cunt toward enemy[season 2 finale] | mean time

Dark.

Light.

Dark.

Light.

He thinks he’s blinking. Then some sluggish understanding tells him, his eyes are incapable of movement, swollen so tight his lids can’t close.

His heart is blinking.

It sounds like the ocean in his skull. Blood surging like snot, cells deprived of vital salts, ebbing flowing in the lilt of Cal’s sentence.

His perception of time is curled around that tongue. His entire sensory apparatus twists in a vortex of smoky enunciation. He watches those thin lips slice into each other, spit evaporating from Calendula’s mouth and fogging the air.

Lazur’s ears pop. His tongue swells to fill his mouth, choking him. His hands claw at nothing, blood vessels bursting black Lichtenberg scars down toward his heart.

His brain shatters with a crunch of glass.

Dark.

Light.

The sound came from outside his head.

Crunch.

Cal looks back, the air shredding with the fangs of his sentence, teeth of the unfinished. Something lurches from the shadows, skin clouded with ash, except ash doesn’t swirl like liquid.

The death word exhales from Cal’s mouth, teeth clicking like a misfired flintlock, searing a black cloud into the wall, an apocalyptic halitosis.

Lazur drops to the floor and gasps as his lungs start working again. Blood speckles his vision, tingling and numb all over, veins unkinking like hoses, slowly showing him the figure coming down the hall.

Her clothes hang charred and blood-soaked from her wiry frame, as if she tore herself from a demonic membrane. Tongue full and forced out, priapic dagger digging into her stomach, nails split open and raining, blood flowing to her extremes. A smile with cracked teeth. Eyes full of burst vessels. Skin clouded with qatran like black mold.

Calendula says something like,

How?

Greenwich spits out a tooth. All those months. You put your poison in me.

Testing your weapon.

She lifts her hand, black as the gun that holds it.

What did you think would happen?

You raped the vaccine into me.

He screams death, and it slams her to the back of the hall, smoke blasting and whirling. When the sun flicks back on, she lays there, panting, then stands up. The qatran stains are bigger, striating her flesh in inky scythes, black wings swooping through her skinscape.

Your lungs will give out before I do.

Cal’s eyes are wider than anyone has ever seen them, straining the tethers of blepharoplasty. His terrified breathing is amplified through the black wax, lips conducting feedback. He covers his mouth, then rips his hand away, taking a strip of skin with it, sizzling with tar.

Greenwich points her gun and flicks the safety off. Black oil contracts and swirls around her pupils as her focal distance dilates. Teeth flash through the ash:

DID YOU THINK
YOU COULD ELUDE
THE JUSTICE
OF THE ONE
TRUE
GOD

On Calendula’s wrist, the green second dial rotates smoothly, and the minute hand ticks over. He starts to speak and she says, Don’t waste your breath.

She pulls the trigger.

His arm jerks up and the bullet strikes his steel watch. The glass shatters, force transmitting into his wrist bone, cracking it into three pieces. His hand flops numb at his side and his shoulder sags as if he was being pulled into the earth. Glass seeds his startled face, glittering under the rolling lights. A green splinter is stuck just under his eye, a radium dial.

He runs.

Greenwich kisses the gun and whispers to it.

—thank you for redeeming me I feel you I am here I am faithful your arm—

The gun is the other hand in her prayer, hot and hard as her faith. It breathes holy incense, a trail for Lazur to follow.

The acoustics broke sometime around the seizure of the sun. Her footsteps echo and interpolate, coming from every direction.

FOR NINE MONTHS YOU POISONED ME

HERE IS THE CHILD OF YOUR IDOLATRY

COME, KISS IT

Her deep voice, the pitch of pitch, booms through the blast zone like a piece of explosion that isn’t finished yet. The qatran ripples through her shredded clothes, flowing with her intent, a delayed howling with her movements, limbs catching ghosts.

Lazur staggers after, head fucked, circulatory system still at the vascular horizon of functional. He comes to a fork in the hallway. Or a new hole made by a fleeing mouth. Hard to see through the dark at the edge of his eyes, and he can’t tell if it’s a problem with his retinas, or the smoke, or both.

His watch has stopped. The LED crystals have exploded.

Tktktk.

Tk.

T
k.

.

Things are trapped here.

His heart beats, and the echo is like a glint in a distant eye. All the way at the end of that hall.

And somehow he knows. If he takes another step. The next will take twice as long. Like grains of rice on a chessboard.

If you come here. You’ll see.

He starts to move. Then he hears a shout, and his head snaps up.

✦

DID YOU THINK YOU WERE ABOVE
GOD’S LAW

She fires into the draconic smoke, then flings herself after the bullet.

DID YOU THINK
NO ONE WOULD HOLD YOU
FAST
FOR YOUR CRIMES

She chases Cal into the lobby. He runs into the light, and from it comes his bodyguard, like a prodigal shadow switching places with him. A mirror of her, their guns raising at the same time, but she was never one to suffer two.

She fires down the luminous corridor and her bullet passes through the metal detector with a yip of alarm and the bullet enters the bodyguard’s brain and frees his soul to serve a better master.

She sprints through the scanner and the alarm shrieks. She touches the bodyguard’s head with the tips of her fingers as she passes, saying a prayer for his return to the gyre. Those red fingers fly back to her gun and grip it with both hands as she reaches the door, and her eyes adjust to the sun reflecting on all the glass that fills the parking lot, two thousand windows blazing shattered on the ground.

