Demon Core: Part 6

[heya_baru]

Part 1

Theophany Engineering

Sestos awoke at three AM, showered, and downed 200mg of Modafinil and 70mg of methylphenidate with a can of Red Bull and a protein bar. He had packed a bag the previous night—boltcutters, night vision goggles, a hand-drawn map, and a Beretta M9 fitted with an oil filter suppressor. Just in case.

For the past two nights, an invariant drumbeat had sounded in his nightmares: a series of numbers, repeated until he could echo them by heart during the waking hours, an ancient chant lodged in his mind.

Thirty-three. Forty. Thirty-Eight. One-hundred-and-eight. Twenty-Eight. Thirty-One.

The Pythia had spoken into his ear, providing him with both riddle and revelation. She could not be denied. At fifteen minutes past the hour, he got in his dad’s 2001 Subaru, and drove south, leaving Los Lunas before the sun drifted over the horizon.

At the early hour, he was the sole occupant of the 380, a miserable and barren stretch of asphalt that fell over the desert like the thinnest of scars, man’s feeble attempt at rendering the desert fit for his civilization. The narrow, yellowing beams of the of the Subaru’s headlights barely reached the dunes that flanked the moonlit highway. One mile of road was impossible to tell from any other, New Mexico taunted him with its scale, endless landscapes utterly apathetic to his survival, broken mountains mocking all of his contrivances. Sestos felt the drugs kick in. He pressed his foot deeper into the accelerator.

Two hours later, Sestos pulled his car off the highway and drove through the sand before he found a spot behind a hill to park. It was still dark outside, the cloudless night sky providing enough light for him to pull the electric motorbike out of the back of the car while he traveled the route in his head, passing over the landmarks and roads visible from satellite. He stuffed the gun into his jacket, threw his bag over his shoulder and briefly aligned himself with the direction of the Oscura mountains—ahead of him was 15 miles that would either kill him or change him. Through the desert, through the murk, through a military missile range.

Sestos had spent most of the past day fretting about the possibility of running into some jarhead child-murdering freaks on the back of a Jeep, the scene replaying in his head while he sat in bed with enough Sativa pumping through his veins to wire a horse: they’d swerve and run him off his bike, he’d go skidding through the dirt and slam into a rock while his stolen KTM went under the Jeep’s wheels—just as they’d raise their rifles he’d whip out his Beretta and fire off a single shot, center mass. No use though, not with military plate armor. They’d pump him full of taxpayer lead, leaving him to bleed out in a ratty biker jacket in the desert, blood soaking into the same sand that drank deep from centuries of nukes and war and genocide. A fitting end for a lumpen product of the imperial core, a dead man walking from the moment he dropped out of college to sell weed to kids from Los Lunas High. Some nights he just fantasized about it—let them martyr him, finish the job they started when they dropped him into a high school in the suburbs with untreated ADHD and a gay lisp. Death is the only real act of defiance left.

The military wasn’t standing in his way. The mountains were. Riding along the side of Sierra Oscura in a dirt bike took the better part of an hour, by which time the sun was bright and high in the sky. He nearly went off his bike and tumbled down the mountains more times than he could count, and when he wasn’t teetering on the rocky edge of a life-changing injury, he was stopping every quarter-mile, listening for the sound of a patrol car lurching over the landscape.

After the mountains permitted him passage, it was three miles of flat land to the monument. He stopped to pull a tablet of Aella out of his pocket, breaking open the capsule and letting the powder fall under his tongue. He drove slow the rest of the way—best not to kick up dust—and in another two minutes he’d be too high to drive in a straight line. He quickly glanced down to check the battery—just over half charge, enough to make it back to the car assuming he didn’t end up in a high-speed pursuit with whatever three letter agency was responsible for hunting down kids that rode around on military bases.

Those two minutes passed faster than a good high on a bad day. He gently set his bike down in the dirt, not quite stupid enough to ride once the earth started to undulate around the corners of his vision, reality throbbing like a head injury. Shadows cast by the jagged rocks skittered around him, his mouth desperately dry despite the water he had been chugging for the last mile. His feet pressed on, independent of his wandering thoughts, directed by the plans he made the afternoon before, a record of mile markers repeating as a mantra in a parched corner of his mind. He arrived.

At some point he skidded to a halt and clipped the perimeter fence with his bolt cutters. At some point he stumbled hazily up to the Trinity Monument, a sad and misshapen tribute to Armageddon stuck into a chunk of New Mexico desert swallowed up by the White Sands Missile Range. At some point he must have stopped, and collapsed onto his knees. He did not remember any of that.

Sestos was sixteen when he took his first tab of DMT, furnished by a man twice his age who provided him with many of the firsts in his short life. The drug sunk its teeth into his mind and cleaved the tenuous fibers connecting him to reality; he fell uninvited into the clamorous ocean of the cosmos, the scale of the universe revealed to him as the thumbs of god pressed themselves into his eyes. The ribcage of the void opens, welcoming him into its viscera. From that night onward, he felt himself drawn towards the long skyline of the unknown, its ancient and shifting streets cleansed by the billions of years that fell like rain. In that lifelong walk towards a city with a hundred forgotten names, there had been moments of doubt, experiences that hinted not at revelation but perdition—the price of knowledge, he sometimes suspected, was the firmament of sanity into which his mind grew its roots. This was one of those moments.

The Obelisk was gone. Set against the backdrop of the southwestern morning was a wound in reality itself, an abominable yonic maw that opened into a darkness that was deeper than night, deeper than death.

The inky blood of tellurian reality, fetid and septic, seeped from the around the gash and pooled at the ground. The maw shuddered, dilating. Something was emerging from beyond. Sestos could hear it from the other side, it hummed with the tunefulness of a collapsing mountain, a grinding chant that drew the air from his lungs and masticated his thoughts. He wept, tears falling into his open mouth.