The Rat Kink

Harold was cold and it was a deep kind of cold. Harold was the kind of cold that got into the bones and threatened to break them. He had been lost for hours and he carried all of them. All the hours he thought he lost, wandering through the woods, were all there perched on his shoulders, weighing him down. He should have known it, too. He could feel the strain on his neck and he could feel it in his back. His feet throbbed, but Harold kept walking because he was afraid. Earlier on, there had been the sounds of wild life, at least. He could only hear the trees and the wind and he felt like he wandered somewhere he shouldn’t have. He imagined two night owls hiding in the trees, looking down at him. The first owl looks to the second and asks, “Should we warn him?” The second stretches its wings and says, “Let the idiot die.”

The moon was blue and round in the cloudless sky and it bled soft light down on the treetops. A strong wind licked through the branches, causing a rackety cry to echo off the wood and toward the distant river water. A storm had passed, but not before it raged. It ripped down bows and soaked the undergrowth, making the ground soft beneath Harold’s old boots. The wet undergrowth had made the going slick and Harold remained ever aware that he was skirting a steep slope. At the bottom of the slope, there was a lake of shadows and jagged rocks jutting out from those shadows like demonic fingers beckoning him to his death. He would not oblige. He hoped not.

The wind was beating at his back, pushing him, goading him. There was something rustling in the shadows. The noise came from beyond the sound of the swaying branches. Rats in the walls, although there were not walls for the rats to hide. Rats in the darkness, he supposed. His body had been shivering, but instead of warming him, it just made him sore. He considered emptying his bladder on himself, just for the warmth of it. He only considered it for a moment. It’d feel good for a little while and then the urine would start to cool and freeze. He was wet enough already.

The noise persisted from the darkness. The sounds of gnawing and scratching and squeaking. Rats in the darkness. Harold tried to remember how to determine North by finding the North Star. It was supposed to be the brightest one in the sky, but all he could see was a passing airplane and the blue moon. He remembered something about moss growing on the south side of trees, but he wasn’t sure if that was right. He couldn’t find any moss anyway.

Harold thought that he was being watched. Possibly by the two night owls in the trees, but he didn’t think so. If there were owls, they had run for the hills. His foot slipped and his legs were too tired to catch him. He fell ad fell down hard and all of a sudden, he was falling down the slope, bouncing and being beaten by random rocks and then he broke through something. There was a brittle snap and then he smacked down hard into a shallow puddle of stagnant water. Down in the darkness, there was a vicious stink. The kind that clawed up into the nose and made itself comfortable. It was ***** and urine and clotted, putrefied blood.

The sound of his fall had echoed out into a long nothingness. The ceiling of the place wasn’t high. If it were, he probably would have been dead. Beneath the icy cold puddle, there was hard stone and something that he didn’t want to believe was human skeletal remains. Maybe a deer. Maybe someone’s hunting dog. There was no skull, just a rib cage. Harold kicked the bones away and there was an odd cry. Definitely nothing human. There were the sounds of scuttling and eating and it was greater now. Where ever he was, he was close to the source.

He moved through the darkness, shivering so hard that he worried that he’d shake himself apart. His foot kicked something hard, something that wasn’t a rock or a bone. He bent down and picked up a flashlight. Someone had been here and Harold thought about the rib cage he found.

“It’s a deer.” Harold had insisted, rolling the long barrel of the flashlight in his hands. He slid a switch on the flashlight and for a wonder, it turned on. It might have been the cruelty of fate that the flashlight had batteries that worked. Had the light never turned on, Harold would have never had seen the rat kink. Hung over head, like a writhing hive, was a mass of rats tangled up together. Rats were all feasting upon each other and fornicating with each other and shitting over each other and all of their eyes moved to look at him. They were dripping with blood and urine and rat pups were crapped out the bottom to die on the ground. The dead pups had made a high mound beneath the kink and other rats scurried about, feasting on the pups. They saw him and saw that he was warm flesh, though Harold didn’t think of himself as warm flesh.

Once Harold saw the rat kink and the mound of dead pups and the fat rats eating the rat pups, he knew that the rib cage had been human and soon there would be another to join it. Harold ran, but it meant nothing. For the good it did, he might as well sat down and allowed the rats to wash over him. They bit into him and he batted them away and they kept coming, wave after waves, eating and eating. He fell to his knees as his eyes were eaten out of their sockets. As his shoulder hit the floor, his throat had been gnawed open and he was gone. The light from the flashlight washed over the writhing rat kink and the hunger rats with their wanting mouths and what was left of Harold.

A Very Simple Story

This is a simple story and I won't waste time over-telling it. Close your eyes and see a man on his knees. See another standing before the first, a gun trained on between the first man's eyes.

