Old Like the Sun

You can’t have a Bible nestled between a tampon and a diaper. That’s why we exist. The Company, I mean. THE BEAST. Wait a minute. Let’s back it up. Sometimes I spill the milk before there’s a cow and not everybody gets that. 

Mr. Florentine has to make sure I get my meds at the start of every shift—it’s the only way I can keep my job. And unlike the others I actually like this one. I want to work here. I have to work here because this is the only place where I work. The meds do nothing but make me sleepy, but I suppose in truth they do more than that. They prove to me that what I experience is not mental illness but a new way of being, a lightning-licked path directly to God. I see things with a clarity most will never know. 

The meds are slow motion, the constant detonation that is reality slurring until I can see the dance of Creation, a step-by-step minuet of equilibria. Like watching Kennedy a frame at a time, his head bulging because there’s a bullet in there, slowing down. 

Kieran’s driving the forklift tonight, loading shiny-wrapped pallets of flags, bibles, money into the maw of THE BEAST. Back and forth he zips to irritating guitar rock, cranking the wheel, nearly toppling like there’s a hurry to fill the belly with massive brown cubes. But there’s no hurry—we have all night.  All night to be inside it, the only place where I experience awe.

This is where it happens.

Beneath these ceramic cathedral beams, this is where the things we cannot countenance with the idea of destruction—not personally, anyway—are brought to corruption as everything must. We just do it suddenly. THE BEAST—a Rapid Sublimation Plasma Furnace—drinks juice from the dam on the other side of the mountains, dimming all the lights in its path, in reverence, as holy relics die. Flashed to nothingness in this world, pressed beyond the veil, their energies released into unknown dimensions. It’s mostly magic. We would load it up, fire it, and when reopened, days later and still red hot, it was empty. Clean. Wonderously purified. Flags done waving, bibles misprinted or discarded, too much money all converted in a singular convulsion onto writhing plasma, white hot, the idea of power unleashed as a physical thing.

And what did these oblations bring? Angels? Demons? The Mouth of Satan to unspeak God’s Word? What dread portals spun open in here where no material thing could exist? I know the Company is variously owned by the Pope, the Illuminati and the billionaire Antichrist of the week; surely they know the truth. 

“Clear out, you fucking retard,” Mr. Florentine yells without echo just beyond the threshold. He is tiny in comparison to the vault door behind him, the megaton Hand of God poised to swat.

Kieran nearly runs him over, tipping up on two wheels just like in the safety video. “He’s not a retard, Boss,” he calls over his shoulder as he deftly sets another block into a house-sized wall of pallets. “He’s just what my Grammy would call ‘pie-headed’.” The forklift pirouettes with a whine and darts back out.

“Fuck your Grammy.” Mr. Florentine holds me with an uncompromising gaze. “He’s a state-certified retard. He takes retard pills and works a retard job.” There is more but there are three of him now, one pleading on his knees, apologetic, one with his mouth shut, one saying the hard, cruel things. I can’t pay attention when this happens. Like bees in my head.

Then there’s four of him but it’s just the New Girl even though she isn’t new anymore or even really a girl, I mean not a girl-girl but more like somebody’s mom. She hands Mr. Florentine The Clipboard and when she turns to walk away it’s like the fruit Adam bit into, juicy and dripping down his chin, sticky-sweet, and the world never the same since.

I got a woman, not one of the blow-up ones, but the foam kind. With the moveable eyes. It was nice until one of them got stuck and now I can’t bear to look at her when, well, you know. That’s why I have to put the pillow over her face when she does me. I wanted to call her Eve, but on the outside it scared me what God might think. It’s probably blasphemy that something so wonderfully mysterious as a woman should be rendered like this. So, outside, I call her Katherine. But inside, when she’s doing me, I can’t help but think of her as Eve. My Eve. Blasphemy, I know, but I can’t help myself. And even though it’s wrong, it puts me where I am. 

