Strange Violence Read online

  “Our lives!” Argus snapped at her. “We’ve been pushing it lately! Maybe too far.”

  “I like to live my life on the edge,” Erik replied. “It’s how I’ve made it this far. How we’ve accomplished so much.”

  “Are you losing faith in Erik?” Morgan asked Argus, her voice dripping with frank condescension. He scowled at her in response. For a moment, Erik’s heart winced - although he’d never displayed any sort of interest in Argus whatsoever, he’d always had a soft spot for the boy that he found himself unable to excise. He was not proud of the emotion. He wanted to feel as though he owed no creature alive any sort of protection, and yet his natural instinct led him to think of Argus differently than the others he interacted with. If he had still been human, he might have called it a crush.

  “It’s not about him or his ego,” Argus continued. “It never was.” He looked at Erik. “You know that, don’t you, Silas?” he questioned, sneering his last name.

  “I don’t believe in egos,” Erik responded, “just sensible, practical ways to break things.”

  “It’s deeper than that,” Argus chided. “This is not just about breaking things for the sake of chaos. That’s childish. If we continue to take risks--”

  “Stop,” Erik interjected. “Enough with your logic, I don’t care about your rationality. You’re missing the point. If you are interested in breaking these tyrannies only to start some more of your own, then I suggest you find another organization to join. And you know how I feel about organizations.”

  “We are an organization!” shouted the boy, as Erik often thought of him when he was argumentative. On a practical level, he knew that he should lash out, tell Argus to simply leave the group behind, and not even to give him the option of staying. But, as much as he despised Argus’ hypocrisy, dealing with his ego was a necessary evil in order to consume the greater one, or so he told himself, to cover up his true feelings; so Erik tried his hardest to keep him satisfied. He also told himself there was no sentimentality involved in the compromise, and then buried the subject as easily as he did his victims.

  “You’re being hypocritical,” Argus added, pointing out the obvious. “You say this is for anarchy and chaos, but you’ve built an organization whether you want to admit it or not. And you do have a goal - a specific goal.”

  “What is that goal?” Erik snapped, speaking almost as soon as his sentence finished, showing his weakness and his humanity, and a mere second later blushing at the inadvertent revelation.

  “I’m here because I thought that we were supposed to be taking out fascist, cult-run states one by one… isn’t that how you feel about it?”

  “That’s part of the picture,” Erik responded. “But go on, clearly you have more to say.”

  “Well, why are we taking them out if we’re just going to kamikaze ourselves right into their hands for the sake of your ‘chaos’ bull-shit?”

  “I never said I had even made a decision in regard to our next maneuver,” Erik replied. “But I think I have you all figured out. What’s really the issue here is your desire for justice. Well, I hate to tell you, but I don’t believe in justice. And if you think I blew up Las Vegas, and Phoenix, and Santa Fe, and killed all of those people simply because I wanted to bring justice to the world, then you are sorely mistaken.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because,” Erik spoke directly, “someone has to do it.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “That’s just the way things go. Morgan understands.” Erik turned to her. “Don’t you?”

  “Why not?” Morgan answered obediently. “It’s no worse than what they do us. In fact, it’s more a form of justice than what you’re suggesting.”

  “I haven’t even made a suggestion,” Argus snapped at her.

  “I think you have,” Erik interjected. “It’s clear you think that fascism and tyranny are wrong. They are; it is true. But that’s because everything is wrong. It’s all irrelevant. Things have gone too far. There is a greater Nature at work here than this earth and the filth that grows upon it, and we are agents of that Nature.”

  “What are you talking about?” Argus repeated, irritating Erik beyond measure. “Are you telling me that there is no purpose behind this, behind any of it?”

  “Purpose is a meaningless word, just like everything is meaningless. Do you think there is a meaning behind any of the death and suffering inflicted upon this world? Do you think that the horrors we commit are somehow more acceptable than those done by the ones we’re committing them against?”

