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spookyspaghettisundae · 4 years

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Like the Rat You Are

Rows upon rows of metal carcasses towered on both sides of the narrow valley of steel. Piles of trashed automobile wrecks, silent and dead, stacked to the high heavens. Metal and plastic scrap parts littered the dirty ground in between these monoliths of trash. Broken glass crunched underneath Kevin’s boot.

The sound of it echoed through these artificial canyons of industrial refuse, causing him to pause and look around with a sensation bordering on a panic. Under the cover of night, in the dead silence, that sound sliced through the sky like a knife. His heart raced, accelerating to ever greater heights as he held his breath and listened for any audible clue of reactions to the noise he had inadvertently caused.

After nearly a minute passed, he continued creeping through the junkyard. Closer and closer to the head office at its center, sneaking underneath the looming shadow of the claw that the crane and magnet-arms cast in the moonlight. He tried peering through windows to see inside the dark office, but grime and filth caked its panes, obscuring everything within.

The rusty metal of the door’s handle felt cold in his hand as he gripped it. And twisted. The door was open. Unlocked. Made sense, given that most of Dusty’s security focused on the entering the premises, rather than what was on the messy grounds.

For a moment, Kevin thought that he might succeed at this without anybody dying, after all.

He stepped inside and looked around. It smelled of metal dust and rust. And of the cold itself. It was deeply cold in here, almost more so than outside. So cold that his breath condensed into little clouds just in front of his mouth. That all disappeared when he closed the door behind himself.

The faint remnants of light that managed to seep in through the dirt on the office windows rendered everything in vague, dark silhouettes. There were probably shelves stacked with things, and chairs, and a desk. And yet other things, bunched up against the wall.

To shed some light, he removed a stainless steel lighter from his leather jacket’s pocket, flicked it open, and snapped the flint so it produced its tiny flame. With luck, tiny enough to not be too conspicuous, but enough to see anything in there.

Without any sign of life in the junkyard except for himself, and a more deafening silence inside the office, his heartbeat calmed from the pace it had picked up during his stealthy approach. He swallowed and took in his surroundings.

Most of what he expected to find in Dusty McVeigh’s office was there. The place was a terrible mess, but not any worse than some of the trailer trash homes, dingy motels, abandoned derelicts filled with squatters, and other run-down places Kevin had been in and out of over the course of the past year. Sometimes, that’s just where our mystical journeys take us. This was Kevin’s path.

A pile of random junk cluttered Dusty’s desk, but none of it caught Kevin’s eye. The things that stood out the most were the big solid black safe next to the water cooler—presumably what he had come here for—and an easel with a painting on it, standing all lonely in middle of the room.

The impressionist painting really drew and kept Kevin’s attention. It depicted this same room, with a view through the window onto the junkyard on a bright sunny day.

It was a damn good painting, too, he thought to himself. If Dusty had made this, then he had some serious talent. Maybe he should make a living in art instead of stealing from occult collectors?

The irony of his own thoughts was not lost on him, fully well aware that he was going to steal something from Dusty now.

The artifact had to be inside that safe. It would be the perfect place to keep it secure.

Kevin sidled up to the small vault and looked it over, inspecting its size and make. It looked extremely heavy, like a tow truck would have to drag it out of there, and it had been bolted down onto the floor. So taking the whole shebang was out of the question.

Combination lock. No way of guessing the numbers—Dusty was clever. The bastard would never use any easy combination that anybody could guess. The junkyard owner was missing half his teeth due to a crippling meth addiction and constantly smeared in dirt and motor oil all over, but Dusty McVeigh probably had the IQ of a super-genius. No other way he could work the juju he worked.

Kevin knew better than to just blindly try out different combinations on the lock. Instead, he pressed the tip of his index and middle fingers up against the number wheel of the lock and whispered while inhaling, “Diopes dism, emnothesis iento vingnorm. Mag crein.”

As he focused and the painful words escaped his lips, jumbles of mundane words and numbers coalesced in his mind. He started seeing, hearing, and tasting broken thoughts—thoughts stolen from the void to which Dusty’s thoughts had trailed off to in previous days.

