The Spartan's Ashes: The Spartan's Last March Book II Updated 6/27/18
This is the sequel to The Spartan's Last March and begins just after the final events there. If you have not read that entire book, there will be spoilers below.
“[War’s] element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason...”
One of the three elements of Clausewitz’s Remarkable Trinity, from his work, On War.
People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?"
Revelations 13:4
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine
Chapter 1
Eight miles high and when you touch down
You'll find that it's stranger than known
The Byrds, Eight Miles High
Cassandra\Claw
The Colonel walked alone into the heart of his enemies, and with a single stroke, he set the world on fire. Claw watched the fire from the bank of the San Francisco Bay. Even now, days later, it still burned, filling the night sky with hell’s illumination. To the west, across the black mirror of water, Gomorrah’s former capital blazed. The western skyline was a red-orange glow, a ribbon of nuclear fury, the testament of Gomorrah’s end. The outline of shattered buildings stood before a background of fire that burned with the fury of the man who destroyed it.
Fires blazed behind claw too. These were the bonfires of the survivors, the mutated and the damned, the insane survivors of this dystopian apocalypse. They’d made their camp here, on the other side of the bay. Away from their capital but close enough to witness its ruination. They came crawling to this place from all over, dragging whatever they could with them. They built their fires and the set to the tasks of the doomed and lunatic. More came every day after the blast and more were still to come. There was no order to any of it, no organization other than the new mad canon that had been born from the flames. It could not last, Claw knew. The weight of that fact pressed down upon him. He sighed heavily, wearily, and the fires raged on, placing their claim upon a world reborn through flame.
Claw wore an olive green military surplus coat. With one hand he smoked a cigarette. The other hand he pushed deeper into one of the coat’s empty pockets. He smoked quietly, his eyes taking in the nightmare landscape. Not far away, naked men and women bathed in the night air. They splashed and soaked in the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Their bodies were smooth, with the clean and symmetrical lines of humanity. By the eerie light of the inferno, he watched a woman spread her legs and fill herself with dirty water, hoping to catch a dose of the fallout, if not for herself, then to mutate the children she might someday bear. Claw didn’t know whether to scream or cry. He took a last puff on his cigarette and flicked it towards the bay. He turned and headed into the camp of the survivors. A rusted remnant of a barbed wire fence attempted to block his path. Affixed to the single wire was a faded metal sign that read, “Naval Weapons Station, Concord California.” Claw stepped over the wire and went to see the boss.
Claw was once called Cassandra, but Cassandra died in the nuclear blast that destroyed the city. Casandra was gone, Gomorrah was gone, Doctor Chosen and the High Council were gone. He never liked the name, Cassandra. If there was one good thing that came out of this whole thing, that was it he supposed. His parents named him Cassandra as some strange form of protest. They believed that gender was an artificial construct, a social fabrication imposed by ancient elites to maintain their control. Claw\Cassandra always thought that odd, that a man and a woman could mate, have offspring, and still think gender was an artificial thing. And his parents did have many offspring, although he was the only one who survived. His brothers and sisters had all been sacrificed to the Earth Mother, pitched from the tops of buildings or ritualistically crushed in public ceremonies, or ritualistically killed by whatever the ritualistic execution fad of the day happened to be. It was only by luck that Claw\Cassandra survived his parents' devotion to the Earth Mother, just as it was only by luck that he'd been outside the city in one of Doctor Chosen's many laboratories when the bomb went off. Luck? Claw wondered if that was the right word as he approached the bonfires of the survivors camped along the bank. They danced in the inferno light, mad celebrants reveling in their survival, reveling in what they thought this calamity meant, reveling in the worship of their new god. Claw thought fate might be a better word than luck.
The bass of drum beats pressed upon his chest, and he entered the disorganized collection of bonfires and dancers. Naked forms, scarred, mutated and grotesque all undulated about him. No, this wasn’t luck. This was fate. But was this a fate he was worthy of? Something in a nearby fire exploded and a swarm of embers shot up into the sky. Firelight shifted and he saw a human face that looked half canine. It cackled. The light shifted again and the face was gone as if only a passing nightmare. Claw pushed his one hand deeper into the pocket, not that it had anywhere to go. He could still feel the burning pain there, where his implanted "gadget," had once been. Like so many of Gomorrah's favored citizens, he had technology implanted into his body, for what purpose, he could no longer remember. He could only remember that for some reason he had to have it. And in those final moments, before the bomb went off, he had to get it out. Pain and some mad-science poison had flowed out of it and into his body, twisting it and wrecking it, infecting him until he finally tore the implant free with his one good hand. The implant was gone, but the damage was done. A hideous testament to his vanity remained.
The tempo of the drums rose. The firelight cast more undulating shadows across the dancers. Each dancer’s face was a twisted monstrosity. Human features turned beastly. Claw saw misshapen eyes. Noses became snouts. Skin became scales. Ears stretched out to points. Teeth elongated to fangs. Maybe luck would have been vaporization in the nuclear blast. Gomorrah was never a society based on logic and reason, but this thing that crawled out of its ashes was insane. Not just a disordered insanity, but an evil one.
