Arc 2: Locust and the Pomegranate
“Sacrifice”
*
Fragment: (x-5)^2
Date: Null
Frame: End of Time (EOT)
Subject(s): CUSTODIAL; MANAGEMENT (NEW)
*
The behavioral anomaly, as management would call it, would come to impact the effectiveness of all 4 tribes of Custodians. The first to abandon their duties was the tribe of Corrective Maintenance. Next, Preventative locked their toolboxes and walked. Adaptive and Perfective laid their polish rags and “downed their dusting pans” last.
You might be tempted to call this a “general strike” amongst the Custodians of heaven. Management assures you, refusal to work from semi-sentient beings that cannot make choices is a defect, pure and simple. Semi-sentient beings cannot strike, for they cannot choose. Nothing to debate.
Application of the collar (often without struggle) pacifies, mollifies, and other-wise-ifies the rebellious semi-sentient in no time at all.
*
Fragment: 0
Date: ZERO; BREACH
Frame: End of Time (EOT)
Location: (0); BREACH
Subject(s): NIC, WOLAND ET. AL
*
Two trains driven by the same woman depart two points equidistant from ‘0’, traveling over terrain that stretches and shrinks beneath them. The trains, empty of Nic’s equal and opposite aspects, meet and intersect over the rift–the wound in the scorched plain at the End of Time. As the opposing trains meet and greet they compress-accordion annihilate and explode with a violence and force incalculable (to me, I’m not good with math).
The prismatic blast, its flat ring shockwave over the scorched plain, to an eye familiar with creation, has the aspect of a little baby big-bang. Imitation and flattery and all.
*
A(79) both hands on the wheel, holding the car’s built-in-water-pipe piece in her mouth, smoke puffing with every word: “Boys, unbuckle.” She blows a hit out her schnoz like a dragon.
“Yes ma’am.” Flannel Man and A(84), passenger side front and back respectively unlatch their safety belts. They open the doors of the 2000 something Ford sedan. The craft is flying, clipping the tops of dunes of ash on the scorched plain at the End of Time at the speed impossible.
“On my mark.” A(79) in aviators and the holy bathrobe over her action clothes adjusts her grip on the wheel. So wait, are we counting this down? “Mark.” She slams the brake, cuts the wheel left.
The Ford’s right wheel dips while the trunk swings right. The boys are thrown from the car at great speed as it begins to cartwheel, completely in and out of control. Flannel is prepared, one fist forward in a Superhero flight pose. A(84) tumbles out, clinging to a broomstick by the hilt.
*
Fragment: 0x77.11
Date: End of Time (EOT)
Frame: NULL
Subject(s): 0x77.11;0x54;0x1;0xFD^2;0x29A;
*
“What happened to you?” The child demands. Her hair standing on end, lightning leaping frizz-to-frizz.
“I grew legs and walked, upright, out of the garden.” Other realms and rules and whole plains absent of rules–energy without intention waiting to be written. And I came home.
Woland continues: “I returned to an absent coward and garden overgrown. The whole thing managed by machines in disrepair. The fruit of creation rotting on the vine.”
At Woland’s last line, the child with the frizzy hair sips her coffee and makes an obscene gesture in the air with her free hand. “I like the Pomegranate; I like the garden.”
“They are lichen on a rock. Mud people.” Woland spits his speech.
“You adored them once, the mortals.”
Woland ignores that, speaks over the child to the dark-luminous void-orb. The locust in the jet of chaos. Pushing through, the blank-beast strains and struggles to enter the scorched plain. “That being of perfect hunger, that exquisite embodiment of avarice. It happened by pure accident. No god or devil authored it. None.” Almost admiration. Maybe jealousy.
The child with angry eyes and frizzy hair is not having it: “Old man, I’ve seen the sublime tapestry, the whole fractal.” That’s not possible, even for Nic. “I’ve seen more than your old ass. There’s a reason, they are the reason, there is a great patch of negative space and lifeless-ness outside the garden.” The child hooks a thumb over her shoulder at the locust, pulsing and pushing through from elsewhere. “A little chaos, a new little shimmy to the same old song, that was the goal here. The locusts aren’t chaos, they’re the flood.”
“The garden could use a bit more negative space.” At the barest gesture from Woland, the great wave of animated ash behind him, now his obedient hound full of hunger and hatred, lunges forward toward the child.
The wave arcs over him, miles tall, top-twisted coil-fisted falling to crush the girl.
