Ubo

14

IT WAS JUST past dawn when they arrived back at the barracks. Falstaff grabbed him by the shoulder and pointed at Gandhi. “What’s wrong with him? He’s almost catatonic.”

Daniel trusted Falstaff even less than before. “We’re all exhausted,” he said. “And him more than the rest of us, I think. All that drama with Henry, it really upset him.”

Falstaff nodded and let go. Daniel crawled under the blanket on his bunk. He’d hardly shut his eyes when the roaches invaded the barracks. He woke up to giant insect parts on his face, black mandibles hovering only an inch or two above his eyes. Huge roach legs churned eagerly, leg hairs the size of drinking straws snagging his blanket and tearing it off the bunk. He panicked, raising his fists to knock them away. Something sharp pinned his arms and his vision went slightly blurred. He was jerked to his feet. All around him the roaches were pulling residents from their bunks and herding them out of the room.

The roaches seemed more numerous than they had the past several weeks, but still there were far fewer of them than when he’d first arrived. They were agitated, antennae waving and wiry legs scrabbling over the broken tiles as they shoved and carried the residents rapidly back into the labs.

Daniel was in the corridor now, several roaches surrounding him. Normally he would have been in the waiting room and they would have come for him, and then there would be this gradual loss of consciousness as he was taken into the labs where they induced the scenarios. Although he wasn’t aware of them giving him anything he’d steadily fall toward sleep until he was almost unconscious by the time they reached the final door. As they pushed him through the door it would feel as if they’d just pushed him out of an airplane without a parachute, his face exploding with light and air, his eyes registering no more than a vague impression of the room itself: shiny metal and glass, fragments of mirror and a distant babble of musical voices. But this time he was fully aware when they hit the lab’s double doors. Had they simply forgotten to do what they had always done before, or was there a problem with the drugs they normally used?

He was fully into the room and they were hurriedly strapping him onto a flat surface suspended within a mountain of spiraling glass, great crystalline stalagmites piercing a shadowy net of webbing and blinking nodes, claws and, if he wasn’t mistaken, human hands making a blur of tunings about him, adjusting something around his skull, tubes the size and shape of prescription bottles attached and humming on his head, then something slipping into his mouth, pinpricks along his breastbone and underneath it all a layering of near and far voices in English and French and German and languages he did not recognize, weeping and angrily spitting out their complaints and ecstasies, their life stories uncleansed and uncensored.

Suddenly there was a rapid blinking. The brilliance collapsed into a complete blackness, as if they’d been swallowed up by the earth, and then there was a hum and everything lit up again. The voices around him were frantic, unintelligible. Then the smell of something burning, a whine, and again a profound darkness. A chitter of voices in the night, the sounds of a frenetic exodus, or was it an invasion? They jostled him, but he couldn’t tell if he was being moved. A weight on his chest and then the room blazed again painfully, as if his eyes were on fire. Shouted commands and fast-moving hands.

With a slap to his head he was gone then, and came out of it swallowed up inside the core of someone else’s life, so deeply embedded he could not detect the sound of his own thoughts, as if he were all receiver with no ability to transmit at all.

The God of Mayhem woke to a new kind of stench. It happened all the time now, and for no reason that he could tell. He stepped outside to see if anything had changed since the day before. The world was an unpredictable place. He sniffed the air. The world was a foul place.

Fires burned in the neighborhood, and fires still burned in the old suburbs stretching far behind him. Some of those were his fires, and some were fires set by others. Some of the fires had a practical purpose. Maybe somebody tried to clean up the trash that lay everywhere. Maybe somebody tried to burn the body of someone they loved who had just died. Murder was everywhere. Burning was the decent thing, with no decent place to bury.

Some were for worship—there were a thousand gods and Mayhem was just one of them. And some were probably just for fun. An explosion went off in his head. He wanted to run as far as he could, run right out of this trash heap city.

Barbed, narrow legs played with his thoughts, hard shell and claw and bodies torn and leaking.

The human rats who worked through the trash every day were always uncovering new stink, a constant clatter and rattle of noise as they picked and traded. He could hear the wild dog packs howling on the other side of that collapsed row of houses, and it was all he could do not to howl back. Sometimes the sourness went so deep he could feel it in his lungs.