Mr. Florentine waves me out with The Clipboard—tonight we’re expecting some of the Special Bundles, carpet rolls all wet and heavy, the ones that make the muffled thumps and bangs when THE BEAST lights up. It has to be their souls, the sound they make hammering the innards to get out, terrified as their bodies burn in words, bound in words, burning. Words the smoke from burning skulls. 

Kieran clips the inside edge of the door with a hasty maneuver and tears open one of the big brown cubes, spilling Bibles everywhere. One of the Special Bundles bobsleds down the pile and into THE BEAST, as eager as I am.

Mr. Florentine turns red and shows his teeth. “Get the retard his shovel.”

I feel an ecstatic chill at the words and start to take off my pants. I’m allowed. It’s in the contract. I don’t have to wear my clothes when I shovel. It’s a big wide one, like I suppose they’d use for snow, but I get to do Bibles. Old Bibles, mold Bibles, Bibles that are done speaking the Word and gone hoarse with it, all the lowercase stuff still there but stripped of Power like a drained battery or a movie you’ve seen too much. New Bibles, wrapped in plastic and ready to go except some robot in China garbled the Word at like a million vowels per second as the paper whizzed by, a giant roll of toilet paper wiping a factory’s ass. Not the Truth anymore, just some dangerously subhuman version of it. Can’t read it, can’t sell it, can’t burn it—nothing between skin and air but sweat—I put my back into it. 

“Dammit, Boss,” says Kieran, dismounting the forklift, “I’ll make it right.” He tries to take The Clipboard from Mr. Florentine but Mr. Florentine smacks his hand with it. 

 “No. Retard’s gonna do it. He always gets it exactly right. He has to get it exactly right. Isn’t that exactly right, retard?” 

“Ten steps,” I sing in time with the ringing shovel, “Not seven not five not three not one it’s one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ten steps.” 

Kieran notices my erection before I do.

“Dude,” he says, “You really need to get out more.” 

 • • •

The Clipboard’s too hot tonight so I write it down on my forearms in Magic Marker: 

1. Sound klaxons, 2 short blasts.

2. Call over PA, “Clear out, clear out. Pre-ignition check.”

3. Walk THE BEAST and check the shadows.

4. Sound klaxons, 2 short blasts.

5. Call over PA, “All clear, all clear. Ignition countdown.”

6. Use key with fuzzy monkey keychain to pop panel with Hello Kitty sticker.

7. Raise cover, flip switch, thumb button, watch door close.

8. Wait for 3. Green. Lights.

9. Sound klaxons, 1 long blast.

10. Use breaker bar to short panels on either side of console, where wires stick out.

THE BEAST wakes with a whine that vibrates everything between everything, I can feel my soul shaking loose, and it starts happening in there, Hell blossoming behind yards of weird metal and a thin veneer of understanding. What is it, what is it, I ask pressing my face, my body, my self against the warming shell. I hold on until I can smell it burning me and then I have to go, spent.

This one time I was in a parking lot, a man with a gaping hole in his chest, trying to plug the gushing crimson dyke with white fingers, he staggered into me, grabbed me with bloody hands, whispered fiercely, “God is not the god of man—” When I blinked he was gone, his bloody handprints evaporated. He wasn’t real after all, but the message was. The message was.

On my way to get out more I coast in darkness behind a tractor-trailer rig hauling an identical trailer atop itself. It is confusing and natural. The end of a strap flares in my headlights, rises up in a languid sine wave, then down and into the spinning, hungry wheels beneath where it pulls startlingly taut and blinks out of existence. The trailer shifts, hesitant, and a corner kisses the engorged river of asphalt flowing rapidly past. In that instant I don’t want to jerk the wheel. Nothing is coming apart in front of me, it’s just everything following the rules. Rules that must be obeyed.

Before the second hand can cross the void between hashes I jerk the wheel. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.

Kieran gives me meth, and a beer like soda pop for ugly children, so we’re all in the same place. Too many of us in a different car, speaking in unknown octaves like the chirping of birds we’re going too slow, too slow past the crowd when the guns come out. Then the pop-pop-pop like you wouldn’t expect, shell casings ringing against the fenders and sidewalk, little bells the crowd can’t hear the crowd like an animal you hit with a stick three, four, five times and ask yourself why won’t it move? And then it does, all at once, flowing away as nature intended. The backs of heads and limbs and dear items discarded.

