kagablog

The long, rushing highway lay illuminated in the catastrophic red and green floodlights. She had awoken in the rattling darkness of the dragon rig and crawled up into the noisy pod of the cabin. There she discovered Uncle Bill, strapped into one of two crash-couches, under-lit by greenish panel displays. ‘Paint it Black’ had been locked into an analog tape reel and was blasting on a loop, thundering the glass dome with the endless, droning mantras of apocalypse. To either side of the road was a sort of cracked desert, sucking out into the terminal blackness of the wasteland. The jungle had finally fallen away and they had risen on the high, hot highway leading into the carbon wastes. The floodlights painted burning cars and the flashing forms of dead bodies, strewn like bacteria along the endless expanse of tarmac. Vast rifts of smoke descended from the carbon flats, howling in spectral forms through the gulf, torn to violent spirals in the slipstream. Symbiotes squatted along the side of the road, fornicating with corpses and scampering out into the wilderness like insects. Packs of laughing hyenas were also loose, tearing corpses to shreds and spitting at symbiotes. At one point the dragon rig passed a convoy of armored trucks and tanks, trundling down the line, inbound for Namanga Mori. The situation in the Outzone had evidently become untenable and all manner of power exchanges were taking place throughout the onset of the ‘invasion’. Yet despite the truly apocalyptic visions that assailed them on the road, the pair did not exchange many words that first night. Barbed wire tumbleweed skittered off into the dusty expanses, catching on flesh and metal, playing havoc with the hyenas, who often became entangled and severely wounded in their struggle to escape. The front of the truck ground on ferociously, through the drifts of yellowish smoke. Its lights seared the air while things caught and disintegrated under its spiked bumpers, screaming as they were ripped apart. Uncle Bill gunned the rig ever faster through this nightmare, until the casings shook and the engines roared and blustered. Behind him, in the sallow light of the quaking lampshade, the Symb could be seen. It squatted on the battened down chez longue, clacking its mandibles and gibbering quite insanely to itself. Uncle Bill was hunched, a white mantis before the wheel, juiced on bennies and locked into the road. He seemed barely able to contain an urge to crash and the sweat glinted like specks of quartz along his brow. When he finally spoke it was in a low and dangerous voice, barely audible beneath the blood fever of music and machinery.

“When a traveler turns west, all time-travel ceases to be travel and instead becomes an inexorable suction; pulling everything into a black hole.”

Taty stumbled back into the lounge at some point. Everything was shaking like a house in an earthquake. Her suitcase was sliding across the floor while all the furniture remained absurdly in place. Even the delicate legs of the coffee table had been screwed tightly to the tiles and the effect of stillness within chaos was surreal in the extreme. Uncle Bill was focused intently on the road, crushing long lines of human copses and tearing hyenas to pieces in a sort of dream of speed. She dragged her case to an airlock and discovered a small sleeping compartment beyond. The cramped chamber had been fitted with a monkish cot and an electric light. Paranoid hieroglyphs covered the walls in crazy felt-tip patterns and she had to hold fast to the walls to avoid being tossed about. Another oval door led to a stainless steel toilet/shower cubicle. Her private parts ached abominably and she bathed herself in warm, stinging water, washing herself out and swallowing some painkillers, which she had discovered in a well-stocked medicine cabinet. Going to the toilet would be painful and she would limp for a few days but she resolved to survive and draw strength from her experiences. She showered as best she could in the shaking metal cupboard, clinging to a sink and staring at her face in the chipped shaving mirror. A cold anger had started in her sleep and was now sending out tiny roots, seeking purchase in her mind and attempting to grow. Unsure of its purpose, she concentrated on survival. She discovered plasters and made a jagged, somewhat artistic pattern along the left side of her face after disinfecting her cuts and bruises with Mercurochrome. A black felt-tip marker was rolling around and she scrawled the words RAPE ROCKER across her face, in a fit of morbid spontaneity. The deafening noise and music of the truck was starting to agree with her, wiping away her pain with the balm of distance and annihilation. She noticed that the facial wounds dominated the left side of her face and was suddenly reminded of Miss Muppet’s tattoo. There was something of that woman’s icy glint in her now; a hardness around her eyes and mouth, compounded by dried blood and damage. It was the Outzone itself she realized. It was creeping into her and claiming her, as it did all who ventured into it. It was transforming her with its terrible rites of passage, into something other. Her reflection disturbed her immensely and she took a cigarette and red lollipop simultaneously, crawling back to the cabin to watch the highway with Uncle Bill. From the jangled darkness, the symbiote watched too, twittering like some damaged bird. The night passed in whirlwinds, delivering them through a barrage of seemingly ceaseless devastation.