They’d made the world a terrible place, God damn them, his moms and his pops and all the ones that came before. The air was full of black bits and all the little kiddies were dying. Even the drinking water stank.

The early morning sky blazed red with the sun peeking through a curtain of black boiling clouds. Down below a paler smoke wrapped the buildings and wandered lost as a ghost through the alleys and streets. Roofs and ceilings fell into wavy stacks with trees growing through. Out front was a bus half-filled with dirt. A churn of filth decorated the rooftops. A fuzzy green border hung from the eaves. Beyond the broken backs of roofs and a scatter of walls was one edge of the flooded and foul Boston Harbor. Three tanker ships sat low in the water on the near side, slowly leaking their dark shadows to wander the harbor. He’d had a notion to set those ships on fire, but didn’t like starting a fire he knew he could not control.

He couldn’t control the weather. He couldn’t control starvation or the invasion of disease. But he could control who he killed and how. The first time he’d killed—a shovel to the back of another boy’s head—it was just to see how it felt. But it hadn’t been an impulse—they were always saying he was impulsive when he was a kid—but he’d been planning it forever.

He could control his fires by how he placed the fuel, and where he started them, and pretty much how they spread. And sometimes who they burned.

Farther south and near the old docks was the quarantine area. “Unidentified Biological Organisms” was the name they used. UBO painted on all the buildings. It meant “If you come here, you will die.” So even if you couldn’t read, you recognized those three letters, and you stayed away. The worst kind of diseases, if they were telling the truth, which was rare. Whole neighborhoods flattened to the ground, and in the middle that big building like a castle on a hill. He remembered it had been a mental hospital for a long time. Rumors were that years ago they kept the worst of the plague victims there. No problem—creepy thing like that, who’d want to go there? What a world. A world that could make something like him deserved to be killed.

The God didn’t think he’d been born to do evil, but it had been too long ago for him to remember for sure.

He let some ash fall on his tongue. He tasted it but couldn’t identify it. One day if he got good enough at what he did he’d be able to figure out the sex, the race, maybe even the nationality of the body they’d burned.

Sharp insect legs and brittle antennae massaged his brain, working their way into his plans. He thought of dead bodies underground shedding their underwear. He wobbled his head to shake the crap out. He’d always been part bug. He had bug needs and bug appetite. That was part of what made him a god.

The trash and the waste was always talking about him, what he had done. But when they saw him they had no idea he was the one. They talked about the fires, and they talked about the murders, but they weren’t smart enough to tell that the same one did both. He thought maybe he was almost as old as time. The bug who would inherit the earth.

He went back inside and stood in his living room with what he had saved over the years. The walls were covered with photographs, none of them of people he knew. Some were of adults he had killed, not that he liked collecting trophies, but just because he thought they should be in his collection. Many were family pictures he’d taken from the abandoned homes he looted: people on vacation, young men in their graduation gowns, couples at dances, family picnics and barbeques, nameless people straining to grin into the camera lens.

All night long the savage shadow people had rioted, beating on their non-working appliances, their motionless automobiles, drinking their poisonous hooch, screaming out their lungs, setting their pitiful fires and dancing until their brains shut down. He’d waited, listening from his thin pad of a bed, thinking about what he’d charge them for his loss of sleep.

Somebody new was inside him, but it was afraid, and had no voice. It made him grin. He’d finally begun to scare his own demons.

Each morning the God of Mayhem rose with the sleepless insect chatter eating its way through his brain. Each morning he could feel the heat spreading through his blood. Each morning the God of Mayhem stepped out into his backyard to see a tumble and a collision of houses falling down the slope behind his home, a collection of closed-down, boarded-up, scribbled-over buildings sitting in mounds of garbage and discarded furniture, housewares, the worn-out and the broken, the last sorry pieces of America.

The ground near the bottom of the hill was soggy with a dark and poisonous-looking liquid. People didn’t live in the houses there. What was left of the police never came around.

Sometimes swastikas appeared on walls, but it was hard to tell what people meant by them. Sometimes it was just a complaint about everything. He’d seen both the whites and the brownskins painting them.

He pulled on his overcoat and hid his insect eyes under a hat and trundled out the door, jogging down the street narrowed between piles of rubble until he reached the backside of a row of low shacks. He found the one that had made the loudest screaming the night before. Five bodies were sleeping under a window propped open for air. He reached in and grabbed a clump of black hair at random, yanked the head back and drew his knife across the throat. The blade was gratifyingly sharp and the new opening in the body quickly filled with blood.No one even stirred. He jogged back to his house, whistling.

