PRESIDENT BLOWS CEREMONIAL RAM’S HORN OVER CONSTITUTION AVENUE: URGES SURRENDER

“EXPLOSION” IN FAMILY REUNIONS

*
The results of the first bi-centennial elections in the States Formerly Known as the United States of America were in. And the results were clarion clear, lucid as the shofar blast that the President had sent up over the American capitol the morning before. The results were so clear, in fact, so definitive and triumphal, that they were mathematically impossible. Of 84,000 or so polling stations, 270,000 had reported. Wyoming, in fact, had grown in electoral significance from roughly 200,000 voting-age adults, to three hundred million. North Carolina, on the other hand, contributed just eight hundred and fifty-two ballots altogether. The citizens of California topped all-comers by casting one and a half billion. This incredible outcome was the result of the sub-human resources crisis created by the demonic labor difficulties already discussed.

Dignitaries and pundits, at any rate, raced out to legitimize and illegitimate the result. One former President urged calm recounting, praising patience and arithmetic. Another less popular former President stepped in to certify the election in absolute and Shakespearean terms.

“What a timeless,” he said, “ever-new, ever-permanent madam is the electoral process. It is nothing less than the American Sacrament.”

He praised Satan—

Speaking of which, the one great surprise of the election was the fact that Satan had lost the popular election by a gaping forty-six point shortfall, earning only nineteen percent for himself. But a less prominent matter on the ballot was the redistricting Satan had proposed, which, as well-advertised, was destined to benefit public schools. And thus, in the only electoral terms that matter—abstract and arcane—Satan won handily.

Patriots rushed out into the streets to condemn the system. They jostled patriots who had rushed out to exalt the system. America became a domain of contradictory, mostly-irrelevant noise. Satan had exactly what he wanted. And at this time he was stabbed to death in his lakeside condominium by a tank-like pinstriped gentleman named Tot Tot Maddock.

Epilogue.
In Hollywood, the much-ballyhooed debut of “Satanic Overthrow” had not come off as hoped. It was unique for a Hollywood premiere in that most of the notable celebrities had walked out of the picture before it was done, all refusing comment. And in that a number of critics had brought firearms to the showing, and briefly peppered the entertainment press outside with gunfire before being suppressed by LAPD.

Hollywood still had a pterodactyl problem. It mourned.

They followed I-70W at ninety-five miles an hour, the big oxcart grumbling beneath them like a dog with a cavernous mouth. Lucas wore a brand new hat:

“SECRET AGENT”

emblazoned.

Time was short. Shortening—

**

About 50 miles in the dark ahead of them, Hitch MacAbee drove in his purloined Chevy Nova. Tamales and hot chili racked and rallied his GI tract. He sweated out road visions.

As they went, the plains were dotted over hundreds of miles with hundreds of men, on hundreds of donkeys.

[ three ]

LEFT BEHIND

If chaos is among God’s creations then it is almost certainly part of his personality.

“Babel”

Tot anointed the doorway. He knocked once. He took a breath.

When the face of Satan’s affable body-man, Maximilian Austerlitz, appeared, Tot kicked the door wide with a snarl and slashed open Max’s throat, yanking through till steel dragged on horny demonic spine (Max had taken to saying “Howdy” to all visitors—this upon Satan’s instruction, at the counsel of Judy Parker—and this was the word that died in Max’s airless mouth as he fell). Tot quickly stepped over the demon, who was suppurating endlessly.

“....How...” Max kept saying, whispery, pained. “...How...” Like a young philosophy student caught in a feedback loop.

Tot crossed the front room and entered the first hallway. Now he baptized the closed bedroom door, carefully returning the tiny stopper to its vessel and setting it on the floor. Smart enough to avoid letting himself consider what he was doing, Tot turned the knob of Satan’s bedroom door. So much for the easy part—he heard some obscure part of his consciousness chatter to itself, a nauseous ocean hollering over him at the absurd dimensions of what he was about to do. He stunk with Max’s fluid.

