No Dogs in Philly (16)

A Cyberpunk Horror Noir | Chapter 16: Apotheosis

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The bridge was even longer than Saru had realized. It narrowed at the middle; glancing to either side she could see the waves of bodies lapping at the walls of the pit below. They flowed like water and pulsed like a pumping artery. They scratched against the rock, skin and viscera fusing into tentacles and appendages tipped with studs of bone and teeth and metal from their implants. They bore into the cracks. Widening. Expanding. Plunging in a tangle of ghoulish roots. Where did the tunnels lead? How many centipedes crawled their thoroughfares? What other connective tissues had spread throughout the city?

“Disgust is a typical, natural reaction,” Friar said. He waddled ahead of her, head craning back to flash that warm, nightmarish smile. “I don’t judge you for it.”

“That’s a relief,” Saru said.

“The human brain evolved a distaste for its own innerworkings. Seeing blood, organs, muscle, and bone—it stimulates an avoidant response in order to reduce the risk of the parasites and diseases that accompany death and injury.”

“Uh huh.” That’s right, gab away. You keep talking, I keep breathing. Win win.

“It’s an unfortunate irony that human consciousness finds the very organs that house it to be objects of disgust and ugliness. Perhaps if human skin had evolved translucence, or the immune and repair systems greater robustness against invasion and trauma, the human brain would signal pleasure at the sight of itself.”

“Yeah, yeah, really interesting stuff.”

“You’re evading my point, I fear.”

“Don’t be afraid. You hold all the cards here.”

“But I do fear, Saru. I fear for you.” Friar offered her a look of sincerest concern. It was ludicrous, his avuncular face framed by the alien hellscape. “What you are seeing registers as frightful, grotesque, dangerous. But that is an evolutionary quirk. An instinctual misfire. Humans hate our bodies. We view our bodies as weak, vile, worthless, and impure. That is why we plunge our brains into the deceit of the Net. Why we distort our features with surgeries, seeking an imaginary, ephemeral beauty. Why we fast and gorge, why we lie in sedentary languor or convulse in pursuit of muscular hypertrophy. Why we pollute ourselves with machinery. We crave modification, transformation, transcendence, deliverance.”

“So? Isn’t that your pitch for joining the Hungry God?”

“Precisely.” Friar nodded. He gestured at the pit of bodies. “This is not the UausuaU. This is us. This is humanity. Our self-hatred. Our self-disgust. Our failure. Our hunger. Our devouring of our own world, to feed our own sins. Your reactions aren’t subtle. You think what you see is monstrous. But the monsters are not the doings of the UausuaU. They are our doings. Our creations. The UausuaU appears monstrous to us, in our world, because we are monsters. Do you understand?”

“Sure. We’re ugly; it’s ugly.”

 “Ugly. Yes. That is our judgement. Our interpretation. This ‘ugliness’ is merely the mechanism, the machinery, the corpus that the UausuaU needs to exist in our world. Humans constitute the greatest biomass on the planet. And so it is our biomass that the UausuaU uses for its margin of similarity. But just as the human body houses consciousness, so too does this body host the consciousness of the UausuaU. And that is beauty. Truth. Purity. Joy. Bliss. Ecstasy. Paradise. An existence that is so wondrous and divine I cannot bear the thought of my fellow humans losing it.” His eyes teared up. “So I do fear for you. I fear you’ll let an atavistic quirk of biochemistry, a cultural brainwash, turn you away from salvation.”

“What do you want?” Saru aimed a finger at the sea of bodies, furious at his earnestness. “You want me to dive in there with a big fat grin on my face? You want me to be happy about this? I came here to hurt you. To kill you, again, forever.”

“I want you to keep an open mind,” Friar said, simply.

“For me to believe you my mind would have to be so goddamn open my brain would fall out of my head,” Saru snapped.