Buried inside the God of Mayhem, Daniel was only occasionally aware that he had ever had his own life. At best his self-awareness was muted—this was a scenario unlike any he had experienced. He’d been swallowed whole and digested.

The God’s gray beard softened his face, made him look less fierce, less brutal. He drew no one’s notice when he moved through the Boston ruin. He’d stoop and limp to exaggerate his age. If anyone did think he was weak, well, he’d just kill them.

But this morning he needed to take care of things at home. He heard the scream close by and ran out into his backyard. He could see the top of the boy’s head above the fence next to the alley. “You! I told you not to come around here anymore!”

He could hear the boy laughing in the alley. Then there was a whining noise, and then another scream. It sounded like a child or a wounded animal. The God of Mayhem moved to his back gate, flung it open, and stepped into the lane. He saw the boy about ten yards down, waving the leash with the empty collar.

“I said stay away!” the God of Mayhem shouted. The boy smirked and turned his back, walked away.

The bloody mess of dog lay in the middle of the pavement. At least the boy didn’t set the animal on fire this time. After considering whether to take care of the corpse or not, the God of Mayhem went back into his house. If this was a message he had no idea what the boy was trying to say.

He had never killed a child, but if the boy came back he would have to reconsider. Clearly the boy must know who, what the God of Mayhem was. So why wasn’t he frightened?

The God of Mayhem was bothered by vivid memories of the first creatures he had ever killed—an assortment of pets and countless birds, a few snakes, dozens of frogs. When he was just a boy he had called them his experiments. They had been good practice, so he didn’t understand why the memories were so troublesome, but they embarrassed him.

He’d discovered the pleasures of fire when he was a boy, too. The beauty of it, the shape of the flames, and how efficiently it consumed and transformed. It calmed him, filling him with undeniable pleasure as he watched. So pleasurable the fires had been that for a while he didn’t feel the need to kill anything at all.

Once he killed an entire family of adults, planted them around the circular kitchen table, soaked their heads in oil and set them on fire. He’d called it “his birthday cake.”

Daniel had brief moments of self-awareness when the God of Mayhem entered more deeply into a ruminative mode. So compartmentalized was the man, so disconnected from the voices that drove him, Daniel discovered he was able to ride quietly inside this monster for some time.

The God of Mayhem had come to understand that his was a religion best practiced at night, when not so many curious eyes were watching.But the terrain was treacherous—he had to scout things out during the day. Broken building facades were typical in most neighborhoods, wall sheathings sloughed off, timbers rotted and fragile décor disintegrated and liquefied, spilling out of empty windows and past ruptured doors hanging from their shattered frames. That didn’t necessarily mean no one lived there.

This particular night he would invade a shopping district several miles north of his home. The overcoat came on, hiding an arsenal of guns and knives and other deadly devices. By the time the God of Mayhem exploded out his back door he was in full adrenaline mode, his feet propelled into a dance of constant movement, his palms itchy with the need to grab, smash, and tear. He burst through the front door of a house a few blocks away, for no particular reason other than its proximity to his planned trajectory. He swung a hammer into the skull of a man sitting in his kitchen sucking something out of a green bottle. He paused only long enough to pry the hammer from shards of bone before flattening the two younger men screaming into his face, then through the back door and another yard and down a broken sidewalk where he sliced a piece off a figure walking with its head down. His victim tumbled into the tall weeds crying weakly.

Daniel was fully aware then, drunk on whatever chemicals raced through the blood of this outrageous psychopath. Peeking into this head was like the mortals who dared look into the eyes of the most terrible deities—it was impossible without pain and you risked losing your mind.

Feel this! Can you feel this? Like a fire the God of Mayhem had set at the center of Daniel’s mind.It was impossible to say how many were killed or maimed during the God’s venture north. Nor did the God care in the least. When they reached the vast parking lot, a sea of metal vehicles frozen within a sheen of rust and filth, Daniel felt the God’s body pulsing with even more energy.

He roamed through the parking lot on his way to the buildings beyond, the vehicles missing tires, batteries, windows, seats. Now and then the God would stop at a car and peer inside. Most of them were empty but occasionally he’d spy a sleeping form stretched across the upholstery, and sometimes two or three people who looked terrified when the God tapped on their window. He always wondered if they could tell by the look of him that he was skilled at turning living things into dead things.

