Squinting through the auto-magnified eye scope, Brother Finnes examined the map carefully. Planting a dirty, cracked fingernail on the faded document, the monk asked his aid, Sowell the Scarred, “You say the scouts reported the Pilgrims were near this ridge?” The aide, purplish face a mass of varicose veins and scar tissue, wiggled his head, and then droned hollowly through the gash of a mouth, “Yes, O Brethren.”
Feeble ceiling fans stirred the dry air in the monk’s chambers; a two-headed fly buzzed in the back draft significantly as if it had a purpose there. Brother Finnes, dragging deeply on an opium pipe, languidly reclined on the settee. Afternoon desert sunlight warmly massaged his cadaverous hands: his plain brown vestments loosely flowed over his thin frame. A laconic, bookish face, with a trace of dry gentleness in the eyes, peered out of the habit’s cowl like a man from a cave. There was a certain peace in his heart. Still he could never find true spiritual bliss until those infidel terrorists, the Pilgrims, were exterminated. To create, one had to destroy: God’s law, bloody but just.
“Call in the bushman, Sowell.” The aide bowed, back peddled discreetly, and opened the door, his grotesque face squirming like a mass of bloodworms:
“Cum forth”, he muttered into the hallway darkness, “Into the presence of this holy man and shew respect.” Sowell then whispered viciously, "Don’t pick yer nose or fart.”
Brumby the scout entered grunted and bowed. Clad in the rough skins of the black desert kangaroo, his unshaven chin dripped with hemp juice and tobacco. A sharp nose seemed thrust in his face like a hatchet. Tangled hunks of dirty hair, no doubt infested with lice, fell almost to his waist. A gross lump protruded from his neck like a huge pink egg. Unnaturally wide, his eyes were shifty, and ill- focused (no doubt too much pot-tripping and isolation). Appropriately, his breath stank beyond belief.
Brother Finnes shuddered: God, what savages he was forced to consort with to purge reality of evildoers! But then there was no accounting for the mysteries of God’s design; his humble role was merely to implement that Holy Plan, not question it.
The monk was even a bit surprised when the barbarian actually spoke words: “M'lord, yer called fer more info?”
“Not only that, Brumby, we may need you to lead an expedition for us.” The bush scout blinked, looking mildly puzzled, his primitive mind taken aback by–for him-the complexity of the Brother’s remark. Also perhaps he did not understand the word “expedition.”
“Um . . . M'lord?" Brumby stammered.
“Certainly, Brumby, we need more info.” (Keep it simple, thought the monk). “Just tell me, my good man, what you and your mates saw there.” Brother Finnes‘s voice was almost sing-song as if he was reading a nursery tale to a child.
Brumby's shoulders visibly relaxed, “Dare waz a grup of many peeples, ‘round a fire . . .”
“Singing . . . ah I mean making sounds with their mouths?” asked Brother Finnes tossing back his cowl and flexing his lips.
“Yes M’lord . . . like dis.” The scout hummed, trilled and chortled.
Smiling, Brother Finnes was gentle: “Very good, my son. What else did you see?”
Bumby’s eyes widened, his voice trembling slightly, “Day had a b-i-g metal box wit’ many gards ‘round it.”
“Was there something on the box?” asked Brother Finnes nervously.
Brumby’s hands made scribbling gestures. Nodding, Brother Finnes handed a blank paper and pen to the scout who drew a crude skull and bones.
Brother Finnes felt his stomach twist and growl. Spoken of by The Fathers for centuries, could God’s divine instrument of revenge be almost at hand? If so, the beginning of the End Times was as near as his shadow. The hour when apostates, the worshipers of the Anti-Christ, would be thrown into an Abyss of Fire was drawing closer.
Then the monk saw Brumby’s hands still fumbling with the paper, painfully scrawling fragments of words:
“WIS” “DOM “ “NUKE” “BIO-“
From the scout’s confused look, Brother Finnes knew that the barbarian had not understood the meaning of what he had seen written. Semi-illiterate, he had only transcribed a few visual marks from his memory of the guarded box. Brother Finnes handed Sowell this childish scribbling for his opinion. Shocked, the aide-de-camp rasped and stuttered. “M’Lord, t-h-e-s-e are the signs of the terrible weapons much rumored about . . .” His face’s ghastly pulp twitched and trembled.
After dismissing Brumby and Sowell, Brother Finnes tried to calm his pounding heart by browsing his peaceful, voluminous library. Though the data transcribers were painstakingly entering these texts into the Order’s Info Processing System, he loved the smell and feel of the old originals. It was more soothing than his pipe.