Cal has stopped, broken wrist clutched at his side. She wonders why he isn’t running, then sees him fighting for a breath, loading it like a shaky bullet. He shouts and the building leaps around her, dust bursting from the walls in snaking cracks and she fires through the dilating vortex, God’s eye. The recoil flips her chopped hair, a vein of the qatran running down her arm into the gun, the dark mouth of a parasite. She tastes the bullet, a flung tongue. Under the copper, it tastes bitter, and waxy, and she thinks she has blown his blaspheming mouth apart, and taught it humility. But there is not enough blood, or saliva.

Cal clutches the side of his head, bloody earwax boiling through his fingers. Then his armored car, black with smoked glass, screeches through the smoked everything, and he throws himself inside the open door, foot dragging, sock pulled half-down, skinning his heel, and then the doorway collapses and she is in the quaking gloom, bulbs bursting in the consecration of this tomb. Through the splitting ceiling, the entire building is coming through.

She looks back and sees Lazur. He is lost in dust, in confusion, in his own darkness, just as she was lost. She repays him with her arm and thanks it for the grace of muscle remaining, to pull him close and into her honor, into the metal shrine, the thick scanner frame, the scale of Ma’at, no feathers, no heart, and the building falls, burying them in the song of weapons, scanner screaming at the hot gun between them.

✦

Clawing the ballistic gel until the dummy looks even less human. His fingers hurt. His nails are ripped out. The dummy’s face is full of crescent moons, a shrapnel of weak protein.

Tears fall into the violent stars of his fingers in that face. If he doesn’t turn the lights on, he doesn’t have to see what color the gouged pools are. But he can taste it.

✦

Lazur limps down the street, each hard step planting an ashen souvenir. Sirens whip past, red and blue spinning with an unearthly keening, a Doppler dirge whistling and wrong, as if reality had been permanently detuned.

He gags, trying to cough something up. He pulls the coagulated strand from his teeth and it keeps coming until it finally splats on the asphalt. Someone’s hair, twisted like something caught in a vacuum cleaner or washing machine, glinting under the nuclear reactor in the sky, worshiped and feared by its captive audience.

A vibration.

He flips his phone open. Something screams like a throat full of glass. Saliva clogging the mouthpiece.

You used me.
Humiliated me.
And it didn’t even work.
You’re so stupid. And small.
I can’t believe I ever.
Wanted your approval.

Their heavy breathing blends in the phone, then:

You didn’t—
take me—
seriously—
because I’m a child to you—

Rubicon.

He doesn’t know what else to say. He knows if he opens his mouth he will just repeat the name, as if it could somehow fix things. It’s like this phone, everything compressed to something other than their bodies, gripping an empty word, gripping plastic.

You’re just another skin graft. A piece of humanity that rejected me.

Fine.

I had to protect myself.

Let’s see how that works out for you.

Rubi—

I’m going to make your dreams come true, Laz.

A rush of air through the speaker, as if flung from a high place, then a hard snap as their connection breaks.

Lazur’s chest hurts. He can’t see. Hot carbon scorches his sinuses. He squeezes the phone until his hand is shaking, then smashes it into the street and the cheap plastic shatters and he stands in the parking lot of a mall, waiting for the explosion, always waiting.

Tk

tk

tk

A red wire is cut. Some kind of lifeblood is running into space. He reaches for it and falls to the rough asphalt. His body still isn’t right. Delayed stroke. Something wrong with his blood. Blacking out on this cracked trail of death. The street is oozing with oil. Black bitumen groans, hunger without a stomach.

Prince of peace.

The asphalt pours over him, heavy and molten and swallowing.

But I wanted. This thing I am reaching for.

His body is the contract. Already signed.

Lazur shuts his mouth to keep from swallowing the tar. His eyes flicker, a gnawing syncope.

He is your sacrifice zone.

Razed trees scream below the black mass. Varicose veins of tar stretch from coast to coast like filled-in rivers, a continental atherosclerosis, asphalt bleeding, rutting, crocodile-cracking.

Prince of peace.
To rise from defeat is yours.
To be saved from shame is yours.

Here is victory.
Take it.
Without him.

Lazur digs his nails into the hot-mix asphalt, trying to tear open a hole for air.

I have knowledge of every door.
Open a door.
And I see it.
Only by closing the door, can you prevent my passage.

His hand slows, then reaches again, pushing into the tar until his nails start to peel back.

Prince of peace.
I curse you.
Each time you see him.
An explosion.
And the curse will come closer.

With each door you open.
You will watch them fall around you.
Until all hope is gone.
And he watches the life burst from you.

Movement slows. Paralyzed. Heart thudding in the tar.

Attend to these true and wondrous words:

If you face him, he will be victorious.

God does not permit us to lie.

This is the price of our movement among you.

His hair slashes around his head, like charred grass in a windy field. He opens his eyes, and they separate like heavy strips of cooling asphalt.

A petroleum wyrm churns the air, howling from many mouths. A quadcopter, four rotors eviscerating the smoke from the building he used to work at, fanning it across the world. It says NNCNT on the underbelly, in the color of dried blood.

Greenwich stands above him, dark poison swirling in the cyclone of her face. She extends her hand, and the ash makes a firm grip.

✦

✦

Thank you for reading. There will be a final season, although I do not know when it will finish. I will keep posting these early drafts, with minimal editing, so it can exist at all. I am glad you came along for this little story.