Der große Schlange
[The Great Snake]
The blue thermolite wall rises, its blocky, bony stegosaurus plates alternating on its back: the rotating surveillance towers, Cyclops-like red eyes scanning the two halves of the city, the two faces of Berlin-Brandenburg, the seven Bezirks scattered East and West. They call it the Great Snake: a 175-kilometer wall splitting the megalopolis, a tongueless reptile which swallowed old freedom, after squeezing it in its tough coils, muscles made of bends defining new borders and districts, camps of madness and gardens of blood. The Great Snake who has no need to molt: his unbreakable skin—polyresin cladding, belts with flexible water portholes, camo scales with their invisible pigments—challenges time itself.
Die Berliner Mauer II: that is the real name of the Great Snake—slightly vibrating to set the geometries of its fan-like metal layers, the mobile structure of the inside of its belly, an unending light alloy tunnel branching from esophagi to livers, until it reaches the very end. No tail, no ass, north and south are the same: two identical heads. But freedom is a real motherfucker of a prey; strong teeth are not enough, and neither are swiveling jaws and powerful enzymes. To digest it, you need brainy acids; troops able to grind down small pieces, pulverize spinal cords, dent DNA, fuck it up among the grooves of its microscopic spirals, carve a neural alarm, make it cry out in the genetic memory of the species. Because that prey does not only need to be liquefied and funneled into the cesspit; it must be extinct, and quickly. The Great Snake possesses special enzymes in its chambers, the Republic militia and their rich arsenals; a pedophile president with his toothless ministers; mazes of isolation cells, labs, and accommodations.
The stuffing of the Great Snake governs the megalopolis, it lives inside its long stomach. Inside the new Wall, protected and sealed, with a belly sixty meters wide. A fattened up and sleepy Great Wall of China, leaving to the gangs, to the motherfuckers outside, the dirty work in Bezirks 5, 6, and 7—the East macro-area of Berlin-Brandenburg. Genetic and anthropologic experimentation, differentiation of activities, religion, and social philosophy. Nothing to share with the macroscopics of East and West Berlin of yore, with tanks and border checkpoints where marines and Cossacks would glare at each other. Old freedom, screwed once again, wanders the city with torn stockings and a purse full of condoms and cyanide pills. Ass sunk in the puritan West and cunt-view from the weird East.
The megalopolis shits all its stuff into immense, futuristic sewers, uniting turds of different cultures and shapes. Underground, without walls and snakes, everything mixes, out of range from the Cyclops eyes of the surveillance towers. Galleries, ducts, funnels, gluey cesspits governed by the Invisibles, die Unsichtbare, camouflaged rats always hard at work, sub-humans armed to their teeth: the government of Berlin-Brandenburg calls them terrorists. Their miraculously-cured commander, Jesus, spits into the city every day a few of his modern kamikazes—human rats stuffed with explosive—via the inspection gateways riddling the sewers here and there. He’s having a ball, pissing off the President and his orgy of ministers with Cloud-6-fucked brains, tearing to pieces citizens of both East and West macro-areas, zero discrimination. A blind Robin Hood stealing souls, bombing everyone to give back nothing to nobody. The underground god of Berlin-Brandenburg is very successful, though; he is charming. Many a wretch chooses to take shelter under the arches of Jesus’s Venice and its shit canals, anything to get away from the absurdity of the surface, be it East or West. Become rats with tails of enriched uranium; be fucked in the ass by suppositories of neo plastrite; swallow down and spit out bombs. Jesus, the sewer Messiah, has a white, byzantine visage, and a row of rotted teeth. He walks on the black waters on submarine-mice and floating garbage. The Vault is not that of Heaven: it is grey-blue, embellished by saliva nests of strange mutated roaches—but that doesn’t matter. Imagination turns everything into stars, even squirts of phosphorescent radioactive shit on the walls of the huge tunnels.
Actually, just like the surface city, the undergrounds of Berlin-Brandenburg are two as well. Jesus—Felix Kraus’s divine nom de guerre—is half a king, after all. The ghost stations of the maglev subway are undisputed dominion of the Fakirs, die Fakire.
Good luck fucking with those guys; damn lepers, nutjobs with cryptonium needles all over their bodies, animals feeding on cadmic butterflies and smoking fumes of Cloud 2—New Moon Corporation’s only commercial flop on the super-drug market, recalled two weeks after launch due to its appalling side effects. Illumination, ghost Nirvana, the subway train which never stops. The Fakirs’ bodies harbor so many infections that they could drop you dead by just looking at you. But that’s not a problem: the ghost stations were cut off from the network after the division of the city, nobody and nothing going down there anymore: they are four-credit territories, they aren’t worth anything. Many believe that the Fakirs of Berlin are an urban legend, or a simple evolution of the old clochards; only organized, more pissed off and poisoned, in every sense. But does it make any sense going there to discover the truth? Descending into those hells of rags, among post-Uxor spiky lepers, only to catch some bug? Fuck it, the shitty Fakirs can keep their ghost stations.
The sewer Invisibles are something else entirely: they do politics, they want to change the world, certainly not melting their minds in absurd rituals. In fact, Jesus is the most wanted man in Berlin-Brandenburg; his video messages, with the usual backdrop of sewers and excrement caves, are everywhere, viral. Nobody ever talks about the Fakirs, while at the imperial office of Basilius Peters, President of the megalopolis, meetings are continually called to discuss strategies with the militia chieftains, and all in order to get that piece of shit and hang him to one of the surveillance towers of the Great Snake. Peters will burst out with rage, one day, he and his two hundred and ten kilos of entrails. Any conflagration in the city makes the membranes of his perfect Wall tremble, together with the bear paws of his throne and the rocks of his fish tank, hosting his precious Venusian microdepolis; and every time, the President’s liver swells a little more. His face reddening with blood climbing up fat tissues, not giving a fuck about gravity, to gurgle in the ducts of his neck until it is level with his eyes. They call President Peters der Kröte Rot, the Red Toad. They always take the piss out of him for that. And his liver keeps swelling.
Toad Peters and Diemo Hollert, leader of the government militia—the Hunde ohne Zähne, Toothless Dogs, as they are called in the East half of the city—keep the West macro-area of Berlin-Brandenburg under strict control: their experimental citizen-imprinting program is going full sails ahead. Die Puritaner, the Puritans of that macro-area—Bezirks 1, 2, 3, and 4—live in a cold and wonderful system of methodical technocracy. Alcohol, drugs, prostitution, gambling, thought and criticism…they are long-eradicated viruses. On the citizens’ neck, at their birth, the rationalizer is installed: a next-gen biomechanical system directly linked to their hypophysis, programmed—according to age and standard variables—to release neural inputs and doses of assorted chemicals. Basically, all behaviors of the West Puritans are massively standardized, via aimed technoneural and pharmacologic interventions. Serial characters defined by Peters’ Identität charts following five viable typologies.
All the great wealth of human differences is reduced to that: classes and predefined codes, shades of nothingness.
The imprinting works with ninety-nine point seven percent of the citizens: the West zone of the city is a quiet mine of trained, chained dorks. Flesh-and-bone robots, gathering every Sunday in the Palaces of Solidarity for coexistence seminaries, where specialized technicians behind the scenes install software updates on their rationalizers, while extrapolating stats from the individual person-system. Complete evaluation, including the number of wanks escaped form homologation. Finally, after listening to the word of the Lord—the Government—you have to pass through a particularly high-tech confessional. After all, you have to clock in if you wish to keep living in your assigned concrete box, to keep working in the factories together with other robots—actual ones made of aluminum, meridium and omega circuits, endowed with more functionalities and autonomy than you, and a telescopic cock longer than yours; it is them, managing all human activities. Flesh slaves and iron directors. And then a government of a few, out of the system, cooking themselves in a boiling broth of Cloud 6. A royal court of madmen and perverts, programming dedicated slaves to satisfy their every pleasure. Raping and dismembering to vent unspeakable drives—or just to kill time during the intervals between the damned bombs, Jesus’s terrorist attacks—that bastard sewer god.
The twelve old districts of the city were reduced to seven. West zone was divided in Bezirk 1 (Mitte/Friedricshain Kreuzberg), 2 (Spandau/Reinickendorf), 3 (Charlotteburg Wilmersdorf/Steglitz Zehlendorf), 4 (Tempelhof/Shoneberg); while the East zone counts Bezirk 5 (Pankow), 6 (Lichtenberg/Marzahn Hellersdorf), and the notorious 7 (Neukolln/Treptow Kopenick)—more like a Circle of Hell than a Bezirk.
Suburban areas were instead normalized in concentric circles: Sphere 1 to 5, until the outmost borders of the megalopolis.
The West macro-area is very different from its East counterpart: the government has (informally) delegated control of Bezirks 5, 6, and 7 to the worst motherfuckers, criminals capable of moving cash quickly, without qualms. Experimentation, mass control, rationalized workforce: okay, but then you need vice to fill up your safes with dilitium ingots. So, the East zone allows prostitution, including wide-scale exploitation, gambling, diffusion of authorized drugs, and trade of human meat. Post-Uxor gold. A world ever poorer of protein, ever more gluttonous for meat; hard-to-find, precious goods. An underground commerce, very profitable, mainly managed by criminal organizations. Anthropophagy is slowly being legalized in a few countries, and secret experimental projects have been launched, like a slaughterhouse-prison in the Mesoamerican Republic and even one under construction on the Moon; or the “body factory” of Białystok, the albinos’ colony of the military State of Warsaw, which recently began dynamic-cloning production of almost tasteless stuff reminding of human meat as for texture and structure—should you want to taste human meat but you cannot afford it. Surrogates. The Government of Berlin-Brandenburg could not certainly ignore this new worldwide trend and dutifully making a profit out of it.
The new Berlin Wall, the Great Snake, divides the Puritans from the Cannibals, die Kannibalen. Eighty meters of distance, considering the two ten-meter-wide corridors of death—moats, dug at the base of the Wall on either side. No crocodiles or other toothy reptiles: that oil-black water does not hide anything alive. Melter 45 dynamos—installed on the bottom every twenty meters—can detect contact with external organisms, following well-set alienity criteria. At the right moment, in case of water trespassing, those electric engines discharge high-voltage to immediately fry any unlucky swimmer or fugitive. Anything bigger than rat-sized, a matter of kilos: you end up like flies and mosquitoes, disintegrated in less than a second.