Gazing into the sky while high as a kite, lying on the hood of an old muscle car. Furiously jacking off to photos of half-naked women in magazine advertisements. The cool calm nerves that came with smoking a cigarette after a long day of hard work. An argument with his friend and the pain his knuckles from throwing and landing a punch that connected to bone. Words that did not connect to sentences, numbers that did not belong together. Strings of arcane symbols that Dusty thought about a lot in his occult studies. Lots of books, most of them fiction.

Instead of drawing a sequence of numbers that opened the safe, something else took shape in Kevin’s mind. A pair of eyes. Glaring. Furious. Staring at him through the veil.

Not a memory. But the here and now. Elsewhere, but connected over a bridge of all things ethereal. Dusty had woken up—jolted awake because he had secured this safe with a spell of his own. Something that flared up the moment Kevin had tried to suss out the combination from the environs of the lock itself. Magick bound to the entire safe, clashing with Kevin’s spell, alerting Dusty to an intruder’s presence tampering with the safe in any way—including the intangible ways of magick.

There it was again: the racing heartbeat. Cold sweat erupting from Kevin’s pores. The feeling that bordered on panic, however, had returned with a vengeance. Full-blooded panic now, causing his glands to pump mind-numbing adrenaline throughout his body.

He had to act quickly now. Get creative.

A German shepherd’s barking in the distance underlined that growing sense of urgency balling up into a tight pit in Kevin’s stomach. Floodlights switched on outside, one by one. Bathing the towering piles of car husks in a glaring bright white shine. Turning the whole junkyard into a sea of light.

Before Kevin severed his spell—and thus the connection to that burning image of Dusty’s eyes, he last glimpsed bony hands with dirt under the fingernails gripping a shotgun. Loading slugs into its chamber. Pumping some mechanism, pumping little black-powder-powered agents of death.

Kevin stuffed the lighter back into his pocket, as the floodlights outside did their part in illuminating the office well enough for him to see everything clearly.

He scanned the desk with haste, looking for anything he could use.

Junk—just a lot of junk. He looked around the shelves, finding only tools, scrap parts, and more trash. Nothing useful. Not even a damned thing he could improvise as a useful weapon.

The barking neared. Someone shouted something. Dusty probably would be bringing company, both canine and human. Likely armed to the teeth. Everybody had guns in this neck of the woods, and the six-shooter weighing a ton in Kevin’s pocket would never have enough bullets for all of them. Not like he was much of a fighter anyway; the thing was usually more for show and coercion than anything else.

Then the painting caught his eye again. Dusty was clever, but so was Kevin. A desperate idea formed in his brain; something that might even work out.

The safe was depicted on the painting, too. Dusty’s meticulous attention to detail was going to be useful.

Kevin’s hands trembled as they dug through the assortment of junk on Dusty’s desk. Some of the useless objects clattered and clanked and fell off the surface of the desktop. Frustrated because he knew he had seen what he needed just seconds before but failed to find it now, he swept a whole load of items off the table, causing them to crash down onto the floor.

There it was: a thumbtack. It would serve well enough.

The noise outside got closer and closer. Probably less than a minute away. Creeping across that distance had taken Kevin minutes, but was a matter of seconds for the junkyard’s owner and his goon buddies.

Kevin licked his lips and stood in front of the painting.

“Wisthibrea, sestna wasterei velth, delwen sidrom,” he said, focusing on the painting with all his might. He repeated it again, blotting out the noise drawing ever closer outside.

Kevin then brought the thumbtack’s needle to the painting and began defacing it. Scratching over the safe’s depiction specifically. The scratching sounds swelled to deafening heights, swallowing all other sounds in the world to the point of turning the world around him silent.

He repeated the magick words a third time, this time just whispering them, but every syllable oozing out with clarity and purpose that resonated with the cosmos. He could practically feel the gravity of the stars all around, piercing the nightly sky and those stars seeing him simultaneously. Watching, silently judging. Pulling.

The needle tore into the canvas, chipping away dried paint and ripping up the fabric until it was just shredded threads. He couldn’t even hear his own breathing anymore.

Kevin’s head swiveled and he looked at the safe. Its front was missing, just a gaping hole with frayed edges, solid metal looking like it had been chewed away by a giant with steel teeth.

The contents of the safe were his to take.

A bunch of papers, stacks of cash, and other shit he had no use for.

