. “Friends, zombies and countrymen! The day of triumph is upon us lucky few!”

            The mass of bodies below reminded Cotton of a pot boiling, their churning roiling movement demonstrating a nervous energy that was still saturated by adrenaline.

            “Blood for the Blood God!” Many in the crowd shouted and jumped about as if anticipating something more.

            “The most to lose!” The crowd rang with cries of the axiom General Bud had taught them all too well, and, ironically, had been reinforced and reiterated by Cotton.

            What outlet would they find to slake their boundless energy, Cotton wondered? A dawning sense of horror crept up his crooked spine. The mania in their expressions reflected in the flickering light of the bloomerie  and he listened in horror as their cries ominously coalesced around that one phrase.

            “Where are you going!” Cotton shouted after the retreating figure of Jed’s Lazari.

            “I’m next!” Jed’s Lazari shouted back, perhaps apologetically, and then began to run.

The zombies reached up toward their new sacrifice chanting as one body, “The most to lose!”  

Jed’s Lazari had put enough distance between himself and the brutal scene that he was barely able to hear Cotton as they tore him limb from limb and began to partake of his body even before the cessation of the anguished screams of Cotton, he who had inherited the mantle of the one who had the most to lose.

 “Even though I’m one of them,” Sarai’s voice was heavy with tears summoned by the realization that whoever Jed had become, she didn’t know him. “I would have spied on them for you.”

“Who cares…” Lt. Langtree muttered as he dragged her back another step with his arm around her throat. “Right now I need you to play along.”

As the lieutenant and Sarai backed closer to the osprey, a zombie broke off from the pack to bum rush them. With his free hand, the lieutenant drew his sidearm and put a bullet in the careless fellow’s chest. Then several more for good measure before the surprised zombie fell down dead, first to his knees and then face first in the sand. Another zombie jumped over its confederate’s dead body and attacked the lieutenant with gruesome abandon, shredding his shoulder as it tried to get at his throat. Langtree bashed the berserker in the face with the steel slide of his pistol, desperate to get it off of him.

Will Cotton noted the zombie frenzy, and hoped it was a harbinger of things to come.

General Bud sat up and looked around, his eyeballs turning minuets inside his head, still a thousand miles from reality and the current dire situation. Whilst in the lieutenant’s head lock, Sarai still managed to knee the zombie that was attacking him in the crotch, and it fell down to its knees, groaning.   

Still unable to make his mind up about the current standoff, Jed’s Lazari took the fellow zombie kneeling down beside him, the one that Sarai had just kneed, as an invitation to pray.

“Son of pharaoh, progeny of him who oversaw the Chosen’s enslavement and engineered our flight to freedom.” Jed’s Lazari addressed Cotton directly.

Taking advantage of the lull, Lt Langtree kicked the release on the side door of the osprey and he and Sarai dove in. The lieutenant reversed his momentum and jumped back to slam shut the door before another zombie acted on the notion to barge in. 

“You, the last womb born link to the day we flew from Sodom to this new life upon the hill, forged by the sweat of our labor into the city of New Bethlehem ... to you we owe our lives our well being and our sacred honor.”

Hearing his own bloody gospel amidst the chaos, General Bud put one hand on the ground and tried to stand as the rotors of the osprey began to spin. In short order, a whirlwind was kicked up around them and they raised their arms to shield their eyes from the blast of scouring sand.

Zombies scattered and returned with rocks and small boulders which they flung against the sides of the soon-to-be departing osprey. One well placed missile clearly damaged one of the turbo prop engine’s housings under the stunted wing just as it had begun to hover.

Jed’s Lazari bowed its head as Cotton Jr. took the onus from the perplexed zombie and continued to do the preaching.

“Yay I say to you my brothers when the judgment is nigh and the zombie god needs feeding before presenting us with his final revelation!” Cotton raised his voice almost to a scream as the wounded osprey rose up behind him like a harbinger of doom. “Of all those among us who would have the most pleasing scent to your God!”

Cotton Jr. surveyed their upturned faces, sensing their affirmation of the connection to the last sermon he had preached to them from the sides of the arroyo near his ramshackle and broken down abode, hoping it would be enough to kindle  the revolutionary spirit he had imbued within them so that at a certain time their collective animus would explode.

“Of all those among us whose sacrifice will lead us one step closer to the final revelation!” The osprey  slowly moved away across the desert, a column of blinding sand like a swarm of locusts rising in its wake. And as it shrunk into the distance, Cotton’s voice became clearer. “Of all those among you who has the most to lose than him!” Then, and only then, did Cotton play his hand and directly accuse the subject of his final judgment.  

 The general froze and stared back at his old friend pointing the finger at him, and all the zombies staring down the through line of that finger’s singular direction, staring and focusing in on him. It was a moment of supreme clarity and ultimate revelation, borne of the over confidence that overwhelmed General Bud and the pride that was his blind spot, the very reason for his imminent fall.

“Oh lost, and by the wind grieved,” General Bud said without thinking.

The obscure line came back to Bud as confirmation of the sudden acceptance and grudging admiration for how Cotton had manipulated his own words and turned his self-annihilating philosophy back on him by exploiting the lessons he’d taught them so often it may as well have been tattooed on their foreheads. The most unexpected sacrifice was the most pleasing to their God. And, certainly, it was he himself who had the most to lose.

“Ghost, come back again.” Bud nearly burst out laughing as his own people—the Chosen, the Lazari and, last but not least, the blood thirsty zombies, fell upon him.

Lt. Langtree brought the osprey angling in low on south by southeast heading. The flight path was erratic. The trail of black smoke streaming from the right engine was an unmistakable sign of a mission in distress.

The aircraft nosed down and disappeared behind the barrier of the deep canyon wall, its sputtering whirr carrying to her on the hot, dry wind. She chewed her chronically-chapped lips. Tasting copper, she swallowed her despair and shut her eyes, slapping her hands over her ears against the sickening prospect of the sound of the laboring aircraft slamming into the sheer rock face and the sounds of smashing metal and the simultaneous explosion.

In the unseen space below the deep canyon, the sputtering engines screamed, and the osprey emerged, climbing vertical from behind the cliff face like a breaching whale. Making a tight arc, the aircraft regained a horizontal profile too late to have adequate room to land. The twin props, which had rotated three quarters to the vertical, stopped spinning altogether, and the aircraft fell from the sky.

“Oh please God.” The doctor clasped her hands together and pleaded to the heavens.

The nose diving osprey sounded like a barrage of incoming mortars whistling down upon their heads. The emergency vehicles all began to back up quickly as their driver’s saw the incoming aircraft and did the math. Beset by the boiling tea kettle drone of the emergency landing, and the discordant high pitched beeping of all the emergency vehicles hastily reversing, Dr. Vandyle took to her heels and ran back toward the campus compound just ahead of the onslaught of diesel smoke and heavy steel.

Her earlier speculation of her current reality being a stagnant sample of a forgotten petri dish of time did not make the chaotic situation any less real, at least as far as her reeling senses were concerned. The fear was altogether genuine, crowding out the apathy that had been creeping in to her heart for so long. Prompted by the whoosh of the trucks’ air brakes and the osprey’s screaming reverse thrusters trying to square the equation of too much speed against too little space and time, Dr. Vandyle turned around just as the plane buried its nose in the rocky soil of the tabletop mesa. A wide geyser of sandy dirt rained from the sky, thrown up by the osprey as it plowed a deep furrow on a path directly for them.

Hitting the slight embankment at the very end of the runway, it flipped up on its nose and, right at the point where drag and momentum found their equilibrium, balanced with its double tail flukes pointing straight up into the sky. For that brief moment, the doctor and all the emergency personnel stood before a makeshift cross.

The trailing sliver of sun disappeared under the horizon as the osprey balanced for what seemed an eternity, taking its sweet time to either flop back down on its belly or keep on going over onto its back. The rescue vehicle drivers released their clutches and revved their engines, anticipating it was ‘go time’ either way. Finally, the osprey fell back and slammed down onto its shattered landing gear.