The building ahead appeared to have been some sort of department store. The front of it had fallen onto the sidewalk, an enormous G, a twisted S rising out of the rubble. As he came closer he saw that several floors of the building had been exposed.

A man with a yellow bottle was standing by the entrance. He staggered, holding the bottle out as an offering. “You find something… maybe we can trade.” The God of Mayhem reached inside his coat, stepped up to the drunk and stuck him below the waistline with a hunter’s curved gut hook, then dragged it up quickly while stepping back. The drunk stared at him blankly, then fell back with a spray of blood. Some splashed on the God’s coat, but he didn’t mind. It was dark and besides he wanted a little blood on his coat. The thought made him slightly light-headed. He breathed in sharply and licked his lips.

He had not yet tried tasting any of his kills, although he’d thought about it. Once he’d killed four in a one day frenzy, with gun and knife and holding one fellow under his bath water and bludgeoning another to death—he’d put his nose against the dead flesh, and his open mouth, and breathed in whatever aromas he could, and licked one corpse along the small of the back, and found it to be unusually salty but not unusually foul. Why… Daniel said from somewhere lost within the God’s tangle of hunger, rage, and passion.

The fellow asked me a question, the God of Mayhem thought, at Daniel. Daniel, shocked to be spoken to directly by the God like this, was desperate to hide. The God’s inner voice roared with astonishment and laughter. My conscience, you nag me!

This had never happened before. Daniel hadn’t thought it possible. He was supposed to be a silent passenger, a listener, not a participant.

The God muddied his coat on the damp ground to obscure some of the blood, not wanting to telegraph his intentions to the crowd. Swaddled in a rainbow of rags covering everything but his eyes he strolled inside.

The sheer number of squatters surprised him. As he went room to room and floor to floor he was overwhelmed by the mass of them, filling every available space except for a few cleared pathways, and with entire families jammed even into the spaces under the stairs. And the stairs and frozen escalators had people sitting to one side of each step. Had they noticed the rust flaking off the beams? And the crumbling concrete, the borders of each room layered in gray chips of the stuff? It wasn’t safe to live here.

Violent young men and lazy females, sprawling families, orphans, criminals, all jammed together with their limited belongings, bodies on top of bodies, acts of theft and violence and degradation seeping out between layers upon layers of human stink.

He didn’t care who he killed, as long as they weren’t children. It was hardly his fault that people had become furniture. The God of Mayhem wasn’t obligated to feel guilt over the death of furniture.

Several potential targets of his rage became obvious. There was the thin man wearing the high collar that hid his mouth. His eyes constantly scanned the crowd as he rubbed up against one female after another, particularly the young frightened ones, the exhausted ones, reminding the God that even during the lean times there were predators of different appetite.

Another candidate was that fellow with the bushy black beard that had been half burnt from his face (one of the God of Mayhem’s own fires, perhaps?). It appeared that no beard would be growing anytime soon on that side, but the fellow had made no attempt to modify the damage to his appearance by trimming the beard. As far as the God was concerned that was in his favor. But he didn’t like the way the fellow stared. He noticed too much.

Off in a corner a crazy looking fellow did comical impressions of anyone who passed. He’d suck in his belly and bloat his belly, allow his tongue to loll and cross his eyes.

An old man sat by one of the many fires up on raised bricks. Now and then he would toss a burning stick at a child and laugh. The old man was layered in burn scars up and down his arms and on his face.

Others were guilty of some simpler form of rudeness. A woman who insisted on her right to public defecation, and who did not hesitate to demonstrate; a fellow who enjoyed showing his rotted teeth to strangers; a fellow whose constant monologue mourned everything lost to time and society’s poor choices. Everything he said was true, of course, but it brought those around him no peace.

All no more than rude behaviors, but a desperate and overcrowded world had no place for the rude. The toilet-rights lady received an iron bar across the base of the skull while everyone’s head was turned in disgust. A large rag stuffed into the rotted maw of the dentally-impaired, his jaws held shut by the God’s powerful hands, the two of them huddled against the wall like lovers: the man’s eyes fixed on the face of his new deity until the light burned out of them. A quick shove sent the body out an open window.