The blue thermolite Wall splits the two halves of the megalopolis, pisses out oil night and day. Shouts inside its Blue sector, people head-butting the walls. They are the fattened-up citizens in the cells, slaughtered for dinner. Pigs with malfunctioning rationalizers. Shouts, in the Presidential sectors; very different ones, cries of pleasure. They are the high notes of the Red Toad, screwing some boy and sucking him like a New Scotland oyster. A constrictor-emperor and his coils of fat.
West macro-area, Hallesches Ufer, Bezirk 4. Night. An unadjusted Puritan approaches the wall, the Great Snake shakes the magnetic rattles of its tail, seventy kilometers farther. The man is no longer afraid of the thermolite walls of the reptile, and neither of the snipers on the towers, watching through their infrared visors the warm areas of his thin body tinted in orange. Those motherfuckers are scanning the digestion of his dinner, the map of his blood vessels, the boiling-red gushes of acids at work. The Puritan is getting too close; he slowly advances with his five-year-old kid in his arms. The snipers exchange a glance and load their pulse machine-guns. Progress slider at 75%.
“Can I shoot the wanker? I’ll leave you the boy if you like.”
“Wait, let’s see what the fuck he thinks he’s doing.”
The Puritan reaches the rim of the electric moat, shields his eyes against the spotlights pointed upon him, turning him into a scorching star. He raises his eyes to the back of the Great Snake, then higher, up to that broken moon that does not give a fuck about East and West. He thinks the bastards will manage to build a Wall even among those craters, soon. Shifting pandemic of glinting measles—the snipers’ laser-sights, small red circles quickly sliding on his chest, on his son’s head, who dreams following the schedule of his rationalizer. The mind leech, grafted in his flesh, its antennae branching out inside that small brain. But the man’s electronic parasite is malfunctioning: the Puritan is getting back to see with his own eyes, widening the pores of his no-longer-filtered senses. The air is crisp, but awareness burns.
The snipers need to stretch their muscles, they need a fix of adrenaline after a six-hour shift.
“So? What are we doing?”
“Easy, let’s give them a few seconds more. Look, down there, that whore under Building 9. Must be his wife…maybe she’ll reach him and we’ll have a triple target for us. A few seconds, then I’ll start with the wanker’s legs.”
“Okay, but don’t kill them, let me work a little, too…the whore isn’t fucking moving, anyway.”
The Puritan guesses the snipers’ moves: with a jerk, he stretches his arm and drops his son into the moat, the Acheron of Berlin-Brandenburg. Sparks, thick smoke, the child vanishes as soon as he touches the surface, which swallows with satisfaction; in an instant, the water is quiet once again.
“Shit! What a damn son of a bitch! Shoot, now!”
The snipers immediately tear apart the crazed Puritan, leaving him no time to dive into the moat to follow his son. He croaks on the rim. The woman under building 9, two hundred meters away, grabs her face in her hands. Her rationalizer short circuits, spits sparks. More sparks.
««—»»
Der Herzogin
[The Duchess]
East macro-area, Bezirk 7/Neukolln/ Treptow Kopenick. Treskowallee - FKK Krimisa.
Dunja’s white face sinks and emerges between the neutex armchairs of the videodrome at the Krimisa FKK (Frei Koelper Kultur)—one of the one hundred and forty brothels of the district. Whores with small tits are very sough-after, the fad of dynamic silicone and pump prostheses is long over, in Berlin-Brandenburg. Dunja is precious goods; she is working on Fischer’s august groin—one of the most important customers of the whorehouse, the man controlling seventy percent of human meat import from New France. His supplying business, Fischer Kreative Delikatessen, is a guarantee. High quality, no prion disease, packaging in iceblock parcels within twenty-four hours from the slaughter. It is all thanks to Fischer’s work, and his illegal connections—his pig-pink vans hustling on the streets of Bezirks 5, 6, 7—if restaurants in the East macro-area can rely on excellent raw material, suitable to satisfy the richest, most gluttonous customers.
Fischer, in his golden-striped bathrobe, has gotten tired of having his cock sucked in the videodrome; he motions the scrawny Achmed, the brothel field marshal following him like a shadow. The man approaches, bends over, brings his ear close to the customer’s oily mouth, sucking in his words, understanding, arranging.
Dunja is immediately moved to the third floor of the Krimisa, to one of the Alpha suites. Old Fischer wishes for something different, after a long day’s work. As he himself could put it, you need something creative, at three a.m., to end in style.
Everything is possible in this FKK, everything for a price, and Fischer’s card has virtually infinite credits. Small-titted Dunja waits for his knight in the suite Alpha 2; two operators are prepping her, oiling her body with a thick cream of rosemary, synthetic hazelnut, ionized melon pulp, and a sprinkle of smoked salt with red elm bark. Ways of technology, and of the Eklund molecular enricher, recently engineered by Viking scientists and immediately put on the elitist market of luxury pleasure. Cutting-edge gear never lacks at the Krimisa FKK.
In Dunja’s neck, they install an emotion paroxyzer—same tech, very different purpose than the Puritans’ rationalizers, which dictate the sporadic sexual activity of the citizens of the loser West, following precise rates and short fertility timeframes. Controlled reproduction, to keep the necessary workforce balanced. Masturbation, on the other side of the Wall, is prohibited and severely sanctioned—those few times it eludes the behavior algorithms of the rationalizers.
The king of Kreative Delikatessen makes his entrance in the Alpha 2 suite, paroxyzer remote in hand and a crooked demiurge grin. His aura is a big black umbrella. Many buttons and programs to choose: Dunja will materialize every fantasy of her excellent lech, even the most extreme, without flinching and with absolute self-denial and enthusiasm.
Fischer does not waste time: he selects one of his favorite programs—among the weirdest. Combo: triangle button twice, then circle. Thousands of credits quickly transfer into Madame Beate’s—the brothel-keeper—account. Dunja is now activated, with the bittersweet scent of her naked flesh sucked into Fischer’s powerful nostrils. She opens the V-Kühlschrank, the pleasure fridge of the suite, rummages among the available instruments, pulls out a Miller electronic scalpel.
Fischer sits on the bed and waits for the procedure. His tight-shaped whore begins carving her own small right breast, frying the circumference with the rotating, glowing green head of the laser scalpel, cutting and cauterizing tissues. The arachnoid metal legs of the frame—a giant harvestman—allow her to carve a perfect circle on her chest, with shining edges. Dunja finishes the job in a few seconds, then she bends again into the pleasure fridge, to look for other things. Fischer enjoys the sight of that so-white ass swaying, he is already thinking about the next combo to key in with his remote. Twice square button, then yellow bumper. The whore finds what she needs: a mesosilicone suction cup, with pump extractors on its flexible stem. She sits close to the lech, lets the instrument suck in her already-carved right breast, moving it into its transparent volume, then she unfastens it, extending the extractors to lay the tit down, limply, on Fischer’s scrotum. Dunja doesn’t bleed; her eyes are shot with strange azure blood: the viral sap of the paroxyzer. That stuff floats in her gaze. Eyes of alien sewers, methane swamps, galleries of hydrocarbon grains.
Fischer grabs the whore’s piece of meat, brushes it to enjoy the crumbling of soft glands among his stubby fingers, then he begins rubbing himself, massaging his body with Dunja’s right breast, a still-living sponge, almost pulsating.
“Now get back and suck it: you’ll taste me, while I taste your well-seasoned tender flesh.”
Fischer’s voice is hoarse, a miniaturized demon hiding among his vocal chords, as he plucks them like a harp of cartilages, suggesting words and thoughts with his silicone horns and his electric ray tail.
“Good girl, like that, slowly. Later, I want to try a stew of your buttocks, they look really tasty. That beast biting your neck will order you as much.”
Fischer lies on the bed spreading his arms like a Babylon emperor dreaming about ejaculating in a thick, sprawling rain upon all his dominion. Over lands, people, provinces, titanic roads. His bliss has a double source: Dunja’s tongue and the taste of her small tit, discharged by his molars as they carefully grind the wonderful fruit of meat. Squeezing out its nectar.
“You, wanker, piss off now! I’ll call for you later.”
Fischer is ordering the thin Achmed, who’s staring at the wall of the room, to leave him alone in the suite with his whore—but that is against the security rules of the FKK.
“Please, sir, you know I can’t. Madame would use me for dog food.”
Achmed shakes; it is not easy to deal with Fischer, but he always must attend in person to the most demanding customers. The brothel field marshal cannot delegate such things to simple standard operators.
“Out, now!”
No way: Achmed is forced to unlock the sliding door, get out of the suite and wait for the customer in the Alpha hall. Isocronic panels line the convex walls of the long burrow, broadcasting hypnotic series of fleshy images. Macrovisions of the lunacies that customers are testing on the tissues of the whores on shift inside the suites. No faces, total discretion; only zooms on heaps of squeezed cells. The Alpha hall has large eyes and many doors. It can see far like the space telescope Kepler IV, which managed to show the asses—without underwear—of many new exoplanets hanging outside our Solar System. Well-endowed gyroscopes.
The mesmerizing effect of the hall panels, amplified by the magnets installed in the golden stripes of the Krimisa bathrobes, eases the spreading of anthropophagy, the petroleum of Bezirk 7. A regression to a primal state, to basic drives, thanks to the ass-kicking of interferences, magnetic reveries.
Fischer takes advantage of the nosy field marshal’s absence to overindulge. Fuck security rules and all the other bullshit of this place. He orders Dunja, his mono-breast flesh toy, to kneel between his legs. He wants to fiddle with the paroxyzer on the woman’s neck, to increase its power tenfold, to see what happens if he sets its parameters to max. His index finger taps and taps on the + button, the red LED turns on. Dunja’s paroxyzer is over-revving, a cocktail of several stimulating substances shot into the whore’s bloodstream. Her eyes flip up. Fischer gloats; the galloping chemical Trojan horse he has let loose bucks more and more inside Dunja’s drives: soon, it will show all its effects. The blue fluid now fills the whore’s eye sockets, begins trickling from her nose.
“Come on, slut, let me see what you can do.”