Mouthing the titles, he stroked the tattered volumes lovely: Dummies Guide to Microsoft Version 25; The Collected Superman (Volume II,); Of Mice and Men; 1984(The Centennial 2084 edition); Macrobiotic Cooking. Between The Whole Earth Catalog and Bambi, a thick, yellowing Word document was stuffed. Entitled The History of the Fathers after the Time of Sorrows, the manuscript―an internal record of the Order’s founding―was one of the first texts preserved. Gently leafing through its fragile pages, the monk’s eye rested on this passage:
. . . and there came an age when there was an eternal blight on the earth. And the rivers, and the land, and even the skies were blackened by the poisonous wages of man’s sinful acts. This time of sorrow was a time of testing and gave rise to many evil breeds―physical signs of a profound spiritual deformity that had cursed the world. From this despair, arose, The Order of the Holy Community . . .
Turning the page, he continued:
But as in other ages of decay and decline, there too arose the Children of Darkness spawned from the seed of Satanic Powers afoot in the land; these cults and sects were spiritual pretenders, whose utter extermination would one day be at hand. For within the wilderness there lay secreted weapons of great force necessary for God’s Purpose: the total extermination of the evildoers …
These wise words soothed Brother Finnes’ nerves; he now saw things clearly: God’s design had led him to “chance” on these passages as a channel through which to remind him of his spiritual roots. Sensing his lungs swelling with a powerful breath other than his own, the monk knew that he had been given a new mission: find God’s Weapons of Mass Salvation.
After Brumby’s revelation, Brother Finnes―feeling kindly toward the creature― had allowed him to lunch in a nook in the commons. Sowell, obviously irritated, had been dispatched to the kitchen to fetch some leftover stew from an irritated staff loathe to feed a dirty barbarian. “I’ll soil me bowl,” Snide the head cook grumbled.
While Brother Finnes abstractly watched the scout greedily eat, slopping food on the floor, the meddler Brother Andrew, trailing a cloud of smoke from his opium bowl, had rushed up breathlessly, cherubic skull beaming, “Dear Brother Finnes, Sowell tells me that God has obliged you to go on a sacred quest.” Irritated that his private meditations had suddenly become common gossip, Brother Finnes replied testily, “Or perhaps I have been seized by satanic forces posing as the Lord’s minions?” (Brother Finnes silently, but guiltily, cursed Sowell, who often used his freakish psychic powers to read and then reveal, usually accidentally, the private thoughts of monks. Maybe it was time to fire his aide and get another one less “talented.”).
“Don’t be coy, dear brother. Being chosen for such a momentous mission merits at least a bit of pride,” answered Brother Andrew, “though, of course,” he added cautiously,” one must not succumb to it in excess.”
Brother Finnes considered Brother Andrew for a moment: portly frame, plump knuckles, chubby hands and face, bulbous lips that smacked every time their owner passed within ten feet of a dinner table, and forever sucked on an overly stuffed opium pipe. And then there was his perpetual flatulence: a bit much for him to be chiding another about excess . . .
#
Fierce wind blew sand in Brother Finnes’ face, jolting him out of these musings. The farting Brother Andrew, the gossipy psychic Sowell and The Order of The Holy Community already seemed years away, though the expedition had only departed a few days ago. The intense light here burnt away even the most recent past, melting experience into the here and now.
Like time, even death in the desert was transformed: no untidy refuse such as bones or a corpse’s clothing littered its landscape. Shifting wind and sand had done God’s work by giving the deceased a respectful burial--no matter how corrupt their souls in their last hours. The Lord is truly great: Brother Finnes touched his heart reverently.
But it was a trial for the living too, as he had been forewarned; the expedition’s camel train bounced violently over the desert’s sliding, billowing dunes. The riders frantically clung to the beasts’ stinking, mange-ridden humps. Brother Finnes marveled at Brumby’s skill as he cajoled his lead camel forward, efforts, which, despite the shifty, uneven terrain, guided the caravan in a straight path. Awkward and bumbling in the Brother’s study, out here in his element, the bush scout was confident and efficient.
Abruptly jerking his camel’s reins, Brumby halted the caravan and ordered everyone to dismount. Pointing toward ten-foot wide gullies, like intersecting riverbeds, across their path, the scout frowned violently. “Here be’s dezert dragins”, he warned.
Turning to his more articulate sub-scout Albert, Brother Finnes asked him to explain.
“In dis part of the Western Desert, dare lives big lizards,” Albert stretched his leathery arms wide, “dat if bothered kin’ attack.” Then the sub-scout motioned up and down the odd maze of depressions. ”Deese are caused by der big tails slidin’ thru da sand . . .”
Despite the heat, Brother Finnes felt a cold trickle of sweat on his lanky neck. Quickly touching his heart, he murmured a prayer, and peered through his powerful binoculars.