The God of Mayhem decided to take his time with his next subject—that vocal mourner of all things lost to the world. “Here, I want to show you something,” he said to the mourner, his arm around the man’s shoulders, squeezing them. “I hear what you’ve been saying, and I am deeply in tune with it. You, my friend, are the voice of a generation.

“I have a gift for you and I think you will find that it greatly clarifies your situation. I think, in fact, that you will find this quite healing.”

At first the man quivered, looking up at the God of Mayhem as if he were the monster that he was, but the God had a way of making his eyes soft and welcoming. The man actually smiled and looked surprisingly eager.

“Yes,” he replied, and the God led him out of that crowd, and down the stairs, and outside. He walked around the exterior of the building, his arm still over the man’s shoulders, which had started trembling again. “What—what is it exactly we’re looking for?” the man asked.

“I think we will find him, ah, here,” the God said, and pulled the tremulous man closer, and made him sit down with him on the ground in front of the fallen corpse. He increased his grip on the man. “So, you see, all those things you have mourned, all that we have lost in the city—art and culture, beautiful parks, a sense of safety—those are nothing compared to a human life. Because as long as there is life we can hope that things might change, even though they probably won’t.”

“Wait, just wait—”

“No, no, have some patience,” the God of Mayhem said. “You have to be patient. Tell me, do you believe in God?”

“I don’t, I don’t know. In times like these, with all that has happened to us—”

“No, the times shouldn’t matter. Either there is a god or there isn’t.”

“I can’t believe a god would be so cruel—”

The God of Mayhem laughed. “Sometimes it’s part of the job. I’m a god, and I’m right here in front of you.” He took the man’schin and turned the head to face him. “Can you believe in me?”

The man looked terrified. Hesitantly he nodded. “Just please don’t kill me.”

The God of Mayhem made his sad face then. “I’ll be honest with you. I’ll consider it, but once I start to kill someone I don’t stop until the job is done. It’s one of my rules. Hesitating, having second thoughts, that’s how I might get myself caught or killed.”

“How … how?” He tried to kick his feet. The God raised a finger and wagged it in warning.

“I do have some ideas as to what I’m going to do, unless I change my mind, which I’ll just say again, is highly unlikely. Although I prefer the quickness and efficiency of a gunshot to the heart, or into the back of the head, or under the chin, ammunition has become much harder to come by. Have you ever tried it? Do you own a gun?”

“N-no.”

“I believe you. Now if I didn’t believe you, or you had answered yes, I would have made you take me to your home and I’d take that gun and all your ammunition. Hell, I might just leave the gun behind, if it’s one I already have, and I have plenty, and just take all your ammunition, because that’s what’s really important. A gun without ammo is just another piece of iron to beat somebody with, you dig?” The man nodded shakily. “Oh, and then I would kill you, of course.

“Now I use a shotgun from time to time, but I don’t really care for them. I shot a man in the head once with a sawed-off and the man’s head just completely disintegrated. Imagine my surprise! I thought that just happened in those old movies. Hey—when you talked about things you missed, things that had been lost from the culture, you didn’t mention movies! I used to love movies! Anyway, I’d lured this fellow into my house and did it there—always a mistake but at the time I felt I needed to seize the opportunity. The clean-up took most of a day and the house stank for weeks!”

“I—” The man looked sick. He started to cough and choke up.

“Don’t you vomit on me! You vomit on me and I’ll be beyond angry!”

The man’s eyes went red and he kept licking his lips. Finally he didn’t look sick anymore. “I avoid poisons—they never really work for me. Sometimes they will vomit when you feed them poison, and I hate vomit. If I happen to find the right amount of cyanide that’s okay—I know how to use cyanide. Everything else is too unpredictable and likely to have a messy, drawn-out, and generally unpleasing outcome.”

The man’s nodding looked strangely eager. The God assumed by that he didn’t want to be poisoned.

“But stabbing always works out pretty well, if you have a pretty good sense of anatomy, which I do. I know just where to stick it in. Just like I know how hard and where to club someone in order to kill them, as opposed to stun them, depending on what I club them with. It’s all about knowing the job, understanding the craft. It’s good to know a craft, but it doesn’t come easy.

“Of course it’s hard to make a precise strike if there’s a lot of frantic wrestling around. It’s best to blindside them, catch them unawares. Otherwise you’re exhausted and covered with someone else’s bodily fluids by the time the job is done.

