Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse

Stephen Donald Huff’s

Terminus

A Novella of the Apocalypse

(Authored Sunday, December 13, 2015)

Published by Capital Ideations LLC

Copyright 2016 – All Rights Reserved

ISBN-13: 978-1530640485

ISBN-10: 1530640482

For the madness that drives us all to take our next breath.  Only the end and the beginning are real.  Everything in between is illusion.

Table of Contents

THE END

Global insanity.  Institutional violence on an unimaginable scale.

Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse.  One minute it all functioned with a standard sort of craziness, and the next it devolved into ten billion psychotic inmates at each other’s throats like suddenly sprung animals.  The catastrophe came and went so quickly, its progress so insidiously thorough and encompassing in its completeness, that too few remained to name it for history.

Indeed, in the aftermath, we print no history books.  No schools remain to teach from them, because no students remain to attend.

Those of us left in the ashes refer to civilization’s final irrational act as ‘Terminus’, but this is an unofficial label.  It benefits none of us.  It simply gives us a handle with which to wield the concept of our end times.  It bifurcates our memory.  Before.  After.  In between, a river of blood and a quagmire of guts so unspeakable in its abrupt brutality that it remained unnamable during the act.

This was no world war.  No border dispute expansion.  Terminus was not a gradually building conflict borne of diplomatic complexity or misconstrued cultural ambiguity.  Its combatants carried no flags.  They fought beneath no banners.  None of them claimed cause.

Rather, the planet simply rolled ‘round beneath the sun and with it swept night away for day.  As the dawn lit empty streets to shine through opened windows, sleepy eyes awakened and dreamy minds cleared, then every human brain inexplicably filled with thoughts of bloodshed, mayhem and violence.  Partners rolled across sweat-tossed beds to strangle one another.  Parents stalked along half-lit hallways to bludgeon their children.  Teenagers hefted kitchen implements to slash their parents and their siblings.  As that final civilized morning devolved into anarchy, the last standing human being emerged from each gore-flung household to wander the streets smeared with clot and streaked with blood, their hands clutching tools of murder and their eyes rolling madly.

From there, the brutality became a matter of neighbor against neighbor.  Clan against clan.  Community against community.

They fought no set-piece battles between pitched contestants.  Armies did not rise up in the tumult to enforce the order of the day, for these institutions also suffered enormously from the effects of Terminus.  Barracks all over the world mirrored bedrooms, as each cadre consumed itself one bloody fistfight at a time.

To be sure, gunplay figured large in this Armageddon, if only for the widespread availability of these devices.  Yet, by and large, the vast majority of Terminus-inspired murders transpired hand-to-hand.  Something about the disease or the poison or the gas inducing that ultimate act of worldwide bloodletting required its participants to wade in, knuckles first.  It was all fang and claw.  Fist and foot.  Elbow and knee.

For some reason we survivors will never understand, Terminus required us to tear the world apart on a very intimate first-person basis.  One-on-one times ten billion.

Nobody crawled into a safe shelter to await the return of better days.  Not even those who could, the rich who could afford it or the privileged who could access it, not even the loftiest citizens on the planet sought refuge from the storm.  For this was the very nature of Terminus.  Its ravages left us no choice.  We could not refrain, nor could we abstain.  During that terrible time, every living, breathing, conscious human being on the planet without exception actively participated in the slaughter of their brothers and sisters.

How long for a single person to slaughter his or her family?  Perhaps half an hour.  How long for a neighborhood to winnow its population down to an exhausted lone triumphant?  The better part of a week.  How long for a community to do the same?  A full month.

Ultimately, after perhaps a year, the mysterious effects of Terminus dissipated.  We metabolized the poison.  We developed immunity to the disease.  Or the gas dissipated.

Who was left?  Only people like me.

Largely gone were the physicians and engineers, the scientists and technologists, the artists and artisans.  The meek did not inherit the Earth.  Instead, we monsters claimed it.