A smile twitched in the corner of Friar’s lips, so genuine yet so fake. It was too quick a shift. The longer she spent with him, the more cracks she saw in the veneer. Delicate, hair-thin, almost invisible, but there. It was Friar alright, no doubt about it. But he was too pandering, almost like an AI. He wasn’t acting—just reacting, to whatever she did, in order to convince her. Even if he was telling the truth—and hell, he probably was—nothing he said or did could be trusted. It was all kayfabe and kabuki, all a lure to force some kind of action from her. For all his talk of imperfection, he was missing the flaws and farts and stutters that made him believable.

“I always enjoyed your dark sense of humor,” Friar said. “But here is your predicament—and mine. You are witnessing the ugly without being able to experience the beauty. Your judgement is skewed by prejudice. The elzi come to the UausuaU directly. They hear the song and follow the notes home. It is easy for them to abandon their human bodies. But you cannot go that route. The tinkering of the Gaespora has barred the gates of paradise to you. The parasite of the Blue God will not allow an easy passing. Your joining must come with difficulty. The question for you is—how difficult do you want to make it?”

There it was—the stick. Friar’s eyes didn’t harden like a human making a threat. He didn’t tense or a ball a fist. He stayed kind, concerned, sad, even. His voice merely softened. But there was no mistaking the menace. Not with a literal pile of bodies underfoot. Violence wasn’t Friar’s first choice, no, he was doing everything he could to avoid it. But he wouldn’t hesitate to use it.

They reached the far end of the bridge and Saru saw the central organ and the stalk supporting it were also constructed of bodies. The meat had warped and stretched, hardened and blackened, the implants melting into rivulets of metallic veins. Its shape, its design, its existence was too bizarre for her brain to settle on any conclusive judgement as to what it could be. One moment it looked purely organic and the next it was mechanical.

Friar paused at the entrance, a high, protruding arch like a beak. A tight knit of interlocking arms formed the doors; they swayed in a soft tug-of-war. Gargoyles of eyeless heads studded the façade, their lips murmuring a maddening nonsense. When Saru’s ears tried to grasp the words she tumbled into a montage of fantastical hallucinations—a Thanksgiving dinner with a happy family, a penthouse orgy, a homoerotic barbarian hacking his way through hordes of beasts, a starship with two lonely passengers falling in love, a train ride through a misty forest, a downhill ski race. She could smell the turkey, feel the press of the orgy, hear the hum of the starship engines, taste the mist and the snow spraying her lips. It was jarringly real, so much so that it shocked her brain like a toaster in a bath to return to the awful present.

The cilial arms of the arch withdrew into the fleshy façade and Friar beckoned her to enter. For a moment this too felt like fantasy, and then her eyes burned and she felt their blueness dissolve the illusions, the maddening whispers silenced by the unvoiced howl in her breast. She followed Friar through doorway.

Her brain deciphered the inside as a cathedral, with beams, domes, and columns carved in the impossible details of human skin. The bases of the columns were wetter, rawer almost, and they melded with the floor—the floor. It clacked against her boots like hard black marble, but looking closely she could see all the whirls and patterns were bodies too, all melted together and flattened, grinning, yawning, and screaming up at her.

“What did the Hungry God offer you?” Saru asked.

“Knowledge,” Friar said. “The UausuaU spans galaxies and universes. Dimensions and existences I could never have imagined. The UausuaU gives me infinite lifetimes of learning and discovery. For me, it was an easy choice to be a part of such understanding.”

“And what does the Hungry God get from all this? A meal?”

“The UausuaU too gains knowledge. It learns from us. Our organic makeup. Our evolution. Our homeostatic processes. Our memories. And it uses our discarded material components to grow.”

The red light thickened as they moved towards the center. It held a weight to it like a heavy fog, though it wasn’t wet, and it pressed down upon her. Glimpses of horrid, formless figures lurked just at the edge of her periphery, real but immaterial, in the light that wasn’t light. It was both dim and bright, making it hard to see what lay ahead. A shadow. A form. A dais. An altar.

A table.