  “Yes!” Argus shouted. “They have to be!”

  “And if they are not, if they are just as ‘evil’ as you might think of it, then what does that make you?”

  “A murderer…” he answered, almost whispering it.

  “That’s right,” Erik told him. “And that would be awful, if that word actually meant something. If you don’t like doing what I say, then you are free to leave. What happens to you after you leave, however, is none of my concern.”

  He’d gone and said it, without intending to. He stared at the boy, waiting for him to speak back, and Argus returned the stare, defiant, cold and blazing simultaneously. In spite of his seething rage, he said not a word. He also made no effort to leave, to Erik’s secret relief. After about thirty seconds, the boy dropped his eyes, and Erik’s stance as leader was once more unquestionable. He looked over to Morgan, who had been viewing this exchange with great interest, and then to Pixel, who seemed to have nodded off. When he looked back at Argus, he had turned away from all of them, and was working on one of the scavenged lap-top computers they had found in an abandoned IAE warehouse near the Mormon territories. The period of silence left all of them feeling awkward save Pixel, who was in another world entirely inside of her own mind. Morgan, ever in providence of relief, finally broke it, thinking of it as a favor to Erik.

  “So…” she started, hesitant, “…the LSD?”

  “I think it’s time,” Erik told her. “We can drop all the nukes in the world. That won’t change anyone’s mind. But if we can get into New Mecca and drive all of those uptight reality-fascists insane… well, it should be an interesting experiment.”

  “They’ll kill you, and then they’ll kill us all,” Argus replied, still not facing his unspoken master.

  “I’m not afraid of death,” Erik said. “I love it.”

  “We need to get to the Cleveland outpost to pick up the LSD, and then we can head to New Mecca from there. We should probably be getting out of this area before any survivors or allies come looking for us…” mumbled Argus, sounding disheartened, but obedient; Erik’s cold heart warmed by the tiniest fraction possible.

  “Then I suggest we leave now,” he replied. He walked over to Pixel and snapped his fingers in front of her face. She flinched, and then looked up at him with her soft green eyes. They shone like emeralds under the single fluorescent light of the bomb shelter. “We’re going now,” he told her. She looked disappointed, as though she was hoping to rest for a while, but stood, as obedient as Argus. The boy closed the computer, which fit under his arm, and put it in a back-pack which he firmly affixed to himself.

  Erik took a look around the bomb-shelter one last time. They had spent a month here. Most of the operation was planned outside of New Mexico, near the only Mormon state left on the North American continent, just beyond what used to be called Santa Fe. It had been renamed the “City of Soldiers” before nuke number two detonated, zapping all of the lunatics that lived there and relegating them to the ‘Outer Darkness’ that they liked to go on about. He wondered how many of them had thought the end was the rapture.

  “Cleveland,” he said, savoring the name, trying in vain to imagine what it must have been like before the eighty-year long nuclear winter that devastated the world up until these last few decades. Unlike most of the cities in America after the invasion, Cleveland had never been re-named the City of anything. He had never been there, though it was clos
e to the Neo-Baptist citadel that had spawned him at the dried out bottom of Lake Erie. Pondering the odds, he supposed it might be the only time he would ever get to see the place. Death awaited him in New Mecca, and he would embrace Her with open arms, relishing all that he encountered along the way. And when he arrived in the capital, he would send Her message to all who lived there, and to the states of this continent, and to the world: he was the end. They would all see him coming.

  3. Pilgrimage

  Their sojourn began as thus: they encountered no resistance leaving the territory once officially known as Nevada. There were no Mujahedeen marauders out for vengeance, sniping through the desert sands for the destroyers of their homeland; no brutal assassins, nor irradiated beasts, aside from the usual fare of large insects. A vicious wind was all that confronted them as they left behind the desert, and once they had made their way through it, they continued east along the cracked highway, past the skeletal remains of automobiles and other, more organic creatures.

