Before the Train Comes by HJDoom
“You’re too young, you’re too goddamn young. Look at you sitting there with your short trousers and that shapeless goddamn t-shirt. What the hell is a Malthusian Crisis anyway?”
Shivering little cunt, sat there with his face switched open with vacant smiles the ugly red worms shiver across his eyeballs. Green and blue light flickers in the background. The train will be here soon and they will have to move.
“It’s a band miss. They used to play down at the sonic disco, years ago so my father said.”
“I don’t give a shit what your father said. You’re a stain, a rhesus monkey in a shit smeared suit offering me handfuls of what I don’t want. I need men, strong and virile with their cocks stirring the air like predatory beasts at the waterhole. I need men who can smell the fat sex of their prey from a mile away. How many times you cum in a day?”
Her breasts are rough and ready hills squandering the promise of her hips. In her teeth she bites down hard on a cigarette but never lights it. In the dank air it swiftly grows brown and then black, liquid drops of nicotine poison spatter the floor where she has been. Her eyebrows furrow, unfurrow, refurrow gesticulating the passage of thoughts through her clenched head.
Each morning they rush and dance through the negatively strobing tunnels, always one step ahead of the howling chaos. Always you can hear the sound of the train in the distance and the oxide smell of its passing hangs in the air for months and months. These platforms are ugly scars, concrete extrusions of a dismal will to chthonic abnegation. They are the vomit of a thousand years of self-loathing held up by chattering columns of rickety stone and metal that shudder and creak whenever the lonely train passes by.
The boy thinks of cum, thick and ropey or thin like off white gruel, spraying madly up the walls or seeping out in the feeble light of a candle, drops lazy down the shaft, wax and semen mirroring their pathways.
“I cum like a hydrant shattered,” he says. This seems to please her.
“We’re all sex maniacs down here. Behind every pillar you’ll find a lesbian grinding beetles into her labia until it glows like the dead sun, filled with negative light and malice. If they go out into the light their cunts explode with the sympathetic weight of photons burrowing through the layers of seal fur around their groin. I’ve seen a sex crazed lesbian fulminating like a power plant, beetle magic engorging her labia to the size of a donkey. There’s nothing like it in the world and it smells like sherbet lemons.”
“Why would they do that?”
“We are underground people but still we crave that yellow piss that drips photon by photon out of the burning sky.”
“My father said that the sky hates us now.”
“Not all of us.” She was grimly fatalistic. Her skull writhed with the excess of hate tamped down by long habit into a throbbing fist of tumours pressing on the animal centres of her brain. She cries often now and for no reason and sometimes she remembers colours that have never existed. Her memories are stitched together from the random collapsing of fatty synapses. She remakes herself from moment to moment which makes her the perfect agent. You cannot betray a conspiracy you have remade from one second to the next.
The boy is called Clem except that no one calls him Clem. Everyone calls him Ian because there used to be a boy called Ian before him and when he exploded no one wanted to be bothered with a new name. Clem was smaller than Ian but they both wore clothes scavenged from rotting piles of vegetation so they reeked the same desperation into the endless darkness.
Sodden steps follow on from behind them. She whirls and her eyes seek blindly into the black expanse of tunnel. Her ears tremble, tingling with the cold whisper of displaced air from something out there.
“Were you followed?”
“No one even knows my name.”
She has a long sharp needle in her hand and she uses it to pierce the skin of a nipple. It makes a sound like decaying fruit and deflates as a gooey mucous bubbles out of the wound. She smears the needle and refulgent glimmers catch the wan light of the boy’s torch.
“Put that out you little shit.” She is curt and filled with decision. Her brows writhe out the semaphore of her cogitation. “Open your mouth.”
Clem’s mouth yawns wide and he stands up on tiptoes as she bends in close, her own mouth widening to meet his own. A shivering contraction runs through her and vomit sprays him in the face. He gulps reflexively and feels his organs shifting around. Everything inside is overwritten like bad dialogue. He swells like a rotten squirrel hanging necrotically from a branch. His stomach bulges and distends, bloody cracks split in the dry skin of his belly and puffy masses of fat wriggle in the wounds.
“Please,” he whimpers.
“Shut up,” said the woman. “I thought you wanted to be a soldier.”
“I thought it would be different.”
“To be a soldier is to be a tool, to be a soldier is to act as directed. You have sacrificed the illusion of free will in order to grant freedom to others. You will never determine your own future again.”
“I want it to stop.”
“Irrelevant. Your body is now a logic gate flapping open and closed only when I determine the appropriate cause.”
The needle with its mucous slick slides innocently into his spine. It’s like fire and life all at the same time. He can feel a billion tiny shrimp tickling the insides of his spinal column and suddenly his body is as stiff as water.
