A Season for Slaughter

Chapter 60 Pictures at an Execution

Fifty kilometers south of Japura. The mandala is somewhere over the horizon. The sky glares. The jungle wilts. The blight stretches out to the edge of the world.

Below, a cluster of twenty or thirty worms stare in awe at the great pink sky-whale. They sing to it-a song of futility. Some of the worms have been waiting in our shadow since the moment we anchored. They're beginning to look tired, they're beginning to look weak. Two of them have already collapsed. But more worms are arriving all the time, five or six now, every hour. They join the gathering and add their voices to the growing song. General Tirelli is considering moving the airship to ano,ther location. Again. This will be the third time. A new location every day. But still, the worms keep gathering. Captain Harbaugh has been worried about the increasing rate of helium depletion. Uncle Ira wants us to finish planting the probes and come home. I want

I don't know what I want anymore.

Three days and madness rages on the airship like an infection. Some people wander the corridors, crying. Some just sit where they are and stare into the vacuum in their hearts. Others work obsessively, long hours into the night, hoping to erase the horror, but only coming hard up against it more intensely every moment. Some… have to be sedated.

Three days.

The flyers go out. Most of them come back. The probes are launched. The monitors are planted. The images come back. We stare in horror. And then we send the flyers out again. We launch more probes. We plant more monitors. And then… even more images come back, piling up horror upon horror upon horror.

Pictures of worms like we'd never seen before, humping and shuffling through their nests, up over the thick walls of their corrals. Worms chewing, digging, building. Worms feeding. Worms flashing their displays of emotion at each other-white, red, pink, orange. Strident, thoughtful, playful, angry.

Bunnydogs, little ones like puppies, clumsily stumbling over themselves in their excitement at being alive. Floppy ears, silly faces, wide eyes, eager squeals of delight. Bunnies wrestling-and then, just as abruptly, bunnies fucking in a wild frenzy, libbits, each other; anything that holds still long enough, they hump. Exhausted, they collapse in heaps, one upon another, in blissful sleep. And the worms come and eat them. Their blood flows red.

Bunnymen, naked and grotesque, slithering through the camp. Doing things. Obscure and alien. Carrying things. Bundles of sticks. Foliage. Building piles. Taking them down again. Riding snufflers, guiding them up and down, over and over the same route-channeling their behavior? Training them? Who knows? Everything is a puzzle now. Why does a Martian wear red suspenders? To get to the other side.

Humans. Grotesque and ghastly parodies. This is the animal underneath the pretense of sentience. Hungry, violent, greedy, selfish. Bloated women, even worse than Coari-too big to move. Dark lines. Swirling spiral patterns on their fat rumps, red embroidery on their thighs, tendril ridges curling across their bellies, up their breasts, vine-like traceries on their necks and cheeks. The bunnymen bring them food, and while they eat, the bunnymen climb up their thighs and pump away at their sickened flesh. Bunnymen and fat, glassy-eyed, little girls. Bunnymen and frisky little boys indistinguishable from bunnydogs. The bunnymen are everywhere. The whole camp wallows in a bath of sexual devastation.

Millipedes, traveling in packs, swollen and shiny. They keep to the dark places between the nests, under the foliage, sometimes down in holes, scuttling up and out to feed on the scraps and more often on the bodies.

Pictures of death. Dead children. Babies. Dogs and chickens. Bunnythings. Once, a snuffler. Never a worm.

A fat once-human thing, a woman, baggy and thick and bloated. Inflated. Bulging thighs, like walrus legs, almost immobile; swollen calves, feet like paddles, splayed and shapeless. Huge flabby arms, pendulous breasts, black blotchy nipples, naked, her brown skin glistening with oil and embroidered with intoxicating traceries of horror, viney ridges carved into her skin, as if by something burrowing, a multitude of many hungry little things, eating and crawling, spreading and curling their trails around her immense body in a Halloween nightmare. The flesh crawls of its own volition. The thing moves without a soul, ambling along, shuffling, posture bent like an ape's, spine pulled out of shape by the weight, curved and swayback, using its atrophied arms almost as forelegs. And still, somehow identifiably female. Its eyes are glassy. The face is vague and expressionless, the flesh collapsing under its own weight, sagging off the skull. Her features are melting away, her whole face changing inexorably into a new gravity-drawn configuration, pugnacious and vaguely hostile, ugly, sad, anguished-does she know what's happening to her? Not human anymore, and yet still recognizable, she moves through the camp like an ambulant disease, grazing on the wormberries and iceplant and rednuts. She chews vacantly and contentedly, her expression a strange mirror of the herds in San Francisco and Los Angeles. How has she gotten out of her corral? Worms of all sizes and colors pass her as she trundles along. Some ignore her, some stop to sniff her curiously, then move on-one stops and sniffs, then flows over her in one swift movement. The blood flows profusely. The worm gulps and jerks, gulps and jerks, pulling her flesh down into its throat. The expression on the woman's face is slack. Drugged? Her eyes are wide with puzzlement, not pain, as she disappears down the monster's engorged gullet. It rests there on the blood-blackened earth, jerking spasmodically while the meal works its way backward.

Is this the way the world ends? Not with a bang, but a belch? I keep waiting for it to happen-for the moment when the monstrousness of the horrors loses its power to stagger me. I keep waiting for the numbness. Instead, I just get more horror. There is no end to it. I am alone in hell. Just me and God and the worms. There is no end.

I don't know who I am anymore.

Just as the worms are transforming-so am I. But into what?

If I knew, then the transformation would have already occurred, wouldn't it?

We cluster in the observation bay, scientists, technicians, aides, members of the airship crew, anyone with time on their hands. We stand around the railings and stare down at the somehow now pitiful animals. Their stripes flicker in bizarre reflections of the airship above. The poor things-they're enslaved to their biology. But I can't help thinking that we are just as enslaved to ours. We poor monkeys.

Monkeys and worms. Worms and monkeys. Locked in a death-struggle that neither side understands.

Another thought floats to the surface. There is no such thing as one monkey.

And what does that mean, I wonder?