“Hell is insanity. And this is hell,” Claw said to himself as he weaved past a host of naked creatures who swayed and weaved and gyrated before a bonfire of stacked refuse. Drums throbbed. Smoke and embers swirled in the air and he saw a pair of glowing yellow, slanted cat-like eyes beckoning him into the darkness. He stalked past them but felt the eyes tracking him long after he passed.
He moved through the camp. At the edge of the firelight, Claw saw and heard more survivors building a tall structure out of scraps of wood. The clap of hammers contrasted with the kettledrum bass of drums. The wooden monument was still in its infancy, but Claw knew what it would be, who it would be, and he could see the image already in his mind’s eye. The wind shifted and his ears picked up the telltale sounds of men digging, unearthing the treasures buried here.
Set aside from the bonfires and crude lean-tos and huts of the survivors was a canvas military tent. It stood alone, olive drab and huge. Two guards stood outside, each swaddled in black robes and red sashes. The firelight danced across them, throwing light and shadow, revealing and hiding. Claw didn’t look at them and they did not challenge him. When he passed them the firelight shifted again but fixed for a short moment. This time the monstrous features did not change. One guard had the yellow eyes and elongated slit irises of a goat. The second guard had a face that dropped on one side and formed an asymmetrical mask marked with a yellow tusk that jutted out diagonally. Both guards bore scars where their gadgets had once been before they, like Claw, had torn them out. It wasn’t the shifting light or tricks of the eye. The mutations were real, products of technology they put into their bodies. From the nuclear fire, they'd all been reborn, reborn as monsters to roam a world once ruled by men.
Claw ducked into the canvas opening of the tent. This was the new reality of Gomorrah, the first step in the new madness. It had been just days since the nuclear fire destroyed their empire and already a new social structure had emerged. At the bottom were those humans who escaped un-mutated, like those bathing in the fallout-polluted waters. Above them were those who had been mutated in the final moments before the atomic flash; Gomorrah’s former elites with their surgically implanted technology. But at the top of the caste system, at the very top were the ones who been mutated long before the attack. Those who Doctor Chosen has personally selected and modified. The ones who had received what was now being called the Doctor’s “Gift.”
Claw stopped just inside the tent. The light was different in here and his eyes had to adjust to it. As he stood, he heard a deep and familiar voice that filled the tent.
“Claw… Claw… Don’t hide your gift. Reveal it for the world to see.”
Claw’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. At the back of the tent, an enormous form took shape. It was human, or at least humanoid. Thickly muscled limbs sprouted out of a body that seemed all chest and shoulders. An oval head sat upon a bull’s neck. The man was hairless, save for eyebrows and eyelashes that were pewter in color, as were the beds of the man’s fingernails. Claw’s eyes discerned more colors and could see the man’s skin was the color blue. This was the lord of whatever was left of Gomorrah. This was Winston Indigo. He was one of Doctor’s Chosen’s genetic experiments. Once upon a time, he was also the doctor’s lover. And now, this man-giant was the inheritor of all that Doctor Chosen had left behind.
“Take it out,” Winston said. His deep voice matched his muscled body. “Don’t be ashamed, Claw. Show the world what the Great Father blessed you with.”
Claw removed the other hand from his coat pocket and held it up into the tent’s dim light. The tips of each finger and thumb were withering and had turned black at the tips. The little finger looked like it might fall off in the very near future, and indeed it would. Jutting out of the hand between the second and third fingers was the tip of a black, hooked claw. Three inches of it were out now, but the talon was growing as the rest of Claw\Cassandra’s hand was dying. Further up the arm, between the claw and the elbow, a wrap of dirty bandages marked where the gadget had been ripped out.
“It smells,” Claw said. “It’s probably infected.”
“It is your blessing,” hissed a voice from deeper in the shadows of the tent. “The Great Father would not have spared you only to have you die of some infection.” Claw saw two more forms in the tent, shadows within the shadows. He knew who they were and ignored them for now. His loyalty lay with Winston.
“We unearthed another container,” Claw said to his massive, blue¬-skinned, lord.
“What’s inside,” Winston asked. He’d been seated behind a desk improvised from plywood and sawhorses. Now the man stood, his giant’s muscles stretching and flexing. He stood more than seven feet tall, without an ounce of fat anywhere. He looks like Paul Bunyan's blue ox, Claw thought, but of course, he did not say that.
“More of the same I expect,” Claw answered. “But we didn’t open it. I thought you might want to be there for the unveiling.”
The voice in the back of the tent hissed again.
“The son of the Great Father has more important things to do than supervise common errands.”
Claw knew it was an insult. Not an overt one, but an insult just the same. He gritted his teeth. He wanted to say something but couldn’t think of anything and so he just tensed at the harsh words. Winston turned toward the hissing voice. Claw couldn’t tell if Winston’s face held approval or a rebuke.
Damn, Claw cursed himself. He’d never been one for conflict. He’d always been more than a little timid, always eager to demonstrate his loyal compliance, his subservience. That was perhaps why he’d held a position in one of Doctor Chosen’s laboratories for so long. But this new world and his new position within it would require from him more than compliance and loyal submission. In the past, he'd been able to squeak by. Those days ended with Casandra’s death in the nuclear flash. If what was left of Gomorrah was to survive, he’d have to stand up for himself and stand for his beliefs. No small amount of self-doubt filled Claw.
