The Damn Disciples (16 page)

“That’s it,” the guard said, pulling the lever back and forth a few more times to force the last few worms of human flesh
out of the grinding machine. “Take it to the commissary.” Stone and Pod #83 turned and rolled the thing back out of the place
and down the ramp, then walked slowly so as not to slop any of the nearly overflowing ground chuck onto the ground. And as
they walked, Stone felt strange. It wasn’t that he could really think all that clearly about the events of the last hour,
but something didn’t feel good inside. As if he had swallowed poison—in his brain.

But if the grinding operation made him feel strange, when they arrived at the back door of K building and several assistant
chefs came to the door to let them in the back way, Stone suddenly found himself ready to puke. For they were in the kitchen.
The side entrance to the main dining area for the whole village. The cooks led the way down a slop-encrusted, fly-buzzing
hallway and then into a cooking room where big pots were cooking over fires everywhere. The smell of sour bread and rotting
vegetables was thick in the air.

“Put them over here,” one of the cooks said, indicating a long wooden trough that had been once used to feed pigs. The wheelbarrow
was tilted to the side as they both pulled up hard the handles of the barrow and the load of freshly chopped meat was deposited
into the trough. The cook leaned forward and scraped out all that was still stuck inside the wheelbarrow. And even as Stone
and Pod #83 turned and started wheeling the empty barrow out of the kitchen, the cooks were already grabbing handfuls of the
meat and cooking it up into big square loaves of meat loaf. Martin Stone, although he hadn’t eaten for nearly twelve hours,
and was most definitely not a gourmet even when not at the mental level of an amoeba with Alzheimer’s disease, still didn’t
think he was going to have lunch today.

Once the whole mess in the Nectar factory was straightened out, which took a good two hours, Stone was back at work slaving
over a hot drug vat. He stirred and he tried to feel nothing. The drug was certainly pushing him in that direction, with enough
chemical force to subdue ten men. But Stone wasn’t an ordinary man. The Indians who had saved him had termed him the “Nadi,”
giver of death. Such men were endowed with strengths, willpowers, depths of grit that made them…different. Thus Stone, unlike
any of the hundreds of others who had been put through the “aura cleansing” process—and hooked on the Golden Nectar—
felt
something.

It was his soul, his heart, that made him feel something. A spark of disgust, a germ of revulsion. A stirring in the guts
that began fighting back against the blinding and deafening drugs. And as he walked around the platform, paddling the immense
aluminum oar through the bubbling swamps of chemical brainfuck, Stone started growing angry. Within his idiocy he didn’t even
know he was angry, but felt a gnawing bite that grew to a burning rage. And Stone’s face began loosening up a little from
its dead, glazed expression, and his teeth began grinding together hard as he stirred.

He had been back about an hour and a half at the oar when there was a big commotion at the front door and the guards were
throwing themselves prostrate on the wooden floor. Stone gulped hard as he turned his head, continuing to walk the platform.
It was—the Guru himself, the Great One. He had come to check out the damage to his precious drug-making equipment.

“Was there any damage to the vats themselves?” the Guru asked. It took all of Stone’s nerve to even look at the man. He was
huge, Stone could see that, even hidden within the all-encompassing black robe. His hood was thrown back, and Stone could
see the round jowled face, the black eyes like black holes in space that could swallow whole planets, let one men, the mouth
with a twisted, amused smile that bespoke pain and blood—tons of it. His ears pricked up as Guru Yasgar walked around the
place inspecting the damage.

“There can’t be any more problems,” he said with a raspy edge to his throat that set Stone’s hair on end. The man hardly sounded
as if he had been born on earth, or had sprung from the womb of a human woman. “Because within two days we begin our shipments
out to the surrounding countryside, ship our Nectar out so that others may benefit from the attainment of Perfect Aurahood.”
The new foreman of the drug building nodded fervently as he walked along just paces behind Yasgar.

