S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 18

Paris; November 13th, 2015.

It’s times like these that I really question the value of the continuation of the human species.

I have just heard about the attacks on Paris.  I was blissfully ignorant until half an hour ago, when I stepped away from my keyboard after hours of writing and revising to check out the news, my e-mail, social media, et cetera–and, of course, I didn’t get past the news.  The human sickness rears its head, the most diseased organs of it blatantly showing in our open wounds.  My mouth hung open in…what?  Surprise?  Disbelief? Despair?  Anger?  All of them. Nausea, above all else.  The first wave of it hit halfway through the first article I read.  My dinner, eaten in comfort in my writing nest, started to kick against the back of my throat.

It keeps happening. Again and again and again.

Or maybe just “still.”

Maybe this is the new normal.

Maybe, in one way or another, it always has been.

First, I want to…I don’t know what.  Offer my prayers to the vast cosmos?  Send my deepest condolences through Twitter?  Cry into the drink I just poured myself to numb the raging things inside my body?  Find every Parisian in the world and hold them, falling to our knees sobbing against each other’s shoulders?  What, if anything, can I do?  Donate my next pathetic royalty check to…where?  Amnesty International?  This is just too big for me.  There’s no verb I have at my disposal that would seem strong enough.  Our powerlessness in the face of this tragedy unites us.  We cannot resurrect the dead.  We cannot rewind time.  We cannot go back and fix the errors of history.  We can only mourn and cry and drink and wake up and try again, tomorrow.

Tomorrow, oh, shit, tomorrow…

I fear for tomorrow. I have visions already brewing in my head.  Tomorrow.

I think of the mosque bombings after the Charlie Hedbo shooting.  Makeshift bombs and grenades crashed through mosque windows, thrown by who-knows-who in an attempt to accomplish…something.  But what?  And why? Directionless anger?  Lust for revenge?  These things are inside of us, I know.  They’re inside of me, too.  But I’ve never thrown a bomb into someone else’s church service.

Tomorrow.  Tomorrow may be a very bad time to be a Muslim. Has anyone even claimed responsibility for the attacks, yet?  I don’t believe so.  Do we even know the political or religious beliefs of the attackers?  I haven’t heard.  But what do you think the assumption will be?  What do you think everyone is thinking, right now?  When people start looking for someone to blame, where do you think the fingers will point?

So, Muslim brothers and sisters, stay inside tomorrow.  Lock your doors and board up your windows.  The huns are coming.  Get ready for the talking heads across the so-called “civilized world” to start giving people permission to attack you.  You know.   You’ve seen it, before.  Get ready to hear the question “does Islam promote violence?” for the millionth time this decade.  Get ready to have the actions of under 1% of your total population make a political sideshow out of your day-to-day life.  This is the new normal.

Tomorrow.  Tomorrow, an unmanned drone will drop bombs on people eating lunch.  It’s estimated that the bombs are far more likely to kill civilians than militant/terrorist threats.  It’s estimated that as many as 90% of the casualties to date, of drone strikes, have been civilians. A woman sweeping the floor is dead seconds later.  The floor is gone.  Nothing is left.  This is the new normal.

Tomorrow we will get the final death toll.  It will be difficult to imagine and harder to stomach.  You will look at the number of the dead and realize it’s larger than your entire social circle.  You will stare at the number and realize that it’s you and everyone you love…your whole family and all of your friends.  The funeral business is booming.  So many graves.  How do we always end up digging so many graves?  This is the new normal.

And, in the end, what are we going to do?

Drop more bombs?  Send in an army?

Who digs the grave for the woman in Afghanistan?

Who digs the graves for all the soldiers?

Still.  Again.  Still.

Where does it end? Drop the bombs, breed the terrorists. They don’t grow out of the cracked desert like weeds, you know.  They crawl out of rubbled streets and poverty.  They search for meaning in a world that refuses to give it to them.  They build up resentment and anger and hatred, not unlike some of our homegrown “mentally ill” mass shooters, until something comes along they can hang onto.  They put on the uniform.  They join the club.  Someone puts a gun in their hands and tells them they can change the world.

Picture, if you dare, a few thousand James Holmeses walking around, hoping to change the world.

Tomorrow looks pretty grim.

There’ll be more murder, I guarantee that.  In Paris, in Afghanistan, in Colorado–there’ll be plenty more murder and it’ll keep on coming for a very long time.  The death toll will shift and change and the headlines will look different depending on who dies and where, but don’t worry, the funeral business will keep booming. Bombs will drop.  People will die.  Young men with old Kalashnikovs will pour lead into crowds of people…and bombs will drop, again.

I’m sick to my stomach. Mankind is a wretched animal.  We’re all just rabid pit dogs, gnashing our teeth, hungry to tear each other apart. Or, worse, we’re the victims, the losing dog, the one at the end of the fight with its jugular torn open.  We’re just people struggling to live our lives, hoping that things will be better tomorrow and never knowing when a bomb will fall out of the sky or a man will open fire on a theatre or someone will throw a makeshift explosive through the window of our temple.  We’re both.  We’re the winning dog and the losing dog.  Even our victories are defeats.  Nobody proved that like Bush.  “Mission Accomplished,“ yeah, right.

And here we are, again, digging graves.  Again.

Still.

And now what?

*****

There is no easy answer. There is no answer, at all, in my opinion.  Sometimes force needs to be met with force.  I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that we are at war–I may be a far-left liberal, but I’m not delusional–but what can come out of said war except for more war?  How many people will we bury before it’s all over?  How many civilian casualties will go uncounted in dusty countries?

How do you stop young men from killing people?

My drink is empty. The above question haunts my mind. Across the globe, from the littlest (and 294th) mass shooting in the United States to the largest terrorist attack in years, young men are killing people and we don’t know how to stop it. They act alone, as in Aurora, or in large tribes, as with ISIL.  We can’t bomb them all.  We certainly shouldn’t end up bombing over 700 civilians just to get 20 of them.

My heart is so ragged from thinking about the world.  My heart is a broken flag hanging from an abandoned ship.

I think often of Heart of Darkness.  A “novella” technically, but also fierce philosophical journalism.  It’s an acute observation of our nature.  Joseph Conrad might’ve written fiction, but every damned word was true.

I remember the scene on the river when all the ships starting firing cannonade into the treeline. “Shelling the bush,” I believe it was called.  It was blind-firing, utter and rampant destruction wrought of paranoia and policy. The corresponding scene in Apocalypse Now, I think, was the carpet-bombing of the Vietnamese forest.  The corresponding news article in Bush-era America was the “targeted” bombings in Iraq.  And, now, the drones–90% of the dead are innocent, remember.  90%.  We’re just shelling the goddamned bush.

Still.

And wasn’t Osama Bin Laden our own Kurtz?  Worked for us for long enough until, one day, he didn’t, anymore.  Until, one day, he became the teeth at our throat.  And when we hunted him down, finally…what did we expect?  A superhuman creature, demonic and virile, waiting to eat our soldiers?  No.  An old man, half-dead, with dry, cracked lips, on the run, locked away, barely able to rasp out his last words.  “The horror” indeed.

And still, here we are.

Still.

We’ve been fighting this war since I was a child and we’ll still be fighting it when I’m dead.  I know that much, now.  I’ve come to terms with it.  The new normal.  “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…”

I can write no more.

I have just watched updates on the Paris situation online and I can write no more.  I can barely string two words together.  The face of mankind is hideous to me, tonight.  I want neither to serve it nor even to look upon it further.

Beautiful Paris, to gaze upon such ugliness…

I am sorry.  I am so sorry.  I hope there is a beautiful humankind waiting for you, tonight, a beautiful humankind riding along in ambulances and working double-shifts in hospitals and working the sirens on firetrucks.  I hope there is a beautiful humankind there to hold you when the dust settles.  I hope there is a beautiful humankind waiting to help you recover, tomorrow.  I hope it lifts you up in its arms and lets you cry on its shoulder, that it listens to your stories, that it looks through old photographs of your loved ones and is there to cradle you through tears of mourning and remembrance.