He entered. He beheld Satan and beside him girl of joy QiQi Richards. The room was large, and the long bed was at the center of the wall, about fifteen feet from the door. Satan was blind-folded, wrists and feet bound to the bedframe, as one prepared for quartering. QiQi was playing with the hair on Satan’s stomach and the Devil wore a big smile as Tot came before the bed.

Satan had heard the door open. “That him?”

Qiqi looked up.

“That’s him,” she said, stroking the hard enormous belly. “May I introduce,” Qiqi said. “The one and only bondagemaster in all of Nevada authentic enough to employ: The cat-o-nine-tails­.”

The old serpent was smiling. He giggled.

“Why?” Satan said. “Have I been bad?”

Tot marveled at how much Lucifer adored this woman, how happy and how stupid she made him—how completely soft he had gone. And for some reason Tot could not convince himself that this gargantuan creature deserved the treatment.

Gunky demon blood hung wet in Tot’s suit.

“What’s his name?” the Devil asked.

“Pontius—” Tot said, trembling before the bed.

Qiqi’s face whipped around to him. Tot had answered too quickly. Mid-syllable his voice cracked. Now he stood, frozen, denuded before stinking ruination.

Satan heard Qiqi shift. For a second he tilted his head, sniffing gently as though weighing the air. Then all at once with a wail his body flinched against the bonds. Of course Tot had hardly an instant left before his own destruction and suddenly came unfrozen, a thrill like a suicide jump coursing his brain and genitals as he fell on his victim in the violence of mortal terror. Tot raised the weighty instrument high as he could and brought it down with a whoosh. Satan shuddered, shrieking and writhing, straining as though about to shatter. But one blow of the sacramental blade was not enough, and so Tot struck again, and again, and again, and again—as in a sex-crime—the blinkered animal roaring inches from his face like an air horn, it’s spirit howling out through his hair, squealing over his ears. The struggle had only lasted a second or two when then bed sheared and broke apart, pine slats bouncing across the large bedroom in opposite directions. Bits of shredded wood and linen and stuffing flew up. Qiqi screamed, and Tot was thrown to the ground in front of the bed as though from an explosion. He scurried back to his feet, however, facing his victim again, the tip of his outheld weapon wobbling back and forth like the needle on a pressure gauge.

The bed was annihilated. The scene was of an improvised abattoir. The silk blindfold was pushed up on Satan’s forehead like a bandage, blood emanating from mouth and nose and twenty other wounds. He was dead. With this realization, Tot shimmied back to the floor. Soon he felt Qiqi slide the knife from his hand. He listened to her working it against the slain animal’s hard, ample body. He knew that if he moved he would vomit.

“That’s it,” Qiqi said finally.

Tot looked up, weak, half expecting the blade to be suspended above his own head. Qiqi was pale, ash-like: Tot saw Delilah, Medusa, Minerva, Jezebel—Damnation Unnegotiable.

“Alright,” he said.

In the living room Max’s head had settled away from its owner, as though having attempted to escape the worthless trunk, only to find itself tethered. The protuberant yellow spine lay open like a moon bridge. Tot and QiQi saw where the medium, Twila Burdick, whom for two weeks Satan had been using as a portable telephone, huddled quietly in a carrier kennel in the wet lounge off the kitchen. Tot and QiQi both sighed, simultaneously thankful for the opportunity of doing something compassionate.

They freed Twila and walked her wobbly form to the front door. When they exited there was a patrol officer in the yard just coming up the porch steps. Behind him on the lawn stood a hard-faced brunette housewife holding a cordless phone receiver. The officer smiled.

“Oh,” he said, examining them. “How are you folks this morning?”

The drenched twosome stood there a moment, neither able to reply.

“Better,” Qiqi said. She coughed.

Tot nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Better.”

“Much better,” said Twila.

“You—” said Judy Parker, stepping forward, shouldering the patrolman aside, trembling back rage like a riled thing contesting for a cub. “You just stole a person’s right to turn his life around,” she said. “That’s exactly what you did. You destroyed any chance an individual had of reestablishing his relationship with the Person that created him. Didn’t you.”