  Pixel was mute as always, and there was an awkward silence between Morgan and Argus. Morgan was so loyal and useful that she was the favored of the two, at least in terms of strategy. Argus, however, was more intelligent than she, and less expendable. Erik knew that he needed to maintain a balance between them, and that he was failing to keep properly adjusted. Morgan was also aware on some level of Erik’s soft spot for Argus, and burned with jealousy for the affection of her chosen master. For this reason she worked against him, and the two sniped at each other on a regular basis, usually at her own initiation. Erik was sure that she did not realize that all of her behaviors were heavily scrutinized, analyzed and reflected upon by him. She was an open book, and if what he know of her was correct, she didn’t even realize it.

  Argus, on the other hand, liked to appear aloof, and tended to keep his true thoughts to himself - a sure sign of his distrust in Erik’s greater goals. His voicing of opposition to the LSD operation Erik now planned on commencing in New Mecca was the first time that he had ever taken his argumentative stature to such a level, and Erik was guessing, by the token of nature, that his defiance would only elevate.

  The two of them bickered, and he did not bother to intercede, but merely listened and observed their pettiness, taking in every detail of their frequent debate scenarios. Argus thought he hid more from Erik than he really did, but that was alright. It made him less guarded, his walls easier to climb and peer over… regardless of what he thought, the boy was right in the palm of his hand.

  Two weeks after leaving the Vegas outpost, the group convened with their brothers and sisters in Colorado. Unbeknownst to the Islamic-American Empire, the Negatives had infiltrated a settlement of Islamo-Christians in the “City of Maximums” - traditionally, “Boulder”.

  Heading the faction of the Negatives that has infiltrated the City of Maximums was a young woman named Shiloh. She had grown up in New Mecca herself, a Neo-Muslim born and raised, until her rebellious instincts finally collapsed the walls of her dogmatic programming at the age of 22. Her anger was helped along by the vial of acid thrown in her face on a public street, in full view of the Mujahedeen enforcers. Erik met her two years later, and had known her for five now.

  They met a mile outside of the city, in the dead of night. A caravan approached, and Pixel and Morgan stared at it, holding hands. Argus stood behind Erik, sneering over a recent ridiculous, redundant debate. A torch appeared at first, heading toward them from the direction that Erik knew the City of Maximums to lie in. They could not see a thing in the darkness - quite fortunately, the Islamo-Christians didn’t believe in electricity. To Erik, they seemed like a combination of the Traditionalist Muslims and the Amish - which made them seem twice as absurd to him as either of the two.

  The torch came at them by the speed of a horse, and as it neared, Erik could hear the wheels of a small caravan approaching with the beating of hoofs on the broken Colorado highway. Two wagons, led by two horses - one black and one white - pulled up in front of them. In charge of the dark horse was a woman in a long, black burqa, who stared out with a dark left eye, and on the right, caught in a trail of scarred flesh, a pinkish-white orb, her other eye which had been ruined in acid-scarring that finally broke her free from the reality-fascists. Her skin was dark, Arabian. This, he knew immediately, was Shiloh.

  There was a male in charge of the white horse, and he held a gun pointed directly at Erik. He wore black robes, but his face was not covered, and a battle-hardened old man’s visage peered out over the top of the garment he had drawn around him. His hair was silver, reflecting the moonlight like the surface of a mirror, and his eyes a deep brown, like Erik’s almost black.

  Shiloh motioned to him, and then removed the hood of her burqa. In Erik’s opinion, her face had been made more beautiful by the violence wrought upon it, somehow more honest and defiant; a symbol of the very sickness that they fought to end forever. At her motion, the man put down the gun.

  “Brother,” she said to Erik. “I’ve missed you, dear.”

  “And I, you,” he replied. He motioned to her friend. “Who is this?”

  “Call him Oliver,” she answered. Erik nodded to him, but made no other motion of social pleasantry. “I heard you were coming,” she added after a moment. “Tonight.”

