Anthology of Ichor III: Gears of Damnation (22 page)

“
Would you like me to organize a convoy and go after them, Mr. President?”

“
Oh no, no,” Albert laughed. “And don’t call me Mr. President anymore. That’s far too formal. I may be the president of this company, but that doesn’t mean I’m any better than my employees. The way I see it, we’re all working for the common good. We all visualize a world without overpopulation, a world freed from the bonds of social morality. We seek to erase the lies created by religion and replace them with truth. The one defining truth, that mankind is an animal, no different than his equine brethren, and needs to consider himself such. Do you understand?”

“
Yes sir, but…”

The smile disappeared from Albert’s lips. “There is no room for doubt. The evolutionary process must continue, and all unbelievers must be removed.”

The guard backed toward the door. Albert could see the fear glistening in his eyes; he could smell it in his sweat. Fear was a beautiful thing. It brought out the animal in him. He could feel his fists clench and his lips peel back in a reptilian smile.

“
Sir… what are you doing?”

Albert circled closer, his back arched. “Did you know that lions sometimes kill cubs? They kill them. Then they eat them. Do you know why?”

“
Sir, I fail to see what this has to do with the situation.”

“
Oh, it has everything to do with the situation. You see, lions must kill cubs to protect their own families. And right now, I have to do the same thing.”

Albert leapt forward, pearly canines bared and ready for action. He slammed his fists down on the guard’s neck, hearing it break with a loud snap as the man turned to flee. The guard tried to scream, crumbling to his knees. He tried to call for help, but it was too late. Albert was on top of him, pounding his head into the ground with savage blows.

Within moments, it was all over. The guard was motionless, and his head had been reduced to a steaming red crater. His entire parietal bone had been smashed and little bits of brain poked through the ruined flesh.

Albert closed his eyes, feeling his heart thunder and smelling the mutilated corpse beneath him. He hadn’t felt so alive in a long time. The blood coating his face and hands sent a shiver down his spine. It was so warm and gooey and wonderful. He could sit there and glory over his kill all day, but that wouldn’t be very productive. He had other towns to experiment on, and new drugs to make.

His solution was almost complete. All he needed to do was take away the disfiguring side effects, and it would be absolutely perfect.

Soon the entire world would know the name Wonderworld Industries.

Soon the entire world would be thrown into primal chaos.

Just like nature intended.

Albert got to his feet and slicked back his hair. Someone should tell the guard’s wife that he would not be coming home. Pity, because he had a pair of young children too. But that was the reality of human nature. It was a dog-eat-dog world. Only the strong would survive.

EPILOGUE

The man and his son never reached civilization. Their minivan was discovered by the State Patrol on Highway 160, traveling east toward Kansas. It had veered off the road and flipped, rolling approximately five times and ending up in a ditch.

The wreckage was still smoldering when the first squad car arrived. Of course, the fire station was called and the plates were identified, but there were no bodies discovered. It was as if they’d vanished into thin air.

Several crime scene investigators theorized that the occupants had been pitched from the car during the initial crash, but that didn’t explain the excessive amount of blood on the hood of the car, or the pair of footprints leading away from the wreckage.

Weeks later the crash would be deemed purely accidental, and written off as a DUI. Nobody would suspect foul play. In fact, the only attention it would receive would be a little three-paragraph blurb on page twelve of the
Durango Chronicle
.

Sure, family members were notified and a little wooden cross was placed at the scene, but no one really cared. A few officers muttered “poor bastards” or “stupid sons of bitches” at the crash site, but that was the extent of the sympathy they received. Most people didn’t give it a second thought. The van’s driver and passenger became just another statistic, just another casualty of drunk driving.

BEST SERVED COLD

by

Marc Sorondo

Johan sat by the tiny fire, eying his surroundings for wood or paper or anything else that would burn. A puff of wind blew thin smoke in his face, and he crinkled up his nose. The fire smelled horrible, consisting almost entirely of burning garbage that had been dragged away from the village by the winter winds.

It warmed his face and brought a thin sheen of sweat out on his forehead. His uniform was warm and after all, it hadn’t snowed for the past few hours, so the air was dry and crisp.
He was sweating, his armpits soaked, after running for what had seemed like miles. His uniform , heavy green wool marked by a red armband and various pins and emblems, had done its job well. He didn’t need the small fire to keep warm.

But he did need it.

His present situation, in Johan’s opinion at least,
served to prove all that Der Fuhrer had said was correct.
These people were inferior and dangerous at the same time, relying on their trickery to undermine Aryan supremacy.

Johan looked at the fire and then at his problem. He checked his ammunition and saw that it was running low – his rifle was almost empty and then all he’d have was a few shots of his pistol. Not that it mattered. Bullets weren’t the solution to this problem; he knew that. He’d tried them, and they’d failed.