Qiqi looked wan and moribund; her face had shrugged all cosmetics in one ecstatic operation. Her eyes were sunk, her lips desiccated and pale, her teeth when she spoke flashed jaundice. The last two weeks’ stress and exhaustion hung in her tone.

“Yes—” she said.

“And who are you,” Judy demanded, “to do a thing like that?”

The conspirators said nothing and hung their heads. Twila Burdick might have made an argument for the justice of the act, but she was too preoccupied with the struggle of keeping upright to waste a breath on anything.
That afternoon the Abnormal Vigilance was arresting a hypnotherapist named Zelda Duchesne in the wastes of outer Clark County, Nevada. Zelda was reported to have been ritually slaughtering neighborhood animals within her home. It was a fact that in an evening of ideological confusion Zelda had been roaming the yards of her neighbors and abducting pets. It was not true that she ever had any intention of harming them. Nonetheless, her actions were textbook grounds for Abnormal Vigilance incursion.

First, as in a typical siege-raid of this kind, agents quietly surrounded the trailer, eliminating phone and electricity. Simultaneously, far behind the police line, a psychic and part-time lifeguard named Maudette Lemieux was erecting a telepathic energy wall to obstruct all paralogical communication in the area. She set up a short altar of streaked black marble. On its face there was an etched pentacle with the head of Baphomet, humanoid billy goat, grinning out from the center window. Maudette placed and lit three tea candles. Then from a small sachet lined with green wool she drew a combination of potassium nitrate, sodium chloride, and bits of friable eucalyptus bark. Dispersed among the flames, when they caught these elements exploded pink, purple and orange, letting forth a bracing cough-drop scent. Maudette began to iterate, slow and building.

At the siege-line a young woman named Otsu Mitsu stood up on the hood of an unmarked Vigilance cruiser, dozens of weapons beneath and behind her like the drawn pikes of a phalanx. In Ideological Therapy Procedural, the Abnormal Vigilance fieldbook, the recitation Otsu was preparing to give was entitled “First Assault.” It was part sortie, part terms of surrender. Otsu took a deep breath. The voice that came from her was clear as harp strikes, the long vocal chords of a soloist.

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe,” called Otsu, high and for clarity. “If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

There was silence. The agents waited for a reply. Surrender was rare.

“The overman,” called Otsu, “has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life’s terrors, he affirms life without resentment...”

Again there was no response. This time Otsu did not wait as long. Her voice remained clear and insistent, the tone compelling.

“The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence—” she called. “Rather a condition of it.”

Still nothing from inside. The agents around her were making last-minute equipment checks—gas masks, zip ties, and other traditional law enforcement paraphernalia, along with tiny, vacusealed fragments of the immaculate prepuce and laminated pocket-printings of St. Benedict’s Vade Retro Satana, the size of large playing cards.

“Alright then,” called Otsu, who always wished her liturgy were more inspiring.

Grenades entered two trailer windows, one smoke and one stinger. Thus the Abnormal Vigilance’s primary target, Zelda Duchesne, was huddling under her kitchen table when a small aluminum canister landed beside her, and before she could even shriek sprayed her close-range with tiny rubber missiles flying bullet-speed. This was an extraordinarily painful event, like being struck on a hundred sites with the hard tip of a Wiffle bat, full-force—Zelda was lucky to retain what she did of consciousness. And now on the other end of her tiny home another aluminum canister was laying out a dense fog that smelled and tasted like burning styrofoam. Zelda eyes welled and overflowed, and she stumbled around her trailer for a moment in total pain and confusion. She heard a strange voice echo weakly through the manifold of her psychic awareness.

“Silence....” said the voice, guttural and emotive. “Silence....Silence....”

Zelda Duchesne wheezed and sputtered in her confine. She placed the words.

“Maudette?”

“THE CROWD—” the mellifluous tones of Otsu Mitsu came yowling again from outside. “Is untruth.”

“Maudette!” Zelda cried. “I surrender!”

