Brandon propped the door open with his barrel of DeGrowth and put his little radio on it. He unsheathed the glaive, turned on the radio, and proceeded to stretch his legs and limber up while the voice crackled through the speaker, the facility around them distorting the signal, with the static fuzz on the voice adding nicely to the nightmarish atmosphere of the scene.

  —other news, the hostage situation with The Contestant! is entering its eighteenth hour, as The Contestant has held the rest of the cast of Get Bit The Most By Venomous Bugs For A House at gunpoint as he claims that he has been the same guy for every season and they just keep telling people his name is different and nobody notices for some reason and they won’t let him go home. But we’re not a news station, we’re WROT. Keepin’ it as splashy and trashy as floodwaters, we here at WROT don’t need to hold you hostage to keep you hooked on our line, but don’t be a sinker! Deaths from people trying to cross rushing water in their cars are surging, so if you’re thinking of trying to see if your car can float, don’t! Stay safe, stay dry, and stay tuned in to the best pre-war, pre-wipe music from the good old days. Our bunker’s stocked with enough beans that I can make sure the vinyl plays all through the final days. What have we WROT? How about another half hour of ad-free music? Yeah, you got it. Only here on WROT.

  “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons started playing.

  Halfway across town, Danny Wilson of the Bear’s Head Alternative Protein Acquisition Squad relayed the news to his team. They geared up. At rest, on standby, the team was always ready to go at a moment’s notice— they had their waterproof pants tucked into their high boots as a matter of course. It was just a matter of getting the protective tops on, strapping on the signature vest emblazoned with BHAPAS in huge letters across the back, and popping on the filter masks and helmets. His gear was still gross from the other day, but his backup gear was missing and the replacements hadn’t come yet. The wonders of corporate bureaucracy and its many efficiencies never ceased to amaze him. No matter. The places they went were always filthy enough to begin with that people hardly ever noticed the smell, and who were they to complain if they did notice it? What, did they prefer the giant rats? Fuck ‘em. From what Griffin said, this was going to be the kind of job where nobody would give him a second look if he walked in already filthy and reeking.

  Still, after this one he would be throwing his gear in the station washing machine immediately. It was getting to be a bit much.

  Danny Wilson drew the full-face mask and respirator down over his blue-grey eyes and handsome face and joined his team in the deployment van. There was work to do. There was protein to harvest.

  The men of Pearl Plumbing were doing their fucking jobs.

  The BHAPAS team hadn’t shown up to aid in disposal yet, but that was fine. They were excising cubes of flesh from the mass with the practiced efficiency they’d honed on their best days. The irregular growths sometimes came out in clean cubes, and sometimes burst halfway with hidden blood vessels. The hard part was piling up the flesh in reasonable spots for extraction once they’d cut it free. Brandon was cutting through the closest exposed layer in a grid pattern, horizontal then vertical to the depth of the blade of the glaive, so then a subsequent cut at the back would free a cube of flesh for Griffin to add into the contractor bag currently occupying the wheelbarrow, which he would wheel off to a side hallway and plop against the wall in low piles, trying to keep walkways clear.

  Danny Wilson had forgotten about the side entrance where the pale man was waiting to let them in when he had been relaying the information to his team, which is what led to a group of foul-smelling men in black tactical gear barging through the front doors of the Faust Medical Solutions complex, brandishing machetes and screaming, “WHERE’S THE FUCKING PROTEIN?”

  The initial hubbub in the main lobby was quickly defused, but it wasn’t made much more productive. The BHAPAS team smelled like sewage and decomp, which they seemed to have grown oblivious to, but it was obvious to every worker they passed, who had to stifle gags. The BHAPAS crew were told that the teratomalith crisis was in another part of the building, which the receptionist gestured towards as she said it, and they started running into the bowels of the complex before she could give clear instructions or recommend they pull the material receiving truck around to the side entrance which was much closer to the problem. Soon there were men in BHAPAS gear storming the halls blindly, making wrong turns, until eventually one found the crisis and the rest swarmed to him like ants that had located a fallen pastry. They still hadn’t found the side entrance they were supposed to use, though, so when they located Brandon and Griffin and the stacks of contractor bags, they ran back through the facility they way they’d came.

  Unfortunately, by the time they did this, the man in the truck had been instructed to pull around to the side entrance for receiving organic material, so a group of BHAPAS men arrived in the lobby with contractor bags in each hand to find that the truck was not there waiting for them. When told it had moved, they did not stop to think that maybe they should ask to move it back out front for the first unloading and then move it to the side entrance for the subsequent work. No, instead they immediately turned around and started running back into the facility again, but there was enough accumulated rainwater on the floor for them that in the process of this reversal of momentum, one slipped and fell into the bag another was holding, dragging that man down with it and tearing the bag open, resulting in a chain reaction of men falling onto and tearing bags that contained cubes of flesh and general gore slop.

  This triggered a resultant “vomit wave” throughout the facility that truly plunged things into chaos for anyone who was walking through the corridors.