I hope this, for you.

And tomorrow, I hope young men prove me wrong.

But I’m not sure they will. I don’t have the faith left in me, tonight, to be sure they will.

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The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 10

(The New American Apocalypse;

Table of Contents: Part One; Part Two; Part Three; Part Four; Part Five; Part Six; Part Seven; Part Eight; Part Nine;

Part Ten:…)

Mr. Ballard breaks the silence: “We need to unite with whoever remains alive, outside.  Whoever is keeping The Feed running, whoever’s shooting the footage…whoever is still awake and unzombified.”

“We need to rile up the proles,” Mr. Swift adds, “we have to cut off the mind-numbing drugs being pumped through everyone’s eyes and ears.  We have to wake them up.”

“We have to stop the forces of darkness from advancing,” Ms. Bradbury finishes her scotch and punctuates her sentence by placing the empty glass on the tabletop.  “We have to meet them in the field before they swarm us all.”

I nodded.  “Good.  All of that sounds like a very good plan.  I’m glad it’s settled.”

“Just one second,” Mr. Conrad holds up a slender finger and turns his head toward me.  “We also need to destroy the Poems of the Apocalypse.”

“Hmm?  What?  Oh, right.  That.” I clear my throat, my feigned innocence unbought.

“And that,” Conrad continues, “is on your head.”

What did I hope for?  That they forgot?  That I could worm my way out of the action at the last second, that I could retreat to my apartment and barricade the doors and live on canned food until they either won or lost the day?  No.  The conversation was destined to play out this way.  I have to own up to my mistakes.  I have to fix them…a process I’d never been very good at, to be honest.

“Well.  So.  I think we’ll start in the morning?”

They all exchange a long look.  Finally, Mr. Swift nods.  “They’ll all be at work in the morning…that will be our best time to strike out.  We’ll have safe lines of travel and communication in all directions.”

“Except during lunch,” Conrad says.

“Right.  Except during lunch.”

“What if they take an early lunch?” I ask.  “Or a late one?”

“Well…we’ll have safe-er lines of travel and communication, then.”

“Safety’s an illusion I don’t think we can afford to have,” Anna pours herself another scotch and leans back.  “Remember, not every member of the M’Ra cult or every armchair neophyte of the Church of the New American Jesus has a job.”

“I still vote we wait until morning,” I say, “because I, for one, am drunk.”

Which is true.  You try splitting a twenty-ounce bottle of whiskey and another half-liter of scotch and see if you feel like fighting a revolution.  The fact of the matter is neither Anna nor myself are in any position to take up arms against a sea of–sorry, that’s Hamlet–but we’re not in any position to take up arms, I’m sure of that.  And by morning we’ll have at least sobered up enough to understand exactly how grim our situation really is…

“Actually, I’m changing my vote,” I say, “because I, for one, am drunk.”

“Excuse me?” Conrad asks.

“If we wait until we’re all sober, we’ll never do it.  We’ll be too scared.  We’ll turn on The Feed and see the masses of the zombified public praying to enormous, veiny masculinity and we’ll chicken out.  We’ll lock ourselves up and turn off the Feed and turn out all the lights and hide.  Our only chance is to strike while the iron is hot!  To get our rum up and move like we’ve got a purpose!”

“Do you remember what you did the last time you acted on your drunken thoughts?” Mr. Swift plucks the scotch from the table and drinks straight from the bottle.  “Or do we have to remind you?”

“But this is different!  I was by myself, then, depressed, sitting in a dark room with nothing but liquor and a keyboard for company.  Now I’ve got you!  Heroes!  Frontline soldiers in the war against the Great Darknesses!”

“That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?” Anna quaffs her drink after the question, eyebrows furrowed at me.

“No,” Mr. Ballard says, “it isn’t.  Mr. Hughes has an excellent point.  Right now we are feeling courageous.  Mr. Swift rammed a cop car with his van not four hours ago.  Mr. Hughes, you mentioned you stared down a Scanner to buy time for Ms. Bradbury to escape?”

“I did,” I say, a little proud of myself.

“Then maybe this is the time!” Mr. Ballard continues, “And what better time than now?  Tomorrow?  The next day?  Next year, next decade, next century?  If we don’t act now, we act never.”

Silence hovers in the air, again.  I can feel something change.  Yes.  Now we’re ready to be heroes.  Now we’re ready to get back out there and defeat the Great American Nightmare, to battle the Darknesses and push them back, to fight off this invasion of all that is just and right in the world.  Now we’re bloody ready!  Hell yes!  We can still change the future!  We can still change the world!

“But first!” I declare, “Another drink.  And, if we’re really serious about this, we’ll need something to keep us lively and awake.  Something to get our nerves steeled and our bodies able.  Something to put us on the very Edge, to keep us sharp and hard even through the blurry courage of liquid heroism…” I gesture to Mr. Swift, “in my handbag there is a bag of pills.  We’ll need one each.”

And this may be one similarity between the mad artists and strident activists of the 50’s and 60’s and those who live today: we really believe we can fix things, we really believe we can make the world a better place, or at least the country, we really believe we can save the day…but we also recognize that we have to be half-crazy and at least slightly high to get away with believing something so obviously insane.  We know the Vegas odds and we’re choosing to blind ourselves against them, to pursue Truth and Justice and Righteousness despite the overwhelming evidence that the whole game is rigged, anyway, because, dammit, we just refuse to give up.

So we each take one of my potent little pills and we finish the first bottle of stolen scotch and we wait for the Need to come upon us, the itching, undeniable desire to get to action and, while we wait, I pick up my phone and announce: “I’m going to call the girl, make sure she survived.”

If you know me, or any other crazed, whiskey-soaked writer type hammering away madly at a keyboard, you know there’s always a girl.  Or a guy, I don’t know, choose your poison.  In my case, girl.

And you might also know, if you’ve read any amount of pulp, hardboiled, noir, or any of the classic genre works, that the girl is usually where things go wrong.

Well…for once on this mad journey, I won’t disappoint you.

Because I pick up my phone and punch in the girl’s number and guess what happens.  Take a wild guess, a shot in the dark.  Throw your bet in on the roulette table and see what comes up.  I’ll give you a second to consider it, but I think we all know way down in our bones way down in the pit of our souls the only way this phone call can go in such a story as this…and that’s with the Bad Guys picking up on the other end, their voices carrying their ugly smirks all the way through the phone line and into my ear.

“Why, hello there, Mr. Hughes,” the Beast says, sounding like money and expensive cigars and thousand-dollar bottles of scotch.  “How nice to hear from you, again.”

And for a second, I think my heart might explode out of my chest.

And I’m a little disappointed when it doesn’t.

The post The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 10 appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

Short Story Release; No Grave Available!

“He woke up, again, to the same alarm as always: static hiss of radio underscoring the accentless newsman as he said, ‘…he went to the gun locker, opened it, and took out the rifle.’ He slapped the radio off before he heard the rest of the story and pushed himself up out of bed. Sarah shifted on the mattress next to him, an airy sigh slipping from her lips as she curled up in the covers. She never heard the newsman, no matter how many times he said the exact same thing. They’d had a fight about it, once. She always heard a rock song, from Oceanrest Rock & Blues Radio. The same song, every time…something by Nine Inch Nails, but he couldn’t remember the title. He only ever heard the news report, the same news report, over and over again.”

So begins “A Man Wakes Up Any Morning,” a short story I wrote published in Sanitarium Magazine, Issue #38.  Sanitarium is a great horror mag–I’ve been a subscriber for quite some time and I am thrilled to be part of it, now.  I highly recommend picking up a copy, if you can.