THE PRIEST

Today, amid empty cities and abandoned villages, we burned-out victors wander the consequences of our lunatic massacre.  Nothing and no one can save us from ourselves.  When we fall ill, we rot and we die.  When we suffer injury, we tend it ourselves or perish.  When something comes undone, we rarely put it back together again.  We take no interest in rebuilding a shattered society.

Thus, post-Terminus, the world has gradually run down.  Like a previously hand-crafted clockworks abandoned to the antipathic elements, our so-called society is shot-through with rust, eat-up with decay, and overrun by neglect.  Today, it limps along like the badly broken thing it is.  We hear the mechanisms of it grinding together defectively, the apparatus within it wheezing sickly and the pipes connecting it all rattling together like tumbling old bones.  Daily, something necessary fails hopelessly, never to return to service.  Monthly, the frameworks of our former culture crumbles, never to be recast.  Annually, creepers advance, weeds invade, forests threaten, and a desultory dust settles thick over everything, the shrouds of nations and the pall of a dying world.

This is our home.  To say it is a violently uncertain place is to understate the obvious.

It is not a nursery of children.  It is not a sanctuary for the elderly.  Ubiquitously, we range from youngish to middle-aged, and we are mostly men.  While we are not all of us ripped with corded muscle or rippling with wiry strength, every survivor one of us possesses something dark and dangerous hidden silently within.  By necessity, we are all mass-killers, spree murderers, serial predators.  None of us survived Terminus without suffering violent assault and inflicting it, too.  Not a single soul is innocent.  None of us are clean.  When we close our eyes, visions of our crimes torment us endlessly, and for us there can be no absolution.  No redemption.  No one can assuage our tortured minds and nothing can relieve our twisted souls.

Though some try.  Case in point, a fellow lunatic we know only as ‘The Priest’.

I have come to his crumbling cathedral to confront his hypocrisy and destroy the vanity of his self-professed mission of global salvation.  The world, or what remains of it, will not benefit from the revival of such repugnant traditions, and his claims of divine deliverance and mystical reclamation are, at best, unpalatable.  At worst, such fallacies belie the horrors of the past and insult our countless dead.

As I climb into the fighting cage erected at the center of his cathedral’s nave, the sparse but maniacal crowd arranged among its disorganized pews falls silent.  Their faces upturn expectantly.  They will hear what we have come to say, The Priest and I, for such is the state of our collectively calamitous ruination that unrepentant brawlers such as we have become its prophets and lawgivers.  We alternately labor to remake our ravished culture in our own flawed image or undo it completely, the former ideal borne of Priest’s designs and the latter of my own.

Bulging and muscle-bound beneath his ecclesiastic vestments, he is a hulk of a man.  Like my own and, indeed, those of every human being on Earth, his brow and cheeks are scarred from repeated assaults.  The bones and knuckles of his fists are many times broken and healed again.  When he sheds his robe, tunic and trousers to bare his torso and legs, they are crisscrossed by the tattered patterns of poorly healed cuts and abrasions.  At some point in his violent past, someone staked him down and whipped him mercilessly.

I know this because I see the unmistakable signs of this abuse etched across his shoulders and upper arms when he raises his fists triumphantly to turn the crowd.  They mumble and nod to acknowledge his prompts, but none of them rave and hoot or boo and caw as they might have done before Terminus.

This is not entertainment.  This is not a much publicized grudge match.  This is our dysfunctional society’s interpretation of learned debate.  This is policy making within the new world order.

I stand alone in my corner of the octagon, having already shed my street clothes prior to climbing into the cage.  I have not come to impress.  I have not come to stage theatrics.  Rather, I have come with a simple purpose in mind.

With bare hands, I will kill The Priest.  Or he will kill me.

From opposite sides of the cage, we size each other for abilities, prowess and, most importantly of all, current states of health and wellbeing.  Having long ago decided to end this man, I have studied him.  I expect nothing less of him.

When we engage within the arena, we will be two things:  kickboxer and wrestler.  The first concept is twinned.  We will engage some form of non-traditional martial arts to use our feet, and we will throw punches.  The second concept is an ancient one.  We will grapple our opponent hand-to-hand.