All he wanted was that small alabaster statuette. Its maker in the 1800s had carved it to look like a praying Franciscan monk, maybe even the eponymous old sage himself. The history behind this thing had no bearing right now, though; Kevin dismissed any such thoughts.

All that mattered was this artifact’s secret power. Not only did he need it to find and get Kim out of that infernal town in Washington, it was now his only ticket of getting out of this jam he had gotten himself into. He grabbed the statuette, clutched it with all his might. Not going to let it go easily, now.

The barking was just outside. Intense. Angry. Hungry, maybe.

Kevin concentrated, wracking his brain to remember the precise words he needed to use to wield this artifact properly.

The shouting had become much clearer, as well.

The man yelling was none other than Dusty himself, swearing up a storm, “You dumb son of a bitch! I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you, you skinny pale-faced cross-dressing motherfucker, you! I know it’s you! Come out and I’ll make it quick, shithead!”

The windows exploded into a flurry of glass shards, the deafening echo of the gunshot followed, ringing in Kevin’s ears. Something warm trickled down his forehead, which he found to be blood from a fresh cut, from the glass that had shattered in the shot.

He ducked behind the desk, making his way towards the door.

“You’re dead! You hear me? You’re fucking dead!”

Another shot tore a gaping hole through the office’s flimsy wall. A cloud of dust continued to roil in the air in its wake, dancing in the bright light flooding in through that hole.

The pain decided to set in with delay, maybe thanks to the adrenaline. Nothing about it was good though, as it clouded Kevin’s thoughts. He reeled, stumbling and then crawling towards the office’s only door.

The sticky hot mess seeping out between his fingers from his belly region splattered out onto the floor.

He had no time nor capacity to check how bad it really was. Kevin currently couldn’t even be sure if he had been hit by anything from Dusty’s shotgun directly, or if it was just debris that the shots that had blasted through the office wall. Blood was blood. An injury an injury.

It hurt like hell, stinging, and robbing him of the strength needed to spring back up into standing. Every movement burned with an unpleasant fire in his gut. Acting on instinct, he pressed his other hand against it while dragging himself closer to the door, the alabaster statuette clutched in his other hand. Dark crimson dots marred the otherwise pure white surface of the object—his own blood.

Another hit and Kevin would be a goner. It was time to go.

He stared at the statuette in his hand and began reciting the words.

“Etheris brahecket hisret dwerio—”

A coughing fit broke out and interrupted his own speech, and each revolving contraction allowed the pain to flare up even brighter, clouding his field of vision with a darkness encroaching from the edges and bright lights glaring against it, leaving a kaleidoscope of colorful blind spots behind. His eyesight blurred but he blinked several times to dispel that growing visual impairment.

Encouraged by hearing his suffering, Dusty shouted outside, “Yeah, you like that, you lil’ bitch? Gonna string you up and eviscerate your sorry ass. Like the rat you are!”

Kevin gritted his teeth and started from the top, training his stare on the statuette while he repeated the magick words.

It looked so serene. So pure. What it looked like on the surface meant nothing, however. What truly mattered was the life force bound to it. The karma, or dharma, or essence, or mojo, or whatever the hell anybody preferred to call it.

“Etheris brahecket hisret dweriomon,” Kevin recited the magick words. His voice trembled as he focused on the incantation, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in his abdomen.

“Son of a—don’t stand around, you lazy fuckers! Get inside and end that walkin’ piece of shit!”

Shuffling of feet. Tiny pieces of garbage and gravel crunching underneath the heels of people nearing the office entrance. Kevin did not need to see them, he knew they were all pointing guns at the door, prepared to kill a man without a second thought.

“Shoshiame wielnod eneroh, plagat thereo eteneadeth,” Kevin finished. Then he started repeating it.

He grunted, struggled to get up on his feet. Another shot tore another hole into the office wall nearby, shattering more glass. Something cut him as a consequence of that, but it was minor and the other pain deep down overshadowed it all.

Kevin let go of his injury and grabbed the rusty metal handle of the office door, leaving a bloody hand print on it. Cold in between his fingers, countering the hot stickiness clinging to his skin. Coarse and rusty, he could practically taste it.

But he never tore his gaze off the statuette, and projected his mind elsewhere. Directed his thoughts to another place. A dank cellar underneath a strip club belonging to a friend of his.

It would do.

He squeezed, twisted the handle, and ripped the door open. Another shot echoed through the air. The dog barked louder and angrier, and the men neared.