The ebook is available on Amazon.com US, Amazon UK,  Apple News Stand, and Google Play Store, with PDF, EPUB, and other digital editions available through the Issue Release Page.

It’s also available in the flesh (or paper, as it were) on Amazon.com.

And while we’re here, I’d like to bump No Grave for the millionth time.  It’s the sequel to my first release, No Reflection, and a far superior book in my utterly biased and completely un-humble opinion.

No Grave is available in digital format at Smashwords.com, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

No Grave is also available in the gruesome, gruesome flesh at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Thanks for the continued support.  Enjoy the grim, terrible experience and we’ll talk again very, very soon.

Sooner than you think, dear readers.

Sooner, maybe even, than you would like…

The post Short Story Release; No Grave Available! appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 9

(Have you stopped the check out No Reflection and No Grave, yet?  Please do!  You already read them?  Oh, I see.  Well, then…maybe you wanted to write a review?  Please?)

(Also, check out Issue #38 of Sanitarium Magazine, featuring one of my short stories: “A Man Wakes Up Any Morning.”)

(Without further ado, The New American Apocalypse!:

Table of Contents:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9:…)

 

And this is the truth: we’ve always been heading in this direction, since the inception of the nation, a delicate curve of roadway getting tighter and tighter up until now, until it became a spiral, a corkscrew turn downhill into madness, abomination, destruction…death.  And I threw caltrops and oil over the asphalt in front of the car, in front of the half-blind American public squinting through the windshield, and the car lost control.  It spun out, careening in squealing 360s right up until it crashed through the guardrail and plummeted into darkness…and as if all that knowledge isn’t enough, as if knowing now what I know isn’t enough…I also have to accept the knowledge that the public at large, the great mass of the American Republic…don’t care.  That they, for some reason, imagine the car tumbling through darkness into endless cleavage and some aberrant mutations of Truth and Justice nobody in their right minds would recognize.  The truth is, Mr. Swift is right.  I only ever added the straw.  The rest of it, well, we did it to ourselves.  Staring into my scotch, the Feed playing on low volume in the background, I know nothing so well as I know this.  We did this to ourselves.

So now what?  Is there some emergency parachute in the trunk of this Great American Car, a Ford of some metaphysical, archetypal variety–or are we truly lost?  Can we be saved?  And if so, what are we being saved from?  Is this what we really are?  Is it all we’ve ever been?

I imagine the future, as directed by the Great Darknesses:

In this future, the streets are patrolled by mutant cops, Cthulhu from the waist down with big badges and giant, blocky guns clutched in their six-fingered hands.  They scan into our souls with their camera lenses, they read our minds with their sensors, they stand at the ready with truncheon and tentacle to act on the merest hint of sedition.  They fall upon protesters and under-privileged youth with ravenous bloodthirst, fanatical in their devotion to the ‘Greater Good.’   Remember: your enemies walk among you.  They could even be your neighbors.  They could even be yourself.  Remember: you are only safe if everyone else is dead.  Remember: you can trust us.

In this future, the great priests of the Church of the New American Jesus lead us in Megachurch Prayers for a small pittance, a tax-exempt tithe taken from our corporate-controlled bank accounts.  They have bombed out all the abortion clinics and banned sex for any purpose except for reproduction.  Gays and other sinners are lynched by the dozen in the name of the new American Christ, whose blond-haired blue-eyed John Doe visage gazes smilingly down on us from towers of opalescent wealth.  Muslims and Atheists soon join the queer fruit hanging from the trees, but eventually other sacrifices will be necessary, too.  The Jews, again?  Or the Buddhists?  Or will the New American Jesus soon demand the blood of a different Christian sect?  One whose teachings are less in-line with the Corporate-Approved Scriptures?  The Quakers, maybe.  Unitarians.  Anyone who strikes out against the booming declarations of the morally Right American Jesus and his Hobby Lobby Apostles.

In this future, the Eldritch Abominations strut through board rooms in crisp suits, their unreal faces ignored by the numb, mindless population.  They smoke cigars and drink $5000 cognac and carry suitcases made from leathered human skin.  Their bank accounts are padded by selling children into sex slavery after the poor kids lose too many fingers trying to put sneakers together.  Exploitation after exploitation, not unnoticed but simply unpunished.  Because nobody cares, mesmerized by reality TV and celebrity gossip.  They don’t even glance up from the screen as the Cannibal Class and its Dark Masters devour their neighbors, more meat for the market, more food for the horde.  The middle-management types, the zeds with a little extra brain in their skulls, tell the toiling workers that if they try hard enough, they, too, might one day earn a comfortable living.  In the meantime, it’s toil, toil, toil, and pray to New American Jesus that you keep your job until your debt is paid off (and it never will be, the Abominations have seen to that–at your current interest rate, it will take the rest of your natural life plus twenty years paying from the grave.)  The homeless and other inferior economic specimens will be shuttled to work camps, yes, like Gypsies in the old days.  They’ll be housed, of course, and given cots on which to rest their weary heads, so that should be an improvement over a park bench, shouldn’t it?  Never mind the fact that the showers aren’t connected to running water…

Never mind that, at all.

In this future, the Cult of M’Ra persists through allotment.  It has found a brother organization in the Church of the New American Jesus and so its teachings are allowed to filter through to the docile public.  Women will be ushered out of the workplace.  It will be taught across the nation that their brain power is diminished by the blood requirement of menstruation.  And with all the calculations going on in their tiny, adorable heads in search of an appropriate mate, how can there be room for extra maths?  These things can’t be helped–it’s just the way we’re built, biologically.  It’s not sexist, remember, it’s science.  And they will teach these things instead of Evolution, a silly theory if ever there was one.  Remember: men have challenges, too, and they shouldn’t be ignored.  The Cult of M’Ra has several pamphlets regarding prostrate cancer.  They haven’t put any money into research for a cure, and they haven’t exactly assembled an awareness council or even staged a march or a marathon…they just want you to know that it sucks, that they have to deal with it and you don’t, that their problems are very pressing, more pressing than your own concern over safety or privacy or rape culture or the breast cancer eating you alive from inside.

This future:

Don’t vote.  It doesn’t matter, anyway.  When has one vote changed anything?  Come and sit down.  Read a Bible.  Watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians.  Do you see what’s on Bravo, now?  Aren’t these Housewives hilarious?  Take these pills.  What do they do?  Oh, it’s nothing.  They make you feel good.  Isn’t this a funny show?  Don’t you feel better about life, now?  Oh, those people?  They’re your friends.  They live in your apartment.  Sorry, did I say your apartment?  I misspoke.  It’s their apartment, now.  You’re going to go live in one of the labor, er, Employment Camps with the other welfare recipients.  It pays minimum wage.  No benefits, but you’ll get cable TV.  Voting?  You won’t have time to vote.  No, no, no.  You have to work.  To pay the bills.  You only make minimum wage, after all.  Do you really want to take time off to register a vote that hardly matters?  Of course not.  Don’t stress about it too much.  There’s always Kim Kardashian.  Look at her little baby.  Look at her oiled up ass.  Take these pills.  No, I’m sorry, there’s no running water in the showers, but if you’re tired of feeling dirty all the time if you’re tired of all the sweat clinging to your pores if you’re just tired, tired, tired of the whole filthy world, I can turn one on for you.  There we go.  It’s not so bad, is it?  Shhhh.  Shhhhh.  Just close your eyes and let go.

I finish my scotch.  This is the Great American Dream, huh?  This is where we’ve all been headed.

To hell with that.

“What are we going to do?” I ask.

For a long time: silence.

The post The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 9 appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 8

(Have you been enjoying The New American Apocalypse?  Feel like helping a poor author?  For only ten cents a day–paid for a couple months in advance–you can feed a starving artist.  All you have to do is purchase the paperback or eBook copy of either No Reflection or No Grave!  And, if you’ve already read them, why not review them?  Isn’t it worth it to know you’ve saved a young adult from starvation?