True, few Terminus survivors are professional pugilists, however most of us learned the same requisite skills while confronting the violent throes of necessity during that primary conflict.  To endure the aftermath, however, most of us took what we learned by rank experience during the calamity and then refined these techniques further.  The Priest and I are no exceptions.

To prepare for my destruction of the man, I have analyzed him.  I know this about him.

As a last resort, he will use his legs, but he will generally keep this aspect of his technique simple.  He prefers the more straightforward front kick and knee strike to the roundhouse and side kick.  When oversight or overextension present the opportunity, he will employ a sweep, but he will rarely lead with this tactic.  Defensively, he will occasionally use his legs to defeat my own lower body strikes, but he will primarily use his lower limbs to entangle, encumber and grapple.  Being the larger, more powerful man, he will strive to get me on the ground for a full mount to pummel out my brains, and he will use his powerful thighs and shanks to maneuver me into this debilitating position.

Secondarily, he is a boxer.  In this mode of the contest, he will be a slugger.   His tactics in this regard will be graceless, raw and brutal.  He will rely on sheer strength in an effort to knockout his opponent with a single punch. Though frightening and worthy of respect, The Priest will lack mobility and will suffer enormously from the attrition of stamina when forced to chase counterparts who are faster on their feet. He will throw harder, slower routines that tend to ignore skilled combinations.  Thus, his pattern of strikes will be predictable, largely comprised of single blows advertised by obvious leads, and the resultant extensions will expose him to lightning counterpunches.  Because he tends to overextend his follow-through in an effort to achieve maximum force with each blow, the best target for these counterpunches will be his chin.  The goal here is to effect maximal leverage across the man’s jaw to twist his neck and traumatize his cerebrum, the primary motor center of his brain.  A precise and powerful strike here could easily render the monstrous Priest unconscious.

Primarily, though, he will be a wrestler, and a formidable one.  If he can manage it, his use of arms and legs while standing will all merely be preludes to a grapple that drags his opponent to the mat where he can dominate.  If he achieves this goal, he will proceed methodically with a series of clinches, locks and holds to reduce his opponent’s ability to fight.  Indeed, he is an expert with various clinches, all of these used to position his victim for an escalating application of progressively more damaging grips.  Though he is well-conditioned, I know The Priest also lacks stamina, hence his aversion to protracted kick-boxing matches.  As a result, he will often employee clinches to rest during a contest, so an extended clinch will be a sign of exhaustion and, thereby, represent an opportunity to escape the grip and return to a standing fight.  Once he successfully engages a clinch to initiate total control of his opponent, however, The Priest will next exploit careless flails of limbs to employ joint locks, preferring upper limb locks deployed to break shoulders, elbows, wrists and even fingers.  Like a medieval torturer, if allowed by an unprepared foe, The Priest will gradually render his counterpart helpless by making arms and legs unworkable before he moves in for the kill.  To inflict damage during a grappling match, he will alternately use compression locks to achieve pain compliance or reduce capacity by crushing muscles, nerves and joints.  Ultimately, all his wrestling techniques will be employed to achieve his ultimate intention:  the choke hold.  I know The Priest’s inventory of these maneuvers is second to none.  If he manages to get his hands, arms, legs or torso between an opponent’s chin and chest, the end of the contest will be swiftly decided.

Consequently, I intend to make this a standing fight.  My primary objective will be the reduction of the bigger man’s powerful legs, because I know he uses these weapons to leverage every other aspect of his fight.  Naturally, these limbs are the key to his kicking style, but they are also pivotal to his method of fist fighting and wrestling.  His most damaging strikes lead from below the waist, not the torso, and he effects his most debilitating holds with his legs, not his arms.

Accordingly, I will dance for as long as I can to exhaust his general reserves of strength and, secondarily, to reduce the energy reservoirs in his legs.  I will burn all the glycogen in his powerful thigh and calf muscles by making him chase me and then, when he is physiologically reduced to burning blood sugar to maintain the fight, I will tie into him primarily with my arms.  I will use my legs sparingly, because I know he likes to grapple badly placed kicks to turn an opponent face-down against the mat.