Friar stopped at the head of a long black table set for a feast. Atop its morbid black surface lay a body. Not like the bodies of the pit or cathedral. This was intact, human still. She was a pale, slight woman, young—god, how that twisted the guilt knife—twenty at most, but her dark hair had the telltale streaks of gray from heavy drug use. She was pretty, mouth open with a spot of blood blending with her lipstick.

Her throat had been cut deep and the veins of her arms opened and drizzling blood, arms and legs spread so she looked like she was just relaxing. He’d stripped her naked, pale skin all the way, signs of bruises, breaks, old scars and screwups that had happened long before Friar had cut her up. Her only visible implant was a plug in her temple, probably for selling memories. Her eyes were open and whole, a dazzling, crystalline blue. They stared at the ceiling and Saru followed the dead gaze upward.

Eyes. Thousands, millions of eyes. Eyes sucked from every corpse in the city, in the pit, slithering and migrating across the membrane of the cathedral to cluster and congregate, staring down with bloodshot intensity at the naked corpse below. Viscous strings of the red light oozed from the hateful eyes, poking, prodding, prying into the dazzling pure blue eyes of the woman. Saru could feel her own blue eyes being picked at, little fingers scraping in, feel the hunger of the eyes above salivating at her presence.

“What is this?” Saru demanded. “Some kind of alien peep show?”

“This is Ria.” Friar took the dead woman’s hand in his own, holding it like he was offering comfort to a loved one. “Do not be deceived by her juvenile appearance or pathetic condition. She is annihilation incarnate. Her margin is so strong that it lingers beyond the masquerade of her expiring flesh. The Blue God lurks within her baleful eyes and would burn this world in an instant were it not contained. We are studying Ria. Purifying her. And when the parasite of the Blue God is drawn out, she may join us. You see, no soul is beyond redemption, no creature so cursed they cannot be saved by the love of the UausuaU.”

Ria. It wasn’t a name on the list. Or it was one of the blanked-out names. Maybe the Gaespora had known about her all along. It wasn’t like the list was there to help anyone. It was just to track the progress of their latest experiment. This was what the Gaespora wanted anyway—death. Torture. Humiliation. Conflict and vengeance. War between the Blue God and the Hungry God. She’d been set up from the start. Set up for the same damn fate. Her life, this woman’s life, all their lives, just playthings, sacrifices, fuel for a fight she couldn’t give a shit about.

The fury of it all shook her clenching fists. A warmth awoke from the bite of her nails in her palm, the heat of escaping blood. No. Too hot. And cool at the same time. She looked down and saw a white glow in her fingers. A white speck of an orb, just like the orb that had appeared in her palm on the imaginary island. She snapped her fingers shut, hiding it from the prying eyes.

Friar picked up a crystal chalice from the table and held it under Ria’s dripping arm. It filled halfway with blood. He wiped away the spatters around the edge with a white napkin, and then folded the napkin and placed it neatly back on the table.

“I would invite you to dine with me,” he said. “But I’m certain you find this to be a grisly spectacle. In truth, it is nothing of the sort. It is merely symbolism. Humans have always communicated with the gods through the act of ritual. It is a way of distinguishing the routine of survival from sacred communion. The ritual is performed with behaviors that are more easily understood by the divine, and it strengthens the margin of those who participate. Even the McChristians drank the blood of their savior, though the god that they found has long since fled. In any case, I don’t think it’s a terrible imposition to ask you to have a drink with me.”

He held out the chalice of blood.

“Say I do have a drink,” Saru said. “Then what? You cut my throat and throw me on the table?”

“To drink would consecrate your willingness to invite the UausuaU in,” Friar said. “There would be no need for invasive measures.”

 Saru took the chalice. She made a quick feign of bringing it to her lips with the dumbest smile she could muster and then poured it out on the floor. The blood sizzled like magma.

“How’s that for symbolism?” Saru said. Then, just for good measure, she flipped him the bird.

Friar sighed and shook his head in disappointment. “I must admit, I expected as much.”

But he didn’t attack.

That was it. This was all a show. Intimidation. Inevitability. None of them wanted to kill her. They wanted her to come willingly. Because the Hungry God really didn’t want this fight.