And, if you’re interested, you can also check out Issue #38 of Sanitarium Magazine, featuring one of my short stories, “A Man Wakes Up Any Morning.”)

(In the meantime, please enjoy The New American Apocalypse, a semi-improvisational foray into the genre of Political Horror.

Table of Contents:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight:…)

 

Of course, we all always knew that reality television was a sedative, didn’t we?  But the concept that it functions on this magnitude, that Mutant Super Police could prowl the streets while M’Ra Cultists chop up journalists and the Church of the New American Jesus conquers DC and…and people are still sitting there, asses glued to seats, watching celebrities pretend to cry on camera?  Watching clever editors cut the world together into trite sound effects and misleading dialogue?

“How did this happen?” I ask, on my second glass of scotch on the rocks.  “How the hell did this happen?”  (I wish I could say I say it half-exclamatorily, but at this point my energy is deflating, my hope shriveling up like a man’s balls after a dip in ice cold water.)

“It was always happening,” the Voice, Mr. Ballard, tells me.  “The People have been hypnotized by daytime television for so long it’s hardly worth noting.  Come.  We’ll talk in the Liberty Den.”

Generally, we refer to this room as merely The Den, because it is just that: a den.  But every team of heroes, however motley, needs to have a fancy name for their headquarters, especially in times of strain and conflict.  So, ‘the den’ becomes ‘the Liberty Den,’ though its inherent function doesn’t change.  Some couches, a couple chairs, a large, beautifully sculpted coffee table topped in crystal, etc… the decor and purpose of the room isn’t changed with its title.  It’s just a den.  Don’t get too excited.

In the Liberty Den, we find the Sleeper Agent (Mr. Conrad and, once more, there’s no relation insofar as I’m aware) staring at the television, mouth agape in consternation.  He is slender and lean, wearing a tailored suit and a silk scarf.  Don’t let his appearance fool you!–he’s just as much at war with the Dark Powers That Be as any of the rest of us, he’s just approaching from a different angle.  Espionage.  Infiltration.  Et cetera.

“What’s on the Feed?” Ballard asks.

“I can’t…I just…” Conrad shakes his head, buries his face in his hands.  I turn my attention to the screen and see what has him so wearied: in DC, the Church of the New American Jesus has built crosses out of old CRT television sets and the M’Ra cultists are showing a constant stream of veiny cocks being jerked off.  Cannibals and zeds stand in the glow of the screens, praying.  I sputter on my drink, only managing to choke it down by reminding myself how much a single sip would cost, had I not stolen them.

The horror, indeed.

“One must imagine,” Ballard says, “that these are curated cocks.  Surely not every member of the M’Ra cult can have such massive equipment.”

“I’ve seen enough curated cock to last the rest of my natural life,” Ms. Bradbury plucks the open bottle of scotch from my hand.  “Turn that shit off,”

The shit is turned off.  There will be no cumshots tonight, ladies and gentlemen.  Not if we can help it.

Conrad, Sleeper Agent and Man in Havana Supreme, turns his eyes toward me.  “You blacked out?”

“That I did.”

“So you…you have no idea what you did?” he continues.

“That I don’t.”

“We thought it better to consult you before we dumped it on him,” Ms. Bradbury pours herself a couple fingers of scotch and takes a sip.  “Considering his state…sorry, honey, but it’s true, you’re a mess…it might be a little much for him.”

“I was just going to leave him to the Scanners,” Mr. Swift shrugs.

“Stop,” Anna huffs.  “Really.”

I drain the rest of my glass and clear my throat.  “So,” I say, “I propose, then, lady and gentlemen, that I very quickly have another swig of very nice scotch, and you tell me what I did that was so…was so…”

I can’t find a word to describe the magnitude of the situation.

“The Poems of the Apocalypse,” Anna replies.

“The what?” having never heard of this bit of work, myself.

“You wrote a shitty book.”

“Another shitty book,” Mr. Swift contends.

“Hey now!” I start, but then…I’m not exactly cranking out masterpieces, am I?

“Anyway, it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back or whatever,” Anna goes in on her drink, apparently quite thirsty (or trying to avoid a hangover after her earlier drunkenness…hair of the dog or the dog entire or just the parts of the dog most useful to her).

“So you’re mad at me because…because I wrote a shitty book of poems?”

“The shitty book of poems,” Mr. Swift picks up, “a book of such awful poetry and prose and utter nihilism, a work of such searing cynicism and senseless rage, of such hopelessness and helplessness, lacking all substance, in such fragmented, nonsense verse that it just…well…” he gestures at the dead-black television screen.  “Now we’ve got that.  Nobody fighting back, nobody voting, nobody bothering to stand up for their neighbors, their community, their basic civil rights… while these new monsters trample all over them, while these dark forces tear us apart.”

I sit down next to Anna.  On the one hand, yes, this seems like a relatively small change, a minor footnote in America’s acceleration toward The End, and yet…I was supposed to be the scribe of the group!  I was meant to play the Bard to those Paladins who Fought The Good Fight…and instead I’d betrayed them, thrown them under the bus in one of my moods, turned away from them to offer supplication to Dark Forces and Evil Entities…to support the Heart of Darkness pulsing in the center of our nation.  The camel was huffing and puffing over the dunes, to begin with, and I, for one reason or another, felt it necessary to shower it with blackened, poorly-edited poems of the nihilistic apocalypse?  What had possessed me during those two blackout weeks?  What awful things had I turned to?…

The answers will all have to wait.

Now isn’t the time for self-pity or self-loathing or the myopic pursuit of my blackout memories.  Now is the time to rally.  To set right what I wronged.  To finish this glass of scotch and pour myself another and top off Anna’s glass and slump back down on the couch and shake my head and figure the rest of it out maybe tomorrow morning after we shake off our various hangovers, yes, I think tomorrow is the best place to start, sometime after the sun rises and all the ghastly creatures running amok in the streets have gone in to work…

“Shit,” I mutter.  “I really fucked up.”

Ballard turned a sarcastic eye toward me, “Really?  You think so?”

“Um.  Yes?”

Well, at least I can still make them laugh.

The post The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 8 appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 7

(While you’re enjoying this somewhat-improvisational story, based loosely on my experiences in New York City, maybe consider picking up one of my darker, less-whimsical works, such as No Reflection and/or its sequel No Grave.  If you already read them, why not review them?  Even a couple short sentences would help.)

(The New American Apocalypse, Table of Contents:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven:…)

 

Johnny Swift slows the car after a dozen or so blocks.  Now that we’re clear of the Scanner Darkly, the air of immediate emergency has calmed.  Now it’s time to blend, to match traffic speed and try not attract too much attention as we make the last five minutes to our destination…

The Cannibal Class is on the march in Astoria, Queens.  The screams, Jesus…it’s the kind of sound you never really get used to hearing.  I stare out the window and watch as a pack of young, bespoke-suited zombies breach the door of a nearby apartment building.  They pull an aged, raisin-wrinkled Greek man from his home and drag him, shrieking, onto the sidewalk.  I look away, turning back toward the windshield, and let my ears do the rest of the narrative work for me.  That apartment is theirs, now.  When they’re done with the Greek man, they’ll have the rest of his family for dessert–an old-fashioned butcher shop feast.  Then they’ll go for the Bangladeshi neighbors.  It makes me wonder…how many real people are left, out there?  And how long can they hold on?

Will the screaming ever stop?

“What the hell is going on here?” I ask.

“Same thing that’s always been going on,” Anna replies, shadowed in the front seat, “just…worse.”

I lean forward, reaching out to tap Johnny Swift, Esq. on the arm, “And you’re saying I’m somehow responsible for this?”

