Authors: Sezin Koehler
Kaleanathi, The Smog Goddess
Y
our fury is wide and deep as caverns on Mars. What’s rightfully yours ripped from your belly. Again.
This means war.
At every turn they’ve underestimated you and soon they’ll see how wrong they were. You drink of the pain emanating from the human souls trapped in your toxic womb. They are delicious, but depleting fast. The remaining vital force of the dead is a drug, its effects wearing off quicker than you imagined.
You return to The Source, whence all power in this multiverse emerges. You and Mother, The Ancient One are the only ones now with the power to do this. This makes you her equal. This makes you co-queen of the everything. All you need now is an army, and The Elementals have always hated The Ethereals. Theirs is a rivalry that goes back to the founding of the universe. It’s time to enlist the other Elementals properly. Nobody can deny you now.
From your perch above Los Angeles, you summon them.
Fiero the murder goddess, who is always ready for a death party.
Aranya, the spider goddess of connections.
Phlage, the goddess of epidemics.
Oceanica, goddess of water, who has the added ability to control humans—their bodies are mostly water after all.
Soleá, the sun goddess, daughter of Ra, bearer of light and fire.
Muuna, goddess of moon and night, at peak power when the moon is full, as it will be tonight.
There are so many more Elementals than Ethereals, and they throng before you, on bended knee, begging to help. They acknowledge your power; they see it radiating from you in waves like it used to off Mother, The Ancient One. You are invincible.
Drunk on power, you no longer have the good sense to honor the trickle of dread that creeps into your belly, telling you Mother is awake, and she’s angrier than anyone has ever been in the history of creation.
Part Two:
The Survival of the Fittest Freaks
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
—Charles Darwin
I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.
—Arthur Rimbaud
Sunday November 1, 2000
8:00 AM
UCLA Medical Center
Operating Theater
D
etective Atticus Red Feather has seen the dead rise before, but only in zombie movies and his dreams. In those his father would manifest as he was after death, marks of torture covering his half-naked frame, solemn eyes pleading for justice. Atticus runs from his father as fast as he can, escaping the shame and the disgust that all these decades later he’s still not fulfilled the promise he made. Every time Red Feather awakens from the dream he’s weeping and so soaked in sweat he’d have to change the sheets. Not that he ever managed to get back into bed afterward. The rest of the wee hours he spends smoking cigarettes and thinking about his dad.
Joseph Red Feather was a good man, a warrior spirit without a battle, who sublimated his fierceness into amateur boxing. He made the rounds in the heavyweight division, a seventy-eight percent win rate. Sometimes up to five thousand dollars a win. He’d come home, face swollen, cauliflower ears bleeding, and with a wad of cash that his wife Melina would take and put with the rest, under the floorboard in their bedroom.
Just as Joseph’s mother taught her, Melina would arrange the herbs and lead a healing ceremony. The children would watch through the cracks in the plywood of their stationary RV. After the ceremony, Joseph would bury his head in Melina’s lap and weep, the only times Atticus Red Feather ever saw his father despair over their station in life.
One uncustomary day Atticus heard his parents fighting. They never fought, loving and gentle was their marriage. Joseph had an offer. An ultimate fighting match: fifty thousand to his family if he loses, a hundred thou if he wins.
“No,” Melina said, “your life is worth too much more.”
Joseph pulled her close. “But I won’t lose,” he promised.
When Father Callahan brought his body, along with the money, it was clear the no-weapons rule had been broken: Joseph Red Feather had knife and mace marks all over his body, his face half gone.
Atticus felt something break inside him as he looked at his father’s shell, the one he had sacrificed so his family could have a better life. He’d given them his share of food if the kids were still hungry. Now, he’d given them the skin off his back.
Melina screamed and fainted at the sight. Atticus’s siblings wailed, thinking their mother had gone the way of their dad, and looked to Atticus for answers he didn’t have. Within a week, Melina bought a new used car, packed up their double-wide, and drove them out to California. They’d only been back to Pine Ridge once, for Grandfather’s funeral.
And so, in Los Angeles, Atticus Red Feather fulfilled his dad’s dream for a better life and became a cop, certain one day he would find his father’s killers. Atticus knows his father continues waiting in the Great Beyond for justice. Hence, the dreams. Those sad eyes, a spirit in limbo waiting for resolution.
Detective Red Feather rubs his face and drags his mind back to the present, where around him witnesses of the Frankenstein hour—body parts from a vaporized site now grown to human size and reanimated through an electric force of nature—run around like headless chickens.
Outside the observation deck LAPD Captain Ward Anderson is on his phone, barking hoarse orders for a temporary media blackout on the events, and then to secure a location for the survivors. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what you have to do. You clear a floor and get security detail set up ASAP. The survivors are to be surveilled at all times, you understand me?” A pause while Anderson wipes sweat from his brow, hating the feeling of it trickle down his back and from under his arms.