The child’s lightning, a prismatic spray, meets the ash diving to crush her. From her eyes, each hand, from the snakes emerging from her frizzy hair, her light burns the ash to oblivion as it falls. But the great falling wave of ash seems-forever-long. It’s mass and force bear down and press down. The child scorches the swarm-beast with prismatic lightning, singing a single clear note above the chaos. She falls to one knee under the weight of the ash pressing down.
With a nod to each, Woland sets Bartleby and Gildenstern walking toward the child. Each G-man wields a baton, a cop-stick, crackling with electricity.
*
LATER
*
The pain wakes A(84), shivering and desperate not to move. Every tight gasp another stab. The explosive shockwave cast Bartleby into him, impaling the two on the broomstick. B’s eyes are empty. The pain does not dazzle, rigid and hot, the pain takes reason.
On his side. Free arm, top arm. He brings it down on the broomstick between him and Bartleby-body. Snap. Whimpers. No longer skewered to the other. He lifts his head, dizzy. Sees Woland looming over a figure in a blue bathrobe.
A(84) tries to crawl, dragging with his free arm over Bartleby’s body, the other arm pressed to his gut beneath the broom stick crammed in him. The movement shifts impaled organs. The pain woke him; the pain put him down. Fade to black.
*
EARLIER
*
Flannel man flying so fast the soft of his cheeks and beard blow in the wind. He flies certain, Superhero-hero-pose-certain, toward a blurry scene at the jet of chaos.
A(84) tumbles, spinning ass-over-schnoz toward the jet. Every rotation, he sees snap-shots of the fight to come. Himself, Flannel Man, A(79) battling Woland’s goons. One glimpse: win for the good guys. Spin slo-mo, speeding impossible forward. Another peek at the fight: win for the villain.
The closer the broomstick Ronin and the fallen HVAC Man get, the more often tumbling A(84) sees a loss for his team in the coming fight.
A(84) see’s his schnoz, the ashy ground, the roiling black-velvet sky stained chaos, one last snap-shot of what is to come, what might already have been decided. He screams, “No!” Syllable stretching.
Flannel man flies fist-first, A(84) flail-tumbles across some threshold, a boundary only seen by God’s Machine. The two fly on toward the jet of chaos on the scorched plain at the End of Time.
*
A(79), deposited by lightning bolt, surrounded by G-beings, gaunt-stretched thin-men and thin-women in black shades and cheap suits. They wield electric-crackling cop-sticks like swords.
Wearing her aviators and action clothes beneath a bathrobe. A(79) hears the ‘thump’ of the 2000 something Ford sedan landing on Mark Shmidt. She giggles at her ‘called shot.’ She sips coffee from her mug held left hand. Holds a sword still-in-its scabbard in her right.
Between the G-goons, tepid-stepping and closing in, she sees the Boys fighting ‘B’ and ‘G’.
The first thin-being charges at the witch woman, A(79), electric cop-stick held high. It’s arm stretches rubber-long to swing. Scalding coffee splash to the face. Scabbard to the jaw. KO’d G-man. The luminous being in aviators and a bathrobe waits.
The rest charge her. A(79) holds the moment slow. Spins on one foot. Robe rises. Ash dances with her.
A g-man lunges. A(79) catches the tip of the ‘sword’ in the empty mug, leans back with her dance. She lunches forward. Thin-man falling back takes a spray of coffee from the never-ending mug, fresh and hot, to the suit and the face.
Scabbard up, catches the next opponent in the jaw. Spin the sword, bops the next opponent on the head with the hilt. A(79) laughs, dances, teleports, drops thin-beings. The G-men swing at her, miss, she dances on, twirling on the scorched plain.
*
Flannel Man’s fist meets Gildenstern’s back. They roll off into the ash.
A(84) tumbles into Bartleby, still screaming “No!” at the after-image-aftermath-end he saw before arriving.
The Broomstick Ronin and the G-man find their feet, square off. A(84) charges, slashes, chops, thrusts with the broomstick blade. Bartleby, man-made-rubber, stretch-and-dodges all. “Give up, Mud.”
*
Flannel man punches Gildenstern in the back of the head and ties his rubbery, stretching limbs in knots. He leaves the G-man a rubber-band ball on the scorched plain.