“Is there no other—”

With all the strength she could muster, Saru hurled the speck of light in her hand at the dome of eyes. She wasn’t sure it would do anything—hell, she wasn’t even sure the speck was real; she’d taken a lot of knocks to the skull lately. But it was absolutely delightful to see the speck fly like a missile, growing bigger and brighter until it exploded in a kaleidoscopic blaze.

Everything changed at once. A sound—a shockwave akin to a scream rattled the air. The ground of the cathedral bucked. The floor, the columns, the ceiling slackened and moistened, the flesh and blood and bodies of the mortar crumbling loose. Popped and blistered eyeballs poured down from the ceiling, bouncing and rolling and absorbing into the oozing floor. The suffocating red light dimmed.

Friar’s mouth ripped and his face twisted into a deranged grin. His neck cricked thicker and longer, and twisted around, not looking at Saru, but searching for something else. His gaze fell at the opposite head of the table, on a faint, wavering disturbance that resolved into the shape of a dog. It was like the one she’d seen on the island, luminous and colorful, vacillating between solid and diaphanous, though she knew in some part of her that this was not her dog but kin. The dog jumped onto the table and bowed to touch its forehead to Ria’s.

There was a flash, and a column of golden light erupted from the dog and enveloped the table and Ria’s body. The heat forced Saru back but Friar stood firm—blood and pus dribbled from the cracks on his face as the skin charred and split. Saru decided now was as good a time as any to make a run for it, but as she started for the door, a centipede shot through and reared up to block her.

The eyes of the torsos opened wide, the mouths filled with mocking smiles, and they laughed at her with their dead mouths and throats, an awful sound of sputtering mufflers and forks caught in the garbage disposal. She skittered to a stop an inch from a grasping hand covered in lice and worms and rot and took a step back. The centipede slid back a few feet and she took another step—another step, another slither, another step, another slither, until she was right back where she’d started and the centipede was back in the doorway.

Cute.

The column of gold faded and the table was gone, melted and cooled into a glassy slag. Ria stood, or floated above the ground, alive, intact, skin glowing like pure light, no sign of cut or injury, clothed in a golden armor that was truly divine, and her eyes shone like blue jewels so bright they hurt. Light poured out of her, and it was warm and comfortable, and within it Saru felt safe, like her big sister had come over to the playground to kick that bully’s ass.

Ria looked at Friar like he was pigeon shit on her favorite shoes. A beam of blue light shot from her eyes and he vaporized. It happened in a flash, so quick Saru couldn’t even process. He was gone. Ria walked over and put a hand on Saru’s shoulder. Her glow faded and she was just a girl now, a girl who had been dead a few minutes earlier. In the touch they exchanged words and meaning, a lifetime of conversation interrupted only by—

“Please, I must insist you comport yourself.”

Saru jolted back. Ria frowned with annoyance and a blue beam shot from her eyes. It was Friar’s voice that had spoken, and out of the corner of her eye she saw another Friar vaporize. And another, and another—they wriggled like tar up from the floor or detached themselves from the columns to swell or shrink and then harden into a new body, a new Friar, intact, dressed in his same ugly getup—that was a small mercy—to be vaporized until the latest of a dozen Friars caught the blue beam in his hand, grasped it like a bright blue tennis ball, and then squeezed so it sparked and fizzled into nothing. Ria quit trying to vaporize him for a moment and stared with that same shit-on-my-new-carpet look.

“You see,” he said. “Fighting gets us nowhere.”

She shot the beam from her eyes again, brighter, thicker, more intense. Friar caught it but couldn’t hold on, and it washed over him and he died again, Saru guessed. It was hard to tell anymore who was dead or alive and if it really made any difference at this point. Because he was back a second later, in another corner of the cathedral.

“Doesn’t this all feel just a little bit futile?” he said, but he hadn’t quite formed right this time; his face was off, merged with another, that of a stranger, and fetal arms and legs wiggled from a shaft of exposed brain. Ria vaporized him again.