But behind that door was that dank cellar, not the junkyard outside the office. Kevin lurched through and slammed the door shut behind him.

The door to the boiler room, adjacent of that dank cellar. Over a thousand miles away from Dusty’s junkyard. Bridging the gap of space between South Dakota and Cleveland.

The relic had worked quite well. Unlike Kevin’s legs, now.

He stumbled forth, coming to a halt against a pillar in the dusty, damp room. He slumped against it and slid down until he remained sitting on the ground, once more gripping the injury where his stomach should be. The blood continued pumping out from there, hot and crimson and sticky. And heralding doom.

He sighed and even that hurt, causing hellfire to ripple through his body from the injury.

Eat shit, Dusty, he thought to himself.

He had retrieved the artifact. But at what price? Everything had a price.

The statuette could do the trick in finding Kim, but that hinged on him surviving this now.

Too bad, though. The blood just continued to pump, like it had waited for this very day to escape his sorry skin. The pain overwhelmed him.

He slipped out of consciousness.

Without any hope of opening his eyes to see another day.

—Submitted by Wratts

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niklioni · 3 years

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End of the World

Most people believed that technology would be completely gone. That we would be thrown back to the stone age. While there was a long stretch of chaos, especially for those nations that were dependent on technology for their everyday lives, most of the world just ticked on over. Kept moving along.

The hardest part of the micro-nova, was what it did to the planet. Earthquakes, massive storms, volcanoes -- Those were minor compared to the polar shift. It had been happening for decades. The magnetic north pole had been wandering slowly, until it wasn't. The last decades, it sped up. And then the south pole started moving. When they met near the southern tip of India, the sun had already gone nova, and loosened the magma layer, so the realigning of the magnetic field in that location brought with it a cataclysmic shift of the earth's surface, aligning the new poles north and south with the solar magnetic field. Kind of like when a magnet FLIPS explosively to line up with another magnet.

The floods were the worst. Electricity was gone, with most wires being used as conduits for all that solar energy, which immediately melted and oxidized them to uselessness. After the dust was gone, the stars were the brightest things in the night sky again. When the floods came, people were in the dark, no information from major news systems to warn them, no cars to take them to places that could be considered 'safe'. So much of the human population was destroyed. Waves higher than the majority of continents washed back and forth across the land, washing away whatever taint mankind had put in place. Much of the earth was changed overnight.

The freeze afterwards brought another insult to injury. Almost nobody was ready for it. A flash freeze of the entire planet. Global warming was not a worry anymore. It didn’t last long, since all that debris that had chokes the sun had been blown away but it was long enough to turn the planet white.

People, when they live in one spot for long enough are used to the weather in that location. Well, with the polar shift, the sun came from another corner of the sky in the morning. Equatorial countries had no clue how to handle the cold. It was something they never had to deal with. Canada was in for a rude awakening when summer rolled around -- for the next twelve thousand years.

Now I say all this to let you know how bad it was. The United States was split in half, a body of water now running from Lake superior to the Gulf. Half of Texas was gone. Just gone. Under water. The hill country to the mountains were amazingly fine, though with the change in weather, we had many flooding events until the green had taken over.

And now we come to the mountains. Ah the mountains. I recall that several decades before the event, billionaires, having failed to control the population, began building mountain bunkers. I get the feeling that they knew more than the average human. Though I doubt they had altruistic ideals when they did this, they did save humanity in many ways.

They bought STUFF. They had all sorts of stuff. Computers, cars, machines to make computers and cars. That was the biggest thing. They had information. They had stuff.

And they were impressively weak about security.

Once people found out where they were, these billionaires were no obstacle. Scientific minded folks gathered together and hired those of like mind and with abundance of survival skills, and headed out to take the first of these compounds. Since there was no technology working, and rich folks do rely on it, they were infiltrated, and if not convinced to cooperate, detained.

It was no more than a week after the floods and tremors stopped, that news was filtering through populated safe areas about needed supplies. Things needed for everyday life without hospitals and internet and grocery stores with food shipped from thousands of miles away. A caravan of survivalists was travelling the routes selling antibiotics, and sutures, and needles, and shovels. There were books with basic information about pumps, smithing, farming, hunting, butchering. Recipes for those without spices. They were a godsend, though likely not the ones the people wanted. They were well armed. They repelled many people. They earned respect for their space and people learned to respect their lives.