In the woods I ask Kieran why? It’s just rules and nature to me, but I genuinely want to know what he’s thinking. He chugs the last of his beer and hurls the bottle beyond the headlights.

“Fuck, man. It just sounded like a good idea.” He pauses and the words reverberate in my head like a child screaming underwater. “It was either that or get laid.”

He calls for another beer and is presented with one. I notice that he has a gun in his hand.

“You didn’t pull the trigger, man, but you were in the car.” He sighs and looks at the gun. “You can’t just be a passenger in this life—at some point you gotta do something.”

He presses the gun into my hand, heavy and warm with body heat. The weight of it coagulates the bees in my head. He’s right. So I shoot him in the leg.

It takes longer than any of us expected for him to bleed out, even though I know the bullet went through the femoral artery even before I pulled the trigger. It’s no coincidence that old-people clocks are round—cause and effect have a way of looping back on themselves that’s obvious if you know how to look at it. Everything’s a feeling—the crack of bone, the kick of the gun, the weight of the unfired cartridge, Kieran’s thumb pressing it into the magazine, the boredom of the Mexican lady who tamped the round at the factory. All the pressing, pulling, pushing that brought us to this moment: we all squeezed the trigger, we all severed the artery. There was no other possible outcome.

He passes with only a little effort at the end—his breath involuntary and agonal before ceasing mid-gasp—I strain to see evidence of his fleeing soul. He was wreathed only in nothingness. 

I bury him with the others.

 • • •

There’s an unhealthy weightlessness that comes with undoing your safety belt and leaving the passenger seat; you float down the aisle and open the cockpit door only to find there’s no God or dog or Chewbacca in the copilot’s chair. It’s just you, the yoke, and 900,000 pounds of metal and jet fuel hurtling toward the ground. You can dart away like an astronaut and try to buckle back in—or you can take the stick in both fists. Either way, the world only loaned you to the sky. It wants you back. It’ll have you back. Because while it’s fun to talk about, you don’t actually know how to fly a goddamn airplane.

THE BEAST is beyond the whine, beyond the low growl that raises hackles in a 10-mile radius—it roars, now, its throat wide open to swallow a little bit of our reality and take it only God knows where. 

Ten steps. Ten steps to get there. The heat squeezes my bare flesh, threatening to press me in pieces through the sieve of another world; it’s hard to be here. It’s taking all of me to be here. The razor makes a line weeping crimson beads of dew and it’s nine steps, then eight, and the steps peel away, bright and shining, a purity of sensation like sunlight on the naked soul.

Ilsa and the Death of Doubt

Beneath the thumping floorboards, Ilsa hugged the hatbox and shivered, eyes squeezed shut. She tried to make herself as small as possible, pulling her knees up to her chest, collapsing inward, crumpling her consciousness into a tiny, infinitesimal wad. The final, fearful refuge of a prey animal, retracting into the crevices of the mind. I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not—

Above, the Ukrainians were making a mess of the Professor's lab. Drawers yanked from desks bounced hollow and metallic, papers fluttered like her heart. Something heavy crashed into glass again and again. Strange liquids began to seep and smoke into the crawl space. The sting in her lungs yanked her out of her mind-hole and a wave of panic gushed after.

"Here!" an accented voice bellowed, "There's a trapdoor under the table! The old man was lying! You two, move it!"

More crunching glass, grunting and a low scrape vibrated the boards above her head.

Ilsa looked at the hatbox. "I have no choice," she whispered. But the Professor said—

Another scrape, longer this time. A sliver of light slashed her face.

"Forgive me," she breathed. Ilsa upended the hatbox and the pearlescent garment spilled out, finer than silk, unrolling like liquid moonlight. She peeled her own dress up over her head in the cramped space, kicking her shoes away. Her bra came off with the one-handed trick, the envy of all man-kind, and she briefly bridged to peel her panties down over her pear-shaped ass and rolled them off her legs and gone. She gripped the second skin, oily and vaguely luminescent, hesitating for what could very well be the last time.