“Yes, Great One, no mistakes,” the man said, knowing this was his chance to rise rapidly in the cult. “We have tested all
gas jets and drainage systems. Everything is working perfectly.” Stone suddenly sensed that the Guru was about to glance up
at him, and he ripped his head away from looking down and walked zombie-faced around the platform like an ox.

“He is a good stirrer,” the foreman said, noticing the Guru looking up. “And we have replaced the stupid pod who fell in with
an experienced pod who had moved on to another job.” He pointed up at the second vat, which had over-flowed earlier. The stirrer
was big, with a huge chest, which without shirt as he pushed hard was covered with a copper sheen of sweat.

The Guru surveyed the situation for a minute, taking in both men as he looked back and forth. Whatever he was looking for,
he seemed satisfied.

“Good, good, all is proceeding according to plan,” the hacksaw blade of a voice sawed out. “It shall soon be our destiny,”
he said, looking around at the other four men who were involved in keeping the fires going and the chemicals pouring into
the vats, “to control this whole country. To spread our word, our way of doing things. Our message will be the world’s message.”

“The world’s message,” the others shouted back as one. They stood stiffly before him, ramrod straight, their eyes aimed ahead
as no man dared look right into that dark, fat, swirling face, those pits of eyes that seemed to pierce anything like twin
swords. The Guru suddenly turned with a swirl of his black robe and headed out the door. The Nectar makers looked at each
other with terrified faces. They knew that they would wind up in C building if there was even the slightest mistake.

Thus, they allowed Stone to work just a ten-hour shift that day, as they didn’t want to risk his being exhausted and adversely
affecting their operation. The other man was released as well, and a new shift was put on. Stone was told to report back at
eight in the morning, and he headed out, his head whirling from the day’s violent events. Things were shaking up inside him,
there was no question about it. An earthquake had gone off inside his brain, and the aftershocks were rippling along every
fiber of his being.

That night was the weekly Ceremony of the Aura, where the Guru himself would perform the ritual. Stone marched in along with
the rest after they had eaten dinner. He had eaten his vegetables—but had made sure they were served on a different plate
than the meat. He would never eat meat in this place again. He didn’t know much, but that much he knew.

The pods were gathered in a large circle around the Great Room and then handed their goblets of Golden Nectar. Stone waited
until the server had just walked past him, and, making a quick glance around, saw that no one’s eyes were on him. He tilted
his head back but lifted the long sleeve of his brown robe—and poured it right inside. The stuff was sticky and dripped down
his armpit and chest. But he got away with it. He lowered the goblet, wiped his mouth, and smiled that dumb smile that they
all got right after drinking it. He held the cup out with a dead stare so the server could take it back.

When they had all finished, they were commanded to begin dancing around the room as drums began welling up from hidden musicians
around the room. The circle of drugged-out pods and higher robes started turning, slowly at first, like the wheel of a great
wagon. But after a few minutes, as the drug really hit home and their bodies got loose like rag dolls and the music swelled,
they moved faster. Skulls were handed to them by half-naked girls, and the dancing men grabbed them from the outstretched
hands as they flew by, like brass rings from a merry-go-round. Holding the skulls, they waved their arms in the air dramatically,
spinning them, making them part of their dance, bone batons.

Already Stone could feel something happening inside him. He hadn’t had a dose of the Elixir for nearly sixteen hours now.
And it was starting to wear off, slowly, for they had them all doped up to the near-limits of human tolerance. But enough
so that his brain began clearing, a few of the cobwebs were brushed away, the doors over the rooms to his thoughts and memories
began opening. And it hurt. The withdrawal began immediately. His muscles ached even as he danced and jumped along with the
rest of them. He could feel a cold sweat break out over his entire body as the withdrawal began making the nervous and circulatory
systems aware that something unpleasant was up.

