Golgotha Run

A Black Flame Publication

Cover illustration by Jamie Jones.

Copyright © Games Workshop 2005.

ISBN: 1–84416–237–0

Publisher’s note:
This is a work of fiction, detailing an alternative and decidedly imaginary future. All the characters, actions and events portrayed in this book are not real, and are not based on real events or actions.

Version: 1.0


My fellow Americans,


I am speaking to you today from the Oval Office, to bring you hope and
cheer in these troubling times. The succession of catastrophes that have
assailed our once-great nation continue to threaten us, but we are
resolute.


The negative fertility zone that is the desolation of the mid-west
divides east from west, but life is returning. The plucky pioneers of
the new Church of Joseph are reclaiming Salt Lake City from the
poisonous deserts just as their forefathers once did, and our prayers
are with them. And New Orleans may be under eight feet of water, but
they don't call it New Venice for nothing.


Here at the heart of government, we continue to work closely with the
MegaCorps who made this country the economic miracle it is today, to
bring prosperity and opportunity to all who will join us. All those
unfortunate or unwilling citizens who exercise their democratic right to
live how they will, no matter how far away from the comfort and security
of the corporate cities, may once more rest easy in their shacks knowing
that the new swathes of Sanctioned Operatives work tirelessly to protect
them from the biker gangs and NoGo hoodlums.


The succession of apparently inexplicable or occult manifestations and
events we have recently witnessed have unnerved many of us, it is true.
Even our own Government scientists are unable to account for much of
what is happening. Our church leaders tell us they are holding at bay
the unknown entities which have infested the datanets in the guise of
viruses.


A concerned citizen asked me the other day whether I thought we were
entering the Last Times, when Our Lord God will return to us and visit
His Rapture upon us, or whether we were just being tested as He once
tested his own son. My friends, I cannot answer that. But I am resolute
that with God's help, we shall work, as ever, to create a glorious
future in this most beautiful land.


Thank you, and God Bless America.


President Estevez


A Benedicta I knew, who filled the very world with the Ideal, whose eyes
burned with the desire for majesty, beauty, glory and all that has us believe
in the immortal.

But this miracle of a girl was just too beautiful to live; she died,
therefore, but a few days after I met her—and it was I alone who buried
her, on a day when Spring swung her censer even in the cemeteries themselves.
It was I alone who buried her, potted in a coffin of a wood fragrant and
imperishable as any chest of India.

And as my eyes were glued to the graveyard of my treasure, I saw quite
suddenly a diminutive individual bearing a quite singular resemblance to the
deceased, who, stamping on the fresh-dug ground with hysterical and somewhat
bizarre violence, cried: “I’m the Benedicta! The real deal! And to punish you
for your blindness, and your self-delusion, you shall love me as I am!”

“No!” I cried in fury. “No! No! No!” And in the rage of my refusal, I stamped
upon the earth so violently that my leg sank to the knee into the fresh-dug
grave. And like a wolf caught in a trap, there I remain—attached, perhaps
for all time, to the grave in which my Ideal still rots.

All the same, though; I suppose a quick one wouldn’t be entirely out of the
question.

Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears, your tongues full of sores,

Before breaking your putrid bones,

Before opening your cholera-infested belly and taking out as use for fertiliser your too-fatted liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys,

Before tearing out your ugly sexual organ, incontinent and slimy,

Before extinguishing your appetite for beauty, ecstasy, sugar, philosophy, mathematical and poetic metaphysical pepper and cucumbers,

Before disinfecting you with vitriol, cleansing you and shellacking you with passion,

Before all that,

We shall take a big antiseptic bath,

And we warn you,

We are murderers.

Artie Newbegin was looking in the bathroom mirror, watching (at last count,
the last time he had counted) four thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine
fragments of face looking back at him.

Of course, that figure had long lost any kind of meaning by now; he had
smacked a fist into the mirror any number of times since then (breaking three
fingers the last time, which had actually been quite painful for a few
seconds).

The mildew was out of control between the cracks again, Artie noted,
congealing over any number of the smaller shards. The overall effect was a
little like looking at the surface of a jewel-strewn swamp.

There was no real point in looking in the mirror in any case, nothing to do or
worth doing with anything he might find in there, should the shattered visage
ever suddenly cohere into something whole and complete.

That face, reassembled, would be a perfect thirty (the mature prime, the
optimal point before the human metabolic flipover into catabolism) with no
trace of toxin-contamination even to the point of a mild hangover.

The teeth pristine and cavity- and tartar-free, courtesy of the Bug, which
knew the function of ostensibly inorganic compounds in the body, and knew, by
and large, the differences between benign and malign bacteria. The beard would
be a fixed, grown-out and somewhat straggly length, the Bug never having quite
gotten its nonexistent head around the entirely human-level concept of
shaving.

