A wave of dizziness overcame him. This was normal and would soon pass as his own senses detached from himself and were replaced by those of the seeker.
What a thing it was. To smell his own humanity before him. The urine and fecal matter was almost overwhelming, disgustingly fascinating. He could see every pore of his own skin, how ashen it had become. The deterioration of the musculature. The bend in the spine. The sunken face. The yellow purple lips. The diseased gums.
“You are beautiful. Beyond human, much more than human. A god. The one true god.”
He sensed the seeker’s own confusion at the invasion within its mind. The creature’s primitive self awareness realized something had entered its consciousness, though it lacked the cognitive ability to even remotely conceive of how such a thing was possible. The invasion instinctively angered it though, to the point of once again straining against the wires that held its limbs, causing those wires to dig deeply into its flesh.
The pain of the wires caused the Great Consulate to cry out in pleasure. This was the experience he so craved - lovely, delicious, life-giving and life-taking pain.
He watched in wonder and anticipation as his own body reached out to take a long bamboo rod from the wall of the killing room. The interior of the bamboo was filled entirely with solid tungsten, among the heaviest and strongest metals. The lower half of the rod was blackened with the blood and skin fragments of the Great Consulate’s previous guests. There had been that old man who had nearly killed him, other men, women, children, and now his own seekers. All of them in the end had fallen under the weight of this bamboo rod, so similar in appearance to the rod the Great Consulate had felt against his own back as a child growing up in Indonesia so many lifetimes ago before he was made a man, before he knew himself to be God.
The seeker pulled itself back tightly into a corner of the room, sensing danger from the approaching figure. The Great Consulate felt the walls cold, smooth surface just as the seeker felt it. So too did he feel the seeker’s fear. He watched himself approach the seeker and look down upon it, the bamboo stick held within his left hand, raising it up slowly above the creature’s head.
The first blow crashed into the seeker’s right cheek, tearing the dark leathery flesh open enough to reveal the bone beneath. The pain was enough to cause the creature to lose vision momentarily as it vomited up a handful sized amount of black bile that fell across the front of its chest and onto the floor.
The Great Consulate watched and then felt as he delivered another blow to the back of the Seeker’s head, and yet another that slammed into the thing’s right shoulder. He could feel the breaking of the seeker’s bone just as he could also sense the excited, diseased smell of his own breath as he struggled to bring the bamboo stick down upon the thing yet again before what little strength he had began to quickly dissipate from the effort.
“Don’t stop! Hurt it! Love it! Feel it! Life and death over all things! That is your destiny! Keep going! Do it! Do it! Do it!”
The voice always lost its composure during the time spent in the killing room. With every painful wound, every surge of instinctive self preservation from the victims, the voice’s excitement grew.
After a couple more fatigue-weakened strikes from the bamboo stick, the Great Consulate leaned against the wall farthest from the seeker, his heart slamming inside his sunken, abscess riddled chest. As the breath painfully wheezed in and out of his single lung, there was a moment of sincere panic that he might be suffering a heart attack. Was such a thing possible?
A minute passed and the pain in his chest began to finally subside enough that he could stand up and look down upon his work. No more communication came from the sensory device because the seeker was now unconscious. The Great Consulate removed the glasses and returned them and the bamboo stick to their places on the wall of his killing room.
Though still struggling for breath, he could not help but shuffle closer to the seeker and look lovingly at the results of the intimate experience they had just shared. It was not dead, and would likely recover well enough that they would be able to enjoy another such experience in another day or two. Seekers were designed to withstand an extraordinary amount of punishment, and were capable of recovering quickly. And this seeker in particular seemed especially strong.
The creatures face was a mass of blood. A cheekbone jutted out from ripped flesh. One shoulder sat noticeably lower than the other. The back of its head still bled profusely. A hand hung loosely from a wrist that had been broken when the thing attempted to block one of the blows.
It was beautiful.
The Great Consulate leaned down and extended a shaking left hand to caress the horrifically damaged cheek of the unconscious seeker. That hand then returned to his mouth, where his darkened, tobacco burned tongue hungrily licked the murky black blood of the creature he considered his child.
“Don’t forget that group from Alaska. They intend to destroy all that you have built. They think they have found something, or someone. Don’t underestimate them. You must kill them. They would believe themselves capable of destroying you. A god! Send more seekers to them. Let your children rip their flesh from those Dominatus pigs. You can watch them as they do it. You can feel that flesh. Taste that flesh. Devour it with them.”
The Great Consulate closed his eyes and imagined how amazing such a thing would be. To be there inside of his children as they caught those animals from Dominatus. Those pathetic creatures who had managed to destroy so many of his beloved drones. Yes, his seekers were coming for them. There were but a few watching them now,
but more were coming. More than enough…
XIV.
Mac was drowning. His lungs were collapsing in upon themselves – unable to replenish with oxygen. Far above him was a glimmer of light – the surface. Below him was darkness. He struggled to rise to the surface, but his arms and legs were unable to move within the water – water that felt too thick and unyielding. His heart threatened to pound itself free from his chest, working much too hard to move his muscles in the absence of necessary air.