Suddenly a cloud of smoke seemed to fill the entire center of the long wooden floor, and the pods let out gasps of blissed-out
terror. And even as they twirled around, from out of the blue smoke appeared the Guru in his ceremonial long red satin robe
that looked as if it had been taken from a cardinal or something, and forcibly, as there were bullet holes and bloodstains
around where the heart was. Beside him was a woman dressed all in black leather, wearing spiked studs around her shoulders,
waist, and head. And on the other side of the Guru sat a dog, which had bizarre markings painted all over its side in bloodred
symbols. It glared ahead, its own head frozen just like the dancing pods’. And Stone knew instantly, as it slammed into his
brain like a safe falling from the top of the Empire State Building, that it was his sister, April, and the damn dog—
his
damn dog. The bastard had stolen everything that was his. Even his fucking brain.

Yet Stone could feel within the migraine headache that rippled through his dazed head from the shock that he was starting
to get some intelligence back. But if just being off the stuff a few hours was any indication, he was in for some bad times.
For even as he danced around the Guru as blue smoke swirled in great swelling puffs from the wind created by the dancing pods
who circled ever faster, Stone’s whole nervous system began twitching, shivers of exquisite pain running through his fingers,
elbows, wrists, neck, and knees. All his joints ached as if he had a very bad flu. And the rage that Stone felt was so powerful
as he saw the murderous Yasgar with all that was precious to him that Stone made himself dance even harder, jump even higher,
so that he didn’t explode or go mad from the pain and confusion and the burning hatred inside him.

“Think, think, you bastard,” he screamed silently to himself, though his mind was having a little bit of trouble re-turning
to its operating circuit boards. He knew he couldn’t do anything now—he had to keep dancing and act as if nothing was wrong.
The machete-clutching guards who surrounded the room at least three on each wall were ample proof of what would happen to
anyone who even tried to harm a hair on the Sacred One’s head. So Stone danced and made his twitching lips smile and laugh
as the others were.

As if they were all in paradise when in fact they were all in hell.

The Guru waved his hands. “Faster, faster,” he exhorted the pods. “Move, you slime. I command you. Make the skulls in your
hands blurs. Thus the auras of the living and the dead are united.” He held his hands to the-ceiling sky and blue lightning
seemed to slash down from above and right into his fingertips. And as Stone watched in growing honor and pain, he saw April,
in her black leather Dominatrix outfit, pull out a whip and begin snapping it out at the twirling dancers. She smiled the
smile of the demonically possessed as she cracked the whip, the long leather tongue taking pieces right out of cheeks and
arms, slicing through robes here and there. But the pods only danced into more of a tornado fury.

On the other side of the Guru the damn dog joined in too, looking like some kind of creature from the mists of the Neanderthal
days with its archaic symbols scrawled over it in red. It snarled at the dancers as they passed, reminding them to keep their
fucking asses high, and their feet aslapping. And they did. And didn’t need any more encouragement than those three and ten
thousand milligrams of Nectar circulating through them.

They twirled for hours, screaming and dropping to the floor in writhing convulsions as many of their nervous systems overloaded
completely and began short-circuiting. And as the hours went by, Stone felt things go from bad to worse. For he was coming
off the stuff fast. Every cell in him was aching. His head was just a throbbing mess of gristle, his eyes watery and puffed
out, hardly able to see. As he spun, tears sprinkled down—to see what had happened to the only two creatures he cared about
on this entire fucked-up planet. The Guru had molded them both to his personal designer taste. Had added them to his entourage
befitting the rule of a small but growing empire of the brainless. Even the fucking dog didn’t have the spark it usually carried
in its almond eyes. Stone tried to catch either of their eyes as he spun around them, knowing it was dangerous but having
to try. To see if there was anything there at all anymore. He could see nothing. Though both of their gazes caught him at
some point over the endless circlings, not a sign of recognition crossed their faces.

The ritual went on for hours, until the room was filled with the odor of sweat and the strong-smelling Nectar. But at last,
about midnight, the Guru suddenly departed again, along with Stone’s ex-family, in a swirling cloud of blue smoke. The pods
left or were rolled out the door and back to the bunkhouses for the night. Now that he had stopped dancing, Stone’s body was
already starting to tighten up. He walked as if on razor blades—for his feet felt as if they were on fire—back to his barracks
and slid into bed. There he lay, shaking and sweating, his teeth chattering together like marambas in a salsa band.