He shakes his head, “You’re not responsible, per se.  I said that out of anger.  What you did was more like the straw that broke the camel’s back.  You tilted the scales at the opportune moment.”

“How?”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

His phone buzzes, the essential Batphone to our battles against Evil.  He and Anna exchange a look, and she ends up picking it up.  I return to my seat (stationed on the bulk of A Brief History of Constitutional Law) and do my best to absolutely eavesdrop on every word.  It’s not that I don’t trust Ms. Bradbury inherently, as I do (in fact, probably more than I trust any other singular person in the world), but after Mr. Swift’s scolding and the strange tension hanging in the car, I worry that I might not be being given the whole picture.  I worry that there are certain elements at play that I have, for one reason or another, been left ignorant of.

Her end of the call is brief: “Hello…Anna Bradbury…I’m out, now…They got where?…Already?…Worse than we thought…We’re already headed over…Spencer’s in tow…I know…I know…He blacked out…” (here, the sound of raucous laughter on the other end of the line, and my assumption that the Voice said something like “Typical Hughes”) “…We’ll be there in two minutes.  Bye.”

She hangs up and turns to Johnny Swift.  “The M’Ra cultists are in DC.  They hooked up with the Church of New American Jesus.”

“Shit,” Johnny says.

“Shit,” I agree, having never dealt with the Church of New American Jesus but having an innate fear of religions.  When you aren’t religious, you see, you begin to think of all religions as being innately cult-like, and my particular opinion on the American interpretation of the Christ Cult is a matter of public record.

Swift puts the accelerator halfway through the floor and before I know it, we’ve arrived at our destination…a small, beautiful little apartment on [STREET NAME REDACTED FOR THE SAFETY OF THOSE INVOLVED].  I mean, it’s a gorgeous place.  The Sleeper Agent and The Voice have incredible taste, and it really shows in the splendor of their apartment.  The interior, I mean.  The exterior is shit.  Utter shit.  And, looking up at it, I can still hear the distant screams of lower-class Queens residents as the new Cannibal Class eats them alive…and that isn’t something that ever adds to the beauty of an apartment building.  No.  I think any Real Estate agent will tell you that the resounding echoes of bloodcurdling screams are bad for property values.

We’re buzzed up to the apartment in short order, leaving Mr. Swift’s massive van tightly parked between two little Fiats.

The Voice, AKA Jason Gerald Ballard (and, again, no relation insofar as I’m aware) greets us at the door.  He’s a hugger.  I am, too, actually, but he’s on a different level, a true believer in the healing effects of the ritual.  At first impression, it’s somewhat uncomfortable, but after a time it becomes comforting, a promise of support so profound it can’t be denied.  We all receive such a hug on our way in–mine is somewhat clumsy, between my manbag and the two bottles of scotch.

“How goes the world outside?” Ballard asks, his voice the precise reason for his nickname–it’s deep and resonant, rich and perfectly enunciated.

“Here,” I hand him a bottle of scotch.  “You’ll need this.”

“Mr. Hughes…back among the living?”

I nod, “Rumors of my death, et cetera.”

“Good to know.”

Johnny Swift clears his throat, “We should get down to business, shouldn’t we?  Is The Feed still running?”

Ballard shrugs, “What little we receive, now, yes.”

The Feed is the alt.news outlet the global network of…well, there’s no official name, per se, because the network is made up of dozens of smaller groups, freaks and weirdos and activists and artists all working toward a better world and largely getting hell in return for our efforts.  Fighting the good fight and paying the price, etc.  In any case, I rarely involve myself with it except in very serious issues, Red Alert scenarios, Code Black and the like, situations in which all members must be called to arms to beat back some dark entity coming either from within or without.  In the day to day, I don’t really play a role…but now, today, in this New American Apocalypse, I have no choice.  Who does, really?  Who can afford to sit back and let this madness play out before their eyes, slouched in a barcalounger while the country, maybe even the world, tears itself apart?

Apparently, the answer is ‘an uncomfortable percentage of the still-surviving population.’

“What?” I ask, following the Mr. Ballard, Mr. Swift, and Ms. Bradbury down a long hallway.  “What do you mean nobody’s watching?”

“Precisely what I said, Mr. Hughes,” Ballard goes on.  “Those people who are members neither of our legion nor the, as you put, the Cannibal Class simply don’t seem to care what’s going on…even as they are eaten alive.”

My jaw drops wide open.  “But…but how…?  I mean, surely, even the mainstream news networks, surely they must have something to say about the Apocalyptic State of the Union!”

He shakes his head, “That’s part of the issue, you understand.  The monsters in question, leaders of the Cannibal Class and those still darker entities that lord over even them, they’ve concocted a perfect sedative.”

“What?  Impossible!  What is it?”

“Kim Kardashian’s oiled-up ass.”

The first nip of scotch that night goes down my own throat.  I feel a sudden need to drown my sorrows.

The post The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 7 appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 6

(As some of you know, I have a dark, dark, dark supernatural fiction novel out known as No Grave — I would be thrilled if you would take the time to read and review it.  Thank you very much.)

(The New American Apocalypse, Table of Contents:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six:…)

The ravening madman is trying to claw out Anna’s eyes!

“Liberals!” he sputters, “Commies!  Got more red in them than just their blood, you can bet!”

The other zeds don’t appear to hear him, too busy devouring their old brother-in-arms to care about anything else.

To be fair to the poor store manager, I am technically robbing him.  But with prices like those, it doesn’t feel karmically/morally/ethically wrong.  And even if it was, why should I care?  I never claimed to be a shining moral pillar.  If anything, I’m obviously the opposite, a fringe freak and a cad; lecherous, over-amorous, volatile…an extreme-leftist horror author who spends his days reading about human cruelty and pounding tales of darkness out on a keyboard while chugging coffee and whiskey and taking pills.  No, no, I’m certainly not the person to be looking at as a moral paragon…

“Spencer!” Anna yells.  “A little fucking help, here!”

“Oh, right.”

I rear back and bring one of the overpriced bottles of Macallan 12 down on the back of the zombie’s head.  A dull glassy THUNK travels up my arm, but the hungry-eyed shopkeep remains mobile, agile and angry, all teeth and claws and breath so bad I can see Anna tear up from smelling it.  I bring the bottle down a couple more times, each time harder than the last, until finally the creature’s body goes limp and slides to the floor.

His last conscious words: “Fucking…Stalinists…”

Anna leaps up from the floor and grabs me.  Several shotgun shells spilled from her bag during the struggle, but there’s no time to stop and pick them up–the other zeds are just about done eating their fallen comrade, and we’ll be their next target.  We rush for the exit and burst back out onto the dark sidewalk.

Flashing lights announce the approach of the Scanner, the Thing in the Cop Car.  The vehicle screeches around the corner and comes toward us like hell on wheels–no, not like hell on wheels, that’s not quite right, more like the hideous manifestation of a malignant and bleak universe on wheels.  And it’s coming right for us, the Scanner’s one camera eye boring into my chest, filming me, seeing me, knowing me, knowing me in ways I can only guess at, maybe in ways I can’t even imagine.

“What do you see!?” I scream at the cop car.  “What do you see!?”

Anna has my arm, again.  “Run!”

We take off down the street as fast as we can, trying to keep a line of parked cars between our bodies and the humming frame of the cop car.  It’s useless and we both know it.  The car pulls ahead of us, our faces caught in the reflection if its side-mounted mirrors, wherein the objects may be closer than they appear (and we appear pretty close) and turns sharply into the crosswalk at the end of the block.  Anna yanks on me and runs between two parked cars, but the cop car revs its engines, backs up, and turns to face us, again.

We’ve been beat.  I woke up in this ruined America less than a day ago and I’ve already scotched it up (literally) and got us beaten.  A world record for failure.  Another notch on a belt with little room left for notches.  Spencer Rhys Hughes: crowned king of mistakes, errors of judgment, and general fuckups.

