cunt toward enemy [s3e4] sludge/bbb

An endless breath. At first he thought it was his own. But his air is congealed, unmoving, stuck in his nostrils and throat like clear resin.

There is something wrong with time. He is suspended in a syllable. The sky has been replaced by a maelstrom of perfectly concentric circles, a horrific vortex that damages his brain to look at. So his retinas slide slowly back to the red dot.

He has been watching the same drop of blood for a long time. He has become attached to it, in this endlessly thawing limbo, crackling like glaciers, undersea recordings. And over it all, a sigh like the sun.

The sigh ends. The droplet hits the floor and explodes, painting everything red. A concrete chamber, damp and steaming, emergency light filtering through horror mist. Maybe a bunker, but he can’t see very well.

To the side, like a hall of mirrors, a reflection of all his deaths. He gleans from his periphery, still unable to move his neck. These dark forms thrash and scream and burst apart in spectacular eruptions of black. Shadows suspended from the ceiling, heavier than shadows, they spasm and swing, the juicy crunchy of bodies being taken apart.

A firing range with lipstick instead of bullets. Agents hang from detcord, bound and bruised and tattered. New speakers train on them, mangling bodies along with pronunciation. Stuttering through a torso, stressing the wrong syllable, killable. He listens for Greenwich’s deep voice but he’s never heard her lose control, what would it sound like?

Detcord explodes and an agent drops to the floor, smoking and bleeding from ropy gashes, and he must have been playing dead, because he suddenly leaps up and sprints across the floor, but the blood is so thick you can smell it, like a drainage ditch slippery with slaughterhouse algae. He slaps to the floor and the phrases, crude as they are, take his limbs and his blood and his eyes, and there is the sense of his spirit held in a distant and terrible place, yet close as these concrete pores. It is the matter of raw panic, false heart attacks, here-and-there, it always was, prefiguring back to the clay of childhood.

Another agent struggles at the sight of this, bait on a hook, waiting for big wet mouths to swallow her. And then her skin pulls away like melted cheese, and her muscles weave into a blinking effigy.

Why is he not up there?

Why can’t he move?

Something rolls toward him, two dark wheels, and he sees how slowly time is still oozing, stuck to him like syrup. Then like a power hose, it’s blasted away, and the agony hits him. A glacier of pain melts, spattering audibly on the concrete which is so hard under his knees. Gravity is four heavy dogs latched onto his wrists and ankles.

He trembles before the power wheelchair, thronelike above him. Rubicon wears a crimson pressure garment, his mouth and eyes visible through the mask, balaclava burn victim royalty. Blond hair sticks through a slit, a sharp tuft curling over his face. Regal lips painted black, the side melted into a permanent sorrow or sneer. His isolated eyes, piercing blue, pierced in turn by blood, somehow hold their color despite the red light flooding the chamber, as if fixed deeper than optics, firing into Lazur’s visual cortex. His split pupils give him an insectile gaze, the wheelchair a spidery abdomen.

“I had to wear a compression suit for a long time. After what you did to me.”

He rolls closer, bare feet dangling in front of Lazur’s face, held in stirrup stockings. A toe scrapes Lazur’s cheek, and he flinches, or he should have flinched. Something is wrong with his muscles. He keeps trying to inspect his body but his neck fights him, and when he bends his wrists it feels like his head is going to drop into the concrete. The wet shadow of his terror darkens the floor

“Pressure keeps your scars from being too greedy. Greedy for blood. Greedy for oxygen. Like you, Laz. My worst fucking scar.”

Lazur’s shoulder blades flex, then snap back, muscles trap-tight. He feels his heart hanging heavy, sagging through his sternum. That’s not his heart. Something is strapped across his chest. Something he needs.

“That’s your gun, Laz. Can you reach it?”

Lazur lifts his hand but his arm folds under him and he collapses in a puddle of face-jizz, how is there so much, like a day’s worth of bad flu snot. He pushes himself back up on all fours and it feels like muscles shredding.

