cryptic filler now for the rest of the page
maybe for the rest of blog indeed

faaack it

Valery:

My mind is broken
broken open
desperate flood water, blood water;
my time is slash and burn, mash and churn

My days are numbered,
unencumbered

So this is the end of Earth and me?
what a ripoff apocalypse, what a gyp, what shit
you'd think the Universe could do better

slash and burn, mash and churn, churn and burn, days numbered,
unencumbered

Trips, they need trips,
more trips for dicks,
more chicks for trips,

blueballs breaking, blood streams
from her nips
and lips; open my veins,

the blood
drip
drip
drips

(red girl blue girl white girl green
horrorshow bitches
like you've never seen)

bright red blood
on white skin, then
unto to darkness again

I don't know where I've been
(I don't know)
I don't care where I've been
(I don't know)

I will make him use the Device
to fill my veins
with ice

then please bury me in
the snow
in the dead Earth's deepest glacier

I'm begging you

I so
want

to be

gone

*

M.

Highway side. Rocks. Gray rocks and black. Cement pipe. Gray and white. Water in there. I sleep in there. I sleep all day
and night. The trucks rumble by. Trash rains down. Bottles, butts, gas. My beard is all lice. I smell like death. How'd I get here

The men in the room is how. After I left the tavern. Long time after. I left the old man and the horse, to tend to the crop and to tend to the liquor. Soon as I left, I spun the Device without knowing what it was or why. For the first time I spun it, and my eyes became as torches, and all the world did I see.

So then I went north. Far, far north. Past the northern schools and the hunting clans, the last places for true men (so they think, the fools). Far north as I could go,
on out into the snow land. And the lands of ice. I fell, I made myself feel to die up there by the green sea, beneath the swirling eye of Aurora Borealis.
So bright now since the death of the moon.

I made myself die, that was how they could find me.

Then I was in the room with the men of the castle. Exceptionally clean men, and tall, if they are men at all. A drawing room in the castle. Exceptional men, men of the salon, with their girls of red, girls of blue, girls of green and magenta and orange, girls of hues never known or seen, more

hues than men would ever dream. Except for these men, these terrible beings. What are you, is what I asked of them. Why have you brought me here. They said they had become gods,
this was said in their minds. Tut to me with their mouths they said
we want to observe you with these girls.

This is what the others like you have dreamed. Somehow you're immune to their feminine charms. We have accounted for no existence like yours.
We have the nano and we have the bio, is what they said in their minds.
We want to see the machines of your cells.

We have made ourselves like you but we did not make you. I said, What have you done to humanity? In their minds, the masters said, we don't understand
you, we don't understand the way you think, how you can possibly ask such questions. We did not account for one such as you. With your knowledge of things forbidden, from earlier times,

knowledge forbidden to men like you.
You can not be, is what they said in their minds.
I said, fuck you guys.
Then I spun the Device.

A bunch of them then exploded dying
as their minds screamed we can not die and then all the girls in the room under the chandeliers, with the string music playing, and the elegant wines, the girls all laughing screaming crying one of them sat in the center of ballroom elegantly twirling

strands of one of the exploded ones' marrow plasma and blood
over her bare, green bosom

This cannot be!, the masters yelled in the mind. We can't be killed. You aint my master.

I blew them up, then they left. Retreat and defeat was what I sensed in their minds. Then they sent in just girls but that didn't matter.
When I am in the Device,
I am outside of time

We have the micro and we have the nano:
they put something in me and and I couldn't move.
That was how they got me in the chair.
The micro and the nano. Both came from the white girl.

The only girl for me.

She put them in me, the micro and the nano. Then I couldn't move because I was in the chair. Stuck in the chair.
Fiery strands,
threads and filaments,

volcano strands in the ceiling. Fractal millions, fiery galaxies. A room of full of sun, thermonuclear glaze. They put me in that chair. They could do it. The micro and the nano. Somehow I let them do it. I couldn't move.

A room full of sun.
Thermonuclear glaze.
Too bright.
And then I was gone

And then I was back,
naked, freezing, out in the snow. I didn't know.
I walked back to the castle again.
That mountainous building, shining.

When the masters saw me anew, their minds were screaming.

The girls were killing them too now. As I had killed them

And so they sent to me again the solitary white girl
dressed inher own blood, they sent her out to me
there in the snow and again we made love

In the blood and the snow.
The micro and the nano.

Then she was gone,

then I was by the highway side. Rocks. Gray rocks and black. Cement pipe. Gray and white. Water in there. I sleep in there. I sleep all day
and night. The trucks rumble by. Trash rains down. Bottles, butts, gas. My beard is all lice. I smell like death. How'd I get here?

Mercygraft:

I knew M. before his discovery of the Device. Back when he was still a man among men, such as we are. Back when he was a walker - like me.

Like I used to be.

Of course, when M. found me, he and January were already a team, which by and large took M. out of the ranks of the true walkers. But that's another story.