Unfortunately there were no paralogical communication lines open in the area and at this point Zelda encountered a velvet ottoman that pitched her forward onto the pink-carpeted trailer floor. She hit her solar plexus flush and pushed up again wheezing, choked.

“Maudette!” she hollered. “I surrender—I can’t find my fucking front door!”

“...Silence.” Maudette Lemieux answered.

Up at the siege-line the Abnormal Vigilance contingent remained poised, as smoke subsumed the trailer, pouring from its windows and all the fissures in its aluminum façade, till it was closed up like an airplane in a cloud. Otsu Mitsu took a deep breath for the final appeal. Her agents were ready.

“Zelda,” said Otsu. “’You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your own love and affection.’”

Otsu waited.

“That’s the Buddha talking, sweetheart. I don’t think he can make it any plainer.”

They waited. Finally Otsu sighed, drawing out her gigantic pistol, easing back its carbon-steel slide.

“Alright—” she said to the agents beneath her, poised like linemen. “We’re ready?”

But at this time the door of the trailer cracked open and swung wide and soothsayer Zelda Duchesne tumbled from its black, vaporous mouth onto the dusty ground. The agents blinked, surprised. Smoke poured from the woman’s clothes where she lay prone, as though overdone. Suddenly cats and dogs were pouring from the residence, drawing wisps of noxious smoke behind them. The cats disappeared behind cars and other trailers; the dogs buried their noses in the dirt, as agents re-holstered with grudging noises.

“Oh,” said Otsu Mitsu. “Oh,” she said again. “Good deal.”
Off the island of Cozumel, Mexico, the Demonic Horde were lazing in the great wet lap of a pleasure cruise. Ix Chil, the moon goddess of Cozumel, who long ago took permanent residence in the night sky due to constant jealous quarrels with her former lover, the sun, now smiled upon the mentally nothing-special crew as they danced, and drowsed, and mojitoed through night. Ix Chil fawned over them as one fawns over beloved farm animals who mean no harm, and are yet fated for slaughter. She swaddled them with light.

The United States Navy had quickly relocated its purloined fleet, of course, but the surrender-order from the President of the United States complicated a retrieval mission: one that would require a massive naval action, involving but not limited to the multiple nuclear arrays already onboard the misappropriated carriers and cruisers. So for now the demons feted, the moon above them affable and pacific.

“You know what?” an ensign called Ariman Papst was saying, as he sat within the pilot house deck of the USS Wasp. “I love rum. I want to say that. I love rum. Is all...” Ensign Papst took a deep breath and coughed wetly, weaving on his stool, “...all I’m saying.”

Ensign Papst consumed what remained in the bottom of his glass, nothing but a drizzle of rum blanco and simple syrup. Then he consumed the ice, grinding up two lime wedges and a fistful of mint. Then he consumed the lowball glass, shards spraying his lap with a gnashing sound, spritzing his black-bristled feet.

“I’m drunk,” he slurred. “And passionate from rum.”

Admiral Kok Ba’el nodded from the captain’s chair opposite, his self-consciously admirable pose. The Admiral had not drunk half what Ensign Papst had, the demon now slithering from his seat and groaning prostrate—green and red drool easing from his shredded mouth. The Admiral was contemplative and historic in mood. The military wing of the Autochthonous Covenant of Satanist Republics was running itself, essentially, as in a bloodless coup. The Admiral reflected with pride upon his executive role: The day after their abduction of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, this Admiral and his ensign had hatched the whole casual insurrection themselves.

“Hey,” Ensign Papst had said. “Couldn’t we just go hide somewhere for awhile?”

The Admiral was looking out over the shoreless blue infinity of the south Atlantic as they trolled—an onrush of misfortune and choking blue death in every direction. The Admiral wasn’t good with water.

He looked over.

“Hide?”

The Admiral thought. “Could we?”

“I mean—” said Ensign Papst. “Satan doesn’t have any radar, does he? For that matter he doesn’t really have a navy. What’s he gonna do?”