“Go!” I yell, pushing Anna away from me and turning to face the headlights of the cop car.  “Come get me you sonsabitches!  I’m right here and I’m drunk enough not to be afraid!  Come on!”

Anna gets her shotgun back out.

“I said GO!” I scream at her, waving one of my dual scotch bottles to indicate that she needs make haste in such a situation.  “Get out of here while there’s still time!”

“I’ve done enough goddamned running.”

The driver’s side door pops open and the THING gets out, its massive lens taking us in.  Seeing the rest of its body…how can I describe it?  It bears an aura like a cloud of ink passed from an undersea monster.  Its legs are black tentacles, and its arms, though humanoid, have a vile, gelatinous texture to them.  A matte black Glock sits in a six-fingered hand capping its right arm.  “Put your hands up, Citizen Hughes and Citizen Bradbury.  You are both under arrest.”

“For what!?” I demand.

“Citizen Hughes for the theft of goods, for the spread of lunacy, and for general sedition.  Citizen Bradbury for violence against other citizens and suspicion.”

Where does its voice even come from?  It has no mouth, it has no mouth and yet it screams, it emits sound that makes my head hurt, feedback from a microphone.  Some new crime-stopping technology, maybe?  Some damned dark magic granted to it by…by…by the Greater Darknesses commanding it?  And what, exactly, are these Greater Darknesses?

“Put your hands up or I will use lethal force!”

Anna lifts her shotgun.  I rush toward her, hoping to stop her from being shot, to take the bullet myself or at least knock her out of its path (hopefully the second option, as I am in no mood, ever, to take a bullet for another human–not a fitting end for a man as selfish and cowardly as myself).  I can already hear the gunshots, even before they happen.

The Cop Monster Thing, The Scanner Darkly, lifts its own pistol.

Our quest is over before it even began.

And then an enormous blue van, a massive whale of a vehicle, runs through the intersection and crashes into the cop car.  It must be going seventy-something miles per hour because when it hits, everything on the street feels it.  The cop car crumples like rough draft paper (and, sadly, the still-human man in the passenger seat goes the same way) and tumbles belly-up onto the Scanner.

My good friend and occasional lawyer(-slash-voice-of-reason) Johnny Swift (again, no relation, at least insofar as I am aware), pushes open the passenger-side door, facing us.  He sticks out his clean-cut mug (never been handsomer in his life, I swear) and calls out: “Anna, get in!  Quick!”

The two of us start in a lope toward his car, the mighty Leviathan, and he waves a hand, “No, no, you leave that son of a bitch right where he is.”

“What!?” I yelp, not slowing down for an instant and finding him much less handsome than I had five seconds earlier.

“You know what you did!” Mr. Swift calls out.

“I really don’t!” I’m ten feet from the van, Anna a couple steps closer.

“We’re not leaving him!” and when Anna says something like that, it’s case closed.  Even the Lawyer knows that much.  He rolls his eyes and lets me open the back-seat panel door.

The backseat, if it can be called that looking so much, as it does, like a bookshelf, is cluttered with law books and old case files.  I jump in, after loading my man-bag and the two bottles of scotch, sit on a dense book called A Brief History of Constitutional Law (which, judging from its size, is anything but) and slam the door shut next to me.

Anna gets her door closed, too, which I notice she left open for a couple extra seconds to make sure Mr. Swift didn’t hightail it away from there without me.  Kind girl.  Very kind.

Johnny Swift puts his foot on the accelerator right as the Scanner flips the cop car off its back and stands up.  I won’t bother to express surprise at this feat, the image of a monster one-third human, one-third octopus, and one-third security camera lifting and heaving a fully-loaded cop car across the street, because for some reason this seems like it was always a foregone conclusion.  Of course the new Scanner Super Police can flip cop cars.  What would be the point, otherwise?

As we speed down the street, doing 55 in a 30, I find enough of my voice to ask: “Why the hell were you going to leave me out there?”

“Because this is your goddamned fault!” Mr. Swift yells back.

“What!?  I’ve been blackout blotto’d for over two weeks!”

He takes his eyes off the road long enough to give me a deathly glare, the kind only a lawyer with a very good knowledge of contract law and asset allocation can give.  “You…what!?”

“He doesn’t remember,” Anna replies.  “Keep your eyes on the damned road.  We need to head to the Voice and the Sleeper Agent.”

With a heavy, long-suffering sigh, Mr. Johnny Swift turns back to the road.

In the back, I sink down in my seat (as far as A Brief History of Constitutional Law will allow me to do) and gulp.

What the hell did I do, this time?

The post The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 6 appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 5

(Another shameless No Grave plug!  Please purchase/read/review my book, I swear it’s worth the entry fee.)

(As for this developing story–now tentatively titled The New American Apocalypse!–here’s a Table of Contents:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

…Part Five:)

In Lovecraft’s work, he writes about ‘that Innsmouth look,’ the appearance people had in a town that had been cross-breeding with undersea monstrosities for generations, giving them a greasy, big-eyed demeanor, slimy and aquatic, and an occasional extra finger.

So let’s say the liquor store was full of people with ‘that Tompkins look.’  Members of the Cannibal Class.  Suits, beards, man-buns, stylized glasses that they probably don’t even need, and hunger, blank indifferent hunger stirring behind their glassy zombie eyes.  Christ, they frighten me.  More than I even frighten myself.

Anna takes point, leading us through the liquor store at a slow, precise pace.  It’s quiet…quiet as the grave, one could say, quiet as the dead themselves whispering through the cemetery grass.  One of the Cannibal Class plucks a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue from a shelf and the ring of its glass against other nearby bottles nearly makes me jump out of my skin.  Anna shoots me a look that I read to be a kind of scolding, a way of letting me know to keep my shit together, and I nod my agreement.  I can’t be like this, in this place.  Scanners outside, zombies within…no, no, this is no place for a civilized man, anymore.

Or maybe this is the next step of civilization.  American Capitalism taken to its own dark extreme.  Maybe I’m the uncivilized man, in this position.  Maybe I’m the backwards man, the artifact of a lost era…

I don’t believe in God, but I pray that this isn’t the case.

We come to a display of scotches.  Five shelves tall, it’s loaded with every overpriced single malt a bespoke-suited monster could want to guzzle down.  I have nothing against scotch, I should mention, only against its price–but this is on a very different level even than what I was used to.  There’s a bottle of Macallan 12 being sold for $166.60.  I won’t afflict your mind by mentioning the price of the Johnny Walker Blue, save to say there are four digits before the decimal.

“Well, this is fucking absurd,” I mutter.

“Shut up,” Anna replies.

“This is highway robbery.  Shouldn’t the scanner-cop-thing be in here arresting these zombies?”

“Shut the hell up!”

“They’re trying to deprive of us good whiskey!  Us and every poor, struggling human like us!  These price-gouging fiends are shaking us down, good working people and artists, keeping our palms spread against the wall, running our damned pockets, and you want me to stay calm!?”

I realize, at that point, that the hungry eyes of the zed populace have all found us and that I have, in fact, drawn a modicum of attention to myself.  But if there’s one thing I’ve learned to do in my life, it’s to mortify, terrify, and discomfort droves of people, to afflict the careless masses, to get the mass and herd of mankind to give wide berth.

“‘s the aliens!” I scream, grabbing a bottle of Macallan and waving it around, “the damned aliens shrieking in my head!  I’m mad as a tinfoil hatter!  I’ve blocked out all reception, buzzing homeworld messages lost in space!”  I grab a second bottle, too, because why not?  The zed seem to be parting, their eyes suddenly wary of the shrieking mad homeless man invading their store.  I stagger forward, slurring, and head toward the door, daring the cashiers or customers to stop me in my rabid, mouth-foaming theft.  “Animals!  You’re all animals!  Feasting, fucking, fighting, look at you,” I pause to make eyes at one zed in particular, one who sweats awkwardness and stares at me like I’m a zoo animal out of its cage, “you…” I growl, “you…have got something in your teeth.”