  The radio was playing “Disco Inferno” by The Trammps at around the time all this happened, and Griffin had been thinking about how he’d read some post somewhere that that title roughly translated to “I learn through suffering” if you read it as a Latin phrase. But amidst the storm and the facility above and around them, the radio fuzzed out long enough for Griffin and Brandon to make out the screams in the distance, which caused them to look at each other in alarm.

  Griffin said, “I’m going to go check that out. See if the BHAPAS team needs any help.”

  Brandon just gave a thumbs-up and kept cutting into the mass of flesh. They were deep into it now.

  Griffin had learned that, as long as you weren’t dripping enough blood for it to be a major concern to the custodial staff, or if there was already a much more concerning amount and source of blood somewhere else, people would stay out of your way if you happened to be strolling through a building holding an axe and soaked with blood, your face fully obscured under a respirator, protective glasses and a cap pulled low. He wasn’t sure about the precise psychological explanation for it, but something about the look of a man in blood-spattered coveralls wielding a large axe made people just get out of the way and try not to draw any attention.

  Especially, as he was seeing right now, if those people were running screaming down the hallways, pausing only to vomit as they did. In that case, people would just keep on running and screaming.

  Soon Griffin found himself at one of the entrances to the lobby, looking upon a mess of men in tactical gear who were all soaked head-to-toe in blood and gore, screaming and slipping as they struggled to stand up amidst the enormous mess of rainwater and bodily fluids on the floor.

  God, this is going even better than I hoped, thought Griffin.

  He stepped over a BHAPAS goon who was retching into his helmet, and then Griffin vanished down familiar corridors from a previous life.

  26

  Griffin walked the way he had many times before. He left a trail of bloody footprints through the windowless corridors and made his way past the supply station, where of all people was Dave, the attendant, who was still here, and seemed to be taking better care of himself. He’d gotten a haircut, his shirt fit better, and his skin was smooth, which was all remarkably apparent even when he responded to Griffin’s habitual “Hey Dave” with a terrified scream and another contribution to the vomit wave.

  Griffin found himself standing in front of the door he’d gone through hundreds of times before, the door that led to the small windowless room where he had, for reasons that were now clearly absolutely insane, subjected himself to daily amputations without anesthetic for three years. But there had been one thought that stuck with him from his final day, one thing that he hadn’t stopped wanting from this job, one goal he was yet to achieve.

  Maybe I could be on the other side of the mirror one day.

  Griffin stepped through the door into the wedge-shaped room. On his right sat the same metal table he’d grown so familiar with, where there sat a handsome young man with blue-grey eyes who had a carbon steel Serbian cleaver in his raised right hand, now staring up at the bloody axe-wielding man in front of him in terror. He looked incredibly familiar, and Griffin knew he had never seen him before.

  Through the respirator, Griffin growled, “This isn’t your job anymore. Get the fuck out. Now. Or I’ll cut it off for you.” Then he held the door open and gestured towards it with the axe. The young man wordlessly put the knife down and ran out the door. As he did, Griffin closed the door behind him, and in one unhesitating motion whirled around and smashed the axe through the glass. It went straight through, shattering the rest of the pane, and in a few swipes of the axe he had cleared away enough of it to see an old man, frozen in place with fear, his pants around his ankles, his small erect penis in his left hand, peeking out from a tuft of white pubic hair. His face was a mask of horror, stuck in a silent open-mouthed rictus, not just from the obvious threat of the blood-soaked axe-wielding man now stepping through the window into the same room as him, but in the shocked shame of somebody caught masturbating to something they really shouldn’t be.

  That shock came through bright and clear from his blue-grey eyes.

  Griffin looked around and realized there were two other windows in the room. The wedge shape of his workspace had been to accommodate other rooms and access hallways in a radial shape around this single panopticon masturbation chamber. These were clearly also two-way mirrors, and beyond them sat handsome young men with a resemblance to Griffin, and the hideous old man before him, and each was holding a cleaver in his right hand but looking at the mirror in curiosity, having heard the commotion beyond.

  “Don’t you fucking move,” said Griffin, before smashing the axe through one mirror, then the other, and yelling, “GO HOME. YOU’RE FIRED.”

  The men in the rooms beyond got the message and evacuated promptly. Now he was alone with the hideous old man, who was shaking in fear. Beside him sat a small cooler, similar to the one Griffin used to store his hand in during his lunch breaks. It was packed with concerningly well-filled sperm sample canisters.

  Griffin laid the flat of the axe blade on the man’s shoulder. “You know, when I got here today, I thought I would find some kind of high tech facility growing clones or something. I used to think I just had one of those faces. Then I started wondering why there were so many of those faces. All this high tech medical shit. I thought you were implanting clone embryos as part of the fertility treatments. Growing them fast with the regeneratives, somehow, maybe. But it’s just this, isn’t it? It’s just an old man jacking off into a cup all day?”

  The old man croaked out, “Who are you?”

  Griffin pulled his respirator and sunglasses off.

  The old man’s face dropped as his eyes widened in recognition. “Oh. Griffin.”

  “Why? Why all this shit, you fucking maniac?”