*
Mark Schmidt, his bulk pinned beneath the stolen Ford sedan, can barely breathe. His hands grip the undercarriage like a car jack. He heaves, roars, and two-tons of UAW crafted steel and aluminum rise and flip off him. He stands, broken-ribbed, finds the man in flannel on the field, bellows an animal noise. Their eyes meet.
“Big boy!” Flannel man charges.
Mark Schmidt, mountain, catches the smaller man’s tackle, lunge-lifts and tosses. Suplex. Flannel Man on his back, gripping his spine, writhing.
Mark Schmidt rises to his feet on the scorched plain, stands over his downed opponent.
*
Woland, cool amidst the chaos conjures his walking stick. Silver handled, the rest jet black. Tapping out a brisk rhythm with it, he strides toward the child.
The lightning roaring from her mouth and eyes and hands, leaping from her hair and the snakes between the frizzes. The ash wave, the monster, presses down. A bakers’ dozen feet above her head. She cannot cope with it and the consultant Woland standing before her. He raises his walking stick, same motion as if he were about to ‘backhand’ the child. He swings.
The stick clanks hard against a flaming sword held by a frizzy haired woman in a bathrobe, Nic. She has many arms and many swords. Her equal and opposite aspect takes the child’s place, scorching the ash. Obliterating the great wave-of-monster diving to crush. She pushes back.
Nic’s other aspect slashes at Woland. Black smoke. He appears 13 paces away. The ancient-beyond-ancient beings duel on the scorched plain at the End of Time.
*
Mark Schmidt drags Flannel Man to his feet by his beanie and hair beneath. He stands the staggered smaller man, iron-grips his hand. Schmidt Irish whips Flannel Man, throws him, sends him stagger-running into the Ford sedan laying on it’s side. Power train to the lower back. Flannel grunts, falls to a knee. “So that’s the style.”
*
A(79) sips coffee in a field of unconscious groaning G-men, casts the cup aside. The witch-woman looks to the fight. She sees Nic’s swords flashing and flicking at Woland, half smoke-half-man, rapier-twist-parry-thrust. She unsheathes her sword, charges. They dance on the scorched plain: Woland bracketed by two women, one ancient-beyond-ancient, one luminous being with aviators and my big nose.
Desperate, the devil calls what’s left of his ash monster to him, away from the child and Nic’s other aspect. It takes form, congeals, the shade-shadow-silhouette of it’s first meal: the fascist A(99).
Woland duel-dances, back to back with his half-assed servant, ash-in-humanoid-shape. Both wielding swords, desperate in their defense. The dance continues, Woland and his servant-shade bracketed by two luminous women with swords. They are relentless.
*
Nic’s equal and opposite aspect cradles the exhausted child. Gives her ambrosia, the coffee sublime, amidst the battle at the jet of chaos on the scorched plain at the End of Time.
*
A(84) feels the jet of chaos tickling his hockey hair, obliterating the tip of his mullet. He looks down his schnoz at Bartleby mute-cackling under the roaring sound of chaos. Time goes out of joint, ‘B”s hand gripping his collar, the arm behind it stretching and pushing him slow-mo backward off his heels and into the jet, head first. Bartleby is dangling him by the collar inches from oblivion in the jet of chaos.
A(84), former-fuckup feels his death and his friends’ defeat looming. Says, “No” calmly.
*
Slow-mo shove dangle continues. He’s off his feet now, tip of the broomstick dissolving in the chaos, burnt hair smell from his obliterated mullet. Bartleby wearing a smug murder-grin.
A(84) mimics the style(s). Time goes slower. He wills his flailing right leg to stretch like rubber, like a G-man’s, to wrap around Bartleby’s own leg. The broomstick Ronin goes grappling-hook-slithers, pulls himself back from the brink and trips Bartleby.
Time snaps back.
The schnoz finds himself standing over the G-man, giraffe-stretches his neck to head butt him. A(84) brings the broomstick down on Barleby’s head and shoulders, again, and again again.
*
Mark Shcmidt clutches both hands, brings them down a hammer-blow on Flannel Man. Flannel spits blood, laughs. The mountain-guard lifts his hands high for another hammer. Flannel Man on one knee holds hand to bloody ear, straining to hear the cheers of a crowd that’s not there. He takes the second blow to the side of the head, almost drops him. Mark Schmidt raises his arms high for the final blow to Flannel’s skull, the goal to collapse it.