Above, more boots now, more grunting.

"I want her alive!" the voice barked. Scattered laughter followed.

Ilsa's hesitation broke and she thrust her feet into the legs, feeling the thing snug about her toes; she pulled it up, over her hips and cool across her tummy. The impossible task of finding the arms in an everyday bodysuit was absent—the thing wanted to be worn. She didn't so much slip into it as it slipped onto her. All that was left was the hood. What will it be like, she wondered, will I ever come back?

Another scrape and more light.

She yanked the hood over her head and it swallowed her face, her self, whole. The Insanitard claimed another rider.

Black was white, the moon was made of kittens. And knives, knives came alive in throats.

So close, so close, grown men struggled with a mere table.

"Hurry it up!" Ilsa growled, flexing against the trapdoor.

Puppet Show in an Empty Theater

The day after the Singularity, everyone woke up feeling just fine.

CODA

When the gods speak to you in the quiet moments, alone with Gutspiller, your sword, it's in the voice of roaring flame, crying babe and creaking bones. The name they use for you is not familiar—though if it be applied by the gods it must be yours.

YOU ARE WASTED HERE, they burn, screech and crack. YOU WILL JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF ALL THINGS AND DO WHAT YOU MUST.

You pause mid-whetstone-stroke. Always, you think, with the obtuse. The last time the gods tasked you to do what you must a kingdom burned, and that had angered them. How were you to know the Virgin Concubine was reserved for Athnas' crippled avatar alone? One sock to the Old King's grey head and the avatar broke open upon the flagstones; then the 43 murders—kingsmen all, and in furious combat, but that's not how you prefer to think of it—and a harrowing scene of a Death-amusing swing from one Impossible Tower to its twin on a rope spun from the Concubine's song as she clung to your back in a parody of the moment five minutes hence when she relinquished her title upon your surging member.

The Pillars of Creation shook that day. But then they did on most days when you were sober enough to tumesce and hold a sword.

"Gods," you grumble, "What use have I for gods? Does the foe leap upon my sword, the maid upon my member, the wine and meat upon my palate by whimsy alone?" Still, you rise.

As is usual, the gods are not content to simply open a hole for you to walk through... it is a myriad of black mouths that dial open in reality, all swirling, sucking, tearing at the scenery and tugging you, screaming with rage, in all directions at once.

DO THIS THING AND IT'S GNORTHLAX THOUSANDLEGS' STORIED HAREM FOR YOU; FAIL US AND... IT'S GNORTHLAX THOUSANDLEGS' STORIED HAREM FOR YOU.

And so your boots are set upon The Path.

There is a swamp with a lowly hut, really no more than a mound of offal and detritus wherein dwells hideous conjoined twins, one impossibly old, the other a pouting toddler; this did you smite.

There is the four-space labyrinth of the Dread Pfeffnorg, where hallways branch back into themselves and the blindfold does nothing for it is behind your eyes the Pfeffnorg lurks; this did you smite.

There is a village of Golden People who worship the idol of a squat frog-god and keep a library of life-effacing technology as well as the Chronicle of All Peoples and Times; this did you smite, burn and partner for a time with the Golden King's daughter, whose smirk and sword were as wicked-cool as her heavy breasts.

There are others, and crowns looted from severed heads, wheelbarrows of swag and burning castles. This is The Path, and though you share it now and again with sidekick and warrior princess it is in the end yours to stride alone and so you do, more often than not... as is your fashion.

When The Path terminates, it is at the Center of All Things. The World Beast rages, beset on all sides by ranks of heroes; sword and spell flash against hide and will as the thing bellows and swats cohorts of them dead with each lumbering step. An ensorcelled catapult fires a volley of sainted skulls into the thing's 37th eye—it roars soundlessly and shifts to the left—

There is a Seal at the end of Creation—a Great Key that locks Everything in its Place; the wretched to their swamps, pfeffnorgs to their mazes, golden kings to their thrones—and Gutspiller in your fist.