High noon on the carbon wastes. The arrow-straight highway cut through a smoking plane of volcanic ash, rich with quicksilver and toppling into mirages on all sides. They had stopped some hours ago and she had watched Uncle Bill collapse into the wicker chair with an iced mint julep and a handful of pink pills. She left him to his devices and wandered a few kilometers down the hot road in a spell of dazed listlessness. The red dragon shimmered some distance behind her, laden with armored cargo tanks, reduced to a quivering red flame against the starkness of the baking flatlands. The sweat poured off her body in rivulets, burning in her cuts. She had her drenched t-shirt off after ten meters, wrapped in a makeshift turban around her headphones and sunglasses. She staggered on topless, wearing nothing but denim shorts and strappy sandals, walkman chugging tape at her hips. She was playing an old Doors compilation, listening to ‘The End Of The Night’ in a daze, rewinding it each time the song ended. The highway was deserted as far as the eye could see, in both directions. They had finally left the carnage of the low zone behind and finally entered into the pure nullity of the highlands. The scorched plain was cracked like a dish, separated into countless carbonized plates, which ground slowly against each other like ceramic dishes. The glassy sound of all these fragments created a jingly dissonance beneath the muted quality of the heat. The turbulence of lava could also be seen, moving like red paste between and beneath these plates, much like blood between the scales of a reptile. The heat rising off this dizzying scape was extreme, almost unimaginable. Some symbiotes had made it out to the carbon waste, drawn by the awful temperatures, roving far and wide into scarred emptiness where they stopped and stood without moving. She could see them spiked in the lava, superheated to a glittery emerald. They didn’t move in the slightest now, all facing the same direction like the grotesque effigies of some ancient and malignant cult, somehow at peace within the slow grind of the lava. The hiss of steam release and perpetual cracking was like the churning of a billion soda pop bottles. The hugeness of it all drove a spike deep into the heart of her growing anger, tempering her newly forming hate like a knife. And it was as though she was confronting the shifting, yet utterly immoveable nature of material reality itself when she stood in that heat. What Number Nun said to her on the boat had also fermented in this acid bath of emotion. Had she been under a spell to have feelings of a kind for the imp? He had after all delivered her into nothing short of hell. She drained the dregs from a bottle of fizz pop and hurled it into the wasteland. It created a puff of flame upon landing and she watched mesmerized as it burned. She loitered there in the oven of herself, too heat-drugged to think properly. There were ugly teeth marks around her breasts and plum purple bruises along her stomach. These wounds stung in her running perspiration, distracting her with spiky thoughts of revenge. The stench of carbon was dense on the open road, reminding her of burning pencils and subsequently of long buried primary school memories– the detritus of a past life. She limped back to the dragon when she could stand it no longer, dark thoughts frying like meat across the scorching skillet of her mind.