Low blow. Flannel Man’s arm rings Mark’s bell(s). The great big man staggers back, clutching his balls, bent at the waist. Flannel stands, knee to the face. Tosses a fist-full of ash in the eyes of the bloodied goon in the cheap suit for good measure. Flannel Man throws a combination to the body, to the big mans broken ribs, one to the the gut. He lifts the big man by his shoulder. Jab. Breaks his nose, for a friend, Mark Schmidt was owed. Right cross to a huge man’s glass jaw. Mark falls.
Flannel Man climbs the Ford on its side like the turnbuckle. He flexes for a crowd that is not there and leaps. The fallen HVAC man delivers a flying elbow drop strikes Schmidt’s sternum. He covers the man and pounds the ash once, twice, thrice.
*
The trains arrive at the station. The journey from -11;11 to zero explosively complete. The flash of fusion, of equal and opposite in-annihilation. The flash of something violent, of particles-that-lack-names erupting strange.
As the opposing trains meet over-and-in the jet of chaos, they compress-accordion and explode with a violence and force incalculable to this narrator who cannot math well.
Nic’s comforting aspect lifts her robe like a blanket, shields herself and the child with the angry eyes and frizzy hair from the shockwave. The ancient-beyond-ancient being whispers something in the child’s ear.
The whole hole, the wound that was a rip-rift, then a single jet. The wound. It closes, healed. The heat of the trains colliding-annihilating, bakes the scorched plain’s skin whole and sealed.
On the scorched plain at the end of time, there stands a single, solitary ‘Shalabh.’ The locust is a flaming void in this frame-unframe. Ichor. Vibrating oil and hunger, boundless hunger.
Nic’s comforting aspect stands. Faces the beast empty handed.
*
FRAME FROZEN
*
A(84)^2 stalks toward the dance, determined to help beat Woland’s ass with what remains of his broomstick. Determined to erase the defeats he foresaw tumbling toward the battle; Flannel man rises, flexes over Mark Schmidt and stomps toward the dance to mess up Wolands angle-face; A(79) slices the congealed-ash goon in half, leaps toward Woland’s back. Her sword held high, crackling lightning dancing off it. She cackles; Nic’s aspect with frizzy hair and flaming swords parries Woland with ease, several hands holding flaming swords stab at his heart; All of the above freeze in the instant the trains meet, accordion-annihilate each other, and seal the rift.
Conscious, aware, frozen. They watch helplessly what comes next.
*
Woland holds his austere watch to his ear, listens to its perfect and reliable functioning. He adjusts his human molar cufflinks. From his walking stick weapon, he unsheathes the true-blade held back the whole fight. He calmly steps toward Nic’s warrior-aspect, looks her in the eye. Woland runs her through with the sword.
*
Lightning crackles and leaps off the locust, dancing from the plain to the beast, from specs of ash in the wind. From anything and nothing, energy-electric dances and flicks off the beast. When it moves, the vibrating oil-ichor of its flesh trails and stretches behind it, appearing almost like spikes on its back. If it had a back.
Nic’s comforting aspect rises, never frozen or halted. She sees the freeze-frame shockwave behind her, her companions and most-foes stuck behind. In front of her, the locust. She walks toward the Shalabh, her many arms shimmer-distorted behind, arrayed as a peacock’s feathers. From some angles, she sings; from other angles she appears to pray.
When she arrives before the locust she is wreathed in blue flame, unburnt. A mouth-maw reaches from the oil-orb toward her. “No.” It never touches the ancient-beyond-ancient-being. Nic’s comforting aspect, now her whole being, dissolves-unburnt in the blue flame.
All that’s left is everything of her: incandescent blue sparks dance and vanish. Amen.
*
Reader, I’m bad with numbers, but I know a bit of the old tongue, the language Nic sang and prayed in (she taught it to me).
Her prayer went a little something like this: let the locust never touch those here. Amen and amen again.
And it’s unclear whom or what could even hear a prayer under these circumstances. Here at the end of the “Time that Time Held Some Sway” at the End of Time. The HVAC department was otherwise occupied. Prayers whispered into vents in the dead of night were going unheard. God’s machine contended with and calculated around and fretted at the great quantity/un-quantity of chaos brought into the garden. The supposed “author of all that is” remains absent/AWOL.
It will later be claimed by some that Nic answered her own prayer (argued most forcefully by the Parson, A(523)).
*
FRAME THAWED/UNFROZEN
*
The annihilating shockwave continues. The child with angry eyes, vanished. An unseen gentle wave, faster than the shockwave, catches and carries all (except for the monsters made of hunger and ash) far away.