Dr. Vandyle reversed course and followed the rescue vehicles to the scene. The pumper truck directed its large caliber nozzle onto the burning osprey, its wide stream of water arcing 50 feet into the twilight and down onto its target, hissing and steaming. Tongues of orange flame flickered out of the thick black smoke billowing from the damaged engine. The growing fire, however, seemed to lap up the pumper truck’s water like gasoline, covering the crippled aircraft in an all-consuming conflagration from which no survivors could ever be expected to emerge.

Dr. Vandyle could barely contain herself. She rubbed her hands together and bounced up and down like she needed to pee. Where was her love? Was the door jammed or blocked so that he was trapped inside the aircraft and doomed to burn alive? A crew of three of the rescuers had the same notion as they sprinted down the hill carrying what appeared to be a giant pair of pneumatic pliers between them like a stretcher.

Dr. Vandyle, though not qualified or authorized to participate in disaster recovery operations, sprinted with them down the hill with the intention of doing anything and everything in her power to save him. 

The man in front tripped halfway down and rolled head over heels the rest of the way as the gargantuan pliers somersaulted behind him, making a few revolutions before sticking like the blade of a giant pocket knife in the hard pan sand.

Seeing the Lieutenant’s last hope in the device stuck in the ground, Dr. Vandyle helped the other man yank it out. By then, the flames had spread to every inch of the aircraft, the heat had become so intense they couldn’t get close enough to use the giant can opener.They could get no closer than 20 feet before they were turned back by the intensity of the fire.

Dropping her end of the Jaws of Life, Dr. Vandyle sank to her knees and covered her face with her hands, unable to watch, knowing her love was at that very moment dying, hoping for his sake he was already dead and not currently experiencing a torturous immolation. 

Just as she was accepting the idea that all was lost, a side panel of glass ejected from the burning aircraft. Lieutenant Langtree jumped down from the roasting fuselage into the outer flame dragging a woman’s corpse adorned in the blackened framework of burnt clothes, her rose-colored flesh cooked rare. The lieutenant’s flame-retardant flight suit’s protection was just enough to keep him going as he dragged himself and the woman’s body out of the death zone. Sarai’s re-animated corpse regained its footing, and they stumbled forward, collapsing just out of reach of the all-consuming flames.

They were his people.

He saw himself and Anna in the men and women working together in their front gardens there, hoeing and planting seed. They would love, live and work together there all the years of their lives. He saw their future progeny as a binding contract; the propaganda of the prior age about the horrors of having children had not altered his spirit. The idea of fatherhood appealed to him more because of his own father’s violent death and how it had robbed him of the vital relationship he still craved after so many years, thinking deep down that, maybe, if he became a father there could be a kind of reverse reconciliation in the eddying sloughs of time. That perhaps in the hereafter of his life, when he owed nothing more to the future, that he and his father would meet, and he would claim him as his own, and know that he was his son.

It was a dream he clung to like a talisman before the current iteration of the nightmare universe he was alternately occupying bled out into the other its mortal wound of death and destruction.

His visual range was like a spider’s dozen sets of eyes. His consciousness split into many, he could process each horrific vision simultaneously correlating the gory details into an overall impression of wanton slaughter. Stretched, abrogated and twisted in ways he’d never thought possible, he could feel the cool night air on the spaces between the perforations of the singularity’s flesh. Inside the central column of the singularity’s squared circle of mismatched and grafted body parts, looking out onto the carnage, his heightened senses focused on the girl who’d sloughed off the golden robe. In bas relief before the bright flames of the bonfire blazing there, he could not see the face but was overwhelmed by the certainty of her presence.

“Anna!” he screamed, his voice legion, a demon horde calling her back to the gruesome scene. The damp warm blackness opened on scores of vertical slashes from which an inner reservoir of blood foamed and gurgled along with the unbalanced panoply of voices.

Father Diocletian reared back with the scythe and swung. Blood squirted up and arced over Diocletian’s shoulder, black against the blazing fire, warming the cool night air even at such a distance. The monster in the golden robe paused only for a moment before moving on to fresh killing, revealing the naked girl dying on the muddy ground, her torso sliced diagonally from shoulder to hip, the cut defined by the line of blood welling up in pulsing glugs from the organ-deep wound.

Drawing his hands back from the fleshly aperture Owen gritted his teeth and cried out in anguish, “Anna!”

The dim light of the bonfire flickered in through his host’s gashes a cacophony of screaming voices rang out as one deafening disharmonic siren song. It was too much to bear. It was not a dream but the worst nightmare he could ever have suffered and lived through, helplessly bound in a tight stricture of hot gore and dismembered bodies. He reached back up to find the opening, intending to rip and tear his way out of that abomination in which he had been bound. But before he could find it again, he felt the gentle pressure of two hands caressing and cupping his face.

“Stay.”

            The hyperventilating soldier caught his breath, tried to say her name but all that came out was a strangled moan.

            “Yes. It’s me.”

            “But…you’re dead.”

            Anna’s laughter rang like church bells on Easter morning.

            “Aren’t we all?”

            “But I don’t…” In spite of his desperation, he instinctively wrapped his arms around her and was initially confused by the bloated contour of her body until the light switch flicked on in his brain. “You are pregnant…again?”

            “All your future hopes and dreams,” she said, nuzzling his cheek with her own. “I share them.”   

“How?”

            “Now that’s a stupid question.”

            “We never …”

            “It wasn’t,” she whispered, squeezing his arm and shaking his head. “The church fathers gave me daily doses of pennyroyal tea.”

            “Did you―?”

            “Induced miscarriage.”

            “But now…it’s back again?”

            “Here in limbo.”

            “You were so young,” Owen gasped, holding back from saying everything that he was feeling.

            “I wasn’t that young,” she replied, suppressing laughter. “I may have been almost still a girl, but he succumbed to my womanly wiles.”

            “D-did you love him?” Owen stuttered, not caring that he was disclosing his pain.  

            Anna kissed Owen’s eyes shut, then skirted the question by answering. “His name was Jed.”

Roused by a cock’s crow, Owen awoke in the cool furrow of freshly tilled soil. His open eyes swiveled in their sockets, attempting to make sense of his surroundings. Corn stalks rose up around him, their adolescent silk pointing up at the dim morning sky. An echo of the past massacre’s killing floor, the pungent scents of bedewed dirt and wet grass combined with the grey silhouettes of the corn plants separating themselves from the thinning shadows.

He cast his arms out to his sides to stretch and jammed his left hand against her body. Recoiling as if his hand had been bitten, he squeezed his wrist in the tourniquet of his other hand. The sky above grew brighter through the interstices of billowing corn leaves and Owen tentatively reached out again. The feel of her cold flesh reoriented him to his grim obligation.

Like a dead man carrying his zombie bride to some far off threshold that, once crossed, promised the consolation of everlasting rest in the Elysian Fields, Owen Brindle trudged over the early-morning streets with his dead love in his arms. Unable to hold her that way for long, he knelt down to readjust her dead weight across his shoulders. A gob of small intestine spilled out against his back as he marched down the street with her in a fireman’s carry, ignoring the long looks and double takes from the few early birds already working in their front yard gardens.

“What in God’s name, boy?” The man stepped off the curb to impede him.

He knew it didn’t look right: a naked boy carrying a nude girl, her guts spilling out across his shoulders, blood and gore running down his chest and back, dripping onto the street between his legs. He’d been on autopilot before he’d been confronted, but then he wished more than anything that he could simpy stop being, fly away, disappear.

“I’ve got to go,” he muttered, staring straight into the incredulous man’s eyes.

For no other reason than to cover himself up, he sloughed her carcass off his shoulders. It landed on the cracked concrete with a sick thud. The derma, bone and muscle layers of her slashed open torso, which had not yet dried out, glistened purple and crimson in the sun. The dead eyes had been covered by a grey film and, thanks to the onset of rigor mortis, her thin arms stuck out perpendicular to her chest, reaching for the sky.

“Jesus Christ.” The man shook his head and backed away. “What the hell are you?”           

A woman ran out the front door of the adjacent house with a blanket. Making her way into the street, she was about to throw it over Owen’s shoulders but sunk to her knees screaming when she caught sight of the mutilated body lying in the street at their feet. The man picked up the blanket and draped it over the dead girl’s body.

“What kind of monster does that to a child?”

Owen covered himself with his hands. “I wish I didn’t know.”