The Admiral watched the water a moment, thinking. The demonic naval force was strictly non-union. The prohibition on solidarity was Satanic mandate. It was enforced by a team of strike-breakers on an amphibious command ship weaving genially through the fleet at all times: as on its long deck stood fifty 1,000 horsepower whole-tree grinders. Thus as a naval demon, if you wished to insurrect, you might ride out the pretribulation as part of a lilting, dispersing accretion of chum. But this threat stood only until yesterday, when the strike-breakers themselves had unionized and struck.

“Hmm....” said the Admrial.

The idea of a vacation seemed to soothe his constant, inadequate fear somewhat. He felt the sideways forks in his gut easing and relaxing.

“I mean,” said Ariman Pabst. “We can still show up when we’re supposed to, but—”

“No,” the Admiral had said. “Say no more, it’s a wonderful idea.”

So they steamed southwest. They snuck by Florida. Ensign Pabst had just enough wit, fortunately, had taught himself the acoustic location apparatus just well enough, to halt the flagship before it encountered the shallow harbor of tiny Cozumel. They anchored within a long swim of the shore, bobbing in the open like an army of skyscrapers.

That night Admiral Kok Ba’el heard his sailors plashing down in the blackness, tumbling from the deck ten stories over the waterline, swimming back and forth from the yellow party lights along the shore. Now a tall slender goblin was swishing past the Admiral in a grass skirt and a bikini top of leather thongs and scallop shells. Admiral Kok Ba’el removed two drinks from her tray. He set one on the floor beside the face of his half-waking ensign, and walked out to the open half-deck to look over the water. He felt the sea shudder against the anchored craft as he ascended and it rewoke his hatred of the turgid, hell-like mass that enswamped them. He stood for awhile and watched the ill fluid crest white in the near-darkness, lit up by a thousand portholes. Admiral Kok Ba’el sucked a minty lime. He toasted the blackness.

“Ahoy,” he said. “Ahoy, Goddamnit.”
At this time Jim Johns the Antichrist and his fiancé Nadyenka Czillicz lay beside a small pool atop the Monte Carlo. It was late. They were in swimwear—they hardly wore anything else in two days. They sat within their rooftop solarium, the pool throwing up blue and yellow light as they talked. The roof was a desert place, perimitered with goons hunched in shadows, all exits and entrances accounted for.

Jim was clipping his toenails, which though human-ish in size and shape were adamant in molecular structure. He employed a pair of vice-grips, a pair of diagonal cutters and a long wood rasp.

“Here’s my thing,” Jim Johns was saying. “Is what sort of millennial cult is going assassinate the Devil? It’s completely unbiblical.”

Nadyenka sipped from a Mango Tango, an island of frozen mango-glop sitting up in a pool of piña colada.

“I don’t know,” she said, stirring slowly. “I think you’re being presumptuous.”

Jim frowned. “About what?”

Nadyenka sipped again. “About how it’s all supposed to go down.”

“Well....” Jim said. “I thought we were supposed to have a rough idea.”

Nadyenka nodded from her chaise lounge.

“Tell me this, Jim,” she said. “Do you want to be Emperor of the Known Universe or don’t you?”

The immediate breath Jim Johns the Antichrist took in response to this question caught in his throat, like he’d aspirated a horsefly. He coughed.

“Well—” he said.

“Isn’t this one of those things you’re always talking about,” Nadyenka said. “Like it’s in the Bible, so we’re screwed and who cares what we do?”

The Antichrist nodded. “Sort of.”

“Do you really want to be the Emperor of anything?”

Jim Johns thought. First of why the woman who was supposed to love him was instead castigating him over his occupation—inflaming and affirming whatever insecurities might lay waiting inside him. Then about the actual answer to her question, which he didn’t know.

“Don’t say ‘sort of’ again—” Nadyenka said.

And so Jim Johns didn’t say anything. All he did finally was sit there a long time and think.

“Okay,” he said. I won’t.”

Later, back in the suite, he received a telephone call from a steely-toned woman who had talked her way past the front desk through uncommon force of will. The concierge seemed to speak from real conviction in his tense promise of “pertinence.”

“Hello?” said the Antichrist.