“You got a lot of nerve, agent. Ha ha ha. Are you laughing? Did you think that was funny? No, just panting.”

Rubicon cradles a mirror between his legs, something small and frameless like you’d shave with on deployment.

What is that shivering body, naked except for the gun harness, DO NOT PET scrawled on his ribs in red marker. His black hair is slicked to his face, caging it in all the strands he can’t sweep back or tuck behind his ear, white streaks flaring out like shredded paper.

His muscles are frozen in a gruesome contortion, veins distended. He looks like a Greek ice statue caught in some horrible agony. But he’s hotter than seems possible to survive, sweat boiling through his pores, scalding with each drop. His mouth hangs open, it has to or he’ll choke on drool. He can’t swallow, and he can’t spit. Saliva pools until it spills over his bottom teeth and down his tongue, a viscous and ropy pendulum.

Rubicon looks down at the mirror held between his legs. “You’re like the soul of my dead penis…”

The mirror fogs with the steam of Lazur’s terror. A Francis Bacon portrait screams silently back at him, painted in red mist. And then it blurs, stealing even this awful reference point from him. He is vibrating into pure molecular terror, disappearing into the portal squished between Rubicon’s compressed thighs.

“Let’s learn about nerve gas.”

Rubicon rolls past, crushing his fingers. But even as he hears them break under that heavy chair, he can’t pull them away. Can’t even make a sound.

The terrorist wipes down Lazur’s sweaty back, and he wonders if this is some kind of mercy or affection. Then the marker dances on his dried skin. He tries to look up, as if he could see what was being written. His neck is paralyzed, his eyes are paralyzed, there is only the tap-tap of sweat and tears.

“SLUDGE/BBB. Remember that from medic training?”

Choking sound. The wheelchair is still on his fingers.

“It’s an acronym for remembering what happens when the parasympathetic nervous system goes hyperactive. You know. When that one enzyme gets shut down, and no one is around to tell your acetylcholine to stop signaling your muscles. It just keeps pressing that button.”

He rolls off Lazur’s fingers, revealing badly bruised digits, maybe even crushed to pulp, can’t tell in the harsh red shadowgore. The marker drifts along his skin, a ghostly red line annexing his ribs and waist and hip.

“All pressure, no release. I turned you into an explosion.”

Hhhhhhhh. A spray of drool.

“S is for Salivation.” The marker slashes erratically in Rubicon’s mutilated hand. “L is for Lacrimation. Wah…”

Lazur is blinded by tears. He wants to wipe them away so badly, but they keep pouring over his paralyzed eyeballs, a trickling torture of salt. Can’t shut them, can’t blink.

Rubicon puts out his gloved hand, and the reinforced stitching looks like scar ridging. He catches the technician’s tears, and the drool makes it thick enough to web between his exposed fingertips.

“Reading about nerve gas symptoms, I got so fucking turned on. But I couldn’t, uh. Get release. I needed my human dick to jerk off.”

“Nnn, nnur…”

Writing so fast it can’t possibly be legible, red line jagging up and down like a visualization of his heartrate. “U is for Urination. D is for Defecation. G is for Gastrointestinal Distress. E is for Emesis.”

That’s what the rest of the thawing universe was doing, a mile down your body. It wasn’t the sound of the firing range, corpses bursting and gushing. It was the complete evacuation of your bladder and bowels. Under the red light, all the fluids of your body are turned to blood. The waste between your legs looks like sloughed mucosal lining.

“And…” (Rubicon’s malformed mouth struggles with the word) “Bradycardia! Is your heart feeling slow?”

““““““““““`

“Bronchorrhoea. Are your lungs drooling? This is important, Laz. This will be on the quiz.”

““““““““““““““““““““““““
“Broncho, uh, constriction, bronchospasm, whatever. Is your breathing tight?”
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The tiny amount of air you get is stained with the innermost terror evacuation stink of your body. Meat in terror tastes like shit. Shit from meat in terror tastes like double shit. The pixelsorted horizon of your involuntary urination smells like cleaning chemicals in a bathroom where someone died. Coughing up mucus, fighting just to inhale a scrap of your own death.