Battering the metaphysical membrane between Jed Lazari’s memory of the past soul that had recently inhabited the body previously bolted to his bones, her closeness overloaded his senses and, clutching her beneath her arm pits, he threw her away from him with a brutish cry.  She flew through the air and landed with a thud at Langtree’s feet, letting out a guttural scream that signaled the impact had forced the air from out of her lungs.

“Whoah!” exclaimed Langtree, surprised by the brute’s impulsive reaction, and, too, its inhuman strength. After his initial shock, he knelt down to assist her. “You OK little lady?”

Will Cotton’s visage came into view as he trudged up the near side of the arroyo. First his head and then his whole body once he crested the hill and walked toward the grounded osprey, curious to know what drama was unfolding.

Meanwhile, a battalion of zombies had become curious too and were slaloming down the steep side of the hill— just as Bud and Jed’s Lazari had done minutes before—to investigate the strange convergence for themselves, zigzagging down the hill like a frenzied troop of army ants catching wind of the putrid flesh of a rotting animal.

Sarai’s eyes fluttered open to the sight of Lt. Langtree’s half grimacing smile. A drop of sweat fell from his forehead and splashed onto her right eyeball. She sat up and rubbed her fist into her eye socket to alleviate the sting.

“Looks like we got company,” said Lt. Langtree, scrambling back to his feet as he saw Will Cotton approaching from the edge of the dry wash, still unaware of the zombies at his flank coming down off the hill. “Wake up!”

Sarai flinched at the abrupt shout and crawled away from him back in the direction she’d come from. General Bud lay motionless on the ground, scrunched up in a semi-fetal position, just as he had fallen. Sarai looked up from the unconscious general to the familiar-looking zombie who had saved her life. She remembered he’d cast her from him like so much trash and thus did not feel the sense of giddiness she had felt before. Her old love Jed wouldn’t have done that to her. As she looked at his face she began to realize she’d been making up a fantasy. The bug-eyed freak didn’t look anything like Jed.

The sun had sunk behind the hill and the footfalls of the approaching cadre of zombies complemented the long shadows that preceded them.

“Back off!” exclaimed Lt. Langtree, realizing they had more company than just Will Cotton by then as the zombies from New Bethlehem hill raised a cloud of dust as they shuffled up behind him.

“Hear me!” He backed away toward the osprey his arm around the neck of the complacent Sarai, whom he held before him, a human shield as the zombie’s coalesced around him. “I’ll blow her fucking brains out!”

“So sayeth the peace maker,” mocked Will Cotton, raising his hands to the westering sky as he limped onto the scene to play his part in the approaching power play. “What’s this?”

He knelt and checked the downed General’s pulse. The heart still beat in the unconscious zombie commander’s chest as he lay there placid and helpless in his unconsciousness. Will Cotton hearkened back to the day he stood on the edge of the arroyo and looked down upon the zombies tearing the pilot limb from limb. It seemed too delicious a coincidence that he would come across the focus of his hatred in such a hapless state. He looked up and scanned the expectant faces of the zombies peering down at him. The import of the revelation nearly made him foolishly rush in, but he had enough self control to keep himself from ending it there and then. Revenge was, indeed, at his fingertips but, he was able to surmise, the deed’s execution still warranted a subtle degree of calculation. All the work he’d been doing to drill the zombie’s minds down the bore hole of his new vision was about to be tested. As with all revolutions, there came a time when the conviction of its adherents needed to be given free rein to charge ahead of their own volition. Will Cotton saw that that time had almost come.

A tremor worked its way down General Bud’s body as Will Cotton knelt above him. One minute later, with several false starts between them, the general’s eyes fluttered open. For the initial brief moment his mind was clear of any previous experiential bias,  and he stared up at Will Cotton and smiled. The younger Cotton felt a splinter of guilt penetrate his heart, but dared not let it dictate the course of his singular intention. Here was one more scapegoat to be sacrificed in the crucible of Bud Bloody Gospel. There was no going back now; too many dominoes had already started to fall.

The doctor turned back and tapped her pencil on her blotter.

Or did natural phenomena need to be observed to be manifest in her reality? She began to wonder if she’d somehow made a wrong turn somewhere and become an atom deflected by an outside force to spin free of its fixed orbit. Since Owen Brindle had disappeared unexplainably as Anna had in the days prior, Ingrid Vandyle questioned her own corporeality and wondered if her own world, as well as the overarching operating system of which her awareness was one tiny part, was disintegrating like a free radical flung from the disrupted orbit of an atom’s infinite space.  She suspected Anna’s dream she had infiltrated to relive the Church of Universal Protest’s massacre had been the point she’d been eddied into a tributary of temporal dislocation; shunted off to a dead end that would gradually decay into a half life wherein they all spun off into oblivion, one by one by one by one. As if reality was a covalent abstraction or nothing more than a numerical simulation: bytes breaking to bits. A wild tangent to be sure, but since her love had been due back from the zombie stronghold of New Bethlehem the previous day but had still not shown, she needed, even craved, some avenue of distraction complex and strange enough to keep her from obsessing on the dread possibility she would never see the lieutenant ever again.

On top of that worry, rumors of an invincible black dragon patrolling the skies and swallowing planes whole added a darkly humorous strain of conspiracy to the screwed up situation. The thought of her love sharing airspace with some monster straight out of the Book of Revelation increased her anxiety sevenfold.

She lay her head down on the desk. Her thoughts went to the thing she’d sensed in Anna’s dream, a black wheel, an absolute negation. Had that been the dragon people were talking about then: perhaps the beast of Babylon that would usher in the final war between the angelic cohorts and the legions of Satan she had read about in her undergrad course on world religion? Or the parables of the Hindus that hinted at the never ending annihilation and regeneration of the universe, an unending conveyor belt of blue Krishnas going on forever representing the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega of each cycle.

She caught her breath and pushed herself to a sitting position. Other cultures believed all matter also had consciousness, not just those organic creatures with internal chemical processes moving through their individual systems. Perhaps rocks, planets and all cosmic phenomena had consciousness, too. Maybe it was only a dragon because that was the label that men had given it. For all she could figure, it might be prescient black hole birthed by the sacrificial rites of a depraved cult of Abaddon upon which the repetition of the divine comedy would play out seemingly like clockwork every Millennia? The biblical “second death” could actually be a cycle that had always gone on forever and ever…

She remembered how odd that in Revelations the devil was only banished “permanently” for a thousand years and then would be released from hell to do its damndest upon the world again; a singularity of repetition that ended abruptly at the eternal gates of New Jerusalem. In Christianity, the repetition was just a one off, a skip trace leading to the abolition of the human heavens—the stars and planets and all the matter the Big Bang was heir to—for the eternal light of the Father and the Son.

She had always questioned the primacy of the books that the powerful of their time had chosen to fill the scriptural canon. What and why the excluded Book of Enoch and the mysterious “watchers” who sired a race of giants? Or the Gospel of Peter that documented giant angels escorting a giant Jesus into heaven followed by a floating, talking cross? The fact of man’s discernment in relation to what became known and remained unseen told of an ulterior agenda. What had they wanted to keep hidden?

“May the circle be unbroken, by and by Lord, by and by…”

She hummed the old hymn and then thought of Ezekiel’s account of God’s throne room having “wheels within wheels.”

Clues were everywhere.

The final product printed for mass publication had been corrupted by the machinations of man. Man’s ability to create monsters for other’s consumption, to anoint with the negative colors of their fear, was well known to her. Possible though theoretical, these prefabricated monsters paled in comparison to the firsthand human monsters she’d known to be real. Passable enough in appearance to mingle with their prey undetected, they’d relinquished their claim on being human long before. Harvesting children who had been tortured before being ritualistically slaughtered, these real-life vampires feasted on the flesh and blood of youth’s essence in the vain hope it would vastly prolong their own miserable lives.

More horrible still, Dr. Vandyle had over time come to believe it was more the rush of dopamine from the physical act of the killing and the witnessing of the children’s pained despair before the ultimate release of death that was the main addictive cause of their soul-killing perversion. The drinking and devouring was just the cigarette after the spectacle of endurance of suffering had triggered a chemical avalanche of psycho-sexual release in the disfigurement of their grotesque brains.

