“If you got stilts, come join the parade. If you on two-feet? Get the fuck off the street!” The lyrics to the marching cadence are simple and direct, amplified by cupped hands and bullhorns and accompanied by brass, wind, and percussion. Indeed, people in the capitol respond by heeding the call and staying the fuck inside.
Maybe you did “duck and cover” beneath a desk or a tornado drill or prepped for a quake in school or at work? Well, Ignatians in the capitol drill twice yearly (once per mating season). Every office and shop, the HR guy or the Mom or maybe even the Pop comes down with the red and black Bird Binder. Everybody practices noise discipline and somebody’s got a stop watch while a “safety officer” gets people upstairs or hunkered down in a one story.
May 1, 2020 is the second time the drill has been used, and the first time in Ignatian history it’s ever been effective in preserving human life.
*
NORTH NULL SITE
*
Todd’s a bit of a chunk head in the day-to-day or a conversational environment. The man knows it, but he reads. He thinks. Aims for warrior poet and lands at Secret Agent Soccer Dad who is trying. But in the bunkers, at the choke points and dead-corners and crossroads with opportunity for enfilade, the man shows his brilliance. Any place the the men in tight pants wait last stand style to get the drop on them, Todd transforms to Ajax or Achilles while You-You directs the birds to rage and devour.
The heroes sought to return two bombs and found an arsenal cobbled a nuke at a time from every iteration of Earth the Consortium had slithered over / under / into–a great arsenal of city busters and world enders under lock and key under an already-ruined Earth.
Todd returns with only the rad-shielded hearts of two American weapons lost since 1966, great hefty things on a bubble wheeled cart that will test the big fella’s endurance in the woods ahead. Ulysses relays what fungus says is to come and how it must be and what cannot be. “I don’t see the need for some heroic self sacrifice. You might have years, decades before this kills you. Look at you. You’re magnificent, and your momma wants you alive.” One naked blue man to another.
And I’d like to continue living long enough to figure out how, but I’ve got to excise a tumor and exorcise a demon. “Shroom?” Shroom.
“We got a good a thing. I’m breach. You and the birds are clear. I’m Salsa, you’re Money. It’s buddy cop action flick chemistry.” What are you trying to communicate?
“Let me help you slay the dragon so we both go home alive.” Todd pops his pecks excessively, still flying high on You-You’s drugged-sweat paint-resin. “Put me in, Coach.”
Ulysses transfigured glows brighter and flexes his muscles back. No. Go home to your family. And he bows as is if to pray at the vault door and the birds gathered there bow alike, shiver, and sway in communion. A song, chant, poem in a dead language Ulysses learned in that instant pours from his lips first a plea. The man’s voice climbs to a wail, then call, ended command sang again and again again as the birds wailed along. Todd “caught the spirit” and danced about the man chanting the prayer the same until light poured a jellied fluid from Ullysses flesh to wash his whole flock until the screeching things glow the same hue of blue.
There the birds, every Ignatian Puffin in proximity to Ulysses-transfigured tasted the holy light. Oh the the wretched auks assembled still carry hate in their hearts, and mushroom rot where the brain should be, but somewhere in each Puffin there is a bit of Ulysses.
You-You lifts a man-portable nuclear mortar scavenged from some hell Earth in the multiverse off a shelf, hefts the thing. Go, quick as you can. My babies will help you find the way back through-and-to-surface. Tell my mom, I didn’t leave her again, and I’ll never leave Ignatius again. Not ever.
Todd, full in the grip of the drug and the moment, kisses Ulysses on the mouth.
*
CAPITOL
*
The revolution? What’s to tell. It was velvet. Nobody died. Not one person. Not an amped up mercenary in the penthouse. Not even Consortium Man Supreme. And let me tell you buddy, everybody who had a somebody who got disappeared or had to go live with the Bird Folk just to avoid disappear-as-verb wasn’t happy with that, but the guy ends up rotting in the prison he used to let people rot in.
The success of the Ignatian Velvet Revolution is primarily attributed to a safety regulation: In the capitol city there shall be, on every city block, not fewer than one building not taller than five meters. And each five meter tall building shall have unobstructed sight lines and no more than a quarter mile walk to the next five meter tall building. Furthermore, the state shall contribute resources for the hardening of these buildings for the purpose of shelter and search-and-rescue in Avian event. Five meter tall buildings shall maintain ready barricades and supply caches (to be detailed below).