During the next phase of the contest, I will employ hit-and-run tactics to keep him moving and make him burn his stores of blood sugar while defending himself against my jabs, roundhouses and uppercuts, mixed with a few short, sharp knee strikes and frontal kicks when I catch him completely unguarded or out of position.

Once I am certain he has exhausted the blood sugar coursing through his veins and his physique has resorted to processing fat for energy, I know he will suffer from perhaps a two minute lag in his constitution while his body switches from utilizing those more readily available forms of metabolic energy to the less accessible but much deeper stores of lipid energy.  This will be my one and only chance to make a close engagement with the man, pin him to the mat, cut up his face, and liquefy his brains.  If this period of my assault takes too long and The Priest is able to successfully engage the fat-burners in his muscle cells, I know he will kill me.  By that point in the confrontation, I will have been forced to commit to his preferred style of fighting.  If I am still wrestling with him when he “catches his second wind”, I expect him to quickly reverse my advantage, destroy the joints of my arms and legs, and then take me apart limb-from-limb until he wedges an elbow around my throat and chokes me out.

All of these thoughts pass in the merest moment that spans his turn of the cage.  Then we square-off, face to face, the crowd falls eerily silent, and the debate begins.

As expected, The Priest uses his preliminary minute of fame to proselytize and extoll the dubious virtues of his savior, the mystical favor of his god, and the mysteriously absent purpose within his will.  My stomach rolls and my guts heave to hear this, even as my thoughts blacken and my vision glazes over red with a savage bloodlust.

When my turn comes, I reduce my minute of fame to a few seconds and a simple question.  Hostile and enraged beyond reason, my voice a vicious grate, I demand, “Where was your god while I was murdering my wife and children?”

Previously all but inanimate, the meager crowd erupts vociferously.  I know they all want The Priest to answer the same question.  I know they all wish he could, myself included.  I also know he cannot.  Nobody can answer it, because we know The Priest’s god, if real, would never have supported perpetration of the slaughter that was Terminus.  Only an omnipotent devil would do such a thing.  So neither of these mystical beings exist.  Here on Earth, there is only us, we human beings, and all of us killers many times over.

On this question, The Priest roars savagely and charges the octagon, head up, eyes wide, arms out, hands spread, fingers splayed, and legs pumping.  I wait for his proximal approach, and then dance lightly away, leaving the bigger man to crash into the flexible framework of the fighting cage.

For a split instant as he passes by me, I contemplate driving into his exposed cheekbone with an overhand strike, but reject this self-proposed opportunity almost immediately.  Something about the direction and angle of The Priest’s eyes warns me of his wariness for this parting tactic, and I suspect he is well-prepared to grapple the extension of this blow into an arm lock, which he would then use to pull me down underneath him while he wraps both legs around my chest.

Instead, I bob around behind him and wait for him to turn to face me again.  For the next several minutes, I jig and jog away from him as he chases me angrily around the cage.  Indeed, I am thrilled by his unreasonable anger, which seems to have unhinged his already precarious hold on lucidity.  Something about my pre-match taunts and jibes has undone him, as I intended.  While we maneuver about the ring, him struggling to grapple me and me striving to avoid his advances, I ponder what I might have said to get to him so deeply.  After a few minutes of consideration, I know the answer.

I attacked his faith.  Post-Terminus, I know anybody who still professes a belief in god must be either crazy or a liar.  He made such declarations of devotion not to tend the flock or gather the faithful, but to convince himself.  After all, the presence of a one, true god might explain the horrors of Armageddon.  As before the end-times, humanity could stand righteous in the pews and profess the same tired utterances.  “God moves in mysterious ways.”  “His will be done.”  “His is the power and the glory.”  On and on and on until nausea overwhelms good sense and regurgitation casts out reason with the vomitus of it all.  Then the peace of oblivion.