Flare (37 page)

Cain coughed twice and then drank a glass of the homemade liquor that he had placed at his feet.

“But I don’t believe that God hates us all; what I believe …,” said Cain, pausing for dramatic effect, “is that God doesn’t
care
.”

Cain let those words sink in for a moment.

“God doesn’t care because He isn’t sufficiently aware of us enough
to
care,” said Cain. “Think of the world as God’s farmland, and we’re simply a colony of worms that He buried in the dirt long ago and then forgot about. We’re here, but He doesn’t remember that we are, and when God wants to water His crops He sends water, even if it’s enough to drown us. When God wants the soil to lie fallow until the next season He does so, even if it leaves us dried of thirst. And when God decides to dig up His plot, He does so without concern for us. Look around you and you’ll see a world dug out completely, with only a few specks of dirt for us worms to fight over. Our Lord has designs for His land, but we are not part of the plan, and He will continue to scorch the earth with His shovel, even if it means every last one of us perishes.”

Cain poured himself another glass of the homemade alcohol, and the liquid in his jar was so cloudy and brown that Zeke almost mistook it for human waste. Instead of downing the liquid, Cain held it up and stared at the crowd as if they had done something to upset him.

“Drink,” he said.

The audience drank with Cain, and soon he was ready to speak again.

“But look around you and realize that God has already done the digging, He has already unleashed His wrath, and we are still here,” said Cain. “He has abandoned us completely, but this abandonment gives us a certain …
freedom
.

“We’ve the freedom to survive, and we’ve the freedom to survive
how we want
. We may now act as we wish without fear of an Invisible Man in the Sky counting our every curse word. We can do so without the threat of punishment, because we’ve already been punished. We’ve already been reviled, shunned, cast out and left to die nameless, by the very One to whom we had promised our immortal souls. We’ve already seen that if there is a grand design at work here, we are not part of it, and this gives us
freedom
. Love has left this earth, and now that we’re on our own, the world is ours, and ours alone.

“Indeed, we
must
do whatever we want. That’s our only choice, and the only way to survive. The soft ground that yielded fruit is now gone, and it’s been replaced by razor blades that cut through our feet with every step. Our only recourse is to become like razor blades ourselves, and cut any others that dare tread on
us
. This is the way of the world now, and the
only way
to survive.”

Cain took another draught of the brown liquid and then smiled.

“With that in mind,” he said, “let the evening’s entertainment begin.”

/***/

They started the evening with a sex rite. Three cloaked women came out onto the stage and lit a ring of candles around a large raised bed. After lighting the candles, they disrobed in front of the audience, revealing beautiful bodies cut repeatedly by the EverRed’s blade. Zeke recognized two of them as Lilith and Delilah from his chamber. The third girl was just as young, but had so many scars that her skin was like putty and appeared prematurely aged. All three of them had fresh wounds that oozed out and left stains as they crawled onto the bed.

They started kissing each other, and their wounds didn’t slow them down. The one with skin like putty was the supplest of all, and she climbed onto Delilah with ferocity, arching her back like a cat and placing her tongue over the large body beneath her, and putting her lower half up in the air to be tongued in turn by Lilith.

Zeke looked around the audience, and they were surprisingly calm. Many were drinking, some were in various stages of sex with one another, and a few were pleasuring themselves. But most were calm and stared straight forward, as if this were really a church, and the orgy on stage was the most natural thing in the world.

Delilah worked her body around until she became a base for both Lilith and the scarred girl, ending up on her stomach. Lilith stopped kissing her partner and started to work on Delilah beneath, planting her face in Delilah’s enormous buttocks, eventually digging herself so deep that she all but disappeared. Lilith eventually bid Delilah to roll over, and the big woman turned to see the outstretched thighs of the scarred girl over her, and Lilith bid the scarred girl to lower herself until her pubis had been enveloped completely within Delilah’s open mouth. Lilith straddled Delilah and planted her right hand firmly between the big girl’s heavy thighs, and then stretched out her left hand to grab hold of the scarred girl and bring her head forward. The two on top embraced and then kissed over Delilah, forming a triangle and then syncing into one collective motion, heaving back and forth in a heavy rhythm.

Their sex and sweat glistened in the candlelight, and they stopped after five minutes. When they were done the girls clapped, three times in unison. A muscular brown-skinned man came out onto the stage carrying a rusty metal cylinder, a container perhaps once used for storing cargo. He also carried a large wrench and placed them both ten feet from the bed, and then took the wrench and pounded the steel cylinder three times. It made three loud
booms
that reverberated throughout the hall, and the women huddled together and stared at him intently. They clapped three times, and he dropped the wrench and cylinder to the ground.

He walked over to the women and they disrobed him, revealing a muscular, nut-brown body and a dark phallus, oversized even in a resting state. The women set to work on him, descending upon his body like vultures over a carcass, wrapping around him tightly and jockeying for position on his large frame. They tore at his skin and dug their faces into every corner of his body.

After he became erect, they all stopped and admired him for a moment, before clapping three more times and then changing positions. They all lay on the bed, with the scarred girl sticking her backside in the air, and the other two on the side supporting her.

The man entered her and began easing into the motion and gradually building up speed until he hit a consistent, forceful rhythm. The other two women braced the scarred girl below as he kept at her. They occasionally reached down to kiss her on the lips, but they never let go of their original supporting position.

After ten minutes, the two on the side clapped three times, and they switched positions. The scarred girl got up, kissed the other two girls and then moved to the side as Lilith laid on her back in preparation for the man’s entry. The scarred girl and Delilah braced their third sister, and the man went back to work, undulating like a machine’s piston, moving in and out as if he could go on forever.