            Misdirection being the enabling factor of mundane evil’s conceit, the blood drinkers had kept their chattel distracted by the fear-driven hysteria of international hoaxes and the perpetual chessboard reconfigurations of endless war. After the seismic paradigm shift of the Zombie Resurrection and its subsequent aftershocks, the slave class had been reduced to such an extent their numbers didn’t even rate the briefest moment of the cabal’s cynical attention. They had all just been wished to fade away, and largely the civilian population, unhappily, had complied.

If the dead could rise and its biblical significance be explained away by a coxcomb’s worth of poorly-furnished science it was not impossible to believe in giant bat-winged reptiles that dined on aeroframes of supersonic metal. Not at all impossible…she put down her pen…but at that moment it was all too much to fully comprehend.

Just as the doctor was nodding off into a discontented slumber, she was roused by a banging at her office door.

            “What is it!”

            “Lt. Langtree’s radio’d ahead,” the out-of-breath airman blurted through the door.

            Dr. Vandyle lurched to her feet. The chair crashed to the floor behind her as she lunged and flung open the door, “When?” 

            “He says he’s in the air,” the 1^st class Airman relayed the good bad news. “Could be a rough landing.”

            “Did he say why?” Dr. Vandyle grabbed the airman’s arm and pulled her inside then shut the door behind her. “Is he hurt?”

“That’s all I heard,” the airman shrugged, then put her hand in front of her mouth and pantomimed sucking on a cigarette.“But, now that you mention it, I think I might have heard something else...”

Dr. Vandyle smiled wickedly, thinking as it ever was thus. She reached inside her lab coat and handed her spy two hand-rolled cigarettes, “I trust dis will jog your memory?”

The airman dropped the precious smokes in the breast pocket of her BDUs before relaying all that she knew. “Some kind of zombie revolt in New Bethlehem, could be an all-out assault on our―”

“Why the rough landing?” the doctor grabbed the airman by the shoulders and shook her. “Is the lieutenant hurt?”

“Says he’s lost a lot of blood,” the Airman switched gears. “Will definitely need medical attention if he makes it this far.”

“ETA!”

 “Ten minutes,” the Airman replied with a nod. “The osprey’s signature should be on the horizon anytime now.”

The Doctor dropped two more cigarettes in the good spy’s breast pocket before running out the door.

Almost too weak to, she pushed herself onto her hands and knees, her whole body shaking. The bonfire crackled and popped sending sparks flying upward into the night sky. Shrill cries of agony were punctuated by those of animal release all around the perimeter of the roaring fire.

The black cocoon of flesh wrapped around him tightly. Indistinct bodies and body parts lashed his blood-slicked skin like writhing eels. To keep him from going irretrievably insane, Owen’s consciousness told him that he was dreaming.  Probing the slimed surface of the membrane, he felt for the welted lip of one of the vertical gashes that opened when he screamed her name. Sliding his fingers between the fleshy lips he tried to tear it open with his grasping hand. Peeling back the overlapping skin, he peered out into the horrid scene and tried to breathe again.

Anna crawled through the earth’s warm slurry of sweat, blood and semen. The prone and twisted bodies were melded together by the brute force and monstrous concupiscence of the physically dominant men. By then most had separated after the abominations of their lust had been spent. The innocent girls, ravage, bloodied and beaten, lay moaning and weeping in the mud. At the center of that fetid circle of suffering and misery, a fire raged inside Anna’s weeping heart. Her gaze fell upon it when her hand moved across the silken fabric partially buried in the mud.

“Anna!” Owen cried out from inside of the singularity.

Confusion welled up inside her from some unremembered past as someone almost familiar called her name. The singularity whorled on the edge of the field, a swirling void shaped like a full-length looking glass reflecting nothing but blackest night. Unseen by all excepting her, its presence was the catalyst to the slightest notion she had been there before because it had no bearing at all on the trove of memories that was drawing out so strong an emotional reaction as her hand kneaded the smooth fiber of Diocletian’s muddied golden robe.

 With the shot to her system of nervous energy, she gathered her feet beneath her and stood up on shaky legs, the robe hanging limply in her hands, an enticing swatch of the fabric burning her palm with unknown recognition, it’s mud-spattered color foreboding something half remembered.

The chill wind bit into her outside shoulder, the half of her body facing the fire felt the heat. The portal coalescing and blinking in and out of phase on the outskirts of the clearing changed angles and revealed the butchered body parts of her classmates welded together in the wheel-like monstrosity of flesh they would all become again, with her or without her. Within the wheel, an Indian girl balanced on one leg, the other raised and bending at the knee in front of the other as her six arms blurred in a matrix of repeating patterns.

“Aanya!” Anna. Mildred. Sarah. Madea. Onomatopoeia. Siddhartha…

Aanya convulsed with despair as the gravitational forces warping her body and soul exponentially increased. Then the three tunnel workers hanging from wires near the top of the giant screen went limp, then suddenly began to resume their struggle only to go completely limp again.  

She spun down into a nautilus-shaped hurly-burly of clutching, grasping hands. The woman shrunk from them, but they encircled her and pawed and groped her as she descended deeper into the vortex, along with the three dead workers that had been brought over into the dimension inside the giant view screen where she was trapped.

 Meanwhile, on the ramp, the goat man barked and bleated as he twirled like a top, and built to a crescendo of loud obnoxious nonsense.

Aanya hit the ground at the bottom of the deep well which she had been falling down and was immediately slung in the opposite direction, absorbing the essences of the dead workers as she flew back up through the wormhole and shot out into space.

 To the accompaniment of alpenhorns, the goat man galloped through the screen to where Aanya was about to be reabsorbed into the singularity. He reached out and grabbed Aanya by the horns. The young Indian woman screamed.

 Aanya found herself on the outside of the screen then, looking into the giant face of the goat as she drew back in a harness made to look like a dung-rolling scarab, an ancient Egyptian proxy for the daylong course of the sun. The goat’s face cried out to them from the surface of the projection screen, then cut to a horrifying mangle of eyes.

Haystacks whirled on the ramp in front of screaming and hysterical people separated from reality by a white film of gauze. The goat came down off the screen to stand amid their number. The gauze-wrapped apparitions fell to their knees and worshiped the bearded goat. 

 The projection screen became intricate clockworks, then a piston-driven train wheel, then clockworks again: Wheels within wheels. A whip cracked so loudly over the external speakers it reset all the many micro scenes happening within the bigger picture.  

A woman in a long red dress appeared at the top of the ramp to a flourish of trumpets. The goat man ran up the ramp to meet her. A goat woman with long horns, dressed in a white sheer leotard, knelt before a woman in the red dress with a 20 foot train and presented to the goat man her posterior parts by shaking her flanks. Shrieking with ecstasy, the goat man mounted her from behind for one thrust or two.  

The giant plasma screen showed a giant clock which kept spinning clockwise and then counterclockwise with no clear rhyme or reason. The performers migrated back up the ramp toward the spinning clock. Clockwise and counter clockwise; reversing and reversing again. The tunnels came into view on the screen; a train went in on one end and them came out of the other and everyone, except for the stuffed shirts watching from the bleachers, exploded in a bedlam of orgiastic paroxysm: jumping and screaming and waving their arms about like the unfortunate vessels of a spastic puppeteer. 

Anna had a flash of recognition she couldn’t pin down just before the vision of Aanya balancing between the wheel of dismembered virgins strobed like a weakening signal before flashing out of sight.

“Anna!”

Her name came from everywhere and nowhere. Through the aural distortion, she recognized the chorus of the doomed daughters of the Church of Universal Protest, the predator Diocletian’s scapegoats and sacrificial lambs; one on the lower end of the scale stood out like a snapdragon in a field of lilies and made her heart sing. Blood and gore bubbled from the vertical mouths peppering the singularity’s circular body and the darkness that seemed to rotate within its indistinct frame. In all its ugliness and horror, it spoke her name. It called to her in a way that made her wonder if angels disguised as devils might manifest before her eyes to test the faith of the uncertain. 

“You!” Diocletian screamed, coming round the fire to snatch the robe away from the dumbstruck girl.