Brother Finnes could see no looming monsters but instead a figure, strutting across the ramparts of a metal and stone fortress about 35 kilometers away. It looked like some kind of storage facility, ringed by high walls. A sudden gust of hot wind chilled his face: terror rumbled through his guts. Was this where the Weapons of Mass Salvation were stored? He again murmured a soft prayer.
#
Jack O Crumpet―the figure seen by Brother Finnes scrambling along the ramparts of the facility known as Fort Helix―was also scanning the landscape, but instead was cursing, not praying. Furious, he had just finished a phone conversation with Ilkie, the driver--handler of a truck convoy--solar cells burnt out--broken down in the desert. Though the hermetically sealed life support freak pods–Ilkie had quickly informed him―were being charged by emergency power, still there was a danger that the weird meat might die in the heat.
Bugger! If there were a delay in production, his name would be dirt among The Brethren―a loss of reputation made only worse by the loss of commissions. A hired project contractor for these bloody holy rollers―whom he secretly detested―he managed the genetic re-processing of (generally innocuous) transspecies into a savage army of assassins―part of this religious community’s battle against the unfaithful and the evil.
Jack O―not interested a bit in holy crusades―was looking only for efficiency because it meant quick cash, not victory over evil. How fast can the production lab convert harmless, freaks into heartless monsters? At Jack O’s suggestion, the Brethren had set up production quotas: four killer freaks guaranteed per month counting the entire process from genetic re-processing to re-education to weapons training and final graduating exams. In fact, his wages plus commissions for meeting last month’s production quotas should be sweet, he thought happily.
At the pleasant thought of easy money, Jack-O sidled, as quickly as his deformed foot would allow, toward the Fort’s main gate where he could watch hopefully for the arrival of the shipment. Ignoring the sleeping guard Frood, whose slack, drooling jaw, piggish eyes and fawning chit-chat he detested, Jack-O slipped by the sentry hut and down to the edge of the stockade: he squinted through the spy-hole at the vast desert salt flats shimmering in the heat like an ocean of sparkling bone.
As a child, living in small towns on this desert’s fringes, he had been haunted by the stories bush scouts often told of this wilderness. All manner of monsters lived here, according to the old tales: nomadic tribes of gaunt, gibbering, fanged Aboriginals, mobs of huge, shaggy-black killer kangaroos. Horrors supposedly lurked everywhere: travelers torn to shreds by vicious packs of Dingo Dogs, bands of multi-eyed religious crazies wandering in search of God and human flesh, lone monks, living in caves, waiting to snare and disembowel lone monks from other religious sects.
Who could say for sure? Most scientific exploration of the Australian interior had ceased years ago so it was impossible to know if these stories were even half-true. During his rare travels, his convoy always clung to the tracks running to the distant urban east, protected on either side by a no-man’s –land of concrete barriers and barbed wire…
Traveling is what he wanted to do again, get the hell out of this eternal hell forever. Once he had copped enough bloody cash, he’d put this waste land behind him, go back to Sydney, and buy a nice little piece of frontage in Neutral Bay along with a comfort woman, maybe a sexy freak with huge tits . . .
Heavy, rasping breathing startled Jack O out of his daydreams of avarice and sex. Peeps the hunchback, newly promoted to his aide-de-camp, stood goggling his eyes, signing and heaving, apparently the creature‘s way of saying that he felt neglected and unimportant despite in recent promotion. Jack O smiled: Ok, he thought, Peeps mate, have I got a job for you. Then he whispered, “Peeps, organize some of the dwarfs into a team, get them out there into the Bush . . . find the convoy and its weird meat . . . I’m losin’ money the longer they're out there.”
Puffing up his chest, the hunchback then dashed here and there like a mad rooster waving his stubby fingers. He bellowed: “Bust ‘er hump boys . . . Hey Dango get da water bottles . . . You Frut go to da supply room ‘n fetch da jump starter kit and soler ‘sells . . . Also Thedo fetch der tow hooks . . . May need to pull the busted truck back ‘ere in order to save bloody Ilkie and the freaks. You Twirdle drive da sand wagon out ‘ere.”
Extremely tall for a dwarf, Twirdle scurried into the Fort’s garage, and backed out the seven-foot auto-console of smoothly welded scrap metal, bobbing on old tractor tires. Twirdle clashed the gears noisily as his scrambling team mates leapt aboard with jugs of water, crates of replacement solar cells and coils of hauling cable and hooks. Spinning the rear wheels, Twirdle sped toward Fort Helix’s opened gate, almost losing Dango who clung trembling to Thedo and Frut.