They traded these things with people who had things like vegetables, meat, lumber. Scrap metals and glass were also accepted, though they preferred such things already in billet form. It packed easier, and the horses here still new at pulling the wagons, so they didn't want to overburden them.

The books, they sold few copies. They claimed they wanted to have enough for every community, and it would be a good idea for people to share the information with their neighbors. They set aside time to teach those who wanted to learn, but they knew what would happen. They understood human psychology. The information would never be shared. At least while the ones who had bought the books had died.

I was in one of those communities when they had come through. I listened to their spiel, listened to them as they read the simply written text of the books, and watched the aftermath when they left.

Half a day after they had continued down the old roads, chaos erupted. I stayed way back once I heard the first grumblings. I got on my horse and rode out of town and camped, watching the town center with an old scope. The four who had bought the books and gear were mobbed. They were killed and their stuff taken from them. SO much gunfire erupted, that I was rather amazed there was that much ammo in the town. The books were left on the ground, torn to shreds. The most valuable thing those people had purchased, thrown to the mud like trash.

I understood at that point that this town was a loss. I was certain that within a year, it would be nothing but old bones, the carcass picked clean by the wild dogs that roamed the hills. I picked up my camp before it got dark, and headed East to the Rocky Mountains from what used to be central Texas. Austin was north, Waco was south, and there was a long ways to go.

Life was hard. Every day consisted of getting up with the sun, setting the kettle on the coals to heat. Splashing some water in my face, and wiping the sweat from my flesh. Brush the horses down, throw last night’s scraps to the penned chickens and ducks, and open the nesting boxes.

I would have to collect more water today, though it was not urgent. I figured I had enough for a stew this evening, but it was always best to be prepared. So I saddled one horse, and put the yoke on the other. They whuffled at me, excited to get out for a while. Once the cart was hitched, I loaded the empty barrels. With rifle in hand and a pocket full of ammo, I walked the two horses over to the trough.

When I had moved out here, I searched cautiously for other people. There were some settlements, a few isolated cabins, but lots of space. I moved on until I could look from a high place and see nothing of another person in all directions. It was lonely sometimes, but I was more concerned for safety, than for comfort. I was not one for settlements.

Tractors littered the fields, dead, even though diesel would easily run once the engine got cranked. Even if they removed all the electronics and managed to get them moving, fuel was severely limited. It made sense to use the smallest engine on the smallest field if one was to use them at all, since transportation was as limited as the farm. Why plant more than you can use and trade?

There was also a new phenomenon now. Roving herds of cattle. Wild cattle. I was amazed they survived, considering how domesticated they were -- thousands of years of domestication can do strange things to an animal. Just look at people at the beginning of the 21st century. Dopey, lazy, stuffed into little boxes for more than half of their income to a landlord who never really gave a crap.

I mounted my horse, and tied the leads of the wagon horse to the horn of my saddle, and took the well worn path to the water well. The day was clear and crisp. About mid spring. Snow was still on the ground, but was steadily thawing. The well would be very full.

Digging that well was an experience for me. There was so much that I needed to prepare before I even broke ground, and there was no guarantee that I would find water at all. I had several shovels, a pick, buckets, rope, and stacked all around where I had decided to dig, tons and tons of stone laying about in piles. I had roughly shaped them all into something brick-like, with two parallel sides. The other sides, I felt, didn’t really matter.

The hardest part of the preparation was the mortar. Sand, in this area, was not a geological feature easily found. Limestone was everywhere, so cooking up lime wasn’t an issue, but sand was absolutely necessary. I was despairing until I remembered that quarries would always have mountains of tailings. Not quite sand, but fine grained rough sided crushed stone. I figured that would be all I needed. It took ten trips to get all that I needed, and still I felt I would need more for other projects, but I was exceptionally tired of making the trip fifty miles there, and fifty miles back.

#dystopia #end of the world #niklioni

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uroch-lore-blog · 5 years

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Hog society

An Uroch’s crude carving in chalk of a hog displaying spines

The prickly hogs can be encountered everywhere the Uroch visit on the surface. Thanks to their formation of complex cooperative societies they have become the most widespread and successful mammal on the planet, dispersing themselves across nearly all terrestrial ecosystems and thriving everywhere while the fragmented descendants of humankind barely cling to survival hidden away in their subterranean refugia.