She had had time to slip it on herself again and dance away before the real monster had come back to find her, but this time in this different timeline that coincidentally proved the mythology of time, preoccupied by the singularity’s intercession, she hadn’t and didn’t put it on but let him grab it away from her. Despite its filthiness, enough gold shone through to spare the person who wore it from the scythe-wielding reivers.

“Now you die!”

Diocletian raised his scythe, the silver blade glimmered in the firelight. She closed her eyes and was enlightened. Spreading her arms out to her sides she understood and raised one leg up to balance on the other. She saw that all was shade surviving in a world blocked at the confluence of all, that would pass away as certain as the resurrection of the other.

 The false prophet  raised the blade above her bloody, purple body about to enact his own twisted scriptural correction. Raising his face to the exploding sky, he cried out in ecstasy. Here was the one he had personally defiled. Over the tempered roar of the bon fire and the cries of raped virgins, Anna felt the blade cut deep into her torso, but felt no pain as she fell back onto the warm, moist soil as does an autumn leaf melt back in the earth to begin again.

The deacons emerged from the dark rows holding scythes, the sharpened-steel blades glinting in the fire light; the same light disappearing in the cold, dead pupils of their eyes. The premonition of death flashed through her mind from the future past, the first time she’d been there among the eternally-damaged souls would finally be her last.

Diocletian turned away, saliva glistening in his unruly beard, the thrill of murder oozing from his demented smile and glinting in his dilated eyes. The deacons began to separate themselves from the edge of the standing corn into the clearing, their scythes indiscriminately slashing and slicing the innocents’ and the pedophiles separately or together sprawled out in the mud.

The trampled earth around the fire soon became an abattoir of stinking piles of hot, bloody organs and mutilated flesh. Though her ability to see had left her, Anna heard its voice trumpeted over all the lower moans and screams of hell, her name again a clarion call rising above the fray as she breathed her last.

It had taken only weeks for Jed’s Lazari to regain all of its skin, and another week for it to gain enough strength for the general to begin its rigorous physical training, which he combined with the rote instruction of the mind, more abstract lessons to follow.

“Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five...” they called cadence as they jogged out onto the flats, past the scampering jack rabbits and gnarled scrub pine, counting by fives, then twos and threes and out into the great wide open by multiples of ten. Their packs were weighted with sand that would not cut into the canvas or rip into their skin like the caliche bricks they’d first used for the purpose of conditioning.

As the physical improvement commenced at a rapid pace so too Jed’s Lazari’s ability to soak up and retain knowledge was at a level far ahead of what would be considered exceptional in a newborn Lazari. The general knew from experience rehabilitating some of his own men and the old iron miners that had risen after they’d commandeered the hill, that there was a store of unconscious knowledge that, once tapped into, fanned out upon external teachings to unlock a multiplier of intuitive categorization that snowballed into an instantaneous understanding of several related subjects that had not yet before touched upon, but that were intrinsic. And in Jed’s Lazari, this phenomenon was itself accelerated beyond the boundaries of the normal range.

The fawning general did not consider the possibility that the attention he lavished upon his subject may have been the key factor in Jed’s Lazari’s unprecedented gains, or that his own monomania could be the dictionary definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bud lived in two worlds simultaneously, the pragmatic physical one that used bricks and anthracite to forge steel, and the invisible one that relied on unseen forces to mold a future-present that would be appealing to the Zombie God and His chosen people. 

As they neared the base of New Bethlehem on their return loop, the radial thwop reached them just before Lt. Langtree’s osprey rose over the top of the hill, its oversized props blurring at its sides like dragonfly wings. For a moment, hovering just beneath the burning disc of the sun, the aircraft angled nose down and closed on the two Lazari staring back defiantly at the aircraft bearing down on them, driving two columns of whirling sand before it like a vengeful Old Testament God.

Jed’s Lazari tapped General Bud on the shoulder and asked, “Friend?” He gestured at the oncoming debris field.

General Bud spit onto the desert floor and wiped sweat off his brow. “Maybe used to be.”

The osprey stopped just before it got close enough to blast them with sand, tumbleweed and various other high-velocity litters. Then it slowly descended and touched down on the sand, it’s thwopping blade’s high pitched sound scaling down by the second.

Bud looked at his protégé. “This will be a lesson in palace intrigue and political theater.”

“Something to think on.” Jed’s Lazari’s lids slid over his bulging eyeballs with a ponderous blink. Though advanced in physical development and mental acuity, his facial features were lagging behind his mentality, his sunken eye sockets and sharp cheekbones still strongly suggestive of the textbook zombie ‘look.’ He turned his head toward Bud. “This is a bad man?”

“To be feared more than an outright enemy,” instructed General Bud, “you must be forever wary of the false friend, the enemy within.”

The side bay door of the grounded osprey swung open and out jumped Lt. Langtree, dragging Sarai behind him by the arm.

“What the hell, general?” screamed the irate Texan, slingshotting the young woman back toward the Lazari. “Take back your goddamn damsel in distress!” Sarai stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. “You think I’m dumb enough to fall for this!”

            “Such a grand entrance…” the general gestured toward the osprey in the double slit strobe of the spinning rotors,...“deserves a better accusation!”

Sarai stayed on her hands and knees, staring at the ground midway between the lieutenant and the general.

“Yeah well, I’m sorry your attempt at spycraft didn’t work out the way you planned.”

            “I’m flattered that you think so lowly of me.” General Bud walked slowly toward Sarai. “But I will gladly take back this so-called damsel.”

Sarai sat back on her haunches and raised her forearm to shield herself, but General Bud only latched onto her wrist and hauled her back up to her feet. She noticed Jed’s Lazari then standing there next to them and briefly wondered if she was dreaming.

“Who the hell is this?” Langtree asked, gesturing toward Jed’s Lazari.

“An old friend!” The general dragged the whimpering girl out from under the osprey’s slowing rotors.

“Can’t be that old,” replied the Texan. “And I doubt if you have any friends!”

Sarai raked Bud’s arm with her fingernails hard enough to draw blood. Still, he gripped her wrist tightly, savoring the pain with an exaggerated smile, showing off his impressive teeth.

“You just wanted New Bethlehem as a stopgap!” General Bud clamped down on Sarai’s wrist as the silhouettes of his fellow zombies were gathering at the top of the hill. “I knew you never really wanted a true alliance with us when you brought up the idea we’d remain ‘separate but equal.’

“That wasn’t my idea!”

The rotor’s had slowed enough for them to be able to be heard without shouting. The lieutenant bowed his head because he couldn’t keep looking into the general’s eyes for shame.

“Zombie or no, I’ve got no problem with you.”

“Zombies?” The general pulled Sarai close, maniacally smiling. “Zombies!”

Sarai pushed back on the general’s chest to try and keep him away and then, realizing she had no power to resist his bloody intention, began to wail blood curdling screams. “Jed! I know it’s you! Help me!”

“I’ll show you stinking zombies!”

Despite her resistance, he pulled her close, arched his head back and opened wide, aiming to clamp down on and rip out her throat as he’d done to Jed’s Lazari those many years before.

In a blinding blur of motion, Jed’s Lazari caught General Bud with a sharp elbow across the temple. Langtree pulled his gun just as the inert body of General Bud crumpled to the desert floor. Luckily for Bud and Sarai, Jed’s Lazari was much faster on the draw than the lieutenant. 

The fledgling zombie and heir-apparent to New Bethlehem’s throne, Jed’s Lazari stood like a statue staring down at his unconscious mentor as if he couldn’t grasp what had led him to do what he had done. The then deathly silent girl’s previous hysterical scream twisted down the braided pathways of his brain toward some partially opened doorway of perception.

Who is Jed? Am I? I am? Who?

Jed’s Lazari fell down on his knees and grasped his head in his two hands, grappling with the situation, all his thoughts screaming, My God, what have I done!?

Hurtling from out the lightning flash reaching up through the clouds and nearly into space, the singularity used the door that had been opened to it; the wormhole the experiment had birthed came and went in a timeless flash of creation, existing in that micron of forever a microsecond more than it had needed to be to be able to breach the brane and hurtle through.