“Ruh. Rrrrr—”

“Hey baby. BB. BBB. That’s how you are right now. Just a stuck signal. BBBBBBBBBBBBB. SLUDGE BOMB BOMB BOMB. HA HA HA—” Coughing, sipping water, and spilling it like always, a few drops on the floor and Lazur wants to drink it. He needs it like a sponge. His cells scream for replenishment.

Those stirruped stockings clutch his face, heels digging in, a slimy embrace of toes. Rubicon’s feet, made dexterous from compensating for his weak hands for so long. But still they tremble, trembling with your fear—

“You always fucking underestimated me.”

Nails long and uncut and jagged, creeping to Lazur’s eyeballs, tugging down the skin and exposing their bloodshot undersides. He gags on the smell and a big toe slips into his wet nausea, hooking his cheek, pulling it open. “Come on. Big smile. Big dumb smile. You know why?
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“You’re my bomb sniffer dog.”

“Awurgh.” Drool gutters down the stirruped arch, dripping from the naked heel.

“I know. I know, baby. Where’s the bomb?” The toe snaps from his mouth, ripping the inside, a taste of blood. “Your lungs. Your heart. Your veins. That’s the countdown, you stupid bitch.”

“Rrhh, Ruhh—”
……………….
“Shut up. You’re supposed to bark.”………………..||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||““““““““““
FEAR COM
MANDS
EVERY NERVE
IN HIS BODY

“””’”’Bbrrghhk!”’’’’’
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“Uh. Sure.”
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“Your pupils are so tiny. Like little. Dots.
···········································’’’’·’’’’’’’’·’’’’’’’’’’’’·’’’’’’’’·’’’’’’’’
See that doggy bowl?”
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Can’t see, eyes blinded by sweat—
’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
“Guess what’s in it.
’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
Haha, don’t be disgusting…
’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
Atropine! And some other stuff. So drink up if you wanna live.
You do want to live, right, Laz?
That’s kind of your defining character trait, huh?”

His tendons are steel bars, and he has to bend them to lower his head. His tongue spasms at the water, already foamy with spit, mucus, and tears. Through the salty phlegm, something mentholated and bittersweet.
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“Atropine is found in nightshade. Isn’t that fun? It might kill you. But it’s your best shot.”
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Slurp slurp slurp, he can’t stop himself—

“If you get too greedy, you’ll overdose. And that’s the opposite. You get to experience the polar freaking extremes of your nervous system. Your pupils get bigger, your heart beats faster, you start to hallucinate. I shut you down, now I’m opening you up.”

His pulse jackhammers, shaking his chest. Even without triggering the lipstick, Rubicon’s words are pure injections, shooting past his blood-brain barrier. Whatever is spoken becomes real, an evil synaesthesia that discolors his muscles and stains his brain. Whatever is spoken becomes his own thoughts.

“And it’s psychomimetic.”

Tendons jerk, psycho and miming.

“You know what that means? It causes psychosis.” Crazy crashes into Lazur’s head like glass birds against a windowpane. “Don’t worry. I looked that one up. It only causes symptoms that resemble, or are identical to psychosis. So it’s not psychosis. It’s just identical to psychosis.”
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He forces himself to stop slurping. His tongue writhes in his mouth, eyes twitching. The red bulbs are swelling, radiance accumulating like acetylcholine, throbbing neon lava fills the room.
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“Wow, your pupils are huge.”
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The light fucks his eyes. It hurts even when he shuts them, burning through the lids. And for some reason his eyeballs keep rolling up in his head, a gross sensation. He tries to control them, to look around and reset somehow, but he can’t shake this awareness of his own eyeballs, and it just shows him terrible things, better to be a dog, isn’t? His fellow agents are dead now, but the firing range is very alive. Something thrives in the burst carcasses like predatory roses. Soon it will bloom on his body, drinking his agony.