Luckily tonight Winston came to his rescue, at least in a roundabout way.
“Turn on the light,” the deep voice boomed.
“The light hurts his eyes,” another voice hissed. This one was feminine and strangely feline, and filled with an angry cat’s hissing malice.
“Turn it on,” Winston thundered back immediately. His voice shook the tent. Claw saw veins on that thick, blue, bullish neck pop out.
A switch in the back of the tent clicked. A small electric lantern on the floor filled the back corner of the tent with a dim blue light that barely rose above the floor. Two figures became visible. One, old and frail, lay sprawled across an army surplus cot. The head was a checkerboard, with patches of long stringy white hair and bald patches where the hair had fallen out. The limbs were thin and twisted around, as if by some super strand of polio. On this broken figure’s left forearm, the titanium casing of a gadget still gleamed.
Take that damned thing out of your body, Claw thought. But this too he didn’t say aloud.
“She’s right,” The old man croaked. “The light does hurt my eyes. But for the son of the Great Father, I can endure.”
The figure next to the old man purred. It was a she, and she brought a damp cloth to the old man’s forehead and delicately patted it. She had neither gadget, nor the mark of a gadget, yet she looked beastly too. She was naked, save for some golden chains she wore around her wrists and ankles, and the piercings scattered all over her body; rings and small barbells in gold and copper and bronze. Her skin was honey brown, her head shaved down to a fine stumble, her front teeth filed down to sharp points.
“The Oracle is not well,” she hissed.
The Oracle is not well because the Oracle needs to rip that technological poison out of his body, Claw thought again.
“The Oracle needs to relax, and so do you Raux,” Winston said firmly. “The Great Father left me in charge. The Great Father buried those containers here for us. Claw is right. I should be there when they crack them open. The people need me, and they need my leadership.”
The woman, Raux, drew her lips back into a sneer, revealing the perfectly white, filed teeth of a cannibal. The Oracle reclined on his cot and brought a limp hand to his head, like some Victorian woman afflicted with the vapors. He let out a soft whimper.
“So they do. But beware the trads, my son. This is not their world anymore. They cannot be trusted.” Claw narrowed his eyes but said nothing to the Oracle. Seconds later he again cursed himself for his cowardice in not speaking up.
Claw and Winston left the tent. The giant ducked low to clear the opening, then moved in great stomps that seemed to shake the earth. They moved through the camp, bonfire flames and floating cinders illuminating their way. All around the dancing monstrosities gyrated. Some stopped and followed Winston, the faithful behind their prophet. Claw studied them. There were beast-people of all kinds, mutants like him. But more were what the Oracle called “trads,” short for “traditional humans.” These were the less favored citizens of Gomorrah, the ones who weren’t implanted with Doctor Chosen’s mysterious technology and thus spared mutation on the day of The Colonel’s attack. In the shifting firelight, they looked just as grotesque, just as crazed as the others. Claw knew that wasn't an illusion. They were just as crazed, they were just as monstrous, and they were made desperate not only by the destruction of Gomorrah but also by their degraded social status. The Oracle hated the trads. Raux, his servant hated the trads. Many of the mutated hated the trads. Gomorrah was mercilessly attacked by New Sparta just days ago and now what was left of that empire was about to turn upon itself in some sort of interspecies conflict. Claw knew if they were to survive they would have to join together; the mutated and the trads. Alone they were too weak. Claw also knew that the Oracle would never allow such a reconciliation. Winston could unite all these refugees. Winston spoke with the authority of Doctor Chosen, the Great Father, a man who’d been made a god by recent events. But as Claw watched the blue monstrosity move through the camp, he doubted more and more that Winston wanted such a reconciliation.
They passed through the camp and came into an open field. The scene looked like some great archaeological dig. By the light of torches and bonfires and a few sets of electrical lights powered by gasping generators, hordes of more refugees dug at the earth by hand. Mounds of wet, excavated dirt lay in disordered heaps. A man wearing only an old pair of mismatched basketball shoes ran wild, a pickaxe in each hand. Red rings around his eyes suggested drugs, which was likely. Those seemed to have survived the attack in abundance.
“This way,” Claw said, careful to motion with the black ‘gift,’ at the end of his arm. He pointed to a crowd of men with dirt covered bodies and beaming faces. They parted at Winston’s approach, opening a path to a 40 foot-long shipping container that was recently unearthed by hand. It had been buried for some time. Rust covered most of its surface. Faded stencil letters on the doors read, "USNU." Winston marched forward. His blue muscled body seems as wide as the container. Animalistic faces gleamed in the light. Lips stretched back to reveal smiles, fangs, asymmetrical tusks. A sledgehammer appeared from nowhere. Winston took it with one hand and smashed the padlock off. Doors creaked on hinges. Lantern light flashed to reveal the buried treasure inside.