“So, should I club you, or stab you?”

Daniel squirmed, if squirming meant anything without a body to squirm with. Aware that Daniel had risen back into consciousness, the God of Mayhem swatted Daniel’s self-awareness away. I’m busy.

“No!” his victim cried explosively.

The God covered the victim’s mouth with his hand and brought a finger up to his own lips. “Shhh. If someone hears I’ll just have to kill you and leave. You’re not ready for that, are you?” The victim shook his head. “I didn’t think so. And by the way, that wasn’t a Yes or No question. So, no stabbing, no clubbing. For now. So what else can we do?” He scratched his head in an exaggerated fashion. “Let’s use our imagination. Not a good thing in general, by the way, but I’ll get to that later. But when you have a specific problem to solve, an imagination can be useful. Simply for variety’s sake if for no other reason experimenting with your killing methods is a pretty good thing. You don’t want to get stale—and that applies to any line of work.

“I once shot an arrow into a fellow’s eye at close range. He died eventually, but not without making a lot of fuss—so you’ll be happy to hear I won’t be using that method again anytime soon. I also once set a couple on fire while they were sleeping.”

The victim began to sob. “Please, I have a child. Please let me go!”

“I won’t warn you again—not so loud. Don’t make me rush this, okay? And if you really have a child, I’m curious why you didn’t mention it before. Anyway, I hadn’t planned on using fire—don’t make me change my mind.” The fellow nodded. Daniel wanted to weep for him, but as soon as he thought that his self-consciousness evaporated. “I once killed a man who lived in a shack, a real eyesore, simply by pushing the shack over on him. It was that easy. People should take better care of their property. Hey, lie down. I’m getting a cramp sitting this way.”

The man wavered, but finally lay down in a slightly fetal position but with his face skyward, because the God of Mayhem had him firmly by his shoulders, and then when he was at last still, by his neck. “You c—could let me go,” he said to the god hanging over him. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“To be frank, what are you going to tell them? I’ll tell you what, if you happen to get out of this, which you won’t, but if you did, tell them God did this to you. Is this too tight, what I’m doing with my hands?”

“G—guess not.”

“I knew that it wasn’t—I know what I’m doing. I just wanted to see if you’d be honest about it. I know how to create the right amount of pressure with my hands, how to support, how to caress, how to kill. See, you can feel my palms on either side of your neck, and the fingertips, they’re near the base of your skull, just below the ears? That’s your sternocleidomastoids. They hold a lot of tension, and I have to say yours are really tight right now. When’s the last time you had a good massage? Never mind, I realize people are too busy just surviving anymore to get massages, but they really should—it would improve their quality of life. There, doesn’t that feel good?

“Once I let some rats eat a fellow down in an old abandoned cellar. No, don’t tense up again. I’m just telling you a story. It was hard to get the both of us down in there, and that in itself was a little exciting. Dragging him through narrow spaces, and climbing down a shaft. At least it was different, kind of an adventure like you fantasize about when you’re a kid, you know? It ended up being just too much trouble, too much of a time investment. But it was an experiment. Not all experiments are bad.” He paused, and grinned. “Well, depending on who’s the scientist, and who’s the lab rat. But I brought all of these spreads with me—mayonnaise, mustard, peanut butter, whatever I could think of. And I spread them on different parts of his body. He was tied up, of course, otherwise he might have eaten everything.” He stopped. “That was just a joke. Anyway, see, I wanted to see which parts the rats went for first. What they liked, what they didn’t like. What they wanted to eat most. When he was all done up I just stepped back as far away as I could and watched. But the screaming went on way too long for my tastes.”

The God of Mayhem leaned in closer and almost whispered, “I like my hands on your bare skin this way. It’s a little more personal, as this kind of thing, well, as it should be. There’s always a kind of… charge, when it’s skin on skin. Much more intimate than a rope, or a chain, or a wire attached to handles.” The man began to struggle, and the God tightened his hands just enough to still him. The man’s eyes kept moving around. The God could tell what he was thinking.

“No, no you can’t get away. I’m too strong. Whatever fantasies you might have about getting away from me are lies. Your imagination, you should have learned to control it better. Your complaints about what we have lost from our past are quite accurate, but that is past—all that you can do now is imagine it—it is no longer real. Now we are in this world—that other is lost forever. It will not return.” He tightened his hands a bit—the man went rigid with fear.