She gets back to the pleasure fridge, moving slower now; her ass is no longer dancing, her legs look stiff, her muscles poured over with plaster. The ludicrous gait of a mannequin, of first-gen gynedroids, the old suck-dolls, endowed with incredibly generous tits, phthalate jelly mouths and conditioned vaginas. That stuff never really sold—just slightly better than a proper wank. Sewers and landfills are still full of those electric sluts, half-dismantled, still sucking the empty air after years, automatically swallowing encrypted butterflies. Nobody turned off the deionic engines stuck up those rubber asses. Synthetic hearts that need more than thirty years to croak, to stop. Social rats and creaking blowjobs, Jesus and his bombs, nets of umbilical cords fishing warped embryos…you never get bored in the sewers of Berlin-Brandenburg. Always a very busy place, underwater and not.
“What are you looking for? Come here, let me see…”
Dunja’s head reappears from the V-Kühlschrank and she suddenly turns toward Fischer, who springs to his feet letting his venerable paunch vibrate. His limp dick, the old snail surviving between his legs, contracts in hiding. The man is only armed with those seven centimeters and his precious remote.
“What do you want to do with that? Stay the fuck away!”
Fischer pushes the buttons, every combination, but Dunja’s paroxyzer is out of control. The whore approaches, without bending her blocked knees. She is holding in her hands a Metzelder chainsaw; that thing is no joke. Fischer knows that well: he used that stuff to cut off a little girl’s arms, years ago. Today, she works at the Krimisa as a living statue, a post-Greek bust painted in cobalt blue, a mutilated Aphrodite installed on the ramp of the ground floor, illuminated by Nydrix spotlights and connected to the walls, to the bio-system keeping her alive via synthetic veins simulating the tentacles of a deviant Kraken and Medusa snakes. The customers of the brothel piss in her mouth before reaching their rooms, or the videodrome and the other attractions of the FKK. An old propitiatory rite. The Kraken with all its bulges, on red background, is the symbol of the place—of the human-meat addiction which squeezes you a little tighter every time, once you try it, tensing its oceanic muscles, the unexpected suckers of anthropophagy, ancient submerged perversions.
The dark, fast teeth of the chain scream loud; the threatening Dunja tries to reach Fischer. She wants his flesh…she wants to cut. The lech flees around the bed, his expired vanilla puddings jolting at every turn. Ruined skin, urine wakes.
“Achmed! Achmed!”
The field marshal swoops in, hands in his hair, and he runs out of the delirious room.
“Where the fuck are you going! Help me, Achmed!”
Fischer trips over, falls down, bouncing on the yellowish moquette: the lech sees the big black circles printed on it in a pair pattern—psychedelic brothel decoration—as the eyes of Death staring right at him, a few millimeters from his face, from his gullet trickling with sweat and adrenaline.
Dunja is above him, her muscles ever stiffer, her eyes of blue ink, black hair standing on end, spread around as pulled up by invisible magnets. The whore can hardly move, her mouth warps with the strain. She manages to raise the chainsaw and aim for the lech’s ass, on display there, where a lot of meat is piled up. Megalopolis of cells, overpopulation. The Metzelder chain is scorching, Fischer feels his stuff whisked, the metal teeth chewing, grinding so fast that pain cannot really catch up with them.
Three shots, Dunja’s skull explodes. The chainsaw drops on the floor, biting at the air, running around in circles.
Fischer—bloodied ass and brain almost shut down—glimpses three figures at the door of the suite. The scrawny Achmed in foreground: it’s he who holds the precision micro-grenade launcher XM35, he who has squeezed the trigger. In the background, two blurred women watch the scene; they seem to be talking to each other. The lech loses consciousness; he won’t easily forget his last adventure at the Krimisa, but he will make it, as always. He will be back to piss into his Aphrodite, to enjoy more delicacies.
“Another fuck-up like that and I’m having that chainsaw used on you, for hours. Outside and inside.”
It is not Madame Beate talking—the brothel-keeper no longer has blood to color her face—but the Duchess, someone way higher than her. A completely different category, you know that well if you live in Berlin-Brandenburg. It is pure chance that she is at one of her many businesses.
“Fischer is a Class A customer; he manages most of my trades with New France. A precious resource, but you should know that. Beate, I have no time to waste here: deal quickly with the customer, and with your fucking eunuch guard. Now.”
Achmed’s bony body, dressed in a red circus jacket—a lion-tamer’s—flies down from the top floor of the FKK. It crashes into the large pool at the entrance, one of the attractions of the place. The waterworks, spat out by pulse pistons up to a hundred meters high, halt. The holo-system turns off the body of light on the busty Venus immersed in the water, screwed by the beak of a motherfucking Kraken lit up in red and yellow stains. No more illusions, now. The hatches of the oyster-shaped openings on the sides of the pool open, and a couple of crocodiles slither out, and with quick, steady tail-strokes they reach Achmed’s floating body, still warm.
People get close, they enjoy the show on the surface and below, through portholes. A child points out to his mother—with his small index finger pressed against the flexible water wall—the eunuch’s head sucked in by its ear through the depuration fans. Bits break and dismember; the other pieces of Achmed become smaller and smaller, until they are completely gone. The spectacle of the waterworks resumes, blood squirting up a hundred meters.
The Duchess’s driver starts the car. Her limousine goes through the somber Bezirk 7 to reach the Presidential section of the Great Snake. Basilius Peters is waiting for her: he needs raw material of the highest quality for his dinner, he has important guests. AAA+ class meat, no second-rate stuff. The same excellent tartare he uses to feed his delicate Venusian microdepolis, serenely floating with a full belly in their elliptical fish tank. The President never shares with anyone his living food stock, imprisoned and fattened up in the brigs of the Great Snake, Blue sector. That is not stuff for everyone, not even for ministers and important motherfuckers from other Countries.
Annedore Verkerk, aka the Duchess, always knows how to satisfy her President and the citizens of his notorious district. The cannibals of Berlin have their own Queen. Peters has never regretted leaving her control of Bezirk 7, specializing in whorehouses and creative restaurants, where anthropophagy and extreme sex blend to perfection, luring in tourists from all around the planet. South Paris 5, in New France, showed the way, and Annedore is a fast learner. The one hundred and forty FKK whorehouses—from Krimisa to Neu Lustgarten—and the thirty-nine cannibalistic restaurants—like the famous Die Seele—are a massive source of income for the government. The Duchess receives a forty-percent share on the profits, but she is no longer happy with that; she has had her eyes on the other two Bezirks of the West macro-area for a long time, now. She’d like to add those to her Teutonic version of Shanti—the fabled holy city in the Mesoamerican Republic—replacing that lunatic Ironhead, with his small army of drug dealers, rapists, and murderers. Legions of nutjobs, people you cannot keep relying on. Peters has a sweet tooth for human meat and little boys to fatten up, screw, and bite. Sooner or later, she will convince him.
««—»»
Eisenkopf
[Ironhead]
East macro-area, Bezirk 5/Pankow—Hobrechtsfelde
A toothless building, dangling frameworks spitting poison and electricity, thin-skinned sidewinders of eumonium fiber, with tails nailed to the debris. Flames on Hobrechtsfelde; the icy dunes of the central conduit, dried out by now, jutting out everywhere like the stumps of an ancient Roman aqueduct. The scorching craters of bombed asphalt. The alloy gates of the landfill, down at the end of the road; the barbed-wire horizon with old hanging guts; the rotten hills of living dirt; the floating cylinders of the molecular burners smoking junk and people. Blue clouds, flaking oxygen. The armored vans surrounded by zombies and old whores. Lines for a fix. Credit readers short-circuiting, frying.
A large parking lot, two hundred meters farther; heaps of turned-off systems, cables, monitors, smooth skulls of dismembered androids. A man in underwear, maimed by the claws of Cloud 4, holds a satellite radio and speaks with Jesus Christ, pacing back and forth. A slut, no longer able to pay for her milligrams, is head-butting an advertisement sign, smashing her brains against the fitful image of a ten-meter mouth. Half shells of public key-points, mowed down, uprooted, thrown down the incline like crazed spinning gondolas, stuffed with boys with black tongues, charred by the super-drug. Guttural sounds of post-Uxor primate puppies, a reader tied to their neck to communicate, their home addresses tattooed on their right forearms.
The optic jungle of high-density lianas, the undergrowth of phosphorescent millipedes and new hair-thin insects with alien, pulsating gills; the roofs warped by the Uxor rains, with no corners anymore, melted dish antennae, a crashed-down satellite just beyond the corner, its circumference glowing. Farther, the titanic LEDs of the Great Snake spin, the red eyes of the all-seeing Wall.
The wavy tunnel of the old subway station, under the knots of the overpass, from which pieces of freshly-run-over sluts rain down: this is the lair of Adonis Vogt’s men. Vogt, aka Ironhead, army general of Bezirks 5 and 6. His slice of Berlin, to be exploited under an off-the-record Presidential mandate; the tolerant government pocketing sixty percent of the proceeds from his activity—same treatment as the Duchess for her sex-cannibalistic area. In Ironhead’s ghost Bezirks, the driving business is drug: an infamous cocktail based on different versions of Cloud, New Moon Corporation’s super-drug—now available in version 6, the brainburner, if your card is chock-full of credits. And all eyes are on New Moon now, because there is rumor about a low-price, mass-market launch of the new version 7—Cloud 7, the Holy Grail of short-circuit. But maybe it is just a whopper—like the urban legend that New Moon is slaughtering inmates for human meat in its new EDS (Extraterrestrial Detention System) on the Moon, New Belmarsh Penitentiary, the infamous Naraka.
“So? Where the fuck is our sommelier?”
Ironhead is nervous. His lab 3 is stuck at stocking and product-analysis phase. Benz is missing, the alchemy man, the great blender, the only guy able to start up production and sales. The tasting table is already set with twenty-seven mixes in their pneumatic syringes: you just have to go through the alternatives, try micro-doses and choose the best cocktail. The veins of every Berlin zombie are waiting for their mad fuel, the dealers must be already cornered. Many of them risk snuffing it if the goods are not delivered within a few hours. Zombies with melted brains are not known for patience: they knock at the door with assault rifles.
A delicate job, Benz’s; you need a fine nose for certain things, and he is a true pro. You have many things to factor in, to minimize costs and maximize effect and, overall, profits: pure Cloud 6 is expensive, but a pinch of it in a cocktail guarantees high levels of addiction; you mix it up with a good fifty percent meta-derivates—useless shit, not even good for a headache—and at least thirty percent of old batches of previous versions, including expired Cloud 3; pure poison by now. Add to it a little bit of Hammer and other stuff, and you have your perfect zombie-making drug. It won’t kill you, probably, while keeping you on a tight leash.