Guns. Guns filled the container. They ran along the walls in double rows stacked one over the other. More guns lay spilled across the floor. There were bolt action rifles with wood furniture, sleek black rifles, double-barreled shotguns, compact submachine guns. There were finely tuned pistols, and pistols worth only their weight in scrap. There were unfired and unissued military grade weapons, and pieces that looked like they spent their lifetime on the bottom of the ocean. Machineguns and grenade launchers neighbored mouse guns and boys’ .22 rifles.
The prize of the lot stood on its unfolded bipod on a plywood table in the back of the container. Winston went in to seize it at once, his bulk filled the container. He took the weapon, came out of the container and exposed it to the dizzying firelight. In his hands, he held a gold-plated Russian RPK machinegun, the buttstock and barrel shortened to make it easier to wield. On one side of the receiver, a gold palm tree swayed. On the opposite side, scrolling letters of a foreign language wrote out a single sentence which neither Winston nor Claw could read. The words read:
I am Saddam
Winston held the weapon aloft in a triumphant gesture. The mob around him went wild. They cheered and roared. They snarled and growled.
“These are our gifts,” Winston roared. “Left here for us by the Great Father! Bestowed upon us by his wife, the Earth Mother. We are all their children! We are here to do their bidding. We are their servants. Take up arms.”
The mob surged in, grabbing at whatever weapons were available. Claw watched them. Animal bodies, human bodies, all in a mad dash to arm themselves. There were weapons, Claw noticed. Lots of weapons, but no ammunition to speak of. Claw gritted his teeth. They had arms but no ammo. They had mouths, but no food. They had a bay full of water that they could not drink. They had bonfires but no shelter, the surrounding structures being torn down to fuel the flames, or to build the crazy structure at the edge of the camp. And then there was the divide between the trads and the mutants. This was a fragile society, and Claw doubted if anybody saw it but him.
The mob did its work. Winston motioned Claw aside and they both walked back to the command tent.
“How many does this make?”
“We’ve uncovered four.”
“And how many left?”
“According to Doctor Chosen’s notes, there are 73 containers still buried out here.”
Winston nodded his head and grunted an approval. During Gomorrah’s heyday, the ruling council had all available weapons collected. Most had been publicly destroyed, like the Hitler-ite book burnings of an age before. But some of the weapons, Doctor Chosen had wisely secreted away.
"There are supposed to be vehicles too, military vehicles. We're not sure where Doctor Chosen hid those though. We're still checking his notes.
Winston made another grunt of approval. They continued walking.
They circled around the edge of the camp. On the east side, facing where tomorrow’s sun would rise, they passed the structure. Even now, at night, survivors were hard at work. Most of the surrounding buildings were torn down to feed the many bonfires. But some wood was set aside to build this giant effigy. It had only just begun, a pair of legs not much past the knees were planted there. But in their minds' eye, both Winston and Claw could see what it would be.
“When it’s done, the rising sun will be at his back,” Claw said. “As he looks down upon us.”
“He’s always looking down upon us,” Winston returned. “He and the Earth Mother.” Claw turned to face the king of Gomorrah’s ruins.
“Do you really believe that,” Claw asked. It was a dangerous question to ask. Winston's eyes shone. They were the color of pewter and matched his nail beds and his eyebrows.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Winston laughed. “And it doesn’t matter what you believe. What matters is what they believe.” Winston nodded with his chin at the workers.
When they got back to the tent, the Oracle and Raux were gone. Winston collapsed into a chair and looked up at Claw.
Claw had a multitude of questions. What were they going to do about New Sparta? What might these mutations mean long term? Were the widespread mutations the results of New Sparta’s attack? One of Doctor Chosen’s experiments? The work of an unknown third party? What was going on in the rest of Gomorrah’s empire? And what about all of Doctor Chosen’s research and technology? For decades Doctor Chosen had conducted biotech research and development, with the resources of an entire empire at his disposal, and completely unhampered by a single moral or ethical consideration. The fruits of that R&D was housed in secret laboratories spread all over North America. Not only did they not know what the Doctor’s work yielded, they didn’t even have a solid idea of where those laboratories were located, or even how many there were. For that matter, they didn’t even have a solid idea of what he was working on.
“No questions now,” Claw said.
“I’m hungry,” Winston said. Claw had no doubt he was. Winston was ravenous, always ravenous. How much did he weight? Claw’s guess was 350 pounds, all of it muscle. Even that estimate might be on the low side. It took a lot to fuel that much mass, and Claw also guessed Winston might still be growing. The mutating poison that was turning his hand into a claw was also making Winston grow even bigger.
“Bring me meat,” Winston ordered without looking up at his lieutenant. Claw nodded and left the tent, cursing himself as he went. Winston needed meat, and Claw was the one who brought it to him. The arrangement was proof the whole thing it couldn’t last.
“It is all too fragile, and I’m a coward,” Claw said to himself in a whisper that was barely audible and yet thundered inside his soul.
In addition to his claw, he had an exquisite knife he kept on his belt. It was a quality weapon, made before the protest. The knife was long and sharp, and its blade slanted back into a wicked point. It was dark out. The trads were down in the water.
Claw went to get his master meat, cursing himself as a coward the whole way.