Ria lifted her arm as though she were tossing a ball and lo and behold a ball appeared, a bright white orb that flew up and cast its harsh fluorescence through the cathedral. A thin white ray flickered from the orb, emitting a sound of wires crossing mixed with someone sucking spit. Another Friar, vaporized. The flickers came faster and faster until the ball and its light faded.

Saru heard a groan behind her and she whirled to see a body detaching itself from a column. It came free with a shcluck and then shivered and slouched its way towards her. From the eyeless sockets and ragged mouth burst tangles of hair-thin strings. Saru dodged but three stuck in her leg, three knife thrusts, pain mixed with a confusing, venomous ecstasy, and she could feel her blood sucked greedily out. A flash and the wires burned away and the body poofed into a cloud of ash. But more came from the walls, crawling down from the ceiling, men, women, and children with dancing bloody wires poking from their sockets and mouths, metal-spaghetti vomit writhing out, and they spoke: “Come…come…come, Saru.”

She tossed a microgrenade at the nearest group and blew them all to smithereens. At her back Ria sent more globes into the air, a circling halo of pearls that cackled out death rays. She laughed and shot blue death from her eyes, holding out her hands and bathing the area around them in wide cones of golden flame. Saru tossed another microgrenade, shiv in the off-left, Betty in the right hand, feeling inadequate. That’s right, assholes, come any closer and I’ll stab ya.

There was a voice in her ear, Friar, and she twisted and strained her neck and looked in every possible direction, but his fat ass was nowhere to be seen. He was in her head, a spirit, a voice, like the singing voices of the pit and the cathedral, not physical but there.

“Do you really wish to serve this creature?” he asked. “Look at her. She worships violence and pain.”

That was true enough. Ria was blasting and burning with the joy of a kid in a porno store. A particularly fat corpse waddled at her and she positively shivered with delight as she ignited his wires and watched the flames travel back and consume him. And so what?

“Doesn’t bother me,” Saru said, guessing Friar could hear her. A tiny child corpse tottered through the rays of light and fires to try and latch its wires onto her. She kicked it in the head and then nearly vomited when the head tore free and bounced away. Wires slithered through the gore of her neck, worms in mud, and then shot out in all directions. She slashed at them with her hip shiv, but one wrapped around her leg and burrowed into her shin. Oh god, the pain! She sank to her knees and grabbed at the wire but it was sharp and her hands came away with blood. She felt it burrow deep, working its way up her calf into her kneecap.

“Come to us,” Friar whispered. “Embrace us.” And then pain in her leg turned suddenly to pleasure.

“No…”

She kicked out with her left leg and tried to cut the wire with her heel dagger, managing to cut open her shin in the process. She got it the second time and stumbled to her feet, where she swayed back and forth and watched the scene before her like she was staring through an aquarium. They were surrounded now, her and Ria, by a horde of shambling bodies spraying bloody snake wires from their eyes and mouths.

Ria danced and laughed as she spun and shot bright colors from her eyes and hands, turning the bodies into fire and ash. She clasped her hands together and disgorged a jet of golden fire the width of a truck tire, spinning it around like a flashlight beam, passing through walls and columns and hundreds of bodies and leaving crackling bloody steam and slag behind her. The beam crossed the centipede perched in the doorway and hung there, casting the creature as black swirling particles amidst the gold, and when the beam moved on there was nothing, just a few severed legs clattering against the melted stone in confusion.

“Is this what you want for your world?” Friar asked, still whispering in her ear. “Death and fire? Why not love? Why not have all your desires come to life?”

“You are trying to kill me,” Saru slurred back. “How are you thinking this sounds to me right now?”

“I’m trying to save you,” Friar hissed. “Kill her. Kill her before she burns your world. Before the love of the UausuaU is lost. Before you are.”