But Ironhead asks more of his trusted mixer. Benz must be able to reutilize even minimal doses of Regnum, the discontinued drug that ices you without too many complements; if you know how to manage it, you’ll snuff it in a couple of months spent anchored to a horrible limbo. Two years ago Ironhead bought a lot of that stuff; he got a raw deal, syphoning millions, and now he must use that stuff somehow. Benz, the Alchemist of Berlin, knows how to lead customers to their timely death, never too soon. In his magical recipes, a sprinkle of Regnum is always there, curbed by low-grade mesolynes, working as an endorphin protective layer. Harder than guessing the Coca Cola recipe, Ironhead always says.
“Go look for him. You have half an hour, before I send your balls to the Duchess as a gift.”
Ironhead projects Gerko out of the lab with a well-placed kick in the ass. The man, sieged by sweat, runs to look for Benz: he well knows the boss isn’t one to fuck with. When Ironhead is pissed, the biomechanical prosthesis grafted on his skull, covering his occipital bone, glows on and off. Under the thin, silver dome of that deronium hive structure, a stain of green blood lights up—an underground phosphorescent pond. Ironhead has an electronic beast screwed in among his white hair, stretching its retractable tentacles—stimulation cables—into his vertebral channel, to keep his spinal nerves mapped. They all know that story: years ago, a kamikaze named Emmanuel managed to stick a bullet in his head, before being hanged by his guts to the Ausgang sign of the overpass. But Ironhead hacked it; the grafting of that hellish device not only saved his life but transformed him into an even more visionary piece of shit. The pinchers of the electronic beast, apparently, work really well inside his head, plucking the right neurons.
Gerko is back to the lair after a few minutes: he has dragged Benz away from his half-collapsed attic with a landfill view. The alchemist is wasted but ready to work. The green semi-buried pond in Ironhead’s skull becomes fainter, until it turns off: good sign.
“My alchemist, finally! Can you see me? You know who I am, where you are? Good, the tasting table is all yours. Let’s hurry, before the junkies rally up an army and tear us apart. Fucking zombies. Gerko, give him something to reboot his brain, we don’t have much time.”
Benz staggers, talks about his mother, about her famous Sunday roast. The old woman has been buried for months under the crashed satellite, beyond the turn, not far from their lair. And of course, she hasn’t been cooking her Sunday roast in the last forty years—not since Uxor came. Bad sign: Benz is always like that when he is too high. His legs are soft, and they don’t give a fuck about his commands; Gerko tows him to his post to avoid further trouble with Ironhead, eager to resume the distribution of his stuff. A few milligrams of adrenaline squirted right into his polluted blood should be enough to resurrect the soul of the Alchemist of Berlin. You just need a pneumatic syringe to stick into his vein—unless you have a three-breasted whore available, Benz’s great passion. Alpha and omega, full circle. Better than adrenaline, for Benz, but those are rare goods in the Bezirk, hard to come by quickly. They say Paris is full of those post-Uxor sirens, with their magic third tit and maybe something else, inside, something you do not see.
Benz begins working on the twenty-seven drug prototypes. The new delivery of Cloud 6 seems excellent: he will be able to blend it without problems, recycling a lot of shit.
The product has been chosen, tested on the Alchemist’s nervous system. Ironhead’s sommelier of madness. The lab gets back online at the usual pace; in a couple of hours, the dealers’ network is going to get everything it needs, and zombies and whores will be served. Benz has selected a tough mix this time; he is melting down on the metal chair, head thrown back, foaming.
“Mummy, give me more.”
Jesus, Gerko thinks, this one’s still talking to his old lady. Not good: maybe Benz has made a mistake, this time—best not to inform Ironhead, though. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe a few hundred junkies less tomorrow, a little too much brutality around. The boss is not going to notice. But now, better to make the Alchemist and his mother’s ghost disappear.
“What a sauce! A marvel, really… Where’s Flora, why isn’t she here for lunch?”
Flora, just what we needed: the frozen ghost. An imaginary sister spawned by too many false contacts inside that ever-cooked brain. Flora, one of the Duchess’s sluts, whom Benz cooked for a week, turning that tender flesh into tasty second courses and weird semifreddos. Flora, cuts of human pulp of different sizes, long since gone from his freezer. That whore used to have a nice smile. It was snowing, that day, in Berlin-Brandenburg, she was crying too loud, scaring away the cloacal gulls in their excrement nests, welded to the varicolored peaks of the landfill. Rustle of wings, of polluted feathers, the hypnotic buzz of the Metzelder carver, bone splinters and an overheated propeller. Then, silence, the boiling broth and the cold transparent plastic bags, sealed in blood.
««—»»
Der Palast der Solidarität
[The Palace of Solidarity]
West macro-area, Bezirk 1/Mitte/Friedricshain Kreuzberg—Reichpietschufer
“Citizens 620.573, 2.488.191, 135.003, 5.855.210, 3.222.707, 451.385, 351.388, 2.495.105: come forward. This month, the Generator has been very generous with Bezirk 1. Come on, don’t be afraid, come and collect your new Family Card! Here they are, look how excited they are…their rationalizers are working at full power, red LED! We’re going to see some fireworks tonight in the Mitte, eh? Please, hand over your readers to our operators, they will think about the updates and your new authorizations. Now, you can get down to business, and you have free rein: what do you prefer this time, male or female? But wait, there is a surprise: on behalf of President Peters, I’m also delivering to the lucky ones the Armilla of Loyalty. By wearing this, you have free access to the optional services of the Bezirk for a whole month. Luxury treatment, eh? What about an applause? Next time, it could be you! The wheel keeps spinning and the Generator never tires!”
Despite the spoiled-prion gout, by now preventing him from standing on his feet, Zommer—Berlin-Brandenburg Minister of Propaganda—still knows how to suck his audience in. As always. He moves on magnetic micro-caterpillars; he looks like an electronic centaur on morphine, riding in jerks, but he certainly does not look like a sick man. He is good, the motherfucker, he is a fantastic enthusiasm-and-bullshit pusher. Almost better than the biomechanical systems regulating the lives of his entire public, the citizens.
The Palace of Solidarity of Bezirk 1 is chock-full of smiling Puritans, of rationalizers shooting in their veins small fixes of happiness. You need a little help to get an army of semi-zombies back on its feet. Someone ejaculates in their pants without even noticing—as they don’t notice all the rest. It is the day of the Fest der Union, the monthly celebration of the Bezirk citizens. The government gladly allows a few small exceptions to the standards; euphoria, involvement, adjustable excitement are needed. Synthetic happiness, prizes and lotteries, music, shapely women, and good teeth on display. Healthy flesh, new dresses. Selection parameters for the attendees are strict: good looks, first of all; the rationalizer deals with everything else. If you have anything wrong—anything that can be seen—you can fucking dream about being invited to the Fest der Union of your district. Sooner or later, every attendee gets something special, something you can wait for while you live in the tidy limbo of the West area, where the dust never shifts.
A cordon of government militia, men armed to their teeth, watches the entrance of the Palace. Special troops surround the entire building: a gathering of citizens of that size always is something to keep under strict surveillance. Every time, you have the wanker of the day. The last rationalizer models boast a ninety-nine point seven percent performance, a small step to perfection, to total zeroing—and the obsessive Wolff, Minister of Culture and soul collector, has a team of engineers on a short leash, hard at work to close that gap. zero-point-three percent of errors, of attempted escapes to the East macro-area and its cannibals, to Jesus’s sewers, to some fucking hole to hide in like an earthworm. All shitty places as well, no doubt, but always better than brain death. And then, if you are a damn motherfucker—one with little scruples—you may even climb the ladder in Bezirks 5, 6, and 7. The Duchess and Ironhead are always on the lookout for clever people: lieutenants, killers, professional rapists, whores and t-girls—for slaughter and for making a career. Like gladiators in ancient Rome: you can start as a slave and turn celebrity, enjoy all the available shit in the East macro-area until it kills you. Until your eyes squirt out of your sockets. The problem is the Great Snake mowing down almost every escapee. It is not impossible, someone has made it. Not today, though.
Taking advantage of the people congestion, and with the militia men all busy with the Fest der Union of Bezirk 1, two men have just tried to fuck off the Wall. They managed to free themselves of the rationalizers thanks to the famous scalpel designed by Mata, a Spaniard surgeon hiding in a basement of the Bezirk 2/Spandau/ Reinickendorf. He moved from the clandestine abortion business to dismantlement of the electronic parasite. One of the few who’s managing to become rich among the Puritans—apart from the government. He is in the Rote Liste, the second most wanted man in Berlin-Brandenburg, after Jesus the sewer terrorist. President Peters dreams about him by night, that Spaniard bastard wedging his sharp tools into his almost-perfect machine. Often, the emperor of Berlin-Brandenburg cannot sleep, thanks to him, and so he is forced to take a stroll in the Blue sector of the Wall. A midnight snack: isolated in the terminal areas, his fattened-up boys are always ready—together with the chef on guard. Fresh meat: no other way to shoo away bad thoughts.
The two fugitives, equipped with a sort of makeshift helicopter—put together somehow in the landfill—have managed to fool the Wall by overflying it above its tail, on the border between the South suburbs and Bezirk 7 Neukolln/Treptow Kopenick. The small propeller, improvised with a cluster of eight restaurant waste-burners, could not make it and made them crash a few hundred meters beyond the Wall. The militia men on guard did not need to open anti-aircraft fire or fly their killer drones. A small fire on the Silverstein is nothing unusual: nobody is going to remember the adventure of the two flying citizens, burned alive in the East Zone, in the Eldorado of Hell.
“Citizens, we are now going to listen to a live video message from President Peters! An important announcement, listen in. One more applause! Please, Frau Weber, let’s open the ch –”
VRUUUMMM!
A powerful explosion interrupts Zommer’s speech. The Palace of Solidarity of Bezirk 1 is ripped open on its long side. The burst seems to come from the large parking on floor zero. The micro-caterpillar transporting the minister flips over; special troopers immediately get to safety their precious gout-sporting piece of shit.
Standard militia men act, too; the operation is led by their supreme leader, Diemo Hollert, a true mastiff, always in charge at each Fest der Union. Security protocols. His commands croak in the radio, through the thick smoke of cooked citizens, scattered on the floor of the Palace meeting hall, directly hit by the shockwave. Smell of freshly singed guts. Panic under control: the control unit in the wall has already activated the rationalizers’ Notfall emergency protocol. The survivors orderly sit on the ground; a lethal dose of cyanide is injected to the most badly injured, automatically detected by their life-sign probes. The government doesn’t want screams, bad publicity, nor does it want to waste credits in attempts at healing compromised victims. All citizens will have their memories of the day formatted shortly, replaced by a clone. The Fest der Union of Bezirk 1 will be a good memory, like always.