Why didn’t he bring a spare shirt?
“We cannot risk even the slightest breach of security here. Move it! You call me when it’s done.” The intermittent sharp pain in his chest becomes a constant. He opens and closes his fist, regulating his breathing, praying.
Inside the operating theatre, Guy Severin cannot steal his gaze away from the group who grew from amputated body parts. The Survivors shiver from the overachieving air conditioning, screaming to be released from the Velcro that hold them to the morgue gurneys.
The Countess Barona salivates, her eyes glued to the young giant with only one eye.
I must have her!
Which politician will be the most effective in turning over this prize? She has dirt on all of them.
But who will get it done?
Barona’s body breaks out in gooseflesh as she conceives of a plan. Not just a plan of how to remand the girl into her custody, but what she will do to her afterward. Mayor Ellis catches a glimpse of Barona’s wicked smile and knows he’s in trouble.
I can kiss re-election goodbye,
deciding he will have nothing to do with whatever the psycho bitch is scheming.
Detective Günn focuses on her breathing, hoping she won’t have a panic attack and embarrass herself in front of her colleagues. Günn excuses herself from their company and heads into the restroom, where she splashes warm water on her face. She fixes the strands of her pixie hairdo, left in disarray by whatever it was that happened in that room. She still feels the electricity coursing around her, making the fillings in her teeth vibrate.
This can’t be happening,
she thinks, the paper towel coarse against her face as she wipes away water and shock. She looks at herself in the mirror, her cream skin patchy and pale. Her eye has stopped twitching, even it has been shocked into submission. A voice insists:
This
is
happening.
Günn puts her hand over her belly. She imagines the baby stirring inside her—even though it’s no bigger than a chestnut—and it feels like the only normal left in her life. Even though it won’t be around much longer. Her appointment is next week.
8:10 AM The Roswell Institute
B
etween a fault line and bedrock, in an underground dreidel-shaped compound engineered to withstand seismic forces one mile beneath Los Angeles, Julie Keaton, deputy technician of the Roswell Institute, looks up from Stephen King’s newest when the monitor in front of her lights up like a Christmas tree on crack. Thoughts of being the next King of horror put aside, Keaton runs her hands over the keyboard, isolating the various pingbacks that are sending the radar into a tizzy. Keaton’s screen decrypts an alert: three of The Institute’s missing specimens have turned up in the LAPD database, apparent victims of the Crane Mansion Massacre that’s making headlines all over the United States and the world.
“Fuck me. Ripper’s gonna have a coronary.” Keaton’s hands fly over her keyboard as she responds to each alert, dreading having to be the one to report back on The Institute’s three most meddlesome creatures.
Keaton’s workspace is in the basement of an already subterranean facility. She likes it that way. Less contact with the freaks and geeks The Institute houses in its five wings. Aliens, cyborgs, viruses, genetically engineered humans, even gods. A whole lot of mess, in her opinion. And damn shames in lots of cases. Sentient beings don’t belong in cages. Not that she’d ever voice these opinions. Far as she’s concerned, a job’s a job.
Steeling herself, she makes her way out of her office. An industrial metal alloy that’s warm to the touch—synthesized from alien technology—makes The Institute feel like you’re inside a metal jellyfish, tentacles trailing out every which way. Keaton can’t stand the screams so she avoids the cage levels, taking the super-fortified express elevator even though it makes her just as sick as the regular elevator, straight to the commander’s office on Level 1. She inhales and exhales deep before knocking on his door.
“Enter,” the voice booms. Keaton does, steadying herself.
Colonel Randall “Ripper” Ransom, Vietnam special ops vet with the scars to prove it, watches a wall of screens in the room, each trained on cages occupied by a variety of creatures in different stages of behavior modification.
Or torture, as Keaton calls it.
There’s the Harpy who won’t prophesize, her feathers being pulled one by one by a robotic hand larger than Julie herself until she decides to change her mind.
Zuul, who will not divulge the location of Gözer no matter how much electricity her captor inserts into her vagina.
And there’s the unicorn, the last one in Roswell Institute custody, having its horn sawn off for the umpteenth time, howling in an agony that makes Julie Keaton’s heart ache for lost childhoods. The Institute weaponizes the material, something else that makes Keaton’s heart break.
Remind me again why I still work here? You make seven figures a year, that’s why.
Colonel Ransom, on the other hand, enjoys their pain far too much and does nothing to mask it. He’s a proud monster. Keaton suppresses a shiver.
“This came in through the wire.” She hands the colonel a sheaf of papers. The girls have been missing for three weeks. Keaton has good reason to fear for her life bringing Colonel Ransom this news: Ripper has shot more than his share of messengers. Keaton’s Kevlar undershirt will help her, but not if he takes a headshot, as is his MO.
Colonel Ransom tears his eyes from the screen and grabs the pages. A moment while he reads. Keaton braces herself. Fight or flight, baby.
