September. The Baths of Caracalla lay in the shadows of the new flyovers, intersecting in multiple crosses, exasperated curves. The whore Rome flows upon there: boxed souls rolling from the city center to the tunnel of Via Cristoforo Colombo. The giant tube leading to the sea, running parallel to the Double Sewer Connector IV. Two entangled snakes of steel2, spitting out clean and waste waters. They seem to bite each other, long metal reptiles, with their copper teeth. The Ostia estuary is spectacular: cannonballs of shit shot into the horizon.
The thermal complex has changed since the 216 AD inauguration, the VI Century abandonment, and now it looks like the ruins of the modern era—splattered in exhausts of human machines and piss of rats. Nothing like that. The construction workers of the Black Hen have been hard at work on the underground structures of the Baths of Caracalla, the forgotten ones. Castra Tenebrarum. They have attached an oxygen tank to old Mithra’s lungs of dust, hidden for centuries in his cosmic cave. Wedged in rock, intubated, pissed off.
The cardinals are gathering in the ancient mithraeum for the new vow established by the She-Pope. Machete at their sides, hooked to the purple sash warped by their fat bellies; the red marbled zucchetto with black bow on their heads, to keep fresh already-crashed brains.
The She-Pope’s generals pass through the vestibule, an inertial-guide floor moving them all without muscle exertion, into a rectangular chamber with cross vaults looming over a floor of white and black mosaics: the Sanctuary. The statue of Aphrodite Anadyomene awaits them.
The primal slut has been restored: covered in neprom, equipped with three breasts, a red flashing LED between her legs, a big chicken beak. The walls are adorned by the ground-down original marbles, by the rough petra genetrix, by new protrusions animating the disorderly trajectories of crystal snakes. Those solid-tongued beasts seem to stretch out toward the cardinals’ buttocks. But who would really get poisoned?
Between the pillars, there are slanting pews. The generals must quickly take their seats for the ceremony. In the middle of the room, a perimeter of Lar fire shows the old pit for the Taurobolium, dug into the rock by Caracalla’s engineers and covered by an iron grate. A damn motherfucker of an Emperor, Caracalla, alchemic and syncretistic: Mithra, Aphrodite, Serapis Kosmokrator, Jesus Christ and Aion.
Many sides of the same coin, an orgy of East and West, an exchange of holy fluids. Stuff for every taste, soul propaganda.
The She-Pope had the ancient mithraeum tailor-shaped for her. On the right wall, a big ass is installed, with two small testicles dangling. It is the ass of Cybele, the ambiguous Magna Mater, the goddess of the t-girls, the Black Madonna of the obscene Candlemas. Nobody else. Processions of ancient eunuchs and twentieth-century transgender, all for her. Korybantes and Mamma Schiavona, the summit of Montevergine, voluntary emasculations and improvised Gay Prides.
Then, no more Taurobolium: in the Rome of the Apocalypse nobody gives a fuck about bull blood, physical prowess, redemption and purification. That’s not the purpose. The new Fossa Sanguinis—the Black Hen’s—will offer a different bath to the twenty-two generals. The bull iconography—the past—is represented by a flexible water beast, nailed on the short side of the chamber, assembled with the classic symbolic figures: a dog and a snake drinking blood from its belly; a scorpion sinking its stinger in its testicles; grain spikes sprouting from its tail; a raven watching with satisfaction the scene of the dying animal. They are the forces of evil, stopping seed and blood from fecundating the earth, to keep breeding. Old bullshit. The raven, the messenger, the liaison between Mithra and the above—the Sun, the Boss—maybe had a malfunctioning radio. Interpretations of Mithraic brains of that time, old stuff that must be represented only to be destroyed.
The tail, the end, the Apocalypse: everything must begin with a head. In the long voyage from head to tail, from beginning to end, going through the acids of the guts, reality unfolds, transforms. The head is the most wrong component of the whole process. The Apocalypse is the tail of something vanishing in the dark.
The first general gets up, undresses, lies down on the iron grate of the Fossa Sanguinis. A priest, clad in orange and with bull horns, turns on the pump of the massive tubing above the mithraeum, a steel earthworm running on the ceiling, hanging over the pit with an open mouth.
Rain of human blood on the cardinal who prays the Black Hen under the great gush flailing him. The pit fills up to the mesh of the grate, the pump automatically turns off.
The general stands, in a daze. He drips fuel of women drained in the leper colonies of the catacombs. Breeding whores. He approaches the bull statue, grabs a hammer and hits with strength. The flexible water immediately loses its unstable integrity, shapes and iconographies, turning into tiny blue beads collapsing on the floor. The past can crumble so easily…
The general falls on his knees; the horned priest closes in and gives his machete back to him, the vow is done. Now, all the others will have their turn with the red rain of the mithraeum.
The Black Hen is well organized, in the leper colonies, to dry out thousands of female prisoners’ bodies, conveying all into the belly of the Baths—its main tank, dominating the center of the new structure. All thanks to the pernickety work of the Hirudinea cheyenne, biomechanical leeches engineered a year ago. Grey cuirass with built-in loading rods, fifty micro-suckers, serrated jaws with allutex spurs. Expansion abdomen with scale-sectors, no digestive tract: the cheyennes only eat electricity.
Once their work is done on a body, dried out in thirty seconds, the cheyennes spread their wings and reach the leper colony hive, to join their companions and deliver the blood into a collection tank, the portable swamp. Nice fucking bioparasites. Some of them escaped from the hives—radio interference issues—and sucked out the stuff of a few regular citizens. Uselessly, like bees losing life and stinger at the same time. Without any blood left, nobody will be able to reconnect the cheyennes to the energy socket: the super-leeches have only six hours of autonomy, then they will turn off forever with their abdomens full of human juice.
A dedicated aqueduct—the biggest synthetic vein in the world—pumps and funnels the contents of all the hives down to the fat belly of the Bath tank. The second largest dome in the city. Ceremonies in the mithraeum are not many, and the tank could contain the blood of all the women in Rome at once. This is not casual: the Apocalypse has just started.
The She-Pope does not waste time in her new mithraeum; from the towers of Castel Sant’Angelo, she is shooting down new angels with an assault rifle. Human clay pigeons. An elastic vibrating platform—a modern catapult with pulse tensors—flings in the air citizens drawn by lots every week.
The Angels Lottery, so they call it.
Emasculated men, painted in phosphorescent white, with fake wings welded on their backs and a plastic sword tied to their right arms. The ranks of the rebel party—the feminists, the uterins, the white hens—keep thinning. People crowd the bridges, the riverbanks. They swallow sandwiches, licking their fingers, betting on every shot, every angel. They laugh out loud when the flying men, missed by pontifical bullets, crash into one of the three hundred black domes of the city, all adorned in iron spikes, to end up skewered; or when they land on the electrified nets of the Off Zone to be disintegrated like flies.
The She-Pope’s aim is good. Many of the shot-down angels fall into the Tiber waters. The alliance with rats is long-standing. That slice of sky of the whore Rome is clear today: for some hours at least, no cursed cloacal gulls. Those birds are clever: they fly farther, they change their routes. The She-Pope’s aim is good, and she has many bullets, hot magazines for every need. They know.