The fire would buy him some time – time to think, to figure things out. Unfortunately the fire was not a permanent solution. It had snowed quite a bit lately, and the sky had darkened, promising more. His fire was doomed.

Johan looked at his situation again, and, finding that no solution would come to mind, muttered in rough, guttural German, “I’m going to kill that fucking Jew.”

~*~

The old rabbi had seen enough, he’d told them. He’d seen his people harassed, seen them reduced to little more than animals in the eyes of the state, seen them belittled and brutalized, but he would stand for no more.

Johan and the two soldiers who’d once been his best friends, Dietrich and Aldous, had just laughed at the old man, laughed right in his face in front of all of his people.

Three days, he said, holding up three long, arthritic fingers, swollen at every crooked joint. Three days and he wanted them out of his village, out of the whole area. One way or another the village would be rid of them, and the old rabbi suggested they leave of their own power.

“
And if we don’t? What power do you have to make us leave?”

“
I know a way. Taught to me by a rabbi in Prague. A wise and ancient man, he maintained all of the holy secrets, and some of them he taught to rabbis who had proven their holiness, and…”

Johan spit in the old man’s face, earning barks of laughter from his friends. “You are no holy man. You are a Jew. You’re subhuman. We’re never leaving.”

“
Three days,” the rabbi repeated as he wiped the spit from his face. “Three days and you will leave.”

Johan, Dietrich, and Aldous laughed again. Johan scanned the faces of the people gathered around them. He saw anger and fear mixed in their eyes. They wanted so badly to end this, to lash out, but they knew better. Only the old man was stupid enough to think a dirty Jew could stand up to the power of the Third Reich.

As they left, Johan said back, “Why don’t you kill another Messiah, you piece of shit.”

This brought another chuckle from his friends, good friends who were now dead.

Johan knew the old man was bluffing with his mystical talk about holy secrets, that at best he’d scrounged up a few weapons and would try an ambush of some kind.

He went back to their makeshift base of operations to use the radio and call his commanding officer. He said that perhaps this little village was planning a resistance, and since there were only three of them who’d been left to keep order…

“
A resistance?” his commanding officer had interrupted. “You haven’t been able to maintain control?”

“
We have…nothing’s happened…but I think they may be planning…” Johan started.

“
Planning? Just kill the ones that you think are planning and that will be the end of it.”

“
Yes, sir, but…”

“
No. Do it. Frankly, I’d rather have you wipe that village clean than lose control of it.” He broke the connection.

Johan knew then that the rabbi had to die.

~*~

The fire was getting weak, which made Johan nervous. He hadn’t come up with a plan. He needed to think, not to run himself into exhaustion, only to fall and….and let his problem catch up with him.

He took off the jacket of his uniform and dropped it into the center of the fire.

Now only the fire was keeping him warm, only the fire was keeping him alive, and even his thick wool jacket would only buy him a few extra minutes.

~*~

Johan had gone back to find the rabbi the next day, but couldn’t. He walked through the village, the snow falling in thick clusters, caught and pushed around by the gusting wind. When he finally decided to ask the others where he was, they all said the same thing: he left.

That was all they would admit to knowing. Every inquiry was met with the same response. Where did he go? He wouldn’t tell us. Why did he go? He wouldn’t tell us.

Johan finally got angry and unholstered his pistol: a Luger, and a nice one at that. It was his lucky pistol. He’d won it in a card game before being left to keep watch of this stupid little town and its herd of Jews. Usually only officers carried pistols, but Johan wore his strapped around his waist with pride.

He held the gun up, pointed the barrel at a young woman’s face, holding it just a few inches in front of her wide, glossy eyes.

Johan had the strange idea that her pupils were nothing more than the black reflection of his gun’s barrel in the mirrored brown surface of the woman’s eyes. It was like she wasn’t really alive, just some empty thing wrapped in living skin pretending to be human.

Johan looked into the black circle in the center of those eyes and asked again, “Where is the old man.”

A gust of wind threw air thick with snowflakes in the woman’s face, but she just stared back at him, her lips pouting defiantly. Then she said, “We’ve told you…no one knows.”

“
Stupid bitch!” Johan screamed. He smacked her in the mouth with the back of his hand, the one loaded with the weight of his pistol. Her lip split against her teeth, and blood poured from it, coating her chin and dripping off.

Still she just looked at him, not giving him the pleasure of an outburst, not even a single tear.

Then Johan heard another man scream, a bestial growl that spoke in the simplest language: rage.

He turned in time to see a man – maybe the woman’s husband or brother, maybe just a friend – about ten feet away and running at him, his hands bent into jagged claws that wanted to what…tear his eyes out, rip across his throat? It didn’t matter.

Johan squeezed off one shot, a smooth action made easy by the Luger’s nearly perfect design.

The gun’s luck was still strong: the bullet hit slightly lower than the center of the man’s forehead, which had been Johan’s target. A mistake, but one that made more of an impression on the people watching than a cleaner shot would have.