Slumrat Rising

The party barge slid down out of the sky. Lights still pulsing in frantic time to the mindless music the bound spirits were compelled to play. The screams of mandatory fun and drugged release turned into fear, raw, clawing, stabbing. The barge slid down, passing the roofs of apartment towers. Passing the dim, shoddy windows of the ever-watchful slumrats. They always loved a free show. Some of the lift spells still worked. The barge fell a little slower than gravity demanded. The wards around the railings held. Screaming accountants and their dates slid along the flashing dancefloor and piled up against the stern, crushing each other as the hammer fell inevitably towards the anvil.

A few had the wit to activate personal spells, break emergency charms, and tried to reach the soft fall medallions lining the edge of the barge. Too late. Their all too human bodies couldn’t struggle against gravity and inertia. Some of the Level Fours might have managed it, smashing bodies out of their way. They might have reached safety. But not with Truth standing by. Waiting for them. Waiting for them to fight free of the crush only to watch the medallions fall overboard. Watching them look helplessly as he flung the medallions off into the void.

Still. You make level four anywhere, let alone Jeon, and you weren’t someone soft. You did things to get that power. And of the four Level Fours in attendance, two had the seven-pointed star lapel pins of Starbrite. Long green wings burst from their backs, feathers meters long and made of cosmic energy fluttered in the rushing air. Another seemed to burst into a foam of tiny white bubbles, more and more and more until he was covered in them; until he was buried more than an arm’s length deep in them. The last one launched themselves horizontally from the barge, aiming for the apartment buildings and trusting in God to provide.

Truth intercepted him with an axe kick that rattled his brain and smashed his face into the deck. In a second or two, he would recover, but… in a second or two the barge would smash into the pavement. Truth launched himself up the sharp slope of the barge, letting inertia and body cultivation send him flying toward the two Starbrite experts. They didn’t see him coming. They couldn’t have stopped him if they had. The Tongue lashed out, gutting one, the wings vanishing as she screamed and tried to grab all the falling pieces of her. He snapped other’s neck, palm shattering chin and turning a classically sculpted face into abstract street art. Not dead yet either, but the wings shattered into the air, and there were less than two seconds to recover.

He bunched his legs under him, cast Abner’s Amble, and leapt straight up. Thrush had been waiting- the air demon caught him and slowed his fall. He watched the barge slam into the sidewalk below him. The sudden cessation of movement meant that all the bodies formerly piled up at the stern shotgunned into the pavement. A fraction of a second after the impact, the street became a gorey hell. Worst of all, perhaps, was that the wards had held until the last. The party had been reduced to crushed and ruined bodies, but they were still mostly alive.

Truth landed, soft as murderous dandelion fluff. His aim had been a little short of the target, it seemed, but nothing too terrible. He quickly jogged a block up the road, passed the destroyed street lights and the steel-shuttered, lightless doorways. He came to the building with the windows all covered and blacked out. The building none of the teeming slumrats would ever dare approach. He knocked twice, then opened the door. Hundreds of faces, mummified, emaciated, or rotting, greeted him. All smiling in their way. He bowed and invited them outside.

They streamed out in silent order, first by the tens, then hundreds of them. They swarmed silently over to the barge, passing through the flickering remains of the wards like nightmares, like a repressed memory. Someone recovered enough to scream.

More joined in quickly, begging, crying. The Ghul preferred quiet, but it seemed they understood the situation. They showed all their usual tenderness pulling away teeth and picking loose nerves. Slowly pressing rotting fingers into eyes until they went pop-pop. Plucking eyes out and turning them around, still connected to the brain, so the partygoers had to watch the ruination of their flesh. Watched their stomachs be torn open and their innards shivering in the cool evening air. Watching their genitals be ground under feet or rubbed between hands until they were simply pulped meat and tissue. Some of the Ghul were collecting parts here and there, bringing them back into their nest. Truth didn’t care to investigate why.

The Level Four who had bound themselves in foam exploded out of his shell. He looked shaken, but alert. He swiftly took in the scene and turned on his heel to run. Truth readied himself to intercept, but there was no need. Boney finger tips poking from decayed flesh sank into the Level Four’s shoulder. Hooked the collarbone. Sharply yanked up and back. The Level Four screamed and spun around, rattling dragons of lightning bursting from his hands. Smashing into the ghoul. Achieving nothing.

The spells reached the ghoul, Truth could see the lightning licking at them. It just did nothing. On some level Truth could not understand, the spell was simply… forbidden from having an effect. They could be harmed by direct force. They could be harmed by superheating the environment around them, reducing their flesh to dust. But magic could not touch them directly. Truth had heard that before, but hadn’t quite believed it. Now, as he watched the screaming Level Four have his face bitten away, his tongue pulled out and bitten off, his ankles chewed into stubs and his knees shattered and his fingers carefully dislocated a joint at a time, he believed it.