The wheelchair orbits him like a grim satellite. The wet floor swims with clotted demons. Barb wire succubi swing from a heat death sky. More reds than he ever imagined, cascading from the slit wrists of the cosmos. Rubicon’s lips are slices of blood orange.

Lazur’s skin is drying, very sensitive to the echoes around him, every draft a blizzard, every breath a firestorm. Inhaling so hard but it brings no relief, it has no color or taste, something is wrong, he’s suffocating, he takes big bites of air. Was there something else you used this stupid hole for? He can’t even understand the sounds the red shape the red god is making above him. His drool tastes like microwaved vomit. His thoughts are the earth’s electrical field. He can’t tell his dissolving flesh apart from something very bad and broken and doomed in the world, something his meat had insulated him from perceiving fully until now, but which panic attacks had been the tremor of.

It has become unbearable. The impossibility of being comfortable, even in the smallest part of his body. When he tries to move, he is paralyzed. When he tries to hold still, his spine twists, jaw stretching until it cracks, bones barking. His broken fingers jam into the floor. His feet dig into the impenetrable concrete until his toes snap.

Is this what you felt?

It’s worse than pain, it’s distortion. He laughs, shattered shrieking and unrecognizable to himself, then goes blind.

✦

The copter lands and Calendula disembarks, nearly tripping as he touches the ground. His ear injury was popping and gurgling in the air, and now he has a dizzying migraine. Chopper blade shouting a mantra, jet fuel burning, he kept smelling fumes but the pilot didn’t. It was too hot and loud, even with earmuffs.

He enters the concrete chamber, which was once the basement. Now it is ground level, the rest of the structure blown away, ice melted around it. The boy is enthroned before a naked, filth-smeared body. He doesn’t recognize Lazur at first.

“Why is he still alive?”

Rubicon’s lips are still black with the qatran he puked up, a stain that flows down his neck. “I did it. I fucking did it.”

“Yes. Well done. But you should have told me.”

“You’re too slow.” The boy clips a leash to the technician’s collar. The man isn’t bound, but for some reason he can barely move, limbs shuddering, eyes vacant. Drugged? He looks practically dead, like someone pulled from the bottom of a mass grave.

“It could have gone very badly.”

“But it worked!”

“He could have shot you. She could have shot you. I’m surprised they didn’t.”

“But—”

“You could have died from ingesting that much lipstick. You could have thrown it up and choked on it while inside the case. You could have been sedated when they removed you from the case. Do you see all the possible points of failure you hung our resources, my resources, behind?”

“I’m chaos, Cal. Get used to it.”

What a mess. Phone calls from allies in every time zone, or former allies. Agencies with ties to INNOCENT, now scrambling into their most paranoid configurations, regressing to the most apocalyptic scenarios of their organizational subconscious, a deep bad psychedelic fundamentalist Cold War hell. Warmongering nations now fully aware of the qatran’s power—a hole melted in the north pole, and a satellite ripped out of the sky, debris hurtling into other satellites, Rubicon’s words cascading across televisions and classified com networks. War is unavoidable at this point. After generations of scheming, political plans set in place by his father, careful manipulation of global tension, promises made to important men—the world’s biggest domino run, and it got blown to pieces.

Cal unscrews his lithium water bottle with a shaky hand, but it’s already frozen. “I brought you into this. This is my plan. My father’s legacy.”

“And mine.”

“Why do you think he never trusted you with it? You foolish little—”

Rubicon inhales, trapping all the heat in the room, the sky (it flows from behind you, abandoning the sun) behind his teeth. Death whistles through the gaps, long and slow like tunnels, and you are in the tunnels, and you can only walk forward.

Calendula nearly pisses himself. He isn’t used to his heart beating so fast and rubbery. The awareness of his complete fragility, the mess of his organs coming undone behind his immaculate suit and perfectly sculpted face. He doesn’t know the name of a single object or where he is. There is only this turgid throb in his chest—

The air whistles out, and Rubicon laughs. “Haha. I got you.”

The boy rolls away, pulling the pathetic man on the floor after him. Calendula is left with a crime scene silhouette of human fluids in the shape of his nemesis.