  “Then your lookouts are doing their jobs well,” he replied. “I’ve only come for the evening. We must rest, and I need you to do something for me.”

  “For you?” she answered, a smirk on her face. “Anything.”

  “Can we go already?” Argus asked behind Erik’s back, sounding rude and impatient. Erik gritted his teeth, wishing in vain that he was not frustrated by the young fool. He turned to face him, an evil glint in his eye. He watched Argus notice and try to hold up against it - failing to do so, in the end, and quivering slightly before shamefacedly realizing he could not conceal his break.

  “We’re going now,” Erik told him, trying to sound as patient as possible - and in the process, he was sure, sounding very impatient indeed. He and Argus climbed alongside Shiloh, and Morgan and Pixel rode along with Oliver. They headed back to the City of Maximums in silence, and upon reaching it, they were let in without quarrel. Outside of the major cities in the Islamic-American Empire’s territories, the small settlements that were spread throughout the wasteland were largely unattended to - lest they should fail to pay the proper taxes to their Muslim “benefactors.”

  The city slept in silence, without electricity and without any interest in night-life whatsoever from most of its residents. It was this darkness that had made the city a perfect place for the Negatives to keep a static base. Shiloh, Erik was happy to say, was the perfect proxy programmer of his American Middle-East operations. In his absence, she had inevitably created such spectacular artwork for hundreds of miles in either direction. He was always pleased when the random probabilities coalesced, bringing them together in brief harmony.

  Their base of operations in this city was a large sub-basement beneath a boarded up building which typically housed squatters, although never for very long, as Shiloh had little tolerance for charity cases. The City of Maximums, although in some places wired for electricity, never actually used it. You wouldn’t know it stepping into this Negatives outpost, as computers lined the walls, and there were various electronic devices propped up on tables throughout the room. It buzzed with conversation, and Erik suspected that it was likely never completely silent amidst this space.

  “Do you have somewhere we can go in private?” he asked Shiloh, raising his voice over the chaos in order to be heard. “And somewhere that my friends could sleep for the evening?” She nodded, not vocally replying, and then motioned to Oliver. He said something to Argus, Morgan and Pixel, and they began to follow him. As they walked away, Argus shot a distrustful final glance at Erik, and then turned a corner into a corridor obstructed from his view. Their hostess then began to walk toward a closed door across the room, nodding at Erik to follow her. He did so, and they enter
ed the room together. She closed the door shut behind him, completely muting the calamity outside of the chamber.

  “I am glad to see that you’re still alive,” she said to him. “I always wondered if they got you… do you ever wonder about me? Do you care about me the same as I care about you?”

  “No,” he told her honestly. “I don’t.” He made no apology.

  “I’m not surprised,” she responded, sounding disappointed. “You’ve got a lot on your mind… no room for non-sense.”

  “You know me too well,” he replied.

  “You’re a great man,” she said, stepping away from the door. She snapped her fingers and suddenly, materializing directly in front of him was a large desk - opaque, like glass, and appearing almost exactly as such. He ran his hands across it, feeling its smooth surface. It vibrated with energy, and a faint heat emanated from its surface.

  “Impressive,” he told her.

  “That’s nothing; a parlor trick. You should see what they’ve been getting up to in New Mecca… This is a convenient invention, but an after-thought, really. The weapons they’ve been building are far more fascinating than a kinetic desk.”

  “How did you acquire it?” Erik asked.

  “I stole it from an IAE outpost we wrecked a few months ago,” she answered simply. “How do you think?”

  She walked around the scientific sorcery, snapping her fingers again. A chair materialized - a kinetic chair, Erik guessed. She sat down, and then suggested he snap his own fingers. He did, and another chair materialized for him to sit down in. He sat, noting immediately that the slight vibration and warmth were very relaxing, and almost disorienting.

  “You wanted me to do something for you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he told her. “It can only be you, Shiloh.”

  She looked somewhat disconcerted at the tone of his voice. “What are you talking about?” she questioned suspiciously.