This is the sequel to The Spartan's Last March and begins just after the final events there. If you have not read that entire book, there will be spoilers below.
“[War’s] element of subordination, as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason...”
One of the three elements of Clausewitz’s Remarkable Trinity, from his work, On War.
People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, "Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?"
Revelations 13:4
Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine
Chapter 1
Eight miles high and when you touch down
You'll find that it's stranger than known
The Byrds, Eight Miles High
Cassandra\Claw
The Colonel walked alone into the heart of his enemies, and with a single stroke, he set the world on fire. Claw watched the fire from the bank of the San Francisco Bay. Even now, days later, it still burned, filling the night sky with hell’s illumination. To the west, across the black mirror of water, Gomorrah’s former capital blazed. The western skyline was a red-orange glow, a ribbon of nuclear fury, the testament of Gomorrah’s end. The outline of shattered buildings stood before a background of fire that burned with the fury of the man who destroyed it.
Fires blazed behind claw too. These were the bonfires of the survivors, the mutated and the damned, the insane survivors of this dystopian apocalypse. They’d made their camp here, on the other side of the bay. Away from their capital but close enough to witness its ruination. They came crawling to this place from all over, dragging whatever they could with them. They built their fires and the set to the tasks of the doomed and lunatic. More came every day after the blast and more were still to come. There was no order to any of it, no organization other than the new mad canon that had been born from the flames. It could not last, Claw knew. The weight of that fact pressed down upon him. He sighed heavily, wearily, and the fires raged on, placing their claim upon a world reborn through flame.
Claw wore an olive green military surplus coat. With one hand he smoked a cigarette. The other hand he pushed deeper into one of the coat’s empty pockets. He smoked quietly, his eyes taking in the nightmare landscape. Not far away, naked men and women bathed in the night air. They splashed and soaked in the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Their bodies were smooth, with the clean and symmetrical lines of humanity. By the eerie light of the inferno, he watched a woman spread her legs and fill herself with dirty water, hoping to catch a dose of the fallout, if not for herself, then to mutate the children she might someday bear. Claw didn’t know whether to scream or cry. He took a last puff on his cigarette and flicked it towards the bay. He turned and headed into the camp of the survivors. A rusted remnant of a barbed wire fence attempted to block his path. Affixed to the single wire was a faded metal sign that read, “Naval Weapons Station, Concord California.” Claw stepped over the wire and went to see the boss.
Claw was once called Cassandra, but Cassandra died in the nuclear blast that destroyed the city. Casandra was gone, Gomorrah was gone, Doctor Chosen and the High Council were gone. He never liked the name, Cassandra. If there was one good thing that came out of this whole thing, that was it he supposed. His parents named him Cassandra as some strange form of protest. They believed that gender was an artificial construct, a social fabrication imposed by ancient elites to maintain their control. Claw\Cassandra always thought that odd, that a man and a woman could mate, have offspring, and still think gender was an artificial thing. And his parents did have many offspring, although he was the only one who survived. His brothers and sisters had all been sacrificed to the Earth Mother, pitched from the tops of buildings or ritualistically crushed in public ceremonies, or ritualistically killed by whatever the ritualistic execution fad of the day happened to be. It was only by luck that Claw\Cassandra survived his parents' devotion to the Earth Mother, just as it was only by luck that he'd been outside the city in one of Doctor Chosen's many laboratories when the bomb went off. Luck? Claw wondered if that was the right word as he approached the bonfires of the survivors camped along the bank. They danced in the inferno light, mad celebrants reveling in their survival, reveling in what they thought this calamity meant, reveling in the worship of their new god. Claw thought fate might be a better word than luck.
The bass of drum beats pressed upon his chest, and he entered the disorganized collection of bonfires and dancers. Naked forms, scarred, mutated and grotesque all undulated about him. No, this wasn’t luck. This was fate. But was this a fate he was worthy of? Something in a nearby fire exploded and a swarm of embers shot up into the sky. Firelight shifted and he saw a human face that looked half canine. It cackled. The light shifted again and the face was gone as if only a passing nightmare. Claw pushed his one hand deeper into the pocket, not that it had anywhere to go. He could still feel the burning pain there, where his implanted "gadget," had once been. Like so many of Gomorrah's favored citizens, he had technology implanted into his body, for what purpose, he could no longer remember. He could only remember that for some reason he had to have it. And in those final moments, before the bomb went off, he had to get it out. Pain and some mad-science poison had flowed out of it and into his body, twisting it and wrecking it, infecting him until he finally tore the implant free with his one good hand. The implant was gone, but the damage was done. A hideous testament to his vanity remained.
The tempo of the drums rose. The firelight cast more undulating shadows across the dancers. Each dancer’s face was a twisted monstrosity. Human features turned beastly. Claw saw misshapen eyes. Noses became snouts. Skin became scales. Ears stretched out to points. Teeth elongated to fangs. Maybe luck would have been vaporization in the nuclear blast. Gomorrah was never a society based on logic and reason, but this thing that crawled out of its ashes was insane. Not just a disordered insanity, but an evil one.