Saru looked down and saw a dagger in her hand, a black spike, swirled like the floor, and the stone-flesh walls. It was heavy and real, not her boot knife in disguise. Ria was right behind her, blind to betrayal, caught in the ecstasy of destruction. A hard thrust in her back would do the trick, that would wipe the smile off her face. Little bitch, making me chase you around the city, waiting until the last moment—why couldn’t you have done this earlier? Before we were trapped in this hellhole? Before half the blood had been sucked out of her and aliens had shredded her mind? But Saru knew the answer.

The Blue God didn’t waste its time with losers. It had only contempt for the weak. It was waiting at the bar to see if anybody wanted to dance, any shapely bones with attitude and a bit of fierce in them. A partner that could throw a punch and take one too and wouldn’t squat and cry at the first little lost limb. It was her kind of god—an action god, a god of instinct and right-angle decisions, sharp teeth, big guns, hot fire and bloody knuckles. She tossed the black knife, whether it was real or a metaphor.

“Screw you,” she said to Friar, and in her mind she burned him, tied him to a post under a pile of dry logs and sent him in ashes to the sky. The heat was real, rushing through her brain, and she could feel it licking, lapping at the walls around her mind, human walls, god walls, barriers thrown up by the weak and fearful and now burned, burned, burned away to let the fire of her instinct free. The fire traveled to her eyes and flared, and the blurry half-dead spectator vision faded. She saw clearly, more clearly than she ever had, and stood straighter. Her hand grasped the handle of a golden scepter, hard, heavy, bronzed with sharp blue jewels around a vicious head that crackled with lightning-fire energy. She raised her head to the heavens and screamed her war cry and embraced the gift of the Blue God.

Ria threw her hands up to the heavens and the cathedral shook. A shimmering circle spread out from her feet. Saru screamed and charged the hordes of bodies, each swing of the scepter an arc of lighting flame that splashed away her enemies in droves. She laughed at the tickles of their wires bouncing against her skin, their cries to come now sounding less like menace and more like the pleading of a beggar. A smash to the face, an explosion of color and splatter of blood. Two quick knocks, two bodies on the floor. A backhand blow, an uppercut, a carefree spin that would leave her dead in the real world; every pat and tap of her new toy was death and she reveled in it. Here was joy. Here was power. Here at last was an offer of real temptation. Damn your peace, your love, your ten million bucks and luxury. I am home.

Ria kept her arms upraised and light burned through the fake light, the lying light of the red mist. True light cut away the haze, bright, impossibly bright, and yet with Saru’s new eyes it felt good and right, growing more and more around them until the bodies began to sizzle and pop, the stone grew sweaty and moist and dribbled away, the centipedes screamed and thrashed as they burned and burst and her clothes caught flame and dissolved, an agony as her implants boiled in her skull, the shivs in her thighs and the armor plates and pins throughout her bones all vaporized, but her skin and blood and hair and eyes were all intact and crying out in joy at the heat of the light now so strong and wide and powerful that all was white, the pure, perfect white of a star.

Saru felt herself rising then, the walls and ceiling gone, the floor itself now made of light, rising, rising, up now free of the ground, a perfect circle in a beam of light, rising like an elevator to the heavens. The light dimmed, the whiteness fading, the glorious hot subsiding into a cool air, real, fresh night air. She stood next to Ria on a pure white disk floating above the city. Below them raged a pit of fire, the cathedral and the soup of bodies burned away, the corruption of the UausuaU purged from the earth. The fire burned white hot, cresting in waves like an ocean, an ocean of fire in the city’s heart that she knew would burn forever, a warning to those who would defy the Blue God.

Were there innocents trapped in the flames? Men and women in their homes, unknown to the UausuaU, caught in the fire for no reason other than chance? No. There were no innocents. There were only the weak and the strong. Faithful servants of the Blue God and enemies to be destroyed.

Saru felt the fear of the people from below and reveled in it.

Ria surveyed her kingdom, the world she was to command, and laughed. She took Saru’s hand and let it drop. Saru searched her eyes—blue, murderous blue—and saw no trace of a human girl. Ria was a god, commanding her to kneel. She knelt, and for the first time in her life, Saru Solan did as she was told.