Modesty caused her to wriggle back into the sticky shirt as the truck drew closer. The steel reinforced wheels stood just over her height, dwarfing her like knife-thrower wheels. She clambered up the burning drop ladder and cracked the airlock. A heavy magnetic humming emanated from within the cabin, causing the hairs on her body to prickle. Objects were inexplicably suspended in the air, buoyed up by a flux of unnatural reversions. Paperbacks, flowers and glasses wafted in circular gradients, orbiting the peculiar spectacle of Uncle Bill and the Symb. Uncle Bill stood in shirtsleeves, with his back to Taty, struggling, as though caught in a heavy ocean current. He was engaged in some manner of sexual congress with the creature and had a bridle of meat hooks and chains around its head. He had penetrated the symbiote and was using the bridle to pull its body into a sickeningly arched shape – an activity that caused it to hover inexplicably in the air. It was as though he had activated some latent ability of the alien, using his very own body as a sort of yogic key. The limbs of the symbiote had stiffened, extending outward like some thorny flower in bloom. Each bent the wrong way, creating a fascinating geometric shape in the space before him. Uncle Bill had somehow forced the Symb to enter into a state where its faceted alien body had begun to vibrate at an intense, escalating frequency. There was an atomic violence in this phase-shift, and Taty had impression the thing might detonate any second, creating some sort of puncture in the fabric of reality itself. It was an instability that Uncle Bill was holding in place by the sheer force of his will. A harsh, diamond of light emanated from the symbiote’s back, shining directly up into Uncle Bill’s face. He obscured the source of this light and Taty hovered uncertainly at the threshold, uncertain whether or not to leave.

“Sorry,” she fumbled. “I didn’t mean to…”

“Come and look at this,” he commanded, his voice strained and thin, as though it cost an enormous effort to speak.

She pensively crossed the cab, her hair rising in anemones as the strands fell in tune with ruptured magnetic fields, gusting about in a sort of frenzy of poltergeist activity. She began to feel dizzy and sick from the gravitational distortions. Her organs felt as though they were gnashing like teeth within her, moving in opposite directions, shifting like balloons. Yet she continued on, overcome by a desire to witness the source of the luminosity. Within a few steps of the pair, she felt as though she were wading through thick fluid and had to lean into the invisible surge to keep her balance. Her ears popped with pressure and she fought the urge to throw up, certain that the vomit would simply flag around her head like some repulsive sail. Slowly the obscured light source was revealed. The torso of the symbiote had flattened like a crab, its spine inventing a sort of intricate zip-lock. This aperture had opened, uncovering a fleshy portal to another place. This opening was much like a window in a dark room, despite the brightness of the cabin. It was clearly an alien light, the effulgence of a stellar body luminescing at a foreign frequency. The opened symbiote had created a vortex of energies, buoying up its origami-folded body and emitting a miasma of light and quantum anomalies. This light played along the inside walls of the cab in a race of vivid water reflections, making Taty dizzier and dizzier with each step. This strange glare shone full force into Uncle Bill’s face, pushing his skin back like a man witnessing a nuclear blast. She drew close to him and peeked over the lip of the biological portal, feeling somehow that she was standing at the edge of a monumental cliff. Directional velocity blasted her hair back and puffed open her cheeks like a furnace blast. She felt tremendous heat and threw her hand before her face in protection, gazing wide-eyed through her fingers. What she saw beyond the fluttering green porthole of flesh was a vast, illuminated space; a sort of window into a glaring nebula of seemingly limitless proportion. Yet despite its apparent airiness, the space beyond seemed comprised entirely of dense liquid. At first she guessed that it might be some watery occlusion caused by the symbiote’s porthole body, but she soon realized that what she was seeing was an airless universe comprised entirely of dense, protoplasmic fluid. Gargantuan cellular formations turned like clouds in the superheated medium, lending it a microbial aspect. These constellations of semi-organic matter seemed to be formed out of complex lattices of clear cells – giving them the crystalline appearance of frogspawn on a galactic scale. Tiny black figures floated within each cell and Uncle Bill motioned to a hovering telescope with a nod of his head. She plucked the instrument out of the air and focused shakily in on the cells, realizing quickly that contained within each was a symbiote. The beings floated in suspension, as motionless as smelted metal idols. Their brethren in the lava mimicked these straight-backed postures, haunted by some residual memory of this sphere.