Woland and his goons are cast back to Headquarters.
A(84) illuminated; Flannel Man fallen HVAC; A(79) witch woman and luminous being. They are carried-cast-cradled and lifted (along with a stolen 2000 something Ford sedan) back to the church in the ghost grove at the End of Time. Amen.
*
Fragment: 0xFD.07-CONTINUED
Location: Chapel
Frame: End of Time (EOT)
Subjects: A(523)^2; (0x77); CONGREGATION
*
There is a knock at the door to the Parson’s chamber. Again, three crisp drum-raps on the door (must be a Custodian). Her sermon-writing interrupted; her wife’s reading interrupted. At the door two custodians, one holding a baby wrapped in the remains of a bathrobe. The other holding the note that came with the found-baby. The couple reads the letter together.
“Jesus, Nic.” The Parson takes the child, cradles it. Looks into a cooing faced contradiction. Happy babble, angry eyes. Gossamer hairs on the infant’s head shoot in all different directions (as they will her whole life). The parson looks down her schnoz at the baby. She is beautiful.
*
Fragment: 0x14D
Date: Null
Frame: End of Time (EOT)
Subject(s): Woland; Locust; Entourage
*
The door to Woland’s chambers, or his lab if you prefer, clashes with the rest of the room: metal and mechanical. It opens with the grinding of gears. The ‘woosh’ of negative pressure.
Bartleby and Gildenstern and Mark Schmidt. Paper booties. Masks. Face shields. Ridiculous paper pajamas. Clean room protocols for the entourage. The rest of the room is gilded. It is rich hangings and roaring fireplace. Candelabra’s and old-money baroque comforts. A map of the multi-verse flickering on a flat-screen mounted above the fireplace. A monied ghoul’s bomb-shelter bed-chamber. The one bench, stocked with lab equipment ancient and modern.
Woland wears a rich robe over a ragged shirt and breeches. The woman with the purple scar (wearing clean room gear) rubs foul smelling ointments into his swollen knee. His ‘bad leg’ propped, being tended to, the devil leans over his desk and works. The minions watch in awe.
Above a copper platter the last bit of his wounded Locust hovers, a fist-sized glob. Beneath the void-blob and plate, a Bunsen burner heats the thing. With a pipet, he syphons up some slurry from a smoking beaker to the side, distilled from what remains of the animated ash monster. Three drops of the brew onto the locust. Snap pop.
The minions clap.
*
END OF EXILE PT. 7
PT. 8 IS COMING. I HEAR
IT’S GOT THE SAME ENDING
AS THAT ONE SEASON OF THAT SOAP OPERA
WITH THE TEN GALLON HATS:
IT WAS ALL A DREAM
*
POST-SCRIPT
*
Woland’s earlier work, some of it, was high literature. The Book of Job is a sticking point that sticks in his craw though. An argument over that ‘incident’ was the last time he and the “author-of-all” spoke. Woland left the garden on angry terms.
His last visit back, to old Russia in the early 20th century (most iterations), he helped a great book be born. Woland helped a writer taunt a dictator, consoled Yeshua Ha-Nostri. He wore a foreign professor’s skin, brought black magic to the iron-fisted order of the dog-shit moustache-man. As it should be. Amen.
There’s a cost to travel. For mortals, there’s a cognitive cost and a physical toll that will be paid, inevitably. And in his time beyond the pomegranate, beyond the garden you call the multi-verse, maybe Woland paid some cost? Perhaps the devil lost a step?
Reader, that’s the only explanation I can find for Woland’s failure. When he combined the essence of his ash monster and the locust in his profane lab, he married an alien parasite’s hunger with all the hatred and cunning of the ash monster’s first meal: the fascist A(99), destroyer of 13 Earths.
Woland does his due-diligence, usually. The devil dazzles and deceives mortals, but here he was deceived and dazzled by the stats. 13 dead Earths. He was mildly impressed with the ash monster’s malice and power and what it took from its meals. Woland was so dazzled he missed or ignored something in the beast’s essence.
Remember the whole of the ash monster’s first meal: the fascist A(99), his clone-son, and Leonard the aspiring fascist.
Frailty, thy name is Leonard.
It’s not like Woland to miss something, to trip on a loose end. He is the epitome of a ‘detail’ man. Nevertheless, he introduced weakness and fallibility into a beast, the locust, that could-and-should have consumed the whole garden.