The hogs have exceptionally good eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell, able to detect threats even in the darkness, along with strong claws that can excavate tunnels and chambers in the soil and reshape their environment with ease. They are omnivores who can consume and digest almost anything, with a tough bony beak able to crack bone and nuts alike. This gives them an immense variety of foraging options from eating berries, digging up tubers, scavenging carcasses, eating insects and even hunting on occasion.

While they evolved as nocturnal burrowing creatures, they are now bold enough to forage extensively during the day and range widely above ground, taking turns keeping watch and warning each other of any approaching dangers. They keep several sentinels on watch at their towns at any time as well as accompanying their foraging parties, and have a huge repertoire of hooting and screeching vocalizations with unique meanings making up their speech.

Litters are small, rarely exceeding 3, and the young are born helpless in underground communal nursery chambers. They mature slowly, taking a decade to reach adulthood, giving them plenty of time to learn all the threats and opportunities their varied environment presents. All members of the group will take turns babysitting and feeding the young.

Hogs form strong bonds even with individuals who are neither related nor sexual partners, and while smaller groups may be comprised of extended families, in the majority of towns mostly unrelated individuals live and cooperate together. They strengthen social bonds by grooming each other’s soft underbellies, which an individual would find difficult to do without aid.

They typically live in groups of 30 or so with very many more in the largest of their towns which can cover vast areas. Their towns are composed of a complex series of tunnels and chambers with their own dedicated functions including larders for storing any surplus food they can carry back which allows them to get by in leaner times. Each hog will have memorized the entire layout of their town.

A smaller sized hog town

Though usually peaceable they can be fearsome indeed when roused. Their spines are usually kept held flat and harmless against the body, but when they feel threatened the hogs will raise and rattle them creating a fearsome display. Any aggressors who ignore it are likely to meet the sharp end of the spines. Hogs will also attack with their beaks, which being strong enough to crush bone can do serious injury to aggressors. Their claws are equally formidable but are not their primary means of defense. A common threat is giant snakes and centipedes invading their towns. The hogs will form battlelines to drive off the intruders and will usually try to kill these creatures so they will pose no threat in the future. Sometimes one will act as bait to draw the threat away. When severe danger threatens the town some hogs will plug the entrances with their own bodies, turning their backs to intruders and extending their spines to present a formidable barrier, but potentially sacrificing themselves to save the town.

Watch Hogs and Uroch

On rare occasions individual hogs are driven out of their towns after disputes, and many have found refuge in the entrances to the Uroch tunnels. These eminently sociable beings soon formed a symbiotic relationship with the Uroch living below. Though they are burrowers the hogs do not venture deep underground, and have never colonized these regions on their own, but in banding together with the Uroch they have found safety down here. They can subsist happily on leftovers that even the Uroch cannot consume meaning they have plenty of scraps to eat in the Uroch camps, keeping the place clean while these giants protect them from even the most dangerous of predators.

Under the watchful eyes and ears of these hogs at their camps, with senses far sharper than even the Uroch’s, it is almost impossible for enemies, whether hungry predators or rival Uroch, to take the camp by surprise. The hogs will always post vigilant sentinels that warn of approaching danger with their screeching alarm calls. The hogs also assist the Uroch in tracking by scent, leading them to large prey, allowing the stronger beings to make the kill which provides more than enough sustenance for all. They will always accompany the Uroch foragers on their trips to the surface.

The Uroch acknowledge the hogs as full members of society and usually will form very strong and lasting bonds with them as individuals. The hogs usually sleep curled up besides or on top of the Uroch for warmth and enjoy their underbellies being rubbed by Uroch just as they would groom each other. The Uroch have learned to understand and respond to much of the hogs’ hooting speech while the hogs have in turn learned Uroch gestures such as pointing and smiling and can understand their tone of voice. They can live up to 50 years so their lifespan is only somewhat shorter than an Uroch’s. Elderly, injured and sick hogs are cared for and nourished just as Uroch are. The injury or murder of a hog is treated as no less grave an offence as that of another Uroch and they are afforded the same funerary rites, though their skulls are stacked in piles in the shrine instead of being placed in wall cavities.

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