“We always imagine we can have things we cannot have, be things we cannot be. That is the human tragedy. Our imagination is both a cruel bastard and a liar.” He squeezed a bit more and tears rolled out of the desperate man’s eyes. “We should be angry about that. We should make some noise.” Tighter still, and the man began to squirm and kick. “We should tear down some walls and kill whoever we can. Heaven or Hell, is there really that much of a difference?

“Listen to me, little man. You are here, now. You have to take care of the problems we have now. Don’t worry about the past, or make assumptions about the future. You have to knuckle down now. Do you think this is all about us, that we’re the only ones hurting? Why, I hear there isn’t even a Brussels anymore!” The God of Mayhem squeezed harder still, and he began to see veins in the man’s face. “And by the way, I found out that rats will eat anything. I mean anything.” The man began to convulse, his hips thrusting up into the air. “But they especially seemed to like the molasses.” He stopped, looked around. “Do you hear that? I swear it sounds like running water.”

But the fellow was done, and the God of Mayhem was exhausted. People did not appreciate the effort required to strangle a human being by hand, the strength, the focus. He had others to kill here, people who were far more deserving to die, but they would have to wait until another evening. It was strangely quiet, except for that vague sound of bubbling underground.

Somewhere down in the dark of the God of Mayhem’s soul, Daniel felt himself losing hope. He’d never been in a scenario that had lasted this long before, or that had been so aggressively consuming.

A flame flickered in the darkness. “A little fire always makes it better.” The boy held the flame closer to his head, illuminating his face.

“Not tonight, boy. I’m too tired.” But the God hesitated. Much to his surprise, Daniel realized the God feared the boy. “I don’t need to set a fire every day.”

The boy laughed. “You are such a liar! Who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve been with you since the beginning!”

The God shook his head as if trying to rid himself of an annoying insect. “There’s too much trash around. Always too much trash.”

“But you’re an expert!” the boy cried. “You can set a fire anywhere you want. You’re the master fireman!”

“Just because I can set it doesn’t mean I can always control its spread or its volume. I could burn down the whole neighborhood, maybe even the whole city.”

“So? And what would be so bad about that?”

The God thought seriously about it. “I don’t believe it’s time.”

“There’s nothing more wonderful than a beautiful fire. What’s that you’re always thinking? There’s a purity in the way it cleanses things? It greatly simplifies a complicated world?”

“It does. It does all that.”

“Then see what I’ve found.”

The boy led the way into the darkness carrying his small torch in front of him. They were in an area of collapsing houses, porches sliding into yards, rubbish piles everywhere. Again the God heard the burble of water. He watched the ground, careful of where he placed his feet. “Is this far? I have things to do. Is any of this occupied?”

“Oh, nobody’s lived here in years. Come on, you have nothing better to do. Do you have your propellant on you?”

“A little, I have a little.” He always carried some in a small bottle in his coat pocket. The boy led him to a place where two tall houses had fallen against each other. A shower of siding and shingles covered the piles of junk which looked to have been layering the yards for many years. The God of Mayhem wet his lips. A narrow goat path of a trail ran between the houses. Recklessly he followed it until he was standing beneath where the two collapsed houses connected. He raised his arms over his head, suddenly thrilled, giddy. He looked up—he couldn’t see much, but the available moonlight revealed shadowed angles and daggers and spears of collapse, ready to fall and pierce and crush him. It made him breathless with excitement.

Daniel wanted to scream as he looked up into wreckage hanging over them. The scenarios had taken him into dangerous regions before, but this time he was half-convinced that if the God of Mayhem died he might take Daniel with him.

The God pulled out his bottle and dribbled the contents onto the rubbish on both sides of the pathway, now and then climbing onto the piles in the yards and wetting certain areas. He did it all quickly, at a jog, but he had a pattern in mind, a complex design. Once that pattern was laid down, he ran back around lighting it, activating his scheme as the boy cheered. He wasn’t sure if he’d used the boy’s torch or his own lighter, but in either case it worked, everything started, and over the next couple of hours the fiery forms evolved, and like a machine the fire rose and proceeded to dance with grace and nuanced expression.