Straight white teeth and sagacious brown eyes in an ashram in Peru, the girl sweated dharma like liquid wax into the ceramic base of a lighted candle. Touched by the spark of inspiration from the disruption in the fabric of space and time, she welcomed the universe in the happy baby pose and involuntarily smiled after she incidentally farted.

Swirling down into the Godhead, Aanya passed through the hall of infinite eyes, staring, blinking and screaming at her with their bloodshot glare. The goat man pranced and stumbled up and down the ramp punctuating his jerking movements with guttural glottal stops of gibberish and unintelligible imprecations. Ernest Borgnine had already taken his turn as the goat-horned god. David Bowie’s bejeweled skull rotated weightless into space, what remained of Major Tom. Aanya felt her tensions ease, gaining speed and force at every turn her terminal contortions had started to unwind, though the over reaction on the other end could likely rip her head off of her shoulders, or remove her shoulders from her head as the opposite reaction crossed over the point of equilibrium, missing the efficacy of middle ground until entropy and resignation reigned supreme.     

Stars stopped in the sky. The universe sighed, and held its breath. The singularity zeroed back to its point of origin, gliding on rigid black wings through the regimented Galaxies swimming in formation in the ocean of ions, their black oblongs crowding out the sky in negative space. Tens of millions of lost sheep jonesing for the slavish enchantment of their black mirrors had been starved of their mental sustenance by the electro magnetic pulse kill shot that had cast the world into darkness years before, more distressed by the loss of the internet and its distraction at first than the physical suffering and slow death that loomed before them from crushing hunger, unbearable thirst and the worldwide mayhem wrought by these terrible afflictions. 

Conceived in Faido, Switzerland through the simulacrum of the cover story that it was just a simple opening cermony, the participants added their performances to the spell. Somehow Aanya had been trapped in the giant plasma screen of the grand opening of the tunnel which she had participated in ten ways before, the event that was actually a ritual to pave the way for CERN to open up the energy fields and let whatever had been lurking on the other side to come in. Like reruns of Uncle Remus bouncing back from the Van Allen Belt and half remembered one-hit-wonders echoing down gamma-rich dimensions folded into invisible avenues of space, it was in the hectare of corn harvested early for the ritual sacrifice of virgins, General Bud’s symbolic death knell of the zombie resurrection and Aanya’s accidental transubstantiation of The Trashmen that had formed the tripartite cosmic scaffolding onto which the triangulated correction did ascend.

Extending down the concrete tunnel, running the length of the tunnel’s curvature it went. An unending solid state worm whose guts were about to give up the secrets of the insane quantum world,  it disappeared around the corner of each vanishing point, ahead as well as behind. The square corridor vibrated with all the power the place could muster and they had to scream to be understood. 

            “There is about to be a world’s worth of particle energy unleashed through this drag strip!” Winston gestured at the synchrotron as they walked out into the thrumming concrete tunnel.

            “Maybe we shouldn’t be down here!” Aanya put her hands over her ears, the vibratory soundscape was almost painful.  She took out her phone and was not surprised to see she had zero bars.

            “I dream of you Aanya,” the lovelorn scientist confessed, dropping to one knee.

            “I thought you wanted a fast and dirty!” Aanya, jerked her hand from his grasp, suddenly disgusted with his perverse action.

            “Aanya!” Winston lurched to his feet and followed her through the pulsing corridor. “Wait!”

            She turned around and grabbed him by the collar, pulled his face down to hers for a passionate kiss, then pushed him away, just as passionately. “What is this, Winston? You know I must marry a Hindu man!”

            “Perhaps I gobbered ahead myself.” Winston gulped as she had him by the lapels. “Sometimes I don’t think.”

            She released him with a cry of exasperation, then turned away and continued walking down the line of the pulsing Super Proton Synchrotron. Winston followed close, his head bowed like a sad puppy.

After a few hundred feet of walking to the audible build up of advanced proton energy and the revving hive-like hum of the manifold electron, she turned back to him and said, “You scared the naraka out of me, Winston. Please tell me you were joking!”

Winston raised his hands palm out and shrugged as if to say, ‘Who me?’ doing his darndest to get out of saying anything at all.

“This has gone too far!” Aanya raised her hand and looked away. “I want out!” She began to walk. “It’s been a fun experiment, I suppose, but the outcomes are too risky and far outweigh the returns!”

“Oh bugger your daddy, you make it sound so analytical,” Winston moaned, catching up with her and reaching for her hand. “Where is your sense of adventure, of mystery and the often skullduggered fancies of fate?”

She was about to say, ‘That’s easy for you to say!’ —A man in a man’s world of scientific exploration with a secure position and a record of substantive research to fall back on. But the throbbing machine had completely overwhelmed the situation. The aural thrum ramped up immediately into a self-perpetuating feedback loop of electronic distortion that drowned out everything. The track light tubes running the length of the tunnel began to flicker off and on so quickly the space soon resembled the dance floor of an old disco awash with dueling strobe lights.

            Aanya blinked to get her bearings and combat the fit of vertigo the stop-action light was triggering in her brain. As she tried to keep her balance, the muffled sounds of her most recent Youtube fixation started back up from the phone, suddenly and mysteriously back online inside her backpack.

            Bird, bird, bird izza word, a wella, bird bird, bird bird izza word a well don’t you know about the bird?

            “The year is one…well, more correctly I suppose, it’s zero.” Winston’s voice managed to get through to her as well, as he clapped his hands and phased in and out of silhouette and saturation at frame rates too fast for Aanya to process,  jerking toward her down the large square concrete corridor.  “The universe’s gone and given us goose eggs, don’t you see?”

            “Ok now you’re scaring me!” She stumbled through the spinning light and darkness, each state too fleeting to act as one or the other, as if reality had become a double slit test and, God only knew, if she was a particle or a wave. Regardless, she found it difficult to navigate, much less keep her balance, in such a psychedelic situation.

            “For what we deemed eternity the damn thing had been expanding!” He advanced on her, reaching in his breast pocket and pulling out a wicked-looking wrought iron knife. “But now, well, it seems we’ve got quite a singularity on our hands, and, thus, another need.” He stabbed the air with the knife and smiled with his impressive set of snaggly British teeth.

She tried to run away and stumbled onto the concrete floor, screaming in horror. Deathly afraid she’d was about to be stabbed, feel the heavy steel blade pierce her body, she leaped back to her feet, at the same time swinging her heavy backpack to deflect the knife he was trying to  thrust into her. She whiffed, and hit nothing; he was farther back than she had thought. The momentum of the backpack kept her pirouetting a full 360 degrees before she could stop herself and try to put more distance between her and the murderous zombie he had become, menacing her down the corridor with halting and relentless advances. “All you girls these days are such sluts we couldn’t find a single virgin…so, alas, it falls to you.”

            Desperate, she unzipped the small pocket and took out her phone, fumbling with it to turn on its flashlight so that she might mitigate the strobing atmosphere that was blowing her mind so much it was affecting her sense of spatial orientation and balance. The young man on her Galaxy screen, in the ill fitting suit and a fop of blonde hair dangling down across his forehead sang into a microphone as he duck walked around the black and white stage.

            “Papa oom mao mao, papa o mama mao!”

            Distracted, Aanya didn’t see Winston closing in on her until it was almost too late.

Instinctively, she danced to the side and swept her leg in front of her other leg’s knee, spreading her arms for balance as Winston made a clumsy play for the body that no longer occupied the space that he was trying to command.

Missing her, for the most part, his lunging grab made contact with Aanya’s hand and knocked her phone into the air. Up it span, like Kubric’s bone, and when it inexorably came down it neared the pulsing Super Proton Synchrotron and seemed, for a moment to disappear, before clanking off the metal casing and crashing to the floor. Blue bolts of electricity began to oscillate faster and faster between the Synchrotron and the grounded mobile device.

            “Aanya!” The mad scientist brandished his knife. “I love you!”

            “Stop!” The emotionally wrung out young woman shouted back at him as the reaction between the plasma proton beam and the electromagnetism of Aanya’s phone filled the corridor became more blue lightning than empty space.

The monstrous gravitation accompanying the chain reaction twisted and bent her physical body into acute angles it was never meant to be able to conform to. Spinning and whirling, Aanya was sucked into the unending spiral of the singularity. Winston’s hair stood straight up off his straw colored head as he was lit up by the lightning. Shot through the heart with a fatal arrhythmia, he fell down upon the concrete floor, head-bouncing dead.