“Axel, Squad A, citizen evacuation, now! Bendix, Squad B, external scouting, ten-klick red perimeter, activate air support with beta and delta drones. Squad C with me, target floor zero, magnetic grenades in compression. No conventional weapons, I want the pricks alive!”
In his control room in the sewers, secondary duct VII, Jesus enjoys the scene. One of his kamikazes is gone, exploded, but the other one is waiting for the militia men, stuffed with a capsule belt of ammonium nitrate, aluminum and hydrazine, plus a detonator of dilitium azide, all stuck up his ass. Jesus quivers…he is ready to push the button, only waiting for Diemo Hollert to get close enough with his loyal dogs. He is the true target of this attack: Jesus wants to offer a sixteen-thousand-degree inferno to the militia boss. Happy Fest der Union, son of a bitch.
“Bend, are you in position? Situation?”
Hollert is on the radio with his vanguard: they have reached floor zero, the Palace parking, the epicenter.
“Boss, we can’t see shit here, too much smoke… We need aspirators.”
“We’re coming down, star formation, cover South entry. Activate bio-seekers, map the area: we’ll find rats waiting for us down there. Bend, acknowledge! Bend?”
Bend and his specialists can no longer answer, they have been electrocuted by discharges of Melter 45 dynamos, buried in the ground. The same devices installed in the death moats of the wall, patiently fished out at the periphery ends of the Great Snake, modified to be timed and triggered by environmental temperature variations. No water at floor zero, no Acheron; the Invisibles have relied on working lungs. All by plan. Jesus wants Hollert: he must get down to floor zero without the coverage of his scouts, butt-naked.
Hollert, the old fox, orders the energy turned off to slots 32, 56, 67, and to default the control unit managing macro-connection to central and remote systems. If he must go in blind, the sewer dogs will have to make do as well. Use their imagination. Total black out on two-thirds of the Bezirk 1 in less than five seconds. Isolation of the other systems. Hollert has managed to blind Jesus’s remote-control room. We’re playing even now, maybe, without camera support and decrypted tunneling of militia radios.
Fuck you, great rat, think you can fool me? Enjoy the show?
The militia men—Hollert at the rear—advance in the parking. Entry 2. The sight could be better: the carbonized bodies of Bend’s team look like big sleeping roaches. Heads smoking like old heaters, microwaved intestines turned into entangled plastic tails. Smaller roaches, those with intact shells and living jaws, are already hard at work to bring home dinner. They scuttle on quick legs with chops of men bigger than they are wedged in their mouths. Damn them!
The kamikaze, now lacking any info about enemy position, and with no instructions from Jesus’s control room, waits for the voices of the soldiers to come near: only then he will leap out, activating the detonator and carrying away with him—beyond the blue gates of elsewhere—as many pieces of shit as possible. Who knows how the sewer of Hell is going to be? He does not think anything can exist beside those pipes, those tunnels soiled with mutated bugs, those beds of soft leeches, beside Queen Shit, where he has always lived and floated, waiting for his holy suicide mission. Today, he has seen the sky for the first time. A blue tunnel, very high: it cannot be anything else.
The voices are now close enough: the kamikaze leaps out screaming all his rage, the rage they taught him underground. Long live the Invisibles! Fuuuck!
But nothing happens, no fucking explosion, no revenge. Jesus’s bomb has misfired; the kamikaze stays there with his mouth open and his arms spread, like a Christ nailed on the Cross by surprise. He looks around. The militia men, dropped on the ground with their hands on their blue helmets, get up and gnash their teeth. A shot to his stomach, then to his head. Later, the blue gate appears to him.
Morning; energy in the Bezirk 1 has been turned back on. The citizens talk with excitement about the last Fest der Union, full of wonderful surprises. Thanks to President Peters! Nobody notices the intestines on display over the Palace of Solidarity, the debris and the breaches, their missing relatives and friends. The rationalizers’ back-up had its virus running during the night on all devices, fixing things. A modified reality, from the toes of past to the head of future, which is good for everybody.
Hollert is still on the field with his watchdogs. Jesus keeps cursing in his tunnels, the ducts spreading the news to all the tail-less Invisibles. The Wall is warmed by the sun, mirroring in its petroleum moats two black rainbows. President Peters is taking care of his fish tank, the Venusian microdepolis shake their laminar fins to quickly climb to the surface and swallow small crumbs of meat. Unexploded kamikaze meat.
««—»»
Kopf an Kopf
[Head to Head]
— East macro-area, Bezirk 7/ Neukolln/ Treptow Kopenick—Werbelliner Straße: FKK Neu Lustgarten
The large teroresin statue of Apollo—one of the Dodekatheon big shots—splits the bend of the white colonnade, assembled by the hinges of Doric joints and star articulations, spreading around from alien Nabatean capitals. Welding different times together, ages and over-layered imaginations. A spaceship of synthetic marble, painted in glittering myth, seems to detach several spans above common Terran shit, above the asphalt nibbled at by sluts and by the plastic trees of the Werbelliner Straße, with their latex fruits like bananas made of condoms. That is exactly what wealthy customers must imagine: the possibility to buy a pay-by-the-hour citizenship up in the Olympus. Wear the flying underwear of a demiurge, his dilitium armor and winged sandals. New propellers, phallic rockets capable of climbing Peak Mytikas; leaving your soul down at base camp, sitting in the neutex armchairs at the entrance, where you taste divinity by sucking New Scotland sperm-stuffed ice, served in large platters by blue-painted sluts: the Nuns of the Border. The ticket to enter, to go on, is expensive.
On the top of the building—of that amphibious impossible piece of ancient Greece wedged by force among the malodorous alleys of Bezirk 7—glows the heretic quadriga of the mega-whorehouse Neu Lustgarten. A kick in the nuts of the old Brandenburg Gate, that of yore. Four horses towing the carriage, moving Aphrodite’s heavy ass with warped nostrils and swollen ribcages. She holds in her right hand a flaming dildo. Small tits and a well-endowed dwarf licking her thigh. Sadomaso armillas, a necklace of anal pearls on her golden bustier. She reminds of the ancient Venus in a Bikini, from Pompeii, with her small Eros aroused by the goddess’ lusty sandals.
There are guests at the Neu Lustgarten, in the Duchess’s lair.
“Who is she, your new slut?”
Messerschmitt laughs out loud: this time, the Duchess really made a blunder. He rubs his beard, swallows his third glass of tequila, then reveals his friend’s identity. The scar crossing his face stretches quietly, amusedly: he knows he will throw the Duchess.
“Annedore, this is Kiki. One of the best professional killers in South Paris 5—Big Blue’s pet, you know what I mean…the big boss shadowing the Tour Eiffel. Slut? Maybe once, but does it matter? Listen, have them bring another bottle: it’s not good talking business on a dry throat.”
Squeezing her eyes, the Duchess scans Kiki: she is young, too young. Most important, much younger than her. A pro? One of Big Blue’s killers? To be in bed with a triple-jawed shark like that, the little slut must be really good—and not in bed only. Her voice: she wants to hear her speaking now.
“Big Blue? All clear, then. I know the character well…even too well. Messerschmitt likes to keep moving the goalpost. Okay, I’ll play along. But no bullshit: here, things work in a certain way, we’re not in Paris. So, Kiki, how long have you been here? Do you like my Berlin?”
“I’ve arrived yesterday. Messerschmitt let me in from the South suburban border, Sassdorf gate, in a roadtruck loaded with hams. Human, I’m afraid. A nice start, I’ve still got the rind stink of those poor devils hanging from hooks on me. Berlin? As good a place as any. Can I have a glass, too?”
The Duchess motions her blue whores to bring more drinks, letting the lights catch her dilitium teeth: flashes for Kiki’s eyes. Then she gets by Messerschmitt’s side: her left arm reaches around her old friend’s neck, as he keeps indifferently swallowing tequila. Messerschmitt has tanks like an aircraft carrier. The Duchess whispers something in his ear, her tongue sensually vibrating a few centimeters away, her fingers brushing the man’s chest, almost casually, looking for open wells, breaches, transparent scars. But on that man’s skin she risks stepping on minefields.
The Duchess is rotten inside; but her outer vessel, with all those soft dunes, is serious stuff. Very serious. Annedore, despite her forty-two years, is still one of the most powerful magnets in Berlin. A real high-class fox, eating testicles stuffed with ground laurel, an easy-trigger virago: score ninety-seven with the XM9 Metal Storm assault rifle. Way better than the government militia men, and many professionals and motherfuckers as well. Not easy to tame twenty-seven thousand shots a minute or uninstall that light alloy bra without losing your breath.
Let’s see if this Kiki is his slut, the Duchess thinks.
“Does your girlfriend know the plan? How does she come in? I would rather be alone, you and I.”
Kiki won’t have it. She stretches her neck, grabs Messerschmitt’s glass and empties it down her throat. Then, she spits out the rest: “Hey, listen, fucking mantis: I’m here to work. What about you?”
Messerschmitt laughs out loud, it’s getting really hot. Kiki and Annedore shoot bullets and grenades of gazes at each other. A challenge: Kiki’s eyes, too black, could hurt anybody. Assault eyes.
“Annedore…my girlfriend, as you call her, knows everything. I shared my ass with her in the Mesoamerican Republic, about two years ago. If you want this deal, I need her help. If you’re done, could the two of you put back your claws, so we can work? We have no time.”
Annedore Verkerk, the ambitious mantis of Bezirk 7, and Messerschmitt, who has a gig for the Israeli government, have everything planned. You always need two, to make business: objectives must converge, run parallel until they match. The Duchess wants to take over Bezirks 5 and 6, spreading her dominion to the whole East macro-area of Berlin-Brandenburg, increasing profits and extending the territory under the jurisdiction of her toothy petticoat. Gluttonous President Peters is ready to side with her; he has a weak spot for his beautiful supplier of human delicacies—but he cannot intervene, exposing himself directly. To deal with a viper, no matter how long or poisonous it is, you just have to cut off its head. An Iron Head, in this case, phosphorescent skullcap included, together with all the rest of that infernal machinery. With the boss fell—the general of that legion of braindead—everything will go down, smooth and quick. But the motherfucker is not easy to send straight to Hell, holed up in his lair and surrounded by zombies armed to their teeth. Many have tried, every one ending up badly. Every week somebody is found hanging by their own guts from the Ausgang sign of the Hobrechtsfelde overpass. One of Ironhead’s many smoke signals to his competitors. You don’t fuck with his tribe, they have collected too many scalps already.