“What the hell is this place!” Taty exclaimed in awe.

“Its their Protoverse,” Uncle Bill heaved. “The umbilical dimension from whence the symbiotes sprang.”

“It’s so hot in there! And big!”

“It is an entire Protoverse.”

The effort of speaking seemed to be too much for him and he lost his grip on the bridle. The device slipped a few inches and the symbiote fell out of its shape, quivering violently. One of its arms knocked Taty back against the wall and Uncle Bill has to strain to keep it in formation. Sweat leaked out of his strained, red face and he spoke through gritted teeth.

“Been holding it open to long, going to have to refold it now.”

He eased the arched spine of the Symb back and suddenly snapped the bridle off. The creature snapped back into shape like some grotesque rubber band, flopping to the floor and licking its eyes with a distended tongue. The lights and humming died in the blink of an eye. All the levitating objects dropped to the floor. Uncle Bill collapsed to the Persian rug in a panting mess, his trousers collecting around his ankles. Taty staggered up and helped him onto the chez longue. He struggled pathetically, trying to pull his pants up and breathing raggedly. His face and neck were badly burned from the alien light and his eyes were rolling and watery.

“Getting harder and harder to hold’em open,” he wheezed.

“Why the fuck do you want to open the bugs up for?” she snapped. “Who cares where they come from!”

He gazed at her, panting from his exertions.

“Well, between you and I young missy, Uncle Bill here is planning a little trip. If I could just get the schism wide enough to somersault through…”

“But there’s a whole Protoverse of them in there!”

He smiled eerily and reached out a shaking hand, stroking the head of his Symb with something like affection.

She slept in his bunk while he drove, crawling from fitful nightmares to find the sun, baking in through the bubble dome of the driver’s cockpit to heat up the cab up like a baker’s oven. Uncle Bill didn’t seem to sleep. When she questioned him about his insomnia he explained that he would often collapse into a deep sleep after three days of uninterrupted wakefulness. He claimed that he would then sleep for another three days without waking. For some reason three days was his limit either way. She was grateful for this peculiar habit and annexed his cot, badly in need of rest. He was sympathetic, offering her small amounts of morphine to help her sleep and antiseptics with which to bathe her wounds. After the second day the carbon flats grew cooler and the flatlands threw up weird formations of twisted rock. There were no symbiotes this far out and the region remained lifeless and barren, riddled with top-heavy mesas formed out of solidified lava. The road soon dipped, leaving the elevated hot zones and travelling back down toward the jungle. It sank in twisting curves, between high ravines of sulfur-marbled rock while the temperature dropped back down to tolerable levels. Humidity breathed up from the distant woodland, bringing with it the lush smell of chlorophyll and water. Lush pockets of greenery split from the rocks at intervals, announcing the onset of the jungle. The rock became black and craggy as they descended and trickles of water began to seep from the towering escarpments. The high road itself was all but disused. Its battered condition bore testament to the desolation in which it lay. The worn macadam was pocked and cratered. Large fragments of rock had tumbled over the many years, biting crumbing ragged holes into the fabric of the road. Uncle Bill drove like an overmedicated maniac, chasing a red and sinking sun down into the ragged gullies. Taty was oddly calm throughout this suicide rollercoaster, observing numbly as he cornered with reckless abandon and danced the rig over crevices like a raging spirit. At dusk, they rounded a ridge and the world opened up like a magnificent oyster. A vast expanse of jungle spread below, carpeting the world as far as the eye could see in an overabundance of growth and fecundity. He threw on the air-brakes and they shrieked to a dusty halt at the edge of the world. He unstrapped and they cracked the airlock while the engine ticked and hissed, descending to road level, savouring the cool breezes gusting up off the endless canopy of trees. Taty went and sat on the edge of the monolithic drop, swinging her legs in the dying light, feeling rested and light-headed from the shift in altitude. He smoked by the truck, staring out at a great wild, expanse of dying light and she wondered if he really wanted to exchange this majestic world for a suffocating realm of amniotic fluid. He was certainly a strange one Uncle Bill, a real explorer, something of a gentleman. She realized then that she would be sad to leave him. She would have liked to be able to say good-bye to him before made his departed into the Protoverse. She had no doubt that he would one day enter that boiling cosm with his pants around his ankles and it made her laugh to think about it. But then the seriousness of his obsessions would always extinguish her mirth, making her morbid and restless. They were similar, the pair of them, both cosmonauts of the unknown. She gazed down across the broad sweep of jungle and could just make out the dim and distant geometries of the floating pyramids. They were suspended in silhouettes; black triangles against a bloody sun. Where would this pointless journey of hers end, she wondered. Beyond the billowing canopy, the ancient pyramids beckoned, summoning her to an audience with the god of a dead people.