He shook his head in consternation. Hadn’t that all been a dream?  Things had gotten weird, even before the obelisk made of a million smart phones and the descent beneath the tree. And what to make of what came between his visionary time with Anna and the training heavy week-to-week of a soldier? Everything else was just killing time until he could make his way to the bend in the river back to her again and he couldn’t tell which existence was real and which a dream.

 “I must be dreaming again,” he said, snuggling against her beneath the blanket.

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t believe what you are saying but,” he turned to face her, “even though it makes no sense, you make me real.”

She stared back, her eyebrows curling into question marks, then let slip a subtle smile. He laughed softly then looked away wondering if what he’d just said had made any sense to her. It had sounded good in his head, but not so much after he had spoken. 

“You clever, clever boy,” she said, rubbing his thigh beneath the blanket. “You know more than you think.”

He whispered back, "I do."

            “You do,” she cooed, leaning over and playfully biting his ear.

            Owen gazed silently up at the purple twilight and the remaining day fading to pink in the western sky. “I don’t know,” he admitted, wishing he was more deserving of her faith. “I just don’t understand.”

            “Why do you come here to see me each week?”

            He shook his head and said nothing, leaning into it when she kissed his cheek.

            “It’s because you want to fuck me.” She moved her hand up his thigh and rubbed his crotch. “I can feel it.”

            Overcome by the sensation, he smashed his body into hers and forced her to her back, already on the verge from the feeling of her hand against him through the thick fabric of his BDUs. Unbuttoning the top button, he felt his way beneath the waist band of her jeans, the zipper unzipped by the pressure of his grubbing hand. 

Grasping his wrist, she ripped his hand away and turned to face him.

 “Love is the word, but flesh made the world.”

“Papa ohm mao mao,” he repeated as he went in for the kill.

"Not this way." She twisted away from him.

He persisted for a moment, thinking perhaps she’d give in to the uncontrollable urge that he was feeling. As she continued to fight him, he rolled off her in a rage.

"You started me!" He pounded the ground with his fists.

“You're right. I'm sorry. It just not right right now."

“When will it be right!?”

“Well certainly when you don’t attack me.”

“You were practically jerking me off!" He sat up and started laughing to keep from crying or punching her in her stupid face.

“You’re right…I’m sorry.”

 He lay back again and stared up into the sky with his hands behind his head. He clenched his jaw, wondering when and if anything would ever be right for him, knowing that self pity bred more misery and that he needed to just suck it up again and go steadfast and stoic into the future as many times as he could keep getting up from the inevitable crashes he was prone to.

"Here, sit up." She put her hand behind his neck and pulled him to a sitting position, surprising him with her unnatural strength.

"What the...."

"You've seen where I've been haven't you?"

"I'm doing my best to believe it wasn't all a dream."

"That's funny, sometimes I have the strength of dreams." She draped the blanket around both of their shoulders. "Please. You have to be patient…I need you.” 

“You’ve a funny way of showing it.”

“I wanted you, you must know it but I can’t do it now.”

“My dad told me once there’s a sucker born every minute so don’t be that sucker.”

”There’s something growing inside of me, a parasite.”

“Really.” Owen shook his head. “You need some kind of medicine?”

“Well…sort of” She pulled the blanket. “Something like that I guess.”

“I could probably get my hands on some antibiotics or ivermectin.”

She breathed in deep and exhaled slowly before saying, “I need an abortion.”

            He didn’t say anything for a moment as the revelation sunk in. He turned to face her and smiled. “Come again?”

            “It’s impossible to explain, but I’m pregnant with the child of the demon who raped me.”

            “Demon?” He made a half hearted joke if only to try and raise his own spirits. “Like Beelzebub or King Pamon?”

            “No.” She shivered. “His name was Diocletian.”

“Laugh, ahh, reticent lethe, Sinbad!”

“My dear,” said Dr. Vandyle, “I cannot understand vat you are saying.”

Anna choked back all the words she was trying to explain herself with. Confounded by the fact she could not get through, she stopped speaking. Her ability to communicate had been stymied by some inexplicable natural phenomenon or supernatural whim. The girl who, by her own guile, escaped the scythes of the Church of Universal Protest’s reapers and murdered the crazed pedophile priest had begun to speak in tongues. The monster slipped naked from the golden robe and slithered through the charnel house behind her eyes, making his way back to where she lay helpless in the mud.

“What iz it?” asked Doctor Vandyle, alarmed at the abject terror transforming the girl’s face.

Anna scratched letters on the palm of her hand with her index finger, pantomiming pencil on paper. The doctor nodded and left the room, returning minutes later, followed by an older man in a lab coat who was carrying a pad of paper.

“If you would be so good as to recite for us a short poem or some nursery rhyme that you have memorized.”

Anna closed her eyes and shook her head with frustration, ashamed at having to perform like a trained seal.

“Please,” Dr. Vandyle pleaded. “We must confirm the pathology.”

Trusting the doctor, Anna nodded and took a breath, and began to recite a poem she’d learned when she was still a child.

The man Dr. Vandyle had brought with her into the room, a linguist who spoke several languages, scratched the vowel sounds and glottal stops on the notepad.

Dr. Vandyle held her chin in her hand and knotted her eyebrows as she studied the girl. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men … couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” Anna finished the nursery rhyme and glanced over at the tight-lipped blonde doctor and the man, who was still busily scratching on the pad.

“Iz it another language?” she asked when the man had stopped writing.

“Not exactly.” The linguist looked over the top of his glasses.

“Well zen, what iz it?”

The man glanced back down at his transcription and nodded his grey head. “It sounds like English, spoken backward.”

Dr. Vandyle nodded, it made sense to her understanding only after she’d been told, though it had been obvious all along.

Anna sat up in her bed and gestured for the notepad. She had heard the claim, and even though she had no idea how it was happening, didn’t want to add to the confusion by continuing to try and communicate verbally. She took the pen and paper and began to write in letters three inches tall and when she was finished, ripped out the page and handed it to them, pointing at the paper and then at her ears hoping she could get across what she was asking them to do.

The two standing at the side of the girl’s bed looked at each other once they’d read what she had written.

Dr. Vandyle shook her head, mystified, and asked her, “Iz this some kind of joke?”

“Dear ta!”

            The man took the paper from his colleague and read out loud, “Papa oh mao mao ... Papa oom mama mao.”

Dr. Vandyle wrung her hands as she glanced from the girl to the doctor and back again. Anna fell back and slammed her head into the pillow, bawling a guttural wail. The tenets of communication were breaking down into a compendium of absurd non sequiturs. The laws of cause and effect appeared to have no consequence upon the translation of thought to hand to paper.  The nonsense had appeared, magically and out of the blue, to replace what her memory told her she had, in her mind, written down. 

The days following her verbal anomaly, Anna’s senses abandoned her one by one. A day after she had started talking backward, her ability to vocalize disappeared altogether.

Dr. Vandyle’s helpless rage was mirrored in the frustration reflected in the poor girl’s face every time she opened her mouth to try and speak, but all that she could do was generate a glottal sublimation of sound that sounded painful to make and was painful to listen to. Then, through exhaustion or physical disability, even that went away. The next day, it seemed, the ability to hear had been taken away from her, the girl adamantly shaking her head and pointing at her ears as the doctor tried to talk to her, each syllable spoken in vain.

The progression of this regression wasn’t hard to predict and when Dr. Vandyle arrived early the next day she was not surprised to find her lying flat on her back with tears streaming down onto the pillow. Her sightless eyes quivered in the sockets with a dissociated nerve impulse. Shortly, the poor girl had fallen into a state of catalepsy from which she could not be shaken.

Feeling the guard’s eyes upon her, the reluctant zombie ran a hand across the chain link, feigning nonchalance as she slunk along the fence line. How many years before she became too young to fully function or remember? And what would happen to her then? Were there already care homes in the civilized world again, set up to meet the needs of the rapidly de-aging?  How was she going to live, or more exactly ... die? Would they surgically insert her into a surrogate womb that her decelerating body would simply melt into or throw her in a bio-hazard trash can filled with antiseptic plastic liners and used needles?