Truth had seen some awful things. Done some things, a lot of things, he wasn’t proud of. This was a new level of horror. Etenesh wouldn’t be proud of me if she saw this. She would turn her face from me in disgust. He didn’t move to stop it. It was far too late for that. All he could do was make sure the scene had its intended effect on the public. He got his paint from Thrush and in as big letters as he could draw, wrote-

“All The Stars Fall Down. The Tiger Rises. Jeon Forever!”

____________________________________________

Truth took a very long shower. Wasn’t like the talisman was going to run out of hot water. Oh, actually, the cosmic energy is thinning. It really could run out of hot water. His thoughts kept veering into the morbid. What else was he supposed to think about? He just condemned a party barge full of strangers to an awful, degraded death, and he chose them because they were convenient and decently symbolic. They weren’t particularly evil, or no more evil than most. Could something be evil on an absolute scale? If so, then they were evil. If evil was always a relative measure, then they were not. They existed at the background level of evil. Lost in the sinful noise of the world.

Now, the person that crashed a party barge full of office workers and made sure to feed them to the Ghul alive, that person was evil! Truth switched off the shower and dried off. He would try the hot tub. Why not?

He understood Merkovah’s insistence that they were freedom fighters, not terrorists. That they were revolutionaries, and in the desperate present circumstances, “all methods” must be employed. Still the notion of a “just war” was never something he had understood. Partially because no one had ever explained the concept to him, but mostly because it was all just violence. Violence was a tool he used, and that others used against him. Why pretty it up with justifications and excuses?

He examined his body in the bathroom mirror. He looked… good. The face was his face. He could still hear the evil whispers from time to time, but they didn’t crush him anymore. He thanked Etenesh and Jember for that. Their honest appreciation and constant affirmation did a lot to help him to accept himself. His muscles were strong, defined, but not overly bulky. Proportional to his heroic frame. He started from his feet and worked his way up, really looking at every centimeter of himself.

He looked strong. Handsome, perhaps, to those whose tastes ran that way. Too coarsely masculine for Jeon. It lacked that subtle aesthetic polish. His body was hard to the touch. You had the presentiment of strength looking at him- everything about him was purposeful. Intentional. Crafted for heroic work, not left to chance and a flabby life. A body built for a brief and violent moment in the sun. Etenesh called him her “Pretty Man.” Sometimes it made him feel good, sometimes like a fraud.

He walked over to the hot tub and sank into it, trying to work with the heat and the water jets to relax. Even in the Slums, there were things you weren’t supposed to do. You never curb stomped someone. Unless they really had it coming, in which case you did. You never involved family, unless they started it, or you really wanted to. Never involved “kids,” variably defined. Now that he thought about it, all those things you weren’t supposed to do were generally brought up to excuse a “counter” atrocity. You had to slit that guy’s throat and pull his tongue out the hole before hanging a burning tire around his neck and leaving him handcuffed to a streetlight outside his apartment building. You HAD to!

He had crossed the line first by shanking your cousin. It was his own fault it turned out this way. Not like you wanted to do this. You weren’t evil.

He tilted his head back on the cool edge of the tub. It had been contoured into a pillow shape. Nice. He vaguely heard noises from deeper in the house. It seemed the owners had returned. He didn’t stir. If he could break in here, they weren’t worth worrying about. That priest said he could see sin. That sin manifested physically and financially. The worse you were doing in life, the greater your sin. Truth felt a faint trickle of hate flow through him. He would get the priest his cash. Let him eat all the sin Truth accumulated. Let him eat it all.

“Honey, were the cleaners in today?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Shower’s wet.”

“Guess they were in, then.” There was noise in the kitchen area. “Booze is all here, so probably not a break-in. Cleaners.”

“They need to remember to dry the walls after they clean.”

“Sure. We’ll remind them.”

It sounded like two women. Tired women. He could feel the ground in exhaustion through the rote intimacy. He turned around, trying to spot them through the glass walls. A couple of older women. They looked about fifty, which, given their wealth, in Jeon meant they were probably pushing ninety. Back late. He idly wondered what brought them home after midnight. Well. Not his problem. Nor his business. He’d sleep in the guest bedroom. No need to be an asshole.

“Did you eat enough?”

“Yes, I loaded up on canapes. You?”

“I’m alright. I’m not hungry.”

There was a pause. Then a sigh. “Alright, bedtime for you and me both.”

“Yeah. I just…”

There was another pause. “Kind of messed up going to a baby shower.”

“Yeah. Thanks for coming home with me, by the way.”

There was a long sigh. “What, was I going to put you on the carpet and send you away while I drank cheap wine and pretended everything was fine? No, Dear. I’m afraid I caught the same stomach bug you did.” He could hear the smile at the end.

There was a little sniffle. “I just thought I would be dead, you know? That I would die before things got… this bad. That the next generations would have time to fix things.”

“Yeah. Me too.” They sat there- the old married couple holding each other softly and pressing their heads together. Truth sitting in the hot tub, looking up at the locked-down sky.

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