“Hell is insanity. And this is hell,” Claw said to himself as he weaved past a host of naked creatures who swayed and weaved and gyrated before a bonfire of stacked refuse. Drums throbbed. Smoke and embers swirled in the air and he saw a pair of glowing yellow, slanted cat-like eyes beckoning him into the darkness. He stalked past them but felt the eyes tracking him long after he passed.
He moved through the camp. At the edge of the firelight, Claw saw and heard more survivors building a tall structure out of scraps of wood. The clap of hammers contrasted with the kettledrum bass of drums. The wooden monument was still in its infancy, but Claw knew what it would be, who it would be, and he could see the image already in his mind’s eye. The wind shifted and his ears picked up the telltale sounds of men digging, unearthing the treasures buried here.
Set aside from the bonfires and crude lean-tos and huts of the survivors was a canvas military tent. It stood alone, olive drab and huge. Two guards stood outside, each swaddled in black robes and red sashes. The firelight danced across them, throwing light and shadow, revealing and hiding. Claw didn’t look at them and they did not challenge him. When he passed them the firelight shifted again but fixed for a short moment. This time the monstrous features did not change. One guard had the yellow eyes and elongated slit irises of a goat. The second guard had a face that dropped on one side and formed an asymmetrical mask marked with a yellow tusk that jutted out diagonally. Both guards bore scars where their gadgets had once been before they, like Claw, had torn them out. It wasn’t the shifting light or tricks of the eye. The mutations were real, products of technology they put into their bodies. From the nuclear fire, they'd all been reborn, reborn as monsters to roam a world once ruled by men.
Claw ducked into the canvas opening of the tent. This was the new reality of Gomorrah, the first step in the new madness. It had been just days since the nuclear fire destroyed their empire and already a new social structure had emerged. At the bottom were those humans who escaped un-mutated, like those bathing in the fallout-polluted waters. Above them were those who had been mutated in the final moments before the atomic flash; Gomorrah’s former elites with their surgically implanted technology. But at the top of the caste system, at the very top were the ones who been mutated long before the attack. Those who Doctor Chosen has personally selected and modified. The ones who had received what was now being called the Doctor’s “Gift.”
Claw stopped just inside the tent. The light was different in here and his eyes had to adjust to it. As he stood, he heard a deep and familiar voice that filled the tent.
“Claw… Claw… Don’t hide your gift. Reveal it for the world to see.”
Claw’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. At the back of the tent, an enormous form took shape. It was human, or at least humanoid. Thickly muscled limbs sprouted out of a body that seemed all chest and shoulders. An oval head sat upon a bull’s neck. The man was hairless, save for eyebrows and eyelashes that were pewter in color, as were the beds of the man’s fingernails. Claw’s eyes discerned more colors and could see the man’s skin was the color blue. This was the lord of whatever was left of Gomorrah. This was Winston Indigo. He was one of Doctor’s Chosen’s genetic experiments. Once upon a time, he was also the doctor’s lover. And now, this man-giant was the inheritor of all that Doctor Chosen had left behind.
“Take it out,” Winston said. His deep voice matched his muscled body. “Don’t be ashamed, Claw. Show the world what the Great Father blessed you with.”
Claw removed the other hand from his coat pocket and held it up into the tent’s dim light. The tips of each finger and thumb were withering and had turned black at the tips. The little finger looked like it might fall off in the very near future, and indeed it would. Jutting out of the hand between the second and third fingers was the tip of a black, hooked claw. Three inches of it were out now, but the talon was growing as the rest of Claw\Cassandra’s hand was dying. Further up the arm, between the claw and the elbow, a wrap of dirty bandages marked where the gadget had been ripped out.
“It smells,” Claw said. “It’s probably infected.”
“It is your blessing,” hissed a voice from deeper in the shadows of the tent. “The Great Father would not have spared you only to have you die of some infection.” Claw saw two more forms in the tent, shadows within the shadows. He knew who they were and ignored them for now. His loyalty lay with Winston.
“We unearthed another container,” Claw said to his massive, blue¬-skinned, lord.
“What’s inside,” Winston asked. He’d been seated behind a desk improvised from plywood and sawhorses. Now the man stood, his giant’s muscles stretching and flexing. He stood more than seven feet tall, without an ounce of fat anywhere. He looks like Paul Bunyan's blue ox, Claw thought, but of course, he did not say that.
“More of the same I expect,” Claw answered. “But we didn’t open it. I thought you might want to be there for the unveiling.”
The voice in the back of the tent hissed again.
“The son of the Great Father has more important things to do than supervise common errands.”
Claw knew it was an insult. Not an overt one, but an insult just the same. He gritted his teeth. He wanted to say something but couldn’t think of anything and so he just tensed at the harsh words. Winston turned toward the hissing voice. Claw couldn’t tell if Winston’s face held approval or a rebuke.
Damn, Claw cursed himself. He’d never been one for conflict. He’d always been more than a little timid, always eager to demonstrate his loyal compliance, his subservience. That was perhaps why he’d held a position in one of Doctor Chosen’s laboratories for so long. But this new world and his new position within it would require from him more than compliance and loyal submission. In the past, he'd been able to squeak by. Those days ended with Casandra’s death in the nuclear flash. If what was left of Gomorrah was to survive, he’d have to stand up for himself and stand for his beliefs. No small amount of self-doubt filled Claw.