Roaring through the flat terrain, the sand wagon sprayed showers of bone-like grit. Twirdle glanced at his land sonar dial for sand traps or obstructions ahead. His crew, popping on sunglasses, had finally strapped themselves into the rear compartments and seemed content, despite their nervous breathing. Scorching winds raged about them like invisible flames.
After about 25 kilometers, Twirdle noticed little dust plumes on the horizon and pointed. “Frut,” he yelled, you ‘n the boys use yer bi-scopes to check what dar is`on doze flats is.” Twirdle heard frightened squeaks. Thedo―spying Brother Finnes and his halted expedition, spectral and floating on the horizon’s shimmering heat―cried out, “Captin, I think it be’s The Pilgrims!”
Hell’s bells, thought Twirdle, those foul poisoned toads are back in the neighborhood. About a year ago, they had come to Fort Helix demanding dwarfs, sex, narco and money. When Jack O Crumpet told them to piss off, their nutty leader Credo threatened the Fort, telling Jack O that his mob had weapons of mass destruction left over from the Old Days that “would cream the whole lot of them (meaning the Fort) into mush that even a hungry buzzard wouldn’t eat.” Nothing had come of the threats, and they had left.
Twirdle knew the shadow of Satanic Powers when he saw them. For, even though barred from a vocation within the Brethren’s ranks―even half-dwarfs were considered spiritually inferior―he had managed to peek at snippets of various sacred texts that a helpful servant occasionally smuggled out of the prayer rooms. The Pilgrims were repeatedly condemned in these texts as “bearers of The Devil’s Night Soil,” and the “Unspeakable Servants of Darkness.” The same texts also recounted blood-curdling stories of raids, replete with dwarf stealing, rape and other atrocities committed by The Pilgrims, including the sacramental consumption of both human and multigenetic flesh.
Apparently, the demented Pilgrims labored under the twisted belief that their band of outcasts was destined to create, through intergenetic mating and cannibalism, a new super-race, forged from the bodies and minds of both normals and freaks―a “healing” process ushering in a new era of harmony between species. In other words, fucking and eating flesh would lead to world peace. The Fort Helix Brethren, who had foresworn all forms of sex except the occasional, furtive act of masturbation, dismissed these ravings as mere criminal insanity and spiritual disease.
#
Brother Finnes had nervously watched the approach of the sand wagon, swarming with vicious looking dwarfs. A Pilgrim spy mission? Or worse yet maybe an impending Pilgrim suicide attack. His expedition could be in immediate danger.
In his library, Brother Finnes possessed a tattered plastic-sealed document found by fellow monks while hunting in the wilderness near the Order’s monastic grounds. Apparently, left by accident near a camp site used by The Pilgrims, it was some kind of religious rant; he now recalled its chilling words, a credible direct threat against the Order by the Pilgrims:
This world burns with the hot stink of spiritual corruption. Only a greater fire than the apostasy of our times can destroy this rotting corpse that fuels the flames of evil. In annihilation lies purification. Total destruction leads to rebirth. The blessings of mass salvation are thus bestowed through the weapons of mass destruction.
All those who oppose the sacred beliefs of The Pilgrims are worms and maggots. Foremost among these parasites is The Order of the Holy Community and its agents, acolytes and operatives; only the divine sword of The Pilgrims can slaughter these infidel wretches . . .
Brother Finnes bellowed: “My children, blast those little messengers of evil―they’re Pilgrim scum of the desert, tools of Satan himself . . .” Brumby and Albert ordered the other scouts to fire their lasers. They scored a direct hit, the sand wagon exploding into flames, hurtling the shrieking dwarfs into the air like little blazing balls; it was now, God willing, up to the sand and the wind to give these unholy terrorists a proper burial.
Grabbing his cello-phone, Brother Finnes rang Brother Andrews: “We have destroyed a mob of satanic dwarfs trying to attack us. Also there is a fort about 35 kilometers from here . . . I think we have discovered the Pilgrims and where their weapons of mass salvation are hidden . . ."
Brother Andrews’s voice trembled with awe: “I feel the spirit of the Divine in your words, Brother.” Ecstatic, Brother Andrews sensed the exciting birth of a warrior in his fellow beloved monk’s soul. Was this shy holy man, an endless idler in his cloistered library, leaving comfortable theological meditations for dangerous spiritual actions? And high time, too. The Order was getting decadent and soft―he self-consciously touched his own ample girth―and a new crusade to energize the faithful and unfaithful alike was way overdue. Too long had his brethren just drifted along, going through the motions of verbally denouncing evildoers but never taking actual risks in the War against Satanic Terror. Brother Finnes was finally showing the way. He would lead them bravely to the Weapons of Mass Salvation, purifying the world of the ungodly. Brother Andrews whispered a fearful prayer: the End of Days may be at hand. Protect us. Save our souls, O Lord. Amen.