He was dying, and he wasn’t alone.
Someone, or something, was in the blackness with him. Below his still struggling feet, Mac could sense the presence. Darker even than the murky depths, whatever it was it wanted Mac badly.
The former Navy SEAL and government gun for hire, over years of assignments to the very worst holes of humanity across the globe, did not believe in God. He had seen too much pain and suffering in this life to entertain any thought that some loving, all knowing being existed somewhere. And if there were a god, he had certainly long ago stopped giving a shit about humankind. Mac couldn’t blame God for that. Humankind was an assorted collection of nasty pricks and always had been.
No, we were on our own, and once our time was up, that was it – lights out.
Not that Mackenzie Walker didn’t still care about people, he did. He cared about the few good people who were left. He had worked to protect some of them during his time in Dominatus. He still hoped that somehow, maybe, there remained enough good and caring people that some scrap of what was once America could be saved, and built upon, so that future generations could know and live in a United States that did, at one time, actually exist.
His love of America had always been Mac’s driving force. It was what had allowed him to do those things that his government had instructed him must be done. Lives had to be taken, so that many more lives could be saved. Knowing now though, that the system that had ordered him to do so was even then, terribly corrupted, did not diminish the sense of doing right that Mac carried with him during those years of military and contract service. Nor did it diminish in him the love of the United States, at least, the potential that was the United States, Mac had always instinctively been drawn to. Mac Walker had always believed in the founding principles of America. As clichéd or silly as some might view those principles, he truly believed that the United States was built upon the most basic and fundamental human desire for freedom and liberty, and he had based the entirety of his adult life in protecting those principles, even at the cost of his own humanity.
His heart was slowing, giving up the fight.
Mac was so tired. He was old. He was sick. The surface was too far, the water too cold and too deep, and much too dark. Life was leaving him. What was it General Douglas MacArthur had said to Congress upon his retirement? That old soldiers never die, they just fade away. Mac Walker was now just…fading away.
The darkness beneath him was closer, that unknown thing. Mac could sense it reaching for him, wanting to wrap itself around his feet and drag him down.
The thought panicked him enough to force Mac to again fight for his life, to push upward toward the light just beyond the water’s surface. Mac’s lungs were fire inside of his chest, screaming at him to breathe anything – to simply open his mouth and allow the water to fill him. The mind still overruled the lungs though, and Mac’s mouth remained shut tightly as his arms and legs struggled to continue pushing slowly upward. The surface was closer now, the light growing stronger, the blackness falling away below his feet.
Mac was not yet ready to die – he was going to make it.
And then he felt the unmistakable tug of being pulled down. The surface quickly grew more distant. The light above was swallowed by the darkness below. And still, he went down until darkness folded in upon yet more darkness. Whatever thing had wrapped itself around Mac’s feet was never going to release him. Its strength and determination were too great. Mac knew his life was no more. Past, present, and future held no meaning to him here in this place. Never-ending darkness was all that was left.
Mac awoke with his chest heaving, struggling for breath. He quickly covered his mouth to muffle the sound of his own panic so as to not wake the others who slept around him inside the small cabin. A thick layer of sweat covered him, his clothes damp and clinging to his body.
His lungs cried out for oxygen, but even as he opened his mouth wider to accommodate the demand, he was unable to inhale deep enough to do so, and what little oxygen that did enter his lungs caused him to begin coughing uncontrollably. Mac looked down into the palm of his right hand and saw blood.
“Shit.”
Brando had awoken and was looking at Mac, his head cocked slightly to the left. Mac recalled reading many years ago how a group of doctors were using dogs to discover cancerous cells in human patients. The greatly enhanced sense of smell dogs had allowed them to sense sickness in other dogs, and, so the doctors said, in people as well. As Brando’s eyes looked into his own, Mac couldn’t help but believe that on some level, the Doberman was aware of the cancer that was quickly overtaking his body.
“Well, Brando, how about we keep that between ourselves for now, ok?”
Mac laid back and concentrated on his breathing, forcing his lungs to expand and contract slowly and take in as much oxygen as possible as he slowly inhaled through his nose and exhaled out his mouth. The pain from his lungs lessened considerably and his heart slowed to a much more relaxed rhythm.
Satisfied that he wasn’t dying tonight, Mac allowed himself to drift off into much needed sleep.
In a corner of the cabin that allowed him to see outside to where the horses were gathered, Cooper Wyse glanced over at Mac’s form and was glad to see the older man doing better. Clearly something was wrong with Mac’s health, which Brando had sensed almost immediately, but Cooper had long followed the belief that if a man didn’t want to tell you something, it wasn’t any of your business to try and make him. Sometimes a person’s secrets were all they had left in this life. The rancher lowered his hat over his eyes, said a silent prayer for the former Navy SEAL, and let sleep overtake him as well.
XV.
Just before the sun peeked through the tops of the trees from the east, Cooper Wyse was already up and checking on his four remaining horses. Brando was running across the clearing, stopping often to sniff the ground or lift his leg to mark yet another tree. All of the assorted bags that had been packed atop the horses were removed. Cooper knew they would not be going any further on this trip.