And the World Beast has just lifted its hindmost foot off of it.

While the gods could have been more explicit, they could not have lined up a better shot. There's a break in the legions of heroes, a surging zig-zag course that opens between you and the Seal. It is The Path. Sheathing Gutspiller, you run. Through carnage and din, past exploding wizards and eyeless clerics, de-limbed warriors and bandy-legged thieves—you run. The beast rages and rears, a mountain walking or stumbling all over the world's finest. Its shadow is everywhere.

The Seal is a stride-wide plug, a keystone set with a massive ring of eldritch metal, impossibly cold to the touch. You set yourself over it, take one last look at the chaos that roils at the Center of All Things, spit on your hands and seize the ring. The cold is stunning and you almost cry out; instead you bear down and pull with everything the gods gave you. Sinew and bone compress as muscles bulge. You can feel the strain in your teeth as they begin to crack. Veins stand out on your glistening tan, making you look for all the world like an angry, man-sized penis—

Once upon a time, a philosopher-king said that flesh is but the shadow of will. Wary of tricks, you disemboweled him.

In this moment you're almost sorry as the plug comes loose with a final shout and The World drains ou—

A PRICKLE OF PUPPIES

The day after the cylinders opened, everyone got their very own parasite from outer space. They looked like puppies in order to minimize the rioting, burning and general awfulness that panicked humans perpetrate in the name of being the animal that prays and wars. After all, every dead human was one less "doghouse"!

Mum and Da did their best to not look terrified as the parasites swarmed over Harry with obvious interest.

Someone, they knew, was going to get a bellyful of space parasite eggs!

One of the "puppies" ran off, and Harry felt the tug of geneered pheromones like a choke-chain wrapped about the root of his very soul.

Perhaps Mum was thinking bad thoughts about fire and hatchets again?

Overfull with writhing larvae, the "puppy" rubbed itself against the ground and gave off an awful cloud of stink. Mum thought deeply of algebra and novel sex positions in an attempt to mask her murderous intent.

But the thing knew. IT KNEW.

Like a furry spring it leapt upon her chest and vomited a mass of space parasite eggs into her mouth. 

She struggled in vain, for it wasn't so much many tiny eggs as it was an enormous mucus-lubed sac of them. It all went down in one sudden, awful swallow.

Having fulfilled its cosmos-appointed purpose, the thing rolled over and expired.

Later, Harry found a new parasite had been sent to link with him. He soaked a tennis ball in 9-oxybutylcharybdotoxin and chucked it at the "puppy".

"FOOL INCUBOY," the "puppy" barked in his mind, "THERE ARE NO NEURONS IN THIS NODE. WE WILL LICK YOUR POISON—"

"—AND REGURGITATE THE BONES OF NAUGHTY CHILDREN WE HAVE EATEN JUST THIS VERY MORNING."

Suddenly, Jasper the quisling scooted up on his fly rollerblades.

The thing communed with whatever was growing inside of Jasper. "The Wilsons down the street are pretending to be subsumed," said Jasper, "But they put the better parts of themselves down the garbage disposal."

"WE KNOW," barked the "puppy" silently, "YOU WILL NOW ENGAGE IN STANDARD PROCEDURE 3905."

"Stab, shoot, burn!" chuckled Jasper.

Harry couldn't stand it anymore. "Vomit your eggs into me, you little bastard! Get to it! Or so help me God I will squeeze the life out of you!"

And so he did.

"ASK YOURSELF," the "puppy" barked softly inside Harry's mind, "HOW IS IT WE FIT, OUR TWO SPECIES? WE EVOLVED ON DIFFERENT WORLDS, WINDING ABOUT DIFFERENT STARS, SO MANY LIGHT YEARS APART."

"IT IS CLEARLY THE WILL OF YOUR GOD THAT WE SHOULD CLEAVE INTO YOU. YOU ARE A CONFUSED SPECIES, BLIND TO YOUR COSMIC DESTINY—"

"—BUT WE KNOW. AND WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU BE WHAT YOU WERE MEANT TO BE."