“Mr. Johns,” said a female voice.

The Antichrist tingled. He had the distinct impression of being called on.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“The so-called ‘Antichrist’.”

“Here,” Jim said.

“My name is Judy Parker,” said Judy Parker, clearing her throat.

“Alright, Miss Parker,” said Jim Johns, sitting erecter on the edge of the bed. He heard Nadyenka get under the covers opposite—he slid away from her.

“What can I do for you?”
The next morning a rusty blue Nova crawled into view as darkness receded east off the Mohave, unveiling the Red Rock Mountains that encamped Las Vegas, crests sparkling white, sensuous passes of pink and brown and purple. The day opened upon Hitch MacAbee behind the Nova’s ivory steering wheel, his face an undifferentiated mask of sleeplessness, a garbage bag of deprivation hanging on each eye.

MacAbee had been on the road sixteen hours. He could no longer make any useful distinction between sleepless phantasm and real Endtime absurdity. About an hour after he left Kansas City, MacAbee had passed St. Sabine—the very town where he made the fateful call to his mother-in-law just a four days sgo—and this was the last signpost MacAbee remembered with any clarity. A jab of conscience went through him as he thought of Lucas d’Estime, his dead guru. But it was less guilt, Hitch recognized, than plain loneliness.

It was some time after passing St. Sabine, long into night, that a small brown building appeared before MacAbee, hanging above the road, tumbling toward him as though having received a kick from an enormous foot. It was squat, brown, frontier-ish clapboard. There was something oddly familiar about its shape; from this angle it did not seem like a house. Just before the edifice crashed onto the highway, in fact, tumbling and splittering toward MacAbee as the Nova prowed him onward through the blackness, MacAbee realized: it was a small frontier chapel. He hardly had time to wonder if it was his mind or the universe who was mistaken, though; to decide he did not care, as long as either death or his fiancée was on the other side of it; and to then monkey-howl as he passed through: what seemed to be a white iron crucifix had been missiling toward his chest like a javelin in the very last instant before MacAbee shut his eyes.

When he opened them, of course, nothing had happened. The waited-for noise and cataclysm failed to arrive. But the nonevent shook him. It smacked of the hapless quasi-derangement of his old life. And what shook from Hitch MacAbee’s subconscious after a million other abandoned thoughts—the remnant of a vocabulary quiz he could not guess the age of—was a Merriam-Webster definition of the word: “Phantasm.”

When it was light again MacAbee had stopped. He was outside Burlington, Colorado. The Nova sat filling for a long time, the pump emitting the same rhythmic tinny cloink each time the old impeller switched places, allowing the it to spit up a little fuel. At some point a gentleman named Hiram Tapster, the apparent owner, took MacAbee down into a root cellar beneath his station—itself an old refurbished miner’s cabin. Hiram displayed before Hitch the pickled tongue of a capital murderer named Howard Davis Holmes. He produced two horny yellow teeth in a baby food jar, supposedly knocked out of a bartender by Bill Cody. An apocryphal draft of the Colorado Constitution was spread on a workbench. Hiram Tapster claimed a third cousin and a granduncle had created this totally unratified document, which carried a preoccupation with “first principles” and “negro voodoo.”

A confusing pain attended MacAbee’s memory of this interlude, as though he had been brained with an iron skillet somewhere in the time frame. The old man’s revelations became fully problematic when MacAbee realized that he was driving again without any memory of having reentered the car or the highway, the gas tank just about exactly at center. MacAbee wondered if road hypnosis extended to the creation of colorful backwater characters. Probably not. But he was sure he saw Pike’s Peak shudder in his peripheral vision for a moment as he passed, as though at something pitiful and grotesque, too piteous even to squash. He could have sworn he saw Be’elzebub exchanging casserole recipes with a short Mormon woman, unstylishly suburban in aspect. And each time it took him a moment to remember his eyes were closed—

“Who’s driving, then?” a voice would sometimes filter out of the dark.

And they would open. Now they opened upon late-sleeping Vegas in the distance, nude and oversized in daylight.