He covers his mouth, pushing his body back against a display of quintuply-filtered, overpriced vodka.

Of course, I should’ve known better than to press my luck.

“Wait!” one zed yells, “I know that guy!  I saw him walk into an apartment earlier!  He’s not really homeless!”

Anna sighs.  “You idiot.”

The sweating zed in front of me shifts.  I watch fear drain from his face, replaced by a smirking confidence.  He  knows, now, that I’m not nearly as crazy as I put off, that I’m not that different from him…closer to the fringes, sure, closer to The Edge, but…not that different…no…not different enough, by far.

I gulp.  “Ms. Bradbury,” I squeak, voice quieter than usual and at a higher pitch, “I believe I may have got us into a situation.”

Her shotgun appears in her hand.  “No shit.”

“My deepest apologies.”

The zed surge forward, hands reaching toward us–Christ, it’s like we’re the last toys on the shelves of a Christmas Eve sale, the way they come at us, like we’re their last hope of pretending intimacy to each other, of acting like they still in some way care.  I clutch my bottles of scotch close and pray for a quick end.  Pray that they break my neck or slit my throat before they start eating.

Anna squeezes the trigger of her gun and sends one of the zombies to the ground, his finely tailored shirt ruined by his own blood.  In an instant, the other zed turn on him, falling on his half-dead form with wide, starving mouths.  Jesus.  These fuckers are eager enough just to eat their own kind.

And the sounds…the sounds!–the greedy smack of bloodied lips and wet squelch of raw feast–I hear them over the dying zed’s screams, so crisp and awful they are to my ears.  The monsters, the goddamned monsters, they’ve forgotten all about us!  They’re so excited to have someone to eat, even one of their own, that they’ve left the two of us standing there, unharmed, while they rip and tear at their own species!

Anna grabs my arm and drags me for the exit, “We’re not off the hook, yet.”

“What?”

“Shit!”

The store owner leaps over the counter and sends us stumbling.  He’s a large, salt-of-the-earth type man, dark hair and sweat-smelling, a long-suffering small business owner.  He should be on our side, dammit, and yet there he is, shoving me into a wall of fine bourbons and pouncing on Anna.  She struggles with her gun, using its long barrel and her own locked elbows to keep his gnashing teeth at bay, inches from her face.  He screams, spitting with every word: “FOOLS!  HELP ME DEAL WITH THESE NONBELIEVERS!” (I’ll cut the caps, of course, but know that they are there, in spirit): “Progressives!  Socialists!  You heard what they said!  They want to lower the prices, leave the businesses gutted!  They’ll raise your taxes, they will!  They’ll raise the minimum wage!  Kill them!”

The post The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 5 appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 4

(insert another shameless No Grave plug here.  Oh, you already own a copy?  Nevermind, then!  I hope you enjoy it…and maybe also give me a review?  Please? And, now, let’s get on with the New Show.)

(The New American Apocalypse:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

…Part Four:)

 

It’s hard to recall what, exactly, happened after the whiskey.  I remember she had told me about the cult and the rising of the Great Phallus M’Ra, and I had told her about the money-fingered Wall Street bigwigs and tech start-up new agers unhinging their jaws to eat the young, and then we had a fourth or fifth drink somewhere in there, finishing all 24oz of whiskey between us, and….

And the next thing I know, we’re out on the streets of Queens in the lightless night, stars obscured by decades of smog to leave us only with the blanket of a cold, black universe.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“We’ll need the whole team for this one.”

I nod.  “Sounds right.  Who do we pick up, first?”

“The Sleeper Agent and the Voice.”

“They’ve got the most books, besides myself,” a logical leap to then assume they would have the most weaponry, both intellectually and otherwise.

“They do.”

“We should bring a bottle of something with us,” I suggest.  “It’s the polite thing to do.”

“What?”

“It would be rude to show up empty-handed, bearing only bad news and no good whiskey to wash it down with.”

She nods.  This makes sense to her, yes–this would make sense to anyone.  It’s impolite to show up on someone’s door part-way through the opening chapters of The Apocalypse(tm) and tell them it’s much worse than we originally thought and no, sadly, we’re already out of whiskey.  Stories of the Great Phallus and class cannibalism are best swallowed with a heavy numbing agent.

So begins our first quest in this new wasteland world.

“There’s a big liquor warehouse up by the subway station.”

And so, you might think, ends our first quest in this new wasteland world.

But you would be wrong.

We walk up toward the big liquor warehouse, a massive cathedral in dire times, and on the way pass a cop car.  The thing inside–how to describe it?  A thing, certainly, for it could be no man, though the officer in the passenger-side seat is human enough (facing away, head pressed to the window as though trying to escape, as though trying not to look at the entity, the monstrosity, the THING sitting next to him), the one at the driver’s seat can’t be.  Maybe once, some days or weeks or years earlier, but no longer, no.  Its face is a flat, pale mask with but one feature: a slitted camera-eye amidst a pane of blurry white.  It has no mouth, no nose, no hair, and its skin is the color of sweating lard.

But that camera-eye…ah, ‘what does the scanner see?’ indeed.

“What the hell is that?” I hiss, giving Anna a soft nudge.

“Ignore it,” Ms. Bradbury advises.

“What!?”

“Ignore it,” she repeats.

“How am I supposed to ignore that thing?  What man in his right mind would ignore something like that gazing into his history, into his very soul?”

“You’re not supposed to be in your right mind.  It’s a control unit.”

“Of course.”

Control unit, yes.  That makes as much sense as the trip to the liquor store.  Of course there are control units, now, because this is the hellscape that America has become.  Militarized police forces wage open warfare in ghetto streets.  Protesters are hit with sound cannons to induce double-ended spew.  It was only a matter of time before Dark Things became involved, before the Boys in Blue traded the last of their unmarred badges for a little extra security.  And I bet it goes all the way up, all the way to the top.  Maybe that unholy camera doesn’t just feed the NYPD, no, that would be too narrow-minded, and in this age of broadband and cloud technology there is no doubt the police are attached to an even larger entity, feeding digital data to the hive mind of Darkness, itself.  ‘What does the scanner see?’–and who does it see for?  Do the men eating children in Tompkins Square park know, now, that I’ve found an ally in Queens?  And if they don’t, how many pounds of flesh would such information cost in the new cannibal economy?

I shiver.

Anna grabs me, “Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t react like that.  They’ll see.  You’re supposed to trust them.”

“That’s insane.”

“Keep your head down and walk.”

The camera watches us through the cop car windshield until we turn the corner.  The elevated subway line arches over our heads.  Posters are plastered along its green edges reading ‘IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING’ over and over again, hundreds of them, creating a mantra collage.  On each poster is a photo of a community member, a tax-payer for God’s sake, asking the question, ‘COULD THE TERRORIST BE YOUR  NEIGHBOR?’

‘ALL CITIZENS MAY BE REQUIRED TO UNDERGO A SEARCH.  SUSPICIOUS LOOKING CITIZENS MAY BE REQUIRED TO UNDERGO A CAVITY SEARCH.’

There is a winking emoji face next the phrase ‘Suspicious Looking Citizens.’  My intestines quiver at the sight of it.

Anna keeps moving.  In the past fifteen days, she’s seen it all.  I struggle to keep up, distracted by the posters and thoughts of The Thing In The Cop Car.

We stop when we see the liquor warehouse by the subway stairs.  I am suddenly glad that Anna is armed (her shotgun has been stowed in a long coat and her handbag is full of knives and ammo — mine is full of the same things I packed it with, before, sans the whiskey).

They’ve taken over the liquor warehouse.  This much is immediately clear.