Luckily tonight Winston came to his rescue, at least in a roundabout way.
“Turn on the light,” the deep voice boomed.
“The light hurts his eyes,” another voice hissed. This one was feminine and strangely feline, and filled with an angry cat’s hissing malice.
“Turn it on,” Winston thundered back immediately. His voice shook the tent. Claw saw veins on that thick, blue, bullish neck pop out.
A switch in the back of the tent clicked. A small electric lantern on the floor filled the back corner of the tent with a dim blue light that barely rose above the floor. Two figures became visible. One, old and frail, lay sprawled across an army surplus cot. The head was a checkerboard, with patches of long stringy white hair and bald patches where the hair had fallen out. The limbs were thin and twisted around, as if by some super strand of polio. On this broken figure’s left forearm, the titanium casing of a gadget still gleamed.
Take that damned thing out of your body, Claw thought. But this too he didn’t say aloud.
“She’s right,” The old man croaked. “The light does hurt my eyes. But for the son of the Great Father, I can endure.”
The figure next to the old man purred. It was a she, and she brought a damp cloth to the old man’s forehead and delicately patted it. She had neither gadget, nor the mark of a gadget, yet she looked beastly too. She was naked, save for some golden chains she wore around her wrists and ankles, and the piercings scattered all over her body; rings and small barbells in gold and copper and bronze. Her skin was honey brown, her head shaved down to a fine stumble, her front teeth filed down to sharp points.
“The Oracle is not well,” she hissed.
The Oracle is not well because the Oracle needs to rip that technological poison out of his body, Claw thought again.
“The Oracle needs to relax, and so do you Raux,” Winston said firmly. “The Great Father left me in charge. The Great Father buried those containers here for us. Claw is right. I should be there when they crack them open. The people need me, and they need my leadership.”
The woman, Raux, drew her lips back into a sneer, revealing the perfectly white, filed teeth of a cannibal. The Oracle reclined on his cot and brought a limp hand to his head, like some Victorian woman afflicted with the vapors. He let out a soft whimper.
“So they do. But beware the trads, my son. This is not their world anymore. They cannot be trusted.” Claw narrowed his eyes but said nothing to the Oracle. Seconds later he again cursed himself for his cowardice in not speaking up.
Claw and Winston left the tent. The giant ducked low to clear the opening, then moved in great stomps that seemed to shake the earth. They moved through the camp, bonfire flames and floating cinders illuminating their way. All around the dancing monstrosities gyrated. Some stopped and followed Winston, the faithful behind their prophet. Claw studied them. There were beast-people of all kinds, mutants like him. But more were what the Oracle called “trads,” short for “traditional humans.” These were the less favored citizens of Gomorrah, the ones who weren’t implanted with Doctor Chosen’s mysterious technology and thus spared mutation on the day of The Colonel’s attack. In the shifting firelight, they looked just as grotesque, just as crazed as the others. Claw knew that wasn't an illusion. They were just as crazed, they were just as monstrous, and they were made desperate not only by the destruction of Gomorrah but also by their degraded social status. The Oracle hated the trads. Raux, his servant hated the trads. Many of the mutated hated the trads. Gomorrah was mercilessly attacked by New Sparta just days ago and now what was left of that empire was about to turn upon itself in some sort of interspecies conflict. Claw knew if they were to survive they would have to join together; the mutated and the trads. Alone they were too weak. Claw also knew that the Oracle would never allow such a reconciliation. Winston could unite all these refugees. Winston spoke with the authority of Doctor Chosen, the Great Father, a man who’d been made a god by recent events. But as Claw watched the blue monstrosity move through the camp, he doubted more and more that Winston wanted such a reconciliation.
They passed through the camp and came into an open field. The scene looked like some great archaeological dig. By the light of torches and bonfires and a few sets of electrical lights powered by gasping generators, hordes of more refugees dug at the earth by hand. Mounds of wet, excavated dirt lay in disordered heaps. A man wearing only an old pair of mismatched basketball shoes ran wild, a pickaxe in each hand. Red rings around his eyes suggested drugs, which was likely. Those seemed to have survived the attack in abundance.
“This way,” Claw said, careful to motion with the black ‘gift,’ at the end of his arm. He pointed to a crowd of men with dirt covered bodies and beaming faces. They parted at Winston’s approach, opening a path to a 40 foot-long shipping container that was recently unearthed by hand. It had been buried for some time. Rust covered most of its surface. Faded stencil letters on the doors read, "USNU." Winston marched forward. His blue muscled body seems as wide as the container. Animalistic faces gleamed in the light. Lips stretched back to reveal smiles, fangs, asymmetrical tusks. A sledgehammer appeared from nowhere. Winston took it with one hand and smashed the padlock off. Doors creaked on hinges. Lantern light flashed to reveal the buried treasure inside.