She flips the boy up onto her shoulder and holds him there with his head hanging down her back. With a practiced move she skims away his shorts and leaves his skinny ass draped by the side of her head. She positions his legs in a V for better stability. She can aim him by holding his white ankles. She reaches up and pulls off his wormlike cock and the withered chestnuts of his balls. She knows exactly what she is doing. She makes a shape with her hand and reaches inside his ass to pull out his guts. They come out and she twists them round and round into a red glistening narwhal horn sticking out of his twitching anus.
“Put it back,” murmurs the boy.
“Can’t. Won’t. I need the rifling for better accuracy.”
In the darkness comes a howl, low and guttural and then high and keening. Long dead electrical cables sparks and sizzle into a semblance of life at her coming. She is energy encoded into impatient flesh and she flickers like a dying star. The walls are painted in acid shades of luminescence. She comes in savage leaps and bounds her whole body energised by the mindless submission to the inevitable.
The woman waits. Her eyes narrow. She tracks the furious charge of the creature as it caroms nakedly from one crumbling pillar to the next. Her feet leave glowing footprints and in their nuclear wake you can hear albino rats screaming.
She squeezes the boy’s stomach forcing the swollen balloon of his belly against her shoulder. Chemical sigils meet and combine. His meat is bathed in corrosive juice which forces itself splattering through the labyrinth of his innards. She squeezes hard. She squeezes for life. The boy shudders and squirms.
Then, from the corkscrew tip of his extruded guts the mixture explodes forth under tremendous pressure, the sheer power of it bursting his prolapse open like a bloody flower. Creamy jets of acidic horror spray across the tunnel into the path of the thing.
Caught in the stream of unctuous death the thing flings itself to the ground. Pain rips through her as the poison does its work. She writhes and screams as her flesh boils and her blood steams in her ears. Noxious clouds of hallucinogenic gas erupt from spontaneous boils that explode into pus drenched starbursts where she is touched. In a frantic frenzy of chorea she pulls a long knife from her belt and cuts away at the leopard print cat suit she is wearing. Ugly lesions form on her sharp white teeth and nerve endings are flayed into black spirals of cancer under the relentless onslaught.
Clem cannot feel his ass anymore. His whole being, all the young vitality of him was hemorrhaged out through that narrow spout and now he feels cold and alone. His body is a remote control ghost, a strange accident of particles and cellular anomalies. His mind is filled with the difficulty of processing emotion without glands.
The monster bleeds and splinters. She shakes and howls. In deep tunnels the citizens gouge their eyes and stick forks into their ears to blot out the never ending reality. Deaf and blind they learn to appreciate the smell of roasting mollusk. Their precarious civilisation is in a never ending state of collapse and this new challenge provides the impetus to create new and terrible weapons to deploy against the surface. The war never ends.
The monster trembles and quivers like a melting cake. Only one arm functions guided by an eye that slips and slides along its flank like a badly fried egg. The knife finds the entrance to her gash and roots around in the bloody ruin. Screaming she carves free her clitoris and flings it away, the arm that flings it collapse in upon itself, a tower of shaving cream falling into a puddle. Red and grey soup of organs and delight. A screaming pair of lungs inflating and deflating out of bemused habit as they steadily fill with a rancid mixture of watery fat and piss.
The woman thinks she has won but the clitoris squirms into the body of a decaying rat and uses it like an engine to drag itself back up through the corridors and tunnels. Slopping itself gradually from one step to the next, gathering in the rotting flesh like a fist squeezing itself tight and then hurling itself forward and up to flop brokenly up the endless flights of stairs over a period of months. The eyes pop out and the clitoris is behind them, a silvery sheen of filaments burrowing into the skull and mediating a symbiotic love affair. New clitorises form on the rat’s purple tongue and the warm stink of sex announces the creature’s slow, incremental progress towards the light.
The woman drops Clem from her shoulder. His belly is a concave absence and every drop of him has been forced out through his backside. He regains the use of his limbs but they crack like arthritic twigs. The slimy rope of his guts loses its unnatural firmness and softens to something like a long, exhausted tongue that gradually, surreptitiously slurps itself back into his body. His throat is dry, his eyes are wrinkled, his teeth have attenuated into yellowing slivers of ice.
“You were great,” says the woman. “We need men like you in the resistance. I have to go now but come and find me if you want a full time job. We’ll beat those bastards yet, with men like you on our side I know we’ll beat those bastards bloody. We’ll show them that nuclear winter always gives way to a sudden, violent nuclear spring.”
She dashes off into the tunnels. Clem can hear the sound of the lonely locomotive bellowing towards the station on its biannual visit. He uses the tacky surface of his tongue to drag himself into a corner before the lights come on and the commuters make their weary way to range along the platform like starving jackals. What a day to become a man, he thinks. What a day. Pride encrusts the inside of his head like the remains of cracked wallpaper peeling away from a damp wall. What a time to be alive and to be a man. You are a man and everyone who sees you from now on will know it. One of his feet twists, cracks and drops off but nothing matters now, not even the war.