She thought of Jed and the sky exploding above them as they came together in the sleeping bag that last time before they’d stumbled onto New Bethlehem. The only thing keeping her from going out in a blaze of righteous revenge was the promise that one day he’d come back again. Maybe to save her ... but that was wishful thinking counter to everything she already knew about the blackout of recollection from one life to the next. Still, she had lived through all their past history, and she could fill him in on everything right up to the present.

“Young lady,” Langtree’s Texas twang snuck up behind her without warning. “From what are you seeking asylum?” The tall Texan wasted no time getting to the point. 

“General Bud ...” she trailed off, twisting her short hair with her right index finger.

“You sure about that?”

“He threatened to kill me.”

“Did he ever hurt you?”

“I didn’t give him the chance,” snapped Sarai, feeling she needed to ratchet up her game if she wanted him to believe her story.  “If I hadn’t been able to get in here then I’d be dead.”

She squeezed shut her eyes and tried to summon tears. She thought of Jed lying on the desert floor bleeding out from the neck.

“How dare you doubt me!” she sobbed diving down into the depths of all of her collective sorrow, imagining Jesus Christ suffering on the cross as crows pecked at his open wounds and Roman soldiers stood below, laughing and drawing lots for his clothes. “How dare you!”

“Now, now,” said Langtree, softening to her act. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

Two sets of footsteps scraped on the path leading up from the fields outside the wire as Sarai turned her head away from Langtree, sniveling like a little girl who’d just been told she’d get no dessert. In the green light of the misshapen moon, the inky silhouette of General Bud came into view around the last row of corn, leading another man who was limping along haltingly as if a new convert to the act of walking. Then Sarai caught her breath and gripped the chain link fence to quell the shrill cry that had shot up into her throat.

“What is it?” asked Langtree, noting the sudden change in her demeanor. Then he noticed the pair outside the fence shambling past the Texas compound to go on up the hill. “What in the Sam Hill?”

The jerky, faltering man was completely naked and appeared to have holes and perforations that rot and violence could be the only answers for as it dawned on both of them at the same time that the second man was a freshly resurrected corpse.

“Jed!” Sarai croaked, unable to tame her voice.

General Bud, so preoccupied with the emergence of a possible successor, either didn’t hear her plaintive cry or chose to ignore it. The naked man clinging to General Bud’s hand heard, however, and turned his head, locking eyes with Sarai, the foggy whites hanging in their sockets like a pair of runny egg yolks.

“Who’ve you got there, general!” inquired the lieutenant, perhaps too casual to comply with the military bearing he and General Bud’s relationship demanded.

“A new worker,” called General Bud, disregarding the breach of protocol. “Freshly sprouted.”

All true, but free of the hopes and lofty expectations Bud attached to the 2^nd coming of the man he’d murdered to pave the way for the zombie exodus he’d envisioned. He felt the eyes of Texas on his back as they trudged toward the torchlight that surrounded the open air foundry where his people were busy repairing the main furnace, and though his heart sang, he kept it all to himself. Even he, in his partial delusionary mindset, knew how unusual it would sound if he tried to communicate how he really felt about the entire situation, not to mention how dangerous it was to reveal too much, too soon to a womb-born man that had set up their people’s partnership as a lip service “equal” segregation.

Sarai stood, transfixed by the glimpse she’d gotten of his face, the high cheekbones and upturned nose all so reminiscent of the man she had known before. It had been too dark, too nondescript a sample of a familiar face lighted by the dim luminescence of a partially full moon to gauge if there had been even the least bit of recognition looking back at her through those rheumy eyes.

Lt. Langtree walked to the end of the compound and, looking over Sarai’s shoulder, watched the zombie leader leading the other by the hand back up the hill. By physically separating themselves behind a fence at the very beginning, Langtree realized the two factions would remain in a partially antagonistic alliance of convenience where checks and balances would have to be carefully implemented lest either side gain the upper hand. Deep down he knew General Bud was superior to them all. With a nascent steel industry he’d started from nothing but a pile of old library books, adobe bricks and a ghost town on a hill, he’d demonstrated a genius for organization and innovation greater than anything the lieutenant had ever seen. He knew it was a mistake to have given in to his commanders’ misgivings about integrating too fully with the Resurrected, or Zombies as his leaders referred to them. Whatever they were, Langtree had come to see that Bud, as far as smarts and the wherewithal to turn knowledge into action went, was, regardless of his species, a supreme architect and commander.

“Well it’s too late now,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head regretfully.

Sarai unlaced her fingers from the fence and turned to face him. “Too late for what?”

“I was just talking to myself,” Langtree deflected the question. Then, noticing the woman before him was shaking, he asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” she sidestepped and was by him before he could decipher another cue. “I’ve been told there’s a sleeping bag for me in the big tent.”

“Whatever you can find.” Langtree’s word chased after her as she slunk away with mincing footsteps, scuffing sand. “We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

With grudging allegiance to the plan to isolate and marginalize General Bud, or whatever the outside world declared him: Lazari, Chosen or dirty zombie dog, it didn’t make it any easier for him, or less regrettable.  Turning back to the scene on the hill, Lt. Langtree intuited there was more to this picture than he could see. It was easy to spot the old damsel in distress spy game a thousand miles off, but this wrinkle of the ‘new worker’ was definitely a wrench thrown in the gears.

The fly boy spat on the ground and turned away from the puzzling scene. In his opinion, it was was a mistake he’d helped sanction the separate-but-equal forced segregation between the Zombies and Texas. Didn’t they have enough trouble trying to thwart and anticipate the stratagems of their enemies in DC than promoting division between their allies?

When the war was over and the scribes got around to carving the lopsided truth into stone would a plea of ‘just following orders’ have any historic precedent or popular sentiment working in its favor? The answer to that question was obvious in regard to Langtree’s thinking.

Tantamount to the calculus of war was winning and, sometimes, following orders was a detriment to that equation. All men of consequence faced a moment of truth that compelled them to make a decision while the ultimate victory was still in the balance; one that would emblazon their name across the sky in fiery glory or make them history’s eternal villain. Knowing when to Cry Havoc was an unquantifiable gamble taken at the moment it was most likely to seize the advantage. Pressing your luck that what’s upside down today will come full circle tomorrow and treason in the short term will be recorded in the histories of the world as uncanny and heroic vision in the long run was the thing.

Ever since Dr. Vandyle had been helping her work through the brutal remembrances of the massacre, the weight of the trauma was draining from her slowly, leaving a vacuum that had yet to be filled with anything but lightness and bliss.

“Anna!”

Her name carried to her on the wind. The girl sighed, then turned to see the blonde doctor waving at her from the blacktop basketball courts adjacent the tightly clustered adobe buildings sprawled along the mesa.

“I would like to introduce you to another patient of mine,” said the doctor as a tall figure stepped out from behind her.

The young man appeared a wisp, a skinny rake of vertical angles, so easily had he been eclipsed by the slim contours of Dr. Vandyle’s svelte body. As Anna drew closer, she witnessed the spark of recognition combusting into flame behind the young man’s haunted eyes.

“No, please,” he whimpered as Anna stepped onto the cracked cement slab as Dr. Vandyle held onto the chain of the handcuffs holding his arms locked behind his back. “Dear God it can’t be!” Unable to run, the prisoner fell to his knees and slumped over, his nose pressed against the hard, hot ground. “Not again!”

“He was found amid a pile of dismembered corpses in the center of your former Church of Universal Protest outpost,” Dr. Vandyle said standing over the prostrate soldier.

“Oh God,” he moaned, then, glancing back up only to immediately hide his face again and cried out, “Anna, how can it be?”

“How does he know my name.” Astonished, the young lady looked up and pleaded. “How does he know me?”

The boy snuffled in response and, still averting his eyes, rocked forward and back on his knees, mumbling incoherently.

Anna looked back up at Dr. Vandyle, shaking her head in dismay. “Why is he handcuffed?”

“He is accused of murder.”

Anna took a step back. Though experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu, she was still confused as to why the doctor was introducing her to this criminally insane young man.

“The person he is supposed to have murdered is you.”