Harry had to admit, it wasn't so bad once you just let go and accepted it.

With their stubby legs, the things from the stars needed people to push them around in carts...

The chilly limits of the squared-cubed law meant they needed people to keep them warm...

They needed every one of us...

And isn't that what makes life worth living, to be needed?

Every one of us, needed, perhaps even "loved"...

Until we're all used up.

God's Own Editorial Cartoon

From time to time when the wind shifted at the back door I caught the unmistakable whiff of rotting flesh. It was but the faintest hint, like a long-gone lover's perfume, gently nudging a memory to life but not stroking long enough for arousal. I'd get yanked backwards out of the Internet, look up from my laptop and coffee, scrunchy-faced and think, That smells like... must be something under the greenhouse... and then the wind would shift again and it would be gone.

Just as quickly I'd be back to work, some slowly submerging part of my mind figuring it would either get dramatically worse or nature would just kind of sort it all out.

Repeat at odd intervals for weeks, and then dolly-zoom on yesterday:

We're in the backyard grilling and I catch the scent. That submerged memory rises and bursts in my mind like a viscous swamp bubble. Something under the greenhouse. I wander over to the far corner where it meets the fence and the neighbor's wild growth of enormous greenery and get socked in the head by the odor. I bend down to look under the greenhouse and the stench abates. I rise and the volume cranks back up to breakfast-wrestling. Puzzled and nauseated, I cast about, homing in on the epicenter of—

There are moments where you see things so painfully clear, it's like God's Own editorial cartoon, where an enormously fat man in a diaper wrestling with two hookers on a pile of money somehow encapsulates 30 years of socioeconomic history in a few deft strokes of the pen. A maximized fullness of understanding rendered with the absolute minimum of material and effort.

Momentarily stunned, I say aloud, without turning, "I have to clean up something truly horrible." I do my best to convey you don't want to know with word-choice and tone. I don't move, shielding the eyes I know will be summoned to my back by my voice.

My wife hesitates, words and tone doing the trick. "What—is it?"

"You don't want to know." Then, "I'll take care of it." I turn and stride into the house trying to figure the best—and quickest—way to handle it. Garbage bag, no, two, double-bagged, like a giant glove, gonna have to be hands-on, lift slowly, don't pull...

I am suddenly jerked backwards to The Night of the Great Pooting, where the dog was extremely excited about something in the dark but returned almost instantaneously and with a great stink. It billowed and rose through the house, waking all within and making us fear for the amount of de-stinking labor we'd have to suffer before sleep take us again. Luckily, the dog appeared to have been merely grazed, somehow dodging the shot, at the edge of the cone of stink rather than at the center. At the time I thought it a great boon of luck (and not caution or skill on the part of the dog) but now I knew that it was only because the dog was not the target. The thing had pooted at Death itself in a vain attempt to drive the Grim Reaper off.

The possum had been traversing a mildly treacherous section of fence, one where a hand-span gap narrowed to nothing in a long V that terminated, unfortunately, more than one possum-body length above the ground. Here, human enterprise, entropy, physics and a primitive brain all conspired to do the poor beast in. With footing lost, he fell head-first into a puzzle he couldn't solve, at least not before Death would have him. So he hung by the neck at the bottom of that V, scrabbling and pooting, pooting and scrabbling, then menaced by dogs as he pooted every last ounce of poot he could muster.

What was left, weeks later, demanded to be photographed, at least by those at a safe remove; but for me and the requirements of the task at hand taking pictures was the last thing on my mind. I wanted it over with, and now.

It looked, felt, sounded, smelt and tasted exactly like you'd think, only knobbed up beyond 11.

I can still see the cartoon stink lines.

Boobs & Armageddon: A Meditation

Life begins with a sound like a flushing toilet.