You need a specialist to permanently transfer Ironhead to his beloved landfill, a high-voltage cable up his ass and new holes in his armored skull. You need someone unknown in Berlin, a skilled outsider. Messerschmitt is the right man, no doubt.
Messerschmitt’s target, instead, does not involve holes and blood, but a macabre relic: Adolf Hitler’s original skull, scorched and jawless, safely preserved in the Red sector of the Wall, in President Peter’s collection of horrors. A virtually impenetrable area. Before joining the ranks of the Red Toad’s toys, the dictator’s skull had been long locked in a security box belonging the the Petrov family, boasting among their ancestors a Red Army SMERŠ captain, one of the first men to enter the Führerbunker in 1945. A man who had the right coordinates of the Magdeburg tomb where the notorious remains were buried. His ashes scattered in the Biederitz? Bullshit. Somebody made very good profit out of those bones. In old Russia, rumor has it that even one of Goebbels’s tibias and Eva Braun’s scaphoid are around. But those are only urban legends, maybe. Or treasures of wealthy, silent tycoons.
The Israeli government thirsts for stuff like that, for a piece of monster to display in a flexible water case. A new Sancta Sanctorum has been built below the ass of the hovering Temple of Jerusalem: now they have to furnish it. To each Country, its propaganda. People need traditions, legends, holy or nefarious relics, to be guided, to feel the force of the stick with all its knots. The Israeli government knows its customers well, and it knows what it’s doing: a vacuum-sealed Führer’s head would be a nice one, let alone faded Arks of the Covenant or billion-worth military budgets for election campaigns.
Not everybody can rely on financial resources enough to get the most recent technologies, like bio-mechanical rationalizers. Many governments and republics, not only in old Europe, have their eyes on Berlin’s Puritan Project. The first field testing of those electronic leeches, active on large scale in the West macro-area. The Red Toad and his Court of Miracles may hold in their hands the future of the planet. Optimists are served.
The new Sancta Sanctorum of Jerusalem must soon become a great attraction, mark a new course, not only politically. They already have a surrogate of the Even Shetiyyah installed there—the legendary foundation stone of the world, everything thanks to a small meteorite crashed two years ago in the country, north of the moshav of Even Sapir. An omen? Not really: government propaganda was just a lucky bitch this time, and a bitch who knew how to take advantage of the situation. Anyway, though the alien rock is drawing interest, you need much more to burst through the chronic indifference of the post-Uxor era. You need something real, tangible, whipping imaginations from past to future, running through generations: nothing better than Hitler’s skull, well-polished, installed under the spotlights of the Temple for public scorn.
Messerschmitt must bring it back to his Jerusalem, and quick: deals magically interlocking in Berlin-Brandenburg, at the shadow of the Great Snake. Messerschmitt will send Ironhead to Hell, cleaning up the command offices of Bezirks 5 and 6, while the Duchess will deliver him the keys to the Red sector of the Wall, including Peters’ small collection of horrors, thanks to her precious services and connections. An exchange, with two heads in play: one to be burst, one to be polished.
Kiki and Messerschmitt exit the Neu Lustgarten with the Duchess’s suspicious eyes on them, as they peek out from two small openings in the huge Greek scrotum of her guarding Apollo. The two of them will be followed by her men, that’s for sure. Appointment is tomorrow morning; the plan is on.
Head to head, and then game over.
Kiki grabs Messerschmitt’s arms, stares at him in the eye.
“Tell me the truth: why did you want me here? No bullshit, please, there are a lot of killers and pros out there. Why me? Just to piss off your friend the Duchess? In that case, you perfectly succeeded, believe me.”
A kiss on her forehead, then a few explanations. He already knows it won’t be enough, but sometimes you just have to gain a little time.
“Work, Kiki, just work. I can deal with that Ironhead, no problem…but to get inside the Wall and reach Peters’ collection, I need a smart woman. Someone I can trust. And I only trust you, Kiki. If I don’t bring the madman’s head back to Jerusalem, they’ll probably blow up mine. Back home, this is serious, something which will change things. My friend, I’d like to stay whole, I’m in your hands…see what you can do. We’ll study the details tonight…now I need a refreshment. It’s hot, in this fucking half Berlin.”
Kiki listens to all that bullshit looking the outline of the Great Snake; it is scary. She moves her big eyes on Messerschmitt, frisking every inch of him, inside too: there are no armors against her, not even Messerschmitt’s mighty and varicolored one. She takes him by the arm and drags him toward a red sign, on the other side of the street. Seems like a good place to drink something.
“Sure, I see. Work. Are you trying to fool me? I don’t believe it. I’m thirsty, too. Let’s have something, as long as you still have your head on. You’ll tell me everything, before tomorrow. You order, I listen.”
Night. The Great Snake seems to imperceptibly stir, coil up its long sectors and jutting bulkheads, to wait for a new day.
««—»»
Spiel ist aus I
[Game Over I]
East macro-area, Bezirk 5/Pankow—Hobrechtsfelde
Unrest in the ghetto of Berlin-Brandenburg. The lines of Ironhead’s armored vans are sieged by zombies: the product, after Benz’s new composition, is available again—finally. Cocktail of the day: Vanille Himmel: radioactive ground qāt, methylenedioxypyrovalerone, 3.4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, just to name a few, and other shit synthetized by the Alchemist himself. Vanilla Sky, perfect match with the clouds of shit exhaled by the great landfill, piling up above in flocks of ectoplasmic airtight lids. Bingo against serotonin system, neurotransmitter tilt in the shattered belly of neurons, ionic channels mutated in sewer pipes of copper3. Ironhead rubs his hands: his high-voltage synaptic inferno works like magic.
Nobody can wait another minute to shoot into their veins a fix of the latest Cloud-based cocktail. Souls to be painted. Yellowish foam at their mouths, eyes outside the edges of sockets, papier-mâché jaws, borders of humanity, damned souls climbing rocks to hang from the higher Circle. Peeled hands and thoughts. Death, from her ring on top—where the hatch to the other side is installed—reaches out to everybody, lets them come gladly.
The whores push, bite, pull hair to skip the long line behind the vans at the end of the street, where dedicated cocktails are dealt. Something different, amphetaminic, to be able to clock in at the whorehouses and at strategic curb corners; to be able to work on their customers. For them, Ironhead had prepared a new Krash, ready to pollute them all down to their matrix, anesthetizing vaginas, sphincters, foolish porcupine-backed memories. That damn stuff pricking inside.
A zombie—a big one—slowly drags himself on the tarmac. A useless human stain, nobody notices him: scenes which keep happening, when Ironhead’s Hell is open and neon tubes light up the writing Einweihen on the drainpipe of the old subway station. The junkie scratches the sides of the vans, drags himself from one to the next, begs for a small blessing of madness fuel. Another piece of shit short on credits, thinks one-eyed Luk—one of Ironhead’s veterans. He kicks the wretch in the stomach; then gets back to the paying crowd, managing the dealing, hands on the crossed cartridge belts on his chest, full of special capsules—a late Pancho Villa with no sombrero
The wretch—mug on the ground, tongue about to lick the street, where rivulets of urine and azure fluid from broken capsules trickle toward the throats of the sewers—pulls something out of his ragged camo jacket: a small remote. He presses the red button, seven roadvans blow up. Rain of twisted metal foil, pieces of dealers, arms cut off still holding guns, yellow junkie guts. High explosives magnetized a few minutes ago under the armored vehicles.
The fake wretch, aka Messerschmitt, stands up; he enjoys the scene, rubbing his beard, running his thumb along the long diagonal scar sculpted on his face. He approaches the heap of junk a few meters on his left; from under a rectangular block of expired synthetic fat, he fishes a sawed-off Khaybar KH300X. He frames Ironhead’s bastards, the ones still whole who are looking around and swearing. He opens fire: the first burst mows down two, plus a third one on ricochet, randomly, who immediately vomits flames. Incendiary rounds. The dealers burn like hell, with all that stuff still on them. Above, brakes whistle: the nth whore flies down from the overpass, undoing herself against the jagged hood of a still-operational roadvan. The zombies, after the initial confusion, pour in like locusts on the few surviving dealers, mauling them. They raise a free toast to Ironhead who, down in his lair, vents by shooting in the kneecaps two fat lieutenants looking at the scene with their jaws dropped, astonished.
“Wankers! I’ve gathered an army of wankers!” Hobrechtsfelde is in flames, under attack by some fucking ghost. Where is he, who is the enemy?
Messerschmitt has begun working, doing his part.
Smoke, flames, screams. The Hobrechtsfelde asphalt is covered with entrails, half-bodies melted with metal foils. The crashed satellite is rolling toward the landfill like a big pool ball, crushing survivors. Luk—the Pancho Villa with his crossed belts—is still alive and extremely pissed. He is a nostalgic: he defends the last drug provisions against the zombie assault by brandishing a hatchet. Very old school, but always effective. A nice slaughter.
Messerschmitt, stripped out of his junkie clothes and sheltered by chaos, manages to penetrate Ironhead’s lair through a burst elliptic opening. He moves quickly inside, hiding behind the wreck of an old ticket booth. His head pops out, looks carefully. More of Ironhead’s men, most of his personal escort, are coming out on the street to sort the mess and salvage what can be salvaged. They are eager to fuck up the pricks. The boss keeps yelling and shooting at random with his Glock 29. He has already decided culprit and sentence.
“The Duchess, that damn whore! She is going to pay. You must bring her here, alive. I’ll do her a nice flamethrower enema. You’ll fucking see!”
Three men stay back to protect Ironhead, plus a guy with a silver servohue-painted face, brandishing a Bushmaster C90R equipped with grenade launcher and caseless bullets. He wears a necklace of human teeth, his arms are flayed, skinless. Raw flesh, certainly not from the explosions. That one must be Tideo—the Duchess told him about that motherfucker, the Greek, the most dangerous man in Berlin-Brandenburg. A life assurance, so she called him. If he is on your side.