Where once overstocked shelves packed against each other in tight, angular corridors, now there is floorspace.  Floorspace and understocked displays showing only the finest of top- and middle- tier alcohols, and the people behind the cashiers’ counter wear dead eyes and vacant smiles, dressed in the same khaki pants and shirts and soothing cerulean blue aprons.  Another refuge has bitten the dust, transformed by the onslaught of the cannibal class.  The wide, comfortable aisles of the liquor emporium carry mindless zombies through a store that could never be confused for Discount Liquors Emporium.  No, no, this place is New and Improved, ready to serve the Overlords of the Future, ready to sell its overpriced wares to the zed population, ready to yield up its finest grain alcohols to the maws of the cannibal class, to slosh vodka in their skulls as they savor the veal of underprivileged children.

“We have to turn back.  There’s another liquor store on the way, a little hole-in-the-wall owned by this Vietnamese couple, really lovely married couple, they’ll–”

“We can’t,” Anna interrupts, her voice shaking the way it did when she told me about the M’Ra cultists and their rampage toward the City.  “The control unit is watching us.  It’ll see us if we turn around.”

“But…look at them, in there!  They’re all gone.  Far gone.”

“No choice.  We can’t look suspicious.”

“I’ll admit, I’m in no mood to have my cavities searched, but this is a suicide mission.”

“We have to blend in.”

And what choice did we have?

The post The New American Apocalypse, Pt. 4 appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.

Blog Story #1, Pt. 4 (Untitled)

(insert another shameless No Grave plug here.  Oh, you already own a copy?  Nevermind, then!  I hope you enjoy it…and maybe also give me a review?  Please? And, now, let’s get on with the New Show.)

(Part One

Part Two

Part Three

…Part Four:)

 

It’s hard to recall what, exactly, happened after the whiskey.  I remember she had told me about the cult and the rising of the Great Phallus M’Ra, and I had told her about the money-fingered Wall Street bigwigs and tech start-up new agers unhinging their jaws to eat the young, and then we had a fourth or fifth drink somewhere in there, finishing all 24oz of whiskey between us, and….

And the next thing I know, we’re out on the streets of Queens in the lightless night, stars obscured by decades of smog to leave us only with the blanket of a cold, black universe.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“We’ll need the whole team for this one.”

I nod.  “Sounds right.  Who do we pick up, first?”

“The Sleeper Agent and the Voice.”

“They’ve got the most books, besides myself,” a logical leap to then assume they would have the most weaponry, both intellectually and otherwise.

“They do.”

“We should bring a bottle of something with us,” I suggest.  “It’s the polite thing to do.”

“What?”

“It would be rude to show up empty-handed, bearing only bad news and no good whiskey to wash it down with.”

She nods.  This makes sense to her, yes–this would make sense to anyone.  It’s impolite to show up on someone’s door part-way through the opening chapters of The Apocalypse(tm) and tell them it’s much worse than we originally thought and no, sadly, we’re already out of whiskey.  Stories of the Great Phallus and class cannibalism are best swallowed with a heavy numbing agent.

So begins our first quest in this new wasteland world.

“There’s a big liquor warehouse up by the subway station.”

And so, you might think, ends our first quest in this new wasteland world.

But you would be wrong.

We walk up toward the big liquor warehouse, a massive cathedral in dire times, and on the way pass a cop car.  The thing inside–how to describe it?  A thing, certainly, for it could be no man, though the officer in the passenger-side seat is human enough (facing away, head pressed to the window as though trying to escape, as though trying not to look at the entity, the monstrosity, the THING sitting next to him), the one at the driver’s seat can’t be.  Maybe once, some days or weeks or years earlier, but no longer, no.  Its face is a flat, pale mask with but one feature: a slitted camera-eye amidst a pane of blurry white.  It has no mouth, no nose, no hair, and its skin is the color of sweating lard.

But that camera-eye…ah, ‘what does the scanner see?’ indeed.

“What the hell is that?” I hiss, giving Anna a soft nudge.

“Ignore it,” Ms. Bradbury advises.

“What!?”

“Ignore it,” she repeats.

“How am I supposed to ignore that thing?  What man in his right mind would ignore something like that gazing into his history, into his very soul?”

“You’re not supposed to be in your right mind.  It’s a control unit.”

“Of course.”

Control unit, yes.  That makes as much sense as the trip to the liquor store.  Of course there are control units, now, because this is the hellscape that America has become.  Militarized police forces wage open warfare in ghetto streets.  Protesters are hit with sound cannons to induce double-ended spew.  It was only a matter of time before Dark Things became involved, before the Boys in Blue traded the last of their unmarred badges for a little extra security.  And I bet it goes all the way up, all the way to the top.  Maybe that unholy camera doesn’t just feed the NYPD, no, that would be too narrow-minded, and in this age of broadband and cloud technology there is no doubt the police are attached to an even larger entity, feeding digital data to the hive mind of Darkness, itself.  ‘What does the scanner see?’–and who does it see for?  Do the men eating children in Tompkins Square park know, now, that I’ve found an ally in Queens?  And if they don’t, how many pounds of flesh would such information cost in the new cannibal economy?

I shiver.

Anna grabs me, “Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t react like that.  They’ll see.  You’re supposed to trust them.”

“That’s insane.”

“Keep your head down and walk.”

The camera watches us through the cop car windshield until we turn the corner.  The elevated subway line arches over our heads.  Posters are plastered along its green edges reading ‘IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING’ over and over again, hundreds of them, creating a mantra collage.  On each poster is a photo of a community member, a tax-payer for God’s sake, asking the question, ‘COULD THE TERRORIST BE YOUR  NEIGHBOR?’

‘ALL CITIZENS MAY BE REQUIRED TO UNDERGO A SEARCH.  SUSPICIOUS LOOKING CITIZENS MAY BE REQUIRED TO UNDERGO A CAVITY SEARCH.’

There is a winking emoji face next the phrase ‘Suspicious Looking Citizens.’  My intestines quiver at the sight of it.

Anna keeps moving.  In the past fifteen days, she’s seen it all.  I struggle to keep up, distracted by the posters and thoughts of The Thing In The Cop Car.

We stop when we see the liquor warehouse by the subway stairs.  I am suddenly glad that Anna is armed (her shotgun has been stowed in a long coat and her handbag is full of knives and ammo — mine is full of the same things I packed it with, before, sans the whiskey).

They’ve taken over the liquor warehouse.  This much is immediately clear.

Where once overstocked shelves packed against each other in tight, angular corridors, now there is floorspace.  Floorspace and understocked displays showing only the finest of top- and middle- tier alcohols, and the people behind the cashiers’ counter wear dead eyes and vacant smiles, dressed in the same khaki pants and shirts and soothing cerulean blue aprons.  Another refuge has bitten the dust, transformed by the onslaught of the cannibal class.  The wide, comfortable aisles of the liquor emporium carry mindless zombies through a store that could never be confused for Discount Liquors Emporium.  No, no, this place is New and Improved, ready to serve the Overlords of the Future, ready to sell its overpriced wares to the zed population, ready to yield up its finest grain alcohols to the maws of the cannibal class, to slosh vodka in their skulls as they savor the veal of underprivileged children.

“We have to turn back.  There’s another liquor store on the way, a little hole-in-the-wall owned by this Vietnamese couple, really lovely married couple, they’ll–”

“We can’t,” Anna interrupts, her voice shaking the way it did when she told me about the M’Ra cultists and their rampage toward the City.  “The control unit is watching us.  It’ll see us if we turn around.”

“But…look at them, in there!  They’re all gone.  Far gone.”

“No choice.  We can’t look suspicious.”

“I’ll admit, I’m in no mood to have my cavities searched, but this is a suicide mission.”

“We have to blend in.”

And what choice did we have?

The post Blog Story #1, Pt. 4 (Untitled) appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.