The man’s look disturbed Zeke, because the man was indeed
just like a
machine
. He was completely shaved, and his brow was so pronounced that it cast deep shadows over his eyes. The man didn’t have a personality, he didn’t have a soul, he was just an automaton built for the act of sex, and nothing else.

He reduces humanity to this act
, thought Zeke.
He looks to be built only for this, and it makes me wonder if the same could be said for the rest of us. Maybe this is our only purpose, to be with another and mechanically combine ourselves. We’re supposed to do this, and then we’re supposed to die. Maybe there’s no other higher purpose.

The nut-brown man took a turn on the big woman last, and then he was done. The women clapped three times, and he walked back to his steel drum and robed himself. He hit the drum thrice with the wrench, and another man was thrown on stage, this one blindfolded and thin. Zeke reasoned that this man was a prisoner, though he was cleaner than the men who had been with him in the cage.

Still blindfolded, the women took his hand and led him to the bed, and he lay down. They held his hands gently and slipped restraints upon him, and he took them without fighting. Soon both his hands and feet were bound, and he was strapped on the bed like a mental patient. The nut-brown man hit the drum three times, and the girls went to work on him with the same ferocity that they had descended upon the man with the drum.

The blindfolded man was not the
machine
that the man with the drum was, and he had a difficult time becoming ready for the act. The women worked hard, kissing and touching every part of his body to bring him up. He wouldn’t arise until Lilith found that his left ear was particularly sensitive. She straddled him and bent over, then put her tongue in his ear and the rest watched him grow. The big girl held his member in her hand, and once satisfied, she clapped three times. The brown man hit the wrench into the drum three times, and the girls assumed their positions anew.

Once it was begun, the man didn’t last long, maybe two minutes. He started his spasm while the scarred girl was on top of him, and sensing that, she dismounted and put him in her hand to display the deed to the audience. The others surrounded him, kissing his ears and rubbing their hands over his body while he approached climax. He jerked once, then twice, and then a third time with his bony hips thrusting upwards in one final spasm.

After the thin man was done, the brown-skinned man banged the drum once. The three girls clapped three times and put their hands to the sky. The brown-skinned man hit the steel cylinder again, and the girls reached down under the bed and came out with three knives that they held aloft, seen by the enraptured audience but not by the blindfolded man below.

Zeke looked around, and the audience was now intent on the stage. Even those that were engaged in sexual congress or were pleasuring themselves had now stopped and were looking at the three women.

Zeke checked the chains that bound him, and found that they were solidly attached to the surrounding pipes. He knew he could break free if given enough time, but he wouldn’t be able to do it soon, and he looked on in horror as Lilith took the knife and plunged it into the bound man below.

The man screamed in agony, but his yell was quashed by the sound of the steel drum. The nut-brown man banged it with every knife strike, and the sound reverberated through the amphitheater, pushing everything else to the side. The three women were now stabbing their victim in unison, and the man seized in pain each time they did. The man’s screams lessened in intensity with each blow, but the drum sound maintained its strength. Soon the bound man stopped screaming altogether, and beneath the blindfold, his eyes rolled back into the top of his head. The women continued their strikes as the drum continued its steady beat, and the bound man’s life was quickly gone, his entire being and whole legacy drowned out by a deafening drum beat and an audience finding momentary pleasure in his passing.

/***/

They cleared the stage of everything afterwards, leaving nothing but the man’s blood stains on the ground. Five other men brought in more steel cylinders and broad pieces of fencing. They set up the fencing to make a cage around the amphitheater stage, using the steel cylinders as posts, and the quiet crowd began to cheer and laugh again.

Cain came back and bid the crowd to drink more. They did so, and they yelled, and Cain gave a quick preamble about the fight they were about to see. The group at the dockyards had netted a group of twenty innocent wanderers three days ago and quickly ascertained that none of them would be of any use to anyone. So a guard named Botis suggested that these twenty be given weapons and forced to fight each other to the death, with only two allowed to survive the ordeal.

Cain announced that it took some drugging, but the wanderers eventually fought and two survived, a man and woman who joined teams and took five lives apiece before being able to crown themselves survivors. Cain explained that they would have one more set of tests to pass, and if they passed it they would be given new names and enter the dockyard society. If they didn’t pass the test, they would die. When Cain said this, the audience cheered. Zeke noted that though most of the crowd was now in a frenzy and pressing against the cage walls, the members of the audience who had been fornicating and pleasuring themselves still continued to do so.

/***/

The man and the woman didn’t look like an athletic pair, but they worked quite effectively together. The man was big and burly, perhaps two hundred and fifty pounds, with much of it fat in his midsection. The woman was thin and wiry, and she hid behind the man, running out and striking with the policeman’s baton she had been given. They did this before the test began, and she ran behind her partner and through his legs, striking air before returning. They were both decked in old riot gear, with the big man wearing an abundance of armor, a helmet and a shield, and the woman dressed lightly but wielding the baton expertly. She weaved in and out of her partner’s shadow, even climbing over his shoulder to make a move that caused the crowd to erupt in applause.

Their first test was to kill a hundred rats. Cain assured the audience that the rats were vicious, hungry, and so infectious that one bite would surely lead to death. They released a handful at first, but the rats didn’t attack the couple and instead chose to escape outwards into the crowd, causing the audience to laugh at first, and then boo. The woman used the opportunity to take the hems of the man’s pants and tuck them into his socks. She was still scantily clad and quite exposed, but she showed no fear and continued to hide behind her large partner.