Messerschmitt must act fast; in a few minutes, the lair is going to get too hot. A direct assault, leaving his position with five men to face, would be risky. He would need a grenade to make his way, thinning out those friends, then to make a clean sweep; but he cannot get close enough.
Tideo begins grumbling, insistently sniffing the air: he must have smelled Messerschmitt. A real animal; it wasn’t only hype. Tideo drops his Bushmaster, which he has just used to ice several skittish zombies from his position; he moves away from the others, walks down the narrow corridor and approaches the ruined ticket booth with a large double-edged knife. Messerschmitt thinks that his usual luck may have dealt him a card too low, this time. He nervously rummages in his jacket pockets, where is it, where the fuck is it? Now he can feel Tideo’s acrid smell, too, his bittersweet aura; ten seconds, and the Greek will be upon him. Here it is! Messerschmitt throws to his right a strange device, letting it roll close to a heap of old furniture and Palmer condensers. The sphere activates as it touches the floor, projecting a hologram. A quite credible copy of him. With all that thick smoke pouring into the lair, it may work. It is an old recording, materializing a younger Messerschmitt, beard-less, scar-less, armed with an old Israeli IMI TAR-70. But nobody knows his face, in Berlin-Brandenburg.
Tideo throws himself against the holo with a furious, shrill battle cry. He collapses against the toppled morblix counters, trying to gut the empty air, the transparent belly of his enemy. Messerschmitt, the solid flesh-and-bone one, is immediately behind him. He grabs his hair and slits his throat.
He does not miss the opportunity to whisper something in his ear, while the Greek throws up blood: “Say hi to your friends at the Thermopiles.”
Now, it’s the boss’s turn. The Duchess is going to have one of the best orgasms of her long career.
“Tideo! Where the fuck are you?” Ironhead roars; the biomechanical prosthesis screwed to his skull is on red alarm, phosphorescent dome desperately glowing. This time they have really pissed off the boss of Bezirks 5 and 6, close to short-circuit. He is beside himself, and that’s something for someone like him.
Messerschmitt taunts Ironhead, “Come here to get your friend back. Without watchdogs on your leash, if you have any balls.” He knows he is plucking a raw nerve, under the cables of his electronic head.
“Who are you, bastard? One of that whore’s eunuchs? If she hasn’t cut your balls off already, I’ll take care of it. Show yourself!”
Drooling, Ironhead takes the corridor, opens fire against that cursed voice; his bullets sink into the ticket booth, into the low ceiling and the gnawed yellow walls, everywhere. A whole magazine. I’ve really pissed him off, Messerschmitt thinks, in cover.
Ironhead’s three watchdogs immediately follow their master: the fastest croaks right away, and his companions’ combat boots tread on him. A ricochet took him right between the eyes: Ironhead is emptying his M349 to riddle an army of ghosts, spraying randomly on either side. He is out of control. Five, four, three, two, one… Messerschmitt springs out of the wreck through one of the meridium crystal windows on the long side, burst by the explosions, just as Ironhead falls like an avalanche into the booth, with his men in his wake. Right into the trap, the master and his hounds.
Messerschmitt throws a grenade and lies on the ground: the three men blow up with all the rest. Ironhead’s skull, with its snapped cable tentacles, is shot out of the old subway station like a cannonball. It looks like a fucking flying jellyfish.
Messerschmitt lights up a cigar. He watches that half-human dented skull, hanging on the Ausgang sign of the overpass. Nice fucking shot! Game over.
««—»»
East macro-area, Bezirk 7/ Neukolln/Treptow Kopenick—WasserBrücke
Messerschmitt waits for Kiki on the WasserBrücke, the new flexible water bridge. Their appointment is in an hour—if everything goes down smoothly, if the plan works out, if in the end the two heads will be at their respective places: Ironhead’s biomechanical one, already hung on the Hobrechtsfelde overpass; the Führer’s skull, sealed in a mesosilicone bag, ready for the trip to Jerusalem. A skycar is already waiting for Messerschmitt with the madman’s head under his arm, to be carried shoulder-high into the Holy City. The Duchess, informed about Ironhead’s early retirement, climaxed hard, just like Messerschmitt anticipated. She is already organizing the invasion of Bezirk 5 and 6 with her legions of whores, t-girls, pimps and the cavalry of anthropophagic restaurant chefs armed with meat cleavers.
Will Kiki make it? Messerschmitt looks at the nefarious Sprea waters, the macabre drifting of leftovers from cannibal second courses: nibbled ribs, shinbone submarines. On the floating footways, on both shores, disfigured women are whoring, women rejected by the elegant brothels of Bezirk 7. Uxor rains, prion disease, artistic carvings on buttocks and faces by unhappy or drunk pimps, serial genetic bugs, monstrosities. Those women take the worst from Berlin-Brandenburg, and they carry it on their skin. From the WasserBrücke, the sight is perfectly on that grotesque circus of flesh: wealthy Teutons from their roadcars, shifting greasy silicone curtains with their fine dilitium canes, choose the prey of the day. Eccentric tastes, many credits on their cards—enough to buy lives, souls, not only those weird molecular agglomerates, mouths and holes which keep opening and closing, toes gnawed by rats. After all, those beasts are right: their small reign has been unjustly invaded. They have to share their territory, now, their rotten bricks, with that human confinement of marred beauty, of strange mutations. There is the mark of the Duchess, her depraved Kraken on red background, in that infamous chunk of world. She used to be different, Annedore, but the Age of the Apocalypse is turning everybody into monsters. You don’t have much choice: either become prey, or predator. Among burst souls and sold souls, burned in a bonfire smelling like sulfur, of global Sabbath.
Will Kiki make it? Messerschmitt would like to take her with him to Jerusalem, make her leave behind that absurd life in the hell of South Paris 5, away from the hands of lunatic demiurges of blood like Big Blue and his lowlife lieutenants. She is a brilliant, precious pawn for them, now; but she will soon get to the end, to the border, the last square, then to be swallowed by higher interests. He would like to give her an opportunity, and at the same time having another chance himself, but the past holds him by the balls—and squeezes. One day, maybe, he will tell her the truth. He rubs his beard, shifts the cigar in his teeth; his eyes, two clear slots, have moved away from the horrid human circus of the Sprea footways, and now they point on the long back of blue thermolite of the Wall, the Great Snake trying to digest his Kiki whole.
««—»»
Spiel ist aus II
[Game over II]
East macro-area, Bezirk 7/Neukolln/ Treptow Kopenick—Berliner Mauer II—Gate 4
“Hey, you! Park that fucking thing behind the yellow line and get down with your hands up. Where do you think you’re going? Karl, are you reading me? Warn Central, we have guests. Apparently, with nice tits…”
The two militia guards watching Gate 4 of the Wall, one of the few accesses into the belly of the Great Snake, take off the safeties on their bullpup rifles.
“Goddamn, keep those beasts on a leash! Here’s my reader: check. I’ve got a delivery for the Presidential warehouse. Urgent, from the Duchess. You understand that, right?”
Kiki is the key to the Red sector of the Wall, to Peters’ collection of horrors, to the precious scalp for Messerschmitt. The guards chuckle, scanning that pleasant surprise of flesh, whispering fucking lifers’ obscenities. One of them takes the initiative: he must follow security protocol, even though a bulge in his camo pants reveals that our friend is really hard. He checks the reader: everything seems in order, and the woman is unarmed. He approaches Kiki, wagging.
“How come the Duchess didn’t send Gaby? Your accent is turning me on. I bet you’re French. Where do you work, the Neu Lustgarten? I’ll come visit you, that’s for sure, as soon as my shift’s over. But, as you should know, Gaby always leaves us a little appetizer…right, Max?”
Max confirms with a strange sneer.
Kiki smiles, she understands all too well. As usual, Messerschmitt forgot telling her a few details of his genius plan. Or maybe, it was that Verkerk slut skirting the issue.
She needs sangfroid. Improvisation. When this is over, Kiki thinks, she will have to deal with the forgetful Duchess. She is going to shorten her claws. But now she has to get inside the Wall.
“Easy, little soldier! Best not to keep the President waiting…he insisted on maximum urgency. What about this: ten minutes with you or with your friend, not a second longer. Are you okay with that, Max? So…who’s the lucky guy? Make up your mind and let’s go inside, it’s getting fucking hot out here.”
The guards are thrown; they confabulate. Then, judging from Max’s teeth on display—sharp, smooth fangs ready to bite her ass—Kiki understands with whom she is going to deal, once inside the Great Snake. The other, younger guard, who’s going to stay dry and blank, moves away in a streak of curses.
“Karl, everything okay here: the usual delivery from the Duchess. Unlock the hatch, I’m escorting her to the warehouse.”
The voice of the guard in the tower, compressed by radio channel frequencies, amusedly confirms between electric wrinkles: “All clear. Opening in ten. Enjoy your escort, Max.”
Kiki gets back in her roadcar, and she sluggishly follows the strutting Max on a long, wide hallway—Red sector—with hatches on either side. The warehouse must be at the end of it, and the collection at the upper floor…if the Duchess’s map is correct. There are going to be more guards, even nastier. It won’t be easy.
Max halts, turns, and motions Kiki to get down the vehicle and join him. She complies. Then, the man opens one of the side hatches, to a service room; he shoves Kiki inside planting a hand on her ass. Time to pay the ticket to the Red sector.
“Ten minutes, you said? Maybe you’ll have to take care of me a little longer, slut.”
Max grabs Kiki’s neck, nailing her to the light alloy wall, pointing his knife at her left breast; he mimes ripping it, his tongue whirling on his lips, then he spits more words:
“You’re so beautiful, it would be a pity ruining these tits. Now undress, pull down your panties and kneel, if you know what’s best for you. Ten minutes…who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with? I’ll make you feel it for a long, long time, and you’ll like it, you’ll see. No bullshit and keep your mouth shut. You know what we do around here with disfigured whores? Meatballs, very tasty. Now start sucking it, French slut.”
Kiki undresses; the piece of shit does not seem one to be fucked with and his blade is too close. He likes playing the tough guy? Feeling a true macho man who takes whatever he wants? Good, just play along, she thinks.
“Max, you don’t need that knife. I like men like you. You can’t imagine how many customers I have to do, who prefer taking it up the ass. Real men are rare. Take me, just take me for as long as you want.”