The boy jumped and shouted, at times his excitement rising into a hysterical screech. The flames climbed into two swirling, ambitious towers, and then the towers descended, the houses enveloped in hot streamers of crimson, yellow, and blue, the streamers combining and recombining, and between recombinations pockets and tunnels of the deepest black opening up the God was eager to see through to their ends, but they closed much too quickly, and the great shutters of heat drove the tears out of his eyes. Daniel could not deny the raw power of it—the destruction was so fast and devastating that the excitement racing through his body far outpaced any coherent emotional response. The God began to giggle like a brain-damaged ape, and then hysteria swallowed both the God and Daniel.

The fire burned another hour or so. As the geometry of the night dissolved into burning color, trailing smoke, and invisible waves of heat, the God of Mayhem felt calmed and quieted for the first time in weeks. He walked away from there, slowly picking up speed toward morning and home.

Even this early the garbage pickers were out in force, picking up bits, tossing bits away, trading and arguing. Some of them had turned their faces into masks by pasting odd pieces of plastic and other materials onto their skin. This made the scavengers look like burn victims, or atomic bomb survivors. He found them an annoyance, and over the years had killed one or two, but not lately. They weren’t worth the trouble.

Daniel floated out of the God’s consciousness. The God had allowed it, had made it happen. It was as if Daniel was the God’s newly adopted pet.

The God of Mayhem turned and stared at the coastline. He put up to his eye the telescope he’d fashioned out of salvaged metal tubing and lenses. The water was higher than it had been in years. There were areas under water he’d never seen under water before, including much of the quarantine zone, and standing like an island the battered hulk of the old mental hospital. It had the U B O lettering sprayed across the top. Quarantined. Stay away at all costs. Then something shifted along the side of the building, and pieces slid off and into the water, and black smoke boiled out…

DANIEL BOLTED UPRIGHT on the platform. He’d dreamed of drowning, and flying through the air at such speed he couldn’t catch his breath. His head felt swollen. He reached up and discovered a series of cylindrical protrusions pushed through his hair and making a tight seal against his skull. He pressed and pulled on them, but they wouldn’t be budged.

At least half the room had been destroyed. Fragments of glass and cracked appliances, spilled liquids, fried components. Still, portions of instruments glowed and buzzed, and a few digital readouts measured… something. He stared. Ghostly images of past trauma and high emotion overlaid the room. It was as if he were in the middle of a scenario but he was awake, fully aware and moving around. Whatever was welded to his head still kept him connected to their machines. He watched as the train rolled in. As they unlocked each livestock car they herded out the Jews. He was part of the crew assigned to drag out the dead bodies left behind, the ones who hadn’t survived the trip. But he wouldn’t touch the dead babies abandoned by their terrified mothers. He’d rather be shot. This time he’d traded the task to another Jewbut what would he do next time? The image swept away as his eyes grew wet.

Daniel pushed open the fractured double doors and stumbled down the corridor to the waiting room. Smoke and debris were everywhere. He could hardly see anything above waist height. Contoured lengths of metal, tubing and hydraulics, electronics, littered the floor, and in one spot a metal contraption resembling a rib cage. The lights flashed painfully—he wanted to cover his eyes. His head felt unwieldy. He didn’t understand. The cylindrical things attached to his skull felt fragile, insubstantial to the touch, and yet he felt he might fall over from their weight.

“Here, let’s get this off you!” Falstaff suddenly shouted into his ear. The alarm was going off, the volume rising with each repetition. It seemed needlessly hysterical.

Falstaff struggled with the apparatus on his head for some time. “It’s no use!” he shouted. “It’s welded to your skull!”

Daniel wobbled his head to shake all the Jews from his skull. They lay everywhere. They had drifted into the corners of the room.

“The character I played, this killer.” Daniel panted. “He knew I was there. He knew I was a witness!”

“There’s a peculiar thing with the scenarios thatare more or less in real-time,” Falstaff said, working to remove the head gear. “A kind of feedback occurs. Damnit! It won’t budge! The character feels the observer’s presence. They become paranoid.”

“But it wasn’t contemporary! It was set in the future. Something bad happens in Boston, in the future!”

Falstaff hesitated, hands on Daniel’s shoulders. “Probably not. You’re probably mistaken, Daniel. The future doesn’t exist yet, so there’s nothing for the roaches’ system to read and record. The farthest they can go is to this moment, today.”