Uncle Bill slept that night, the symbiote chained to his bunk like some strange hound. The coolness also relaxed her. The pain of her wounds subsided and so she climbed to the roof of the towering rig, where she sat amongst machine gun pods and sleeping searchlights, thinking. Her head had cleared somewhat and she did not even feel like lighting a cigarette. The urge to smother her mind had dissipated as soon as they left the heat-stricken erasure of the carbon waste. An internal border had been crossed and she now felt somehow prepared to face the starkness of her new reality. And so she simply sat there, staring out at the billowing mass of the jungle, pondering what lay ahead. She had been so intent on escaping the city she had not seen where it was she was headed until now: the very deep of the jungle, its silent, ancient heart wherein slept a dead god of the coma cities. Long dead cities, dwarfed by the immensity of growth that cradled them: the big green, the steaming heart of creation itself. The vastness of the jungle had consumed her and she accepted its sleepy annihilation. The House of Alphonse Guava had anesthetized her with the combined narcotics of luxury and trauma and she had accepted any method of escape without considering the consequences. Now she was awake, sitting at the grave of her own childishness, throwing dead flowers at who she used to be. The lamp of wonder had been replaced by a candle of hate – and this flame was not enough to warm her. Something was still left undone.

Uncle Bill was chipper the next day. He awoke, took a long shower and changed into a comfortable three-piece candy stripe suit with a canary yellow tie. She awoke blearily to the smell of frying onions and found him outside, cooking vegetables and cured jungle chicken. They ate quickly and were soon on the road again. He was in high spirits after clearing the burning carbon flats and was singing heartily along to an old tune by Dan Russo and the Oriole Orchestra -something about ‘taking off his skin’, which made Taty raise an eyebrow. The road wound down the rock faces and soon re-entered the jungle, carving a straight line through murky entanglements and rising steam. She drifted back into the lounge, digging around listlessly, discovering a hefty case full of old typewriters. One in particular caught her attention. It was a large brassy affair, with dots and peculiar language modes instead of standard lettering. She picked up the machine and hefted it into the passenger crash couch, where she sprawled with it across her lap.

“What’s that you got there?” he enquired breezily, tapping his gnarly fingers to the music.

“This sure is one strange ticker-tacker.”

“Ah, the old Betsy! It’s a typewriter for the blind. We used to use that baby to circulate subversive documents in the old days. Help train our bodies to converse in other, more tactile languages. I also used to make fast cash writing detective pamphlets for the blind. The hospitals were always in short supply…”

Taty snapped a key absently, staring thoughtfully at the antique machine.

“So this typewriter types in Braille?” she asked quietly.

“Braille? Sure. There are also some code and cipher-transcription settings.”

He glanced at her sideways, suddenly sensing a conspiratorial undercurrent.

“Are you thinking of writing something in Braille?”

“I think I am,” she answered without expression.