She does not need other words. Max drools in front of Kiki’s naked, perfect body. He throws himself on her tits squeezing his face into them, his humid soul; he sticks the knife into the wall, quickly pulls down his pants, eagerly sucks that skin that tastes like mango, like the earth of new continents just detached from an imaginary Pangea made of rust and stars, of salt and honey, of sunflowers with a gynoecium of marrow.
Kiki has played along enough: an open-palm double blow to both his ears and a knee to his nuts easily detach Max’s suckers, as he staggers back in a daze, his tentacles already limp. She pulls the knife out of the wall, her black eyes now looking much bigger. Bad sign. Too much saliva on her skin, disgusting—where is she going to find a shower, now, in the Red sector of the Great Snake? And all that rapist macho stuff has really pissed her off.
Max can now expect the treatment reserved by South Paris 5 whores to unpaying customers. Her freelance-slut memory—dating back only a couple years—temporarily replaces that of the professional killer. French whores are good with knives. A skill learned in time, an archetype by now, just like Amazons with bows. He immediately realizes as much; he tries to get back up and charge her, but he gets a kick in the mug—and the Teutonic macho is out of the game. When he wakes up, and goes looking for his balls, he is going to have a nice surprise. He will soon have to visit a second-hand bioprosthesis shop and buy himself a couple of replacement rubber testicles. His own, by now, are gone.
Max, like many others, won’t forget Kiki.
Five minutes have passed: good, the guard’s comrades will think she is still busy with Max. Kiki gets back in the Red sector hallway. She can now use Max’s knife and pistol, a fucking Krieghoff; certainly not her beloved amphibious Martin 4—and not even the Glock she used when she was eighteen, her first killing, a revenge outworld. But it will do. Using the guard’s precious keycard, she will be able to access the upper floor.
Kiki knows by heart the map supplied by the Duchess, but she has hidden anyway in her panties a small holo-projector with the blueprint. She takes a magnetic ramp on her right, the keycard letting her through, and she is quickly transported upstairs. Before entering the main hallway, she squeezes against the wall of a recess. She cranes to scout the area. Holy shit! Three guards, way more threatening than poor, newly castrated Max; they are watching hatch 24, hiding the President’s macabre collection. A frontal assault would be suicide: Kiki doesn’t have cover nor room for action, and those bastards sport Heckler & Koch G77K double-floating-barrel assault rifles with extra pulse systems. Stuff worth 2,300 shots per minute.
Goddamn, these ones have it big! You need creativity, as good old Messerschmitt would put it, to solve a problem without opening fire, avoid setting off alarms and having a small army rushing in. You certainly cannot start a firefight in the belly of the Wall with nobody noticing. Kiki decides to resort to plan T, as she calls it, with small variations on the theme.
She slips off the slutty t-shirt she had to wear—pink with concentric white circles around the breasts, swelling up like targets of a deviant shooting range. Berlin-Brandenburg whores really have bad taste, she thinks. She is now in black pants, free tits, knife at the ready, stuck in the back of her belt. She pulls out her red lip servohue, passes it over her hands then to spread it on her breasts, neck, arms, to feign the marks of a brutal aggression. And then they ask why women always have to carry so much with them. It is time to introduce herself to these three nice guys, Kiki is ready to play her character.
“Help me, please! That guard…he beat me, raped me…now he’s chasing me, oh God, he’s crazy… I just had a delivery from the Duchess! I beg you, look what that monster did to me!”
Kiki slowly approaches hatch 24, showing her flesh, her drawn red bruises and wounds, her purple-shaded tits that she squeezes in her fingers. A few steps, then she drops on her knees, halfway to her target, breaking into a desperate cry. She is an expert actress. The guards are surprised; they lower their weapons, exchange quick glances, talk without tongues, share the Morse code of testosterone, steadily pulsating. The brawniest of them grins, motions another—the guy with the shaven head—to follow him toward Kiki. He is touching himself between the legs; he has already decided how to help that woman, in his own way. The third soldier stays back in position, his back against hatch 24 and face darkening.
The brawny soldiers says, “Makes your skin crawl, sure… Don’t worry, honey, now we’re taking care of you. Nigg, shut down cameras and sensor network. Move! We’re taking ourselves a little pause. Don’t make that face, you’ll have your turn. Tell the operator at sub-Central, on my behalf, to mind his fucking business and cut off connections to Command…let’s say for half an hour. Nante is on shift, so he’ll no doubt understand. I’ve covered for that old pig so many times…”
Laughter. The big guy is the one deciding, good to know, Kiki thinks, still on her knees, her face toward the floor—until the man punches her, throwing her backward.
“Look at you…all the same, these Duchess sluts. You took it downstairs, you liked it, and you thought to do all sectors, eh? You could save the act, you know, you just had to say you’re horny. You’ve found your match, here, you’ll see. Who was the lucky guy, downstairs? We must thank him for thinking about us, too…”
The two men are close, too close. Kiki pulls the knife from her back, she leaps in a flash, flexing, and grasps the asshole’s huge shoulders: arms and legs clench him hard, wrapped around the man’s body. Another specialty of South Paris 5 whores: thigh muscles of steel. She presses the blade against his throat and warns the three dorks that the plan has just changed.
“Anybody moves, presses a fucking button, brushes a trigger, and I begin cutting. Am I clear? If you want blood, trust me, you’ll see a lot. You two, guns on the floor, slowly, and in line against the wall. Come on, boys!”
“Damn whore.”
With the small garrison at hatch 24 dealt with, Kiki finally reaches room R5. She must act fast; she has only a few minutes left before the guards at Gate 4 start worrying and the operator of the Red sector sub-Central—the “old pig”—turns back online cameras and all connections to Command. Then, she wouldn’t ever make it out of here alive. Kiki moves, her first light and silent steps in the chamber. She walks between large flexible water tanks of different sizes; some set in the walls, like huge fish tanks, others in the middle of the room, in an arrangement leaving two narrow lateral naves to admire the wall tanks, while an internal, ideal path is marked by a perimeter lit in blue.
Kiki is confused by the reflections, by that maze of imprisoned fluids, of unmoving arcane shapes, big and small; and others, fast and toothy, furiously crashing into front portholes and transparent screens without any sound. Then, after the illusions of meta-reflections, she focuses her senses. Disgust and horror take over.
The Red Toad’s collection is really repugnant. The bastard has shut in his cursed fish tanks human and semi-human embryos, seemingly alive, attached via mesosilicone cables to a system affixed to the lids of those hellish boxes. Genetic mutations materializing extra tails and multiple heads, reptile sections with human gazes among spinning scales, staring at Kiki’s face. But that’s nothing: there is more, waiting for her, more abominations; you just have to cast a look at the large tanks along the side walls. Clusters of human organs: scrota, buttocks, penises, vulvas, uteruses, removed from their bodies and endowed with biomechanical gills, floating in the currents like sidereal fishes. Small organs, apparently taken from children, given a new neural autonomy and strange tail-like propellers, a lit LED at the tip. It is them, angrily crashing into the flexible water walls, leaving stains, streaks of pale blood. New creatures which seem to rebel against the horrid, depraved experimentations they underwent. The most miserable sub-human creatures slowly sink on the bottom, sucked in by hidden pumps to be funneled by side turbines into a system of pipes intersecting on the ceiling.
Shit, I don’t believe this! This can’t be real…
Kiki keeps advancing, forcing herself not to throw up her very soul. She discovers more display cases, in the central area: they are not filled with that cursed amber-colored fluid, like the repulsive fish tanks. They contain bones, maybe human as well, and fossilized anatomic parts inside ice cubes. Human eyes, mostly. Unfortunately, small eyes; too small for an adult. They are connected to black boxes supporting them, equipped with two antennae on the sides. They look like they can still—terribly—see. And that’s the case: they open and close, now, while all together, in sync, they follow her movements. They must be somehow all linked.
That bastard…
Kiki is having a hard time breathing; she curses Messerschmitt, who sent her into that absurd hell. Then, finally, she finds the Red Toad’s jewels, artistically illuminated by telescopic spotlights. Human skulls, in pairs, with gems set in their sockets and fractures, newly-grafted dilitium teeth, rows of lights, obscene blinding grins from the beyond. The lowermost display case contains a single skull, with an iridium swastika carved on the frontonasal suture.
This must be the one, and if it’s not who gives a shit, Kiki thinks, I want to get out of here now.
Noises, on the other side of the room: a rustle, a rhythmic rubbing, whispered words, a sort of chant. Fuck, there’s somebody in here!
Whoever they are, that massive shadow rising and lowering, swelling ever more, they do not seem to have noticed the hatch opening—to far, at the other end of the long rectangular chamber—and Kiki’s silent presence.
She gets closer, knife ready to lunge. She puts him into focus, among the labyrinthine reflections of that place, now she sees him: Basilius Peters, the vile President, kneeling in front of one of his fish tanks, butt-naked. He is jerking off, sweating like a slaughtered pig, before one of his gilled asses, its iron tail squirting all around and drawing in the amber water a cobweb of blood-red trails.
A fresh catch, right, bastard? That’s what turns you on, what makes you come?
Kiki holds the madman’s skull; the mission is over; she could just exit that delirious place and reach Messerschmitt on the WasserBrücke. Load on her reader the Israeli credits he promised, and get it over with, go back to Paris, forget. But she is beside herself after what she has seen. She does not move; she keeps watching the Red Toad with loathing. She sees him ejaculating, crying, spreading his sperm on the floor, slipping on it with his elbows and awkwardly tumbling sideways, wrapped in his royal red silk pajamas, while his creature finally manages to burst its own biomechanical gills and drown in its own blood and, finally, slowly pass away on the bottom.
This is too much, fuck the plan, the Duchess’s promotions and all the rest. I’m doing in this prick here and now.
Kiki slips out of the shadow, Peters turns back in surprise, showing her his wide red face. He has the expression of a god who slid down the stairs. He opens his maw, but he cannot even cry—the pain is too sharp. Kiki’s knife has sunk into his big ass, up to the handle.
East macro-area, Bezirk 7/Neukolln/Treptow Kopenick—WasserBrücke
Kiki glimpses Messerschmitt’s unmoving outline on the WasserBrücke, as he watches the foul Sprea water, the floating footways crawling with human monsters and rats. She has managed to reach him as planned. She stays fifty meters back, does not get closer. He turns around, motions her to join him, raising the cigar-armed hand. She ignores him, gets to the edge, climbs on the supports of the bridge fence, leans out and throws the bag with the madman’s skull into the river.
The Führer floats for some seconds, before sinking.
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