I gain consciousness by degrees amid the viscous swirl, my brain lit with cram-download. I become human in moments, a blur-crawl from infancy to full-fledged killer as the gro-gel sluices into the depths. The first sensation is pain as my feet suck to the sharp-edged grid of the vat's drain floor, followed by cold, then weakness and shame as I collapse under my own weight onto all fours, falling onto my side, and finally, gagging, yank the branching umbilicus from my guts, lungs, nose and mouth.

I haven't even taken my first real breath and I vomit a couple liters of snot.

Luckier than most of humanity, I know who I am and why I'm here. I think of my people, dropping from the trees to take on the larger predators, becoming what all life on Earth fears, stamping our bootprint into the backs of all things—even lights in the night sky—and then pulling the trigger on ourselves and pissing a miracle into less than nothing. "Thanks," I rasp with fire in my throat, "you bunch of no-good sons-of-anuses." I'm not sure the idiom is correct, though the visual feels somehow right.

MOTHER gives me three hours, though I'm ready in 20 minutes—cleaned up, girded, strapped and armed. I waste the remainder of the time sitting, ramrod straight, among the broken things. Vast machinery of unknown purpose crowds the cavern into closed spaces, all it it echoing with playback of the countless missions I've failed before. Each loop is a snippet of exclamations, breathy oaths, the chatter of automatic fire, screams that grow with proximity and end with a roar, or the metallic patter of mostly deflected bullets, the whump-crunch of worse, or the flea's-knee klick of lost telemetry.

This time, I'm good to go.

The playback ends. MOTHER dials open the lock. I step inside and take a final lungful of clean air, tap the ammo-count on the .75 and spool up the MASER, all before the iris valve pinches off the last bit of sanity and humanity behind me. I check the cycle time and prime a grenade for a hair just past that, position myself before the outer door, balancing arm extended, grenade fuzing quietly next to my head in the other fist.

A circle of candy-colored light bursts from the center of the outer iris and I'm already halfway through the throwing arc. The grenade vanishes into the bright and rings the metal hull like a bell. Blowback scorches my breastplate.

I stride into the mess and leave my bootprint in the ones still breathing.

•••

This is life for long enough that I would be viking-shaggy (if I could but grow hair) and a-dangle with skulls and flapping hides (were I to collect trophies) and with a name that precedes my arrival (if the things out here could speak). Instead, it just goes on until I'm low on ammo.

••

You'll know her when you see her. A human woman, bound and magnificent, outsized curves straining the boundaries of adolescent fantasy. She is attired as savages might swath the Venus of Willendorf for sacrifice, exposing enough lusciousness to attract the eyes of the Gods while covering those few bits that make Them blush. She stands proud and unbowed atop the stepped pyramid, smeared with handprints, a mane of wild hair obscuring her eyes, shoulders, and most of her back. A sea of admirers laps at her tiny feet. They chant blasphemies.

I give the suit a moment to read the crowd and calculate a trajectory before lighting the thrusters and jumping in, crushing four of them and burning others as I hit and leap away, CBM dispensers spinning wedges of shrapnel off my back as my boots leave the earth, feather-light. With a hop, skip and a jump I'm up the pyramid and arcing back down toward the small stone square carved with caricatures of talking cars and skeletons in business suits. I land in a wash of smoke and flame, sock the high priest in the nugget with a mailed fist, snatch the girl and rocket away.

Arrows fashioned from the bric-a-brac of a dead civilization shatter across my ass and pincushion hers, though she makes no sound, this brave Concubine of Death. She'll make a fine MOTHER of the New Human Race.

•

Back at the hab I toss her onto the waterbed, as is fitting for this moment in History, the way a pulp hero or misogynist might. The suit releases me, a tripartite zippered maw vomiting a pink and hairless doll. 

She lounges on the undulating bed stiffly. 

I step to the foot of it and remove my shirt in a double-fisted spray of buttons and begin to fumble at my belt. Some of the foam rubber has come loose from her curved belly and I spy—with rising horror—the metal beneath. As the whole of human history bottlenecks and dolly-zooms on me and the appliance, my horror redoubles and then does so again as I realize I've never seen my own genitalia. I can't, for the life of me, remember whether or not I have a penis.