  “To repopulate our ruined world. To be a new Genghis Khan. To cement the dynasty of Faust.”

  “What is this fucking nightmare? How did you make everyone so okay with this? This isn’t a job, this is just ritualized self-mutilation. What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you doing this?”

  The old man looked him dead in the eye and said, “This is the only way I can cum.”

  Griffin couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  He loosened his grip on the axe as he pondered the disgusting, pathetic man sitting in front of him, who at that moment decided to lunge and use both arms and his full body weight to press the handle of the axe away from him, which Griffin allowed, as he used his prosthetic left hand to unzip his coveralls, grab the pistol from inside, and fire it into the old man’s genitals.

  Roderick Faust’s penis and testicles ceased to exist in that moment, and he screamed a high piercing wail that reflected his level of pain and horror at this new development, as well as its effect on his worldview and priorities. He cried something that was probably, “Why, my son?” before Griffin fired another bullet through his left kneecap, causing the screams to become completely nonverbal, painting the room with even more blood. Another round through his right kneecap caused a level of shrieking and weeping Griffin hadn’t really prepared for.

  Once all the fight was out of the old man and he was experiencing an amount of pain beyond what most humans will ever approach, Griffin grabbed his withered left hand, drew it out onto the table beside him, knocking over the cooler, and he chopped off Roderick Faust’s left hand in a single swift strike. The old man went silent at this, the scream so complete it had drawn all the air that was left in his lungs and his eyes bulged from his head.

  Griffin cut off the old man’s other hand, then slapped him. The old man’s eyes were wide and searching as he grew paler, blood flowing freely from him, and Griffin grabbed his head with both hands and stared him directly in the eyes as he calmly said, “Fuck you. You deserve this. You ruined the world. You deserve this. You’re going to die soon and I’m going to keep telling you how glad I am that you’re in pain right now until you’re dead, because you deserve this. Everything you ever worked for led to this moment of your illegitimate son killing you. You deserve this. You’re a fucking piece of shit. You deserve this. My only regret is that I can’t keep you alive longer to make you feel this forever. You deserve this. I wish I had the time to fucking peel you. You deserve this. You deserve this. You deserve this. You deserve this. You deserve this. You deserve this. You deserve this.”

  The light went out of Roderick Faust’s eyes, and Griffin smashed the axe through his head. He kept hacking away at the body for a long time, swinging until he was gasping for breath and his arms ached, and when he came to he was standing in front of a thick red puddle with a few remaining discernible bits of what had once been a person.

  He pushed the remains into a pile, then stepped back into his old room and grabbed the day's tub of fresh regenerative coolant gel, which he poured directly over the slop that had once been Roderick Faust, causing it to bubble and froth and coagulate into a grotesque pulsating mass. The mass had a few blue-grey eyes over its surface, presumably where pieces of the old eyes had ended up, and they all swiveled to look at Griffin.

  “Hi again,” said Griffin, and he slammed the axe down once more.

  To the workers in the lobby at Faust Medical Solutions, it was downright comical to see yet another BHAPAS goon come stumbling out of the depths of the facility, soaked in blood, carrying yet another contractor bag, apologizing profusely for having gotten lost in there, saying he was just gonna go around outside to the other entrance anyway. Coming in so late after all the others, apologizing and lost, was the cherry on top of the slapstick gore pile that they had just finished shepherding out of the lobby. At least this one’s bag hadn’t ripped. The masked BHAPAS goon went out the front door with his bag, and nobody thought twice about that compared to the huge mess that preceded him.

  “Took you long enough,” said Brandon as Griffin returned, freshly soaked in rain for some reason.

  “Yeah, well, the BHAPAS guys royally fucked up out there. I don’t know if they told you quite how bad, but they royally fucked it and spilled a bunch of gore right in the lobby. Hey, I’m gonna borrow the hand truck and use the DeGrowth to get some of the residue they spilled, alright? I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Fuckin’ amateurs. Yeah, go handle it. I’ll keep cutting.”

  “You’re the best, Brandon.”

  “No problem.”

  Griffin completed the remainder of the day with utmost professionalism. The BHAPAS crew, once wrangled, managed to load the segments of the teratomalith into their extraction trucks with something resembling competence, and it was prime high-protein biomass suitable for refinement. People would be well fed. Brandon said that, except for the hiccup the BHAPAS guys caused, it was Griffin’s finest work yet, and that one of these days he would have to teach him something about how to actually do plumbing so he could take over the business one of these days. Griffin thanked him, but said that he wasn’t sure he wanted to grow old in this line of work.

  27

  Jun Saito-James came home to find his fiancé dancing with the cat in the living room. Griffin held Mr. President in his arms, the confused feline tucked against his chest with the prosthetic arm as he grooved out to “Ready to Fly” by Masayoshi Takanaka, one of Jun’s dad’s old favorite records. The storm that had been raging all day had tired itself out and the lowering August sun was peeking beneath the remaining clouds to scatter orange light all around their humble apartment. The music was up too loud for Griffin to hear the door, but as he completed a twirl he spotted Jun and his eyes lit up.

 

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