Like all regulations pertaining to the public’s safety and health (which public? Any public). That regulation is written in blood–its the result of the last three times Puffins came calling. Twice they picked the place clean. Third time, half the town lived because of the five meter shelters.
The fourth time the birds came, not one person lost their life. I won’t bore you with the rest of that regulatory language, but that’s what won the day: rest. The marching band beat out a tune to keep the birds from killing everyone. The musicians and marchers, from the percussion to the wind instruments and the chorus of Ignatians on roof-tops and balconies singing long lullabies in the night, worked in shifts.
The Consortium men and Oligarch-lackies huddled and counted bullets and gold trinkets they might barter for life and limb with, and Consortium man Supreme threatened any who would suggest surrender with a fancy French word for getting throwed the fuck out a window a full one hundred and fifty stories high. “We will wait these peasants out.”
But I mean, it was time off work for the whole capitol. There was plenty of mystery whiskey and good Ignatian weed and what not and a lot of stashed supplies. And even if one didn’t necessarily want to topple the Consortium, the need to lull the birds that held all present hostage called every person to a figurative barricade.
For a full two days and half a third, the people danced and sang and demanded the resignation of the incompetent shitheels top of the gaudy glass architectural atrocity. From the tippy-top of the needle-dick Tower of Babel speakers amplified threats.
Bullhorns below hollered back: “Hurt us and we’ll herd the birds into your tower to do what they do. And that will be the end of you.” Singing as much as shouting it. Somehow, some tech or magic conveyed communication between parties. And when the Consortium Macbeth threatened death again, the greyest and most stone faced military man called the penthouse just to say, “Hi. Harm the Ignatian people and I’ll throw everything at that ugly building, everything I’ve got, all kinds of booms comin’ your way.”
It was then, the people dancing and Consortium Macbeth brooding. The Army men singing along and refereeing, then that every eye that could see looked to the northeastern sky.
*
NORTH NULL SITE
*
Ulysses wrenches the hatch to the Vessel’s office. At his entrance something calls up the lights to compete with the bioluminescent Blue. The Vessel, the closest thing to an actual Consortium Man Supreme, the shambling semi-sentient thing in a fine suit raises its arm and howls like a ghoul. From vast dark behind the bare desk a tendril ending sucker and spike, like a squid’s grappler made of mushroom lunges toward the former-man’s head to imbed, imbue, and speak-through. The vile rot-body behind the desk hisses “mother” and shudders and still more lights flick-to-life to light the great fungal body dangling from the walls of a rough carved cavern hiding behind the austere office entrance.
The whole great body from the man-puppet to Shroom-itself then speaks: “You will be the next…”
Ulysses interrupts: “I’m going to stop you right there” You-You launches what he’s got, the tiny hell-weapon (the only in the history of the things used to do something decent, for it was detonated in the belly of an already-dead Earth). For a fraction of a portion of a second a second sun erupts and sets to incinerating every wicked thing in the Megalomaniac hole, especially the portion of the Consortium’s cobbled nuclear arsenal most vulnerable to accidental detonation.
Some kind of hellfire crawled through lead-encased concrete and rebar tunnels that straight-line-curled under Ignatius irrational geometry to every world the Consortium conquered, killed, of lodged itself deep within. There and elsewhere across a plane only the fungally profaned among humans can perceive–there is being of beings. Each one looking quite like Shroom but most lacking its malevolence–for none of them brain humped a fascist and found intellectual affinity with the meal. Ulysses fire burnt that diseased node out of the creature-of-creature–the web of fungal fruits and semi-sentient things.
Every bunker on every Ignatius with a bunker, hole full of killers in tight pants got burned past ash. The tombs left not clean, but silent and empty–permanent monument to what not to do.
*
Every eye in the capitol looked to the sky drawn to the sky and Ulysses end. On his world, like every other, a flash and a roar and some smoke to the North. No doomsday cloud. No shockwave. No end of days scene.
High above the rest, in the penthouse, Consortium Man Supreme had the best view in town of the smoke that signaled the end of his kayfabe reign. He surrendered to the rebels at sundown on the third day of the Velvet Revolution.
*
MORE TO COME BUT NOT MUCH MORE