The first man is bleeding and weeping softly. The second man wasn't bleeding or weeping.
"Are you done?" The second man askes the first.
"Yes. Yes. Please." The first man says quickly.
The first man looks cautiously relieved, but that ends quickly as the second man laughs.
"No. You're not." The second man pulled the trigger and the first died on his knees.

A very simple story.

The Last Reich: Bringing Up God Synopsis

“The Last Reich: Bringing Up God” is a 383 page (113,500 words) sci-fi/fantasy novel about a Nazi super soldier, an ax-wielding magician and a teenage girl being tricked into opening a doorway into a chaos dimension by a sadistic warlock. The novel begins with Clod meeting Macy on a pig farm. Clod is looking to pillage a convoy of human traffickers and releases Macy from bondage, expecting that she might be able to lead him to them. She reluctantly does, but not after the two run into the magic man , Fiend in a weather beaten shack in the middle of the desert. Fiend gives Clod a very painful vision and gives Macy a command. “Stay with him.” Clod catches up with the Slaver convoy in a city called Lincoln. The Slavers set up a trap for him, because while he was searching for them, they were searching for him. Little does Clod know, he is a genetically modified human with controls laying dormant in his brain. The one pressing the buttons is Kurt, a fellow super soldier who inherited the hidden Nazi tools and machinery. Clod gets captured, but not by the Slavers, but by the lawmen of Lincoln. They lock him up and the controls were turned back on and he was set off to tear through Lincoln’s underbelly. The Slavers use the opportunity of a wounded city to go for the death blow and take over Lincoln’s industry, petroleum production and refinery. The Slavers attempt to make their victory complete by snatching up Clod, but Macy aids him in escaping. The process of breaking out of prison and crippling a city injured Clod severely and Macy pulls together his bloody, broken form. Barely well, he heads off to find the Slavers, gun them down and find those who used him. He catches up to them again and slaughters them like pigs, but he wasn’t the only one after them. Due to dissention in the ranks led by an unscrupulous man named Hess, Kurt decides to offer a bounty on all their heads. The bounty hunters find the slaughtered Slaver camp and belief that their bounty is being snaked out from under them. They go to reclaim it, meaning they go after the barely healed Clod. Meanwhile, Macy goes after Clod and is confronted by Fiend, who offers her a vision of the future where the Slavers are brutal slaughtered, but their human cargo is left to rot in their shackles. She is dismayed by the fact that Clod would allow them to rot and refuses to let it happen. She marches after him, the Slaver and into the line of fire. She ends up saving Clod again when Clod’s tenuous health declines while confronted by one of the bounty hunters. She blows the man’s brains out of his head. She saves him, but then she leaves him to go after the people locked up in the Slaver’s cages. She finds those poor souls, but in the hands of more bounty hunters, who are hoping to ransom them back to the Slavers. Macy guns them down from a distance, but loses them again to the Pester gang. They snatch her up as well. The gang calls up the Slavers with the same plan as the bounty hunters. While held by the gang, Macy meets Toby, a young man who once traveled with Clod and who had been abandoned by Clod. The Slavers come by, slaughter the gang and take back their property. In the midst of the killing, one of Pester gang reveals the location of Clod, who had been rescued by Gutter, a tattooed magician and brought to a medicine man in the neighboring town of Big Tooth. The Slavers go after Clod and massacred the town in the process. Clod’s luck continued to decline when he’s shot in the gut twice, taken to meet Kurt and to receive treatment. Macy is taken along as well as Hess, who is the sole survivor of the Clod and the bounty hunters. He survived, but is fundamentally changed after an encounter with Fiend. Fiend encounters two other people, Toby and Gutter. Toby, who had been shot in the lung by the Slavers, is turned away from death and turned into a human/dog chimera. Gutter’s just given a lift to the big battle at the end. Gutter’s given guns that offer him freedom from a witch that has been chasing after him for a good deal of his life. He doesn’t realize that he’s being used by Fiend. Fiend set Gutter to take care of his competition for an old piece of Nazi machinery that can either travel through time if functioning properly or punch a hole into non-reality if not. Fiend’s hoping for the latter effect because magical energy flows in from that non-reality. That witch sent forth a slew of zombies to the Nazi compound, hoping to pry the machine from Kurt’s and Fiend’s grasp. The onset of zombies and the understanding by Kurt that Clod could not by made into an ally, caused him to abandon the compound and set off a self-destruct sequence. Toby snatches up Macy and brings her down to the machine. Gutter learns of Fiend’s plan and aims to stop it. Clod learns of Macy’s whereabouts and aims to save her. The two battle their way down to the machine as the compound crumbles around them. Macy and Toby are thrown back in time to present day New York. Gutter is cursed by Fiend and then given to the witch as consolation. Clod is held down and shown his absolute failure. The darkness envelops him and he is Fiend’s newest slave.