“The fuck is this?” Rage transforms Ransom’s already disfigured face into something even more monstrous. As if that were even possible.
“DNA from our specimens NRG, Chamelia, and Secrete was run through CODIS and—”
“You think I can’t read, bitch! Ever heard of a rhetorical question?” Spit flies from between Ransom’s thick lips, broken by a scar that turns bloody. He’s bit the inside of his mouth.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Keaton’s heart palpitates.
Colonel Ransom’s hand itches, index finger flexing, edging its way toward the emergency gun he tapes underneath his desk. He gets away with it too. The Roswell Institute is that kind of place.
Goddamn it
, he thinks.
Those three fucking cunts who escaped not once, but for a second goddamn time! And now they’re on the motherfucking police radar!
Ransom’s job is on the line. A breach of this magnitude is not one The Institute overlooks. Retrieving every scrap of evidence is the only recourse to avoid a firing squad. Or worse. Gotta handle this one like Goldilocks: just right.
Keaton watches a black stain flush over the colonel’s face.
Fuck fuck shit.
She debates making a run for it.
“What the hell are you standing there for like a wart on my ass? Get the fuck OUT of here!” Ripper Ransom slams his hands on the desk.
Don’t need to ask her twice. Keaton turns tail, fighting the urge to run.
“Goddamn those three,” Ransom mutters, seeing red. This is the kind of fury that’s gotten him in trouble before. He drops to the floor doing pushups, needing to blow of steam until he can do his best thinking. Fifty pushups later, the colonel has a plan. And he hasn’t even broken a sweat.
Randall “Ripper” Ransom
You run your hand over the scar that bisects the left side of your face, framing your opaque eye. My Lai, Vietnam. March 16, 1968. Charlie Company. Walking was a special agony after the foot-rot set in. Goddamn ‘Nam and its constant rain, nothing stayed dry.
You can’t remember the last time you slept. Fucking mosquitos and fuck knows what else buzzing in your ear all the live long night. You’ve had the shits for days.
Farted yesterday—or was it the day before?—and dammit if you didn’t crap yourself. The humiliation of asking for new skivvies is not one you’d ever care to repeat. And to make matters worse, you’re not entirely sure why any of you are even here. These people live like savages, thatched huts, no electricity, no water, no fucking antibiotics. What does America care what these backward motherfuckers do, anyway? They might as well be on another planet for all you care. These doubts worry away at the small piece of your mind not occupied with the basic necessities of survival.
Finally in the village and Brewster goes apeshit, brains a villager for looking at him. Grabs the screaming wife and rapes her with his gun. Pulls the trigger.
The horror is incomprehensible. You think you’re going to pass out. The blood pooling from between her legs like a period gone wrong. You start laughing. The expression on her face, gook eyes all contorted and the shock of it. You laugh until you throw up.
You look up and a group of the guys are taking turns with a girl. She can’t be more than fourteen. She stopped screaming after the first one. Martin’s got a gun in each hand, playing John Wayne, shooting them off one after the other, villagers falling in his wake. Red. Everything is red. The world has turned upside down. The screams make you want to tear your ears off. Every way you turn something else to assault your eyes. Charlie Company has lost it.
All you can think about is your mother and her fried chicken recipe, and Elizabeth, your highschool sweetheart. She let you go all the way as a goodbye present. You just want to get back to that safe place.
Please, let me get back to that safe place
, you find yourself saying aloud.
Platoon leader Carlisle sees you standing there. “Get your thumb out of your ass, corporal, and join the party!” He pushes a teenage girl your way, she collapses at your feet, begging in her language for mercy. You stare at her. This is not you. This is not you.
“What’re you? A faggot?” Carlisle screams in your face.
“No. Sir!”
“Then fuck the bitch!”
“Sir…!”
“That’s an order! DO IT!” Carlisle is apoplectic.
You can’t do it out here. You take her inside a hut. You count three dead bodies. Old women. The girl screams and weeps. You wonder if these screams will satiate Carlisle. Your dick has never felt less like fucking in your entire life. In fact, you might never fuck again. The image of Brewster and the gun makes the gorge rise in your throat. You try to calm the girl. You look out the door and see Carlisle is otherwise occupied: spearing children with his bayonet, wailing like a cat in heat every time. You turn and the girl plants a dull machete right into your face. You’re not angry. You hope she’s killed you. You’re dead inside already.
You stumble from the hut and yank the blade from your face. The blood hot down your cheeks, chin, soaking the top of your shirt. You fall to the ground, praying for forgiveness. The world fades from red to black.
You wake up back in America.
Randall Ransom died in My Lai.
Ripper Ransom was resurrected in the Roswell Institute.
When the doctors asked if they should plastic surgery the scar away, you told them no.
That scar is the only thing that reminds you of the innocent boy you once were before you they made you into this monster of a man.