The hair on the head, interestingly enough, would be thick and lustrous and
supremely manageable. Everyone had
fantastic
hair these days, which might or
might not say something about whoever it was who had designed the Bug in the
first place, before it had escaped. Almost certainly it had been a
he
, with
a bad case of male-pattern baldness, for starters.

The bathroom was in an apartment, and the apartment was in a block, in what
had once been downtown Des Moines, through which the wind whistled. Nothing
much had changed, really, despite the pressure of the years inside
Containment. Run-down, certainly, but still ticking over. Cars in the streets
and the buses ran their routes a time out of three and most of them packed
with those who still worked at some daily occupation or other.

The postures of normalcy must be maintained, Artie thought—rather in the
same way that he himself would go to bed at night, when the Dome overhead
polarised to black, and lie there sleepless.

And then, in the morning, going into the bathroom, even though there was
nothing to do there, and going through the motions, before going out to make a
killing.

The Welcome Wagon was sleek and black and looked like death on wheels. In the
Last Days, in the days before the Rapture Bug, a vehicle of this nature—used
for the same general purpose, for example, by some governmental agency—would
have been covert rather than overt, customised to look like a battered old
baker’s van or something to blend into the scenery. Now, the sight of these
utterly distinctive black trucks shuttling merrily through the Des Moines
streets warmed the immortal hearts of people in their thousands. It was a bit
like catching sight of a fire appliance would have been, in the days before
the Bug hit. The Welcome Wagons were a constant reminder that someone,
somewhere, cared.

The process-and-containment facilities took up most of the space in the back
and the cab was somewhat cramped for three; proximity converting those
colleagues one might quite like ordinarily, or at least find tolerable at a
distance, into your worst nightmare.

Artie was currently crushed in the middle of the seat between Mico and Alex,
and Mico was demonstrating his new trick for the fifteenth time: smashing his
fingers against the jamb of the spill-hatch and twisting the resulting
fractured mess into a halfway-recognisable set of male genitalia—as he
remembered them—before they reset under the Bug.

In the hysteria immediately after the Rapture Bug had hit, after the
Quarantine and Containment that would form the basis of the Dome had come
slamming down, that sort of thing had become quite commonplace. In the
higher-end of the art circles—so far as a city like Des Moines had had a high-level
circle of art—there had been a brief vogue for the kind of body-modification
that put the Theatre of Mutilation to shame… brief, of course, because the
reset mechanisms of the Bug made such changes ultimately meaningless even in
the terms of the avant garde. If the transformations don’t stick, and nobody
gains or loses the slightest thing because of them, then there’s simply no
point.

In general life, of course, the world had for a while become full of people
hurling themselves off rooftops or under trucks, hitting each other with
sledgehammers and axes purely for the hell of it. For several months it had
been a bit like living in a
Road Runner
cartoon without the invention or the
wit.

Those who were naturally inclined to jump in front of trucks in any case soon
tired of the sheer futility of it, gradually followed by the rest of the
Contained. Only complete retards like Mico found sufficient amusement in such
things to even bother now.

Alex was driving with a kind of teeth-gritted concentration, fighting blind
impulses that might have had her hurling the Wagon through traffic, careless
of what it might hit… and the darker impulses that might have her aiming the
thing directly at a wall in the vain hope that this time suicide might work.

Alex had once been, functionally, female, and now looked even more so in
certain secondary aspects. Excessively, freakishly so in terms of the days
before the Bug—though of course that was absolutely standard here and now.

It was just another of those not exactly
well
thought-out, blanket
customisations to the genome, reinforcing the suggestion that the mythical
designers of the Bug had been male. Artie had vaguely wondered, more than
once, if the enthusiasm with which Alex treated her work might come from some
form of sublimated impulse of revenge. It was far more likely, though, that
after all this time Alex was merely working on the same basis as anybody else.

Logging up the hours on her Account. Working herself to death.

Now, Artie tried to ignore Mico’s rather asinine antics by making a show of
reading his clipboard, skimming through the client-list of those fortunate
souls who had made enough on their Accounts to warrant the Welcome Wagon’s
current attention.

The process of monetary commerce was as good a way of keeping score as
anything else—always provided that there was some mechanism for
circumventing that process by pure luck.

One of the names on the list was marked with a cheerful little
skull-and-crossbones. One of the
truly
lucky souls, picked completely at random from
the general populace whether they had enough in their Account or not.

It had been months since Artie had been handed a genuine charity case—and
he decided that it was just the thing to make him feel happier about the
world, however temporary that happiness might be.

He’d been feeling so down lately. This might be just the thing he needed.

Artie Newbegin basked for a moment in the warm glow of anticipated altruism.
Then he gave Alex the target and she punched up a location.

It was later. Artie’s shoulder was still quite painful—a kind of
ghost-injury pain in the way that amputees had once had ghost limbs. It would fully
take a half hour or so to clear up.