Guns. Guns filled the container. They ran along the walls in double rows stacked one over the other. More guns lay spilled across the floor. There were bolt action rifles with wood furniture, sleek black rifles, double-barreled shotguns, compact submachine guns. There were finely tuned pistols, and pistols worth only their weight in scrap. There were unfired and unissued military grade weapons, and pieces that looked like they spent their lifetime on the bottom of the ocean. Machineguns and grenade launchers neighbored mouse guns and boys’ .22 rifles.
The prize of the lot stood on its unfolded bipod on a plywood table in the back of the container. Winston went in to seize it at once, his bulk filled the container. He took the weapon, came out of the container and exposed it to the dizzying firelight. In his hands, he held a gold-plated Russian RPK machinegun, the buttstock and barrel shortened to make it easier to wield. On one side of the receiver, a gold palm tree swayed. On the opposite side, scrolling letters of a foreign language wrote out a single sentence which neither Winston nor Claw could read. The words read:
I am Saddam
Winston held the weapon aloft in a triumphant gesture. The mob around him went wild. They cheered and roared. They snarled and growled.
“These are our gifts,” Winston roared. “Left here for us by the Great Father! Bestowed upon us by his wife, the Earth Mother. We are all their children! We are here to do their bidding. We are their servants. Take up arms.”
The mob surged in, grabbing at whatever weapons were available. Claw watched them. Animal bodies, human bodies, all in a mad dash to arm themselves. There were weapons, Claw noticed. Lots of weapons, but no ammunition to speak of. Claw gritted his teeth. They had arms but no ammo. They had mouths, but no food. They had a bay full of water that they could not drink. They had bonfires but no shelter, the surrounding structures being torn down to fuel the flames, or to build the crazy structure at the edge of the camp. And then there was the divide between the trads and the mutants. This was a fragile society, and Claw doubted if anybody saw it but him.
The mob did its work. Winston motioned Claw aside and they both walked back to the command tent.
“How many does this make?”
“We’ve uncovered four.”
“And how many left?”
“According to Doctor Chosen’s notes, there are 73 containers still buried out here.”
Winston nodded his head and grunted an approval. During Gomorrah’s heyday, the ruling council had all available weapons collected. Most had been publicly destroyed, like the Hitler-ite book burnings of an age before. But some of the weapons, Doctor Chosen had wisely secreted away.
"There are supposed to be vehicles too, military vehicles. We're not sure where Doctor Chosen hid those though. We're still checking his notes.
Winston made another grunt of approval. They continued walking.
They circled around the edge of the camp. On the east side, facing where tomorrow’s sun would rise, they passed the structure. Even now, at night, survivors were hard at work. Most of the surrounding buildings were torn down to feed the many bonfires. But some wood was set aside to build this giant effigy. It had only just begun, a pair of legs not much past the knees were planted there. But in their minds' eye, both Winston and Claw could see what it would be.
“When it’s done, the rising sun will be at his back,” Claw said. “As he looks down upon us.”
“He’s always looking down upon us,” Winston returned. “He and the Earth Mother.” Claw turned to face the king of Gomorrah’s ruins.
“Do you really believe that,” Claw asked. It was a dangerous question to ask. Winston's eyes shone. They were the color of pewter and matched his nail beds and his eyebrows.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Winston laughed. “And it doesn’t matter what you believe. What matters is what they believe.” Winston nodded with his chin at the workers.
When they got back to the tent, the Oracle and Raux were gone. Winston collapsed into a chair and looked up at Claw.
Claw had a multitude of questions. What were they going to do about New Sparta? What might these mutations mean long term? Were the widespread mutations the results of New Sparta’s attack? One of Doctor Chosen’s experiments? The work of an unknown third party? What was going on in the rest of Gomorrah’s empire? And what about all of Doctor Chosen’s research and technology? For decades Doctor Chosen had conducted biotech research and development, with the resources of an entire empire at his disposal, and completely unhampered by a single moral or ethical consideration. The fruits of that R&D was housed in secret laboratories spread all over North America. Not only did they not know what the Doctor’s work yielded, they didn’t even have a solid idea of where those laboratories were located, or even how many there were. For that matter, they didn’t even have a solid idea of what he was working on.
“No questions now,” Claw said.
“I’m hungry,” Winston said. Claw had no doubt he was. Winston was ravenous, always ravenous. How much did he weight? Claw’s guess was 350 pounds, all of it muscle. Even that estimate might be on the low side. It took a lot to fuel that much mass, and Claw also guessed Winston might still be growing. The mutating poison that was turning his hand into a claw was also making Winston grow even bigger.
“Bring me meat,” Winston ordered without looking up at his lieutenant. Claw nodded and left the tent, cursing himself as he went. Winston needed meat, and Claw was the one who brought it to him. The arrangement was proof the whole thing it couldn’t last.
“It is all too fragile, and I’m a coward,” Claw said to himself in a whisper that was barely audible and yet thundered inside his soul.
In addition to his claw, he had an exquisite knife he kept on his belt. It was a quality weapon, made before the protest. The knife was long and sharp, and its blade slanted back into a wicked point. It was dark out. The trads were down in the water.
Claw went to get his master meat, cursing himself as a coward the whole way.