I don't know where M. came from, but I have an idea. I think he came from the same place as them cloner girls. How else to explain all the maddening shit he do now? All his luck, all his abilities?

Of course, I might be wrong. I've been wrong before.

I'm old enough to remember the time before the cloner girls. The time of the moon. Since the moon went away, the world's gone wrong.

January asks me sometimes, in his fashion, about the old times, the days of sun and moon. He claims to remember them too, only vaguely, in pictures. Like remembering a dream.

He says he had another life then, one he can't rightly recall. Going around and around. And around and around. Pounding in the mud. Going. Going. Going around and around in the sunlight, and in the sounds of men cheering.

So many things gone wrong in this world. January and his kind, they seem never to age. They heal now, they run and they heal and they speak in the mind. Why not ever the same fate for men?

It would be question for God. Or the President. Same difference, I suppose.

I aint a walker no more. I had to give that up after the accident. After them truckers ran me down, like they like to do to our ilk. The other walkers, my selfsame brothers, oh, when it happened, they ran away. Lying there in the ditch, I saw them running. I don't know if they thought I was dead yet or if they could just see my shins and feet all twisted, broken, bloody. Bones sticking out. A broken arm, a bleeding face.

After the truckers pissed on me, after that formality, I just lay by the side of the highway, waiting to die.

And die I would have, except for M.

He came riding up the center of the southbound lanes going north, him and January, the two of them headed north. Now, as I said, that's another story. At the time, I didn't shit know about the horses, hadn't ever seen a horse up close, let alone a black behemoth like January, and I didn't know shit about going north.

January keeps telling me the time is coming soon when he's going to have go. God, I want to go with him, but I can't see how.

Except.

But never mind.

No. I won't hope.

I keep a tavern. Up here in the woods. I built it in the side of a hillside. M. helped me build it, him and January. They rode far and wide, days and nights, scavenging the boards, the shingles, the mirrors, the tables, the chairs, the jukebox, the generators, everything. January hauled the paving stones for the foundation from up to town, and M. and I placed them by hand. Oh, I can move around a little. I can hold my own, I can still stand. I always did have a strong back and strong arms.

I suppose now, since he found the Device, M. could just. But no.

Never mind.

No. I won't hope.

Farther back in the woods from the tavern, I mean way far back, back up over the rock hills and beyond the swamps, in fact, is where I maintain the distillery, and the crop. No one knows where this is, not even M., to the best of my knowledge. Shit, if I had to walk out there, I'm not sure if I could even find it. And if I could, I sure God couldn't make it over that terrain. Not with no feet and a half-busted back.

Only January really knows the way out there, and he aint telling.

The truckers don't know about the horses, you know. They don't have an idea in the world. January won't even address the issue. When the truckers go by, he goes just as dumb as a stone, deaf as a haddock, and it's like a great light being extinguished in the center of my mind.

The tavern, not everyone knows about it either. But plenty do. Walkers mostly. Some truckers. A select group. I don't like it, but it has to be that way. Without them, no juice for the generator. And no filthy lucre for an old man.

could get me some new bionic feet and maybe even legs, I could be a new man, and then I could go north with

You ever seen a horse laugh? It aint right. I like to deny these thoughts, but that fucking glue factory is all over my thoughts, all over them. It aint right.

You idiot, he says to me, Can't you see him? Aint you watching it?

Then I'll get a vision of M. He's with a white girl and they're standing in the middle of a river. The beasts of men are closing in on them, coming for them.

Then he's spinning the Device.

Then the sky's on fire, and the stars rain blood.

He'll heal you, says the horse. You idiot. Aint you watching it?

I'm afraid. I'm an old man, just an old broken down old walker.

Never mind.

I won't hope won't hope mustn't hope musn't I musn't hope

The white girl's name was Valery and she wanted to die because of what she knew of men, and of what she knew was her portent in their future.

Men were doomed; this she knew. Since the day of the massacre at the Falls, she knew with utter certainty that she'd been conceived and sent into the world as the agent of men's doom.

All of her breed shared similar tales. Many were defined by them.

when that bitch gets in heat, boys, you better watch out. I'm telling you, she was killing them. killing them. them boys was slaughterin each other so bad, the Falls foamed red with blood. using anything they could get their hands on to kill each other, they were. rocks. logs. tire irons. they own hands and teeth, tearing at each other like rabid dogs. finally slaying each other up with the bones of the fallen, I shit you not

Valery and her kind were known amongst all men, largely through the medium of the Airwaves, the vestige of an ancient (or at least poorly remembered) medium of mass electronic communications, now held by most men to be the mouthpiece and repository and vehicle for communicating oratory and intent of the President, and of God (as was said among men, same difference). As agents of the War, all of the truckers had broadcast radios and many of them had TVs and some had obtained even more sophisticated receivers, usually acquired either through trade or treachery in the course of their travels to the north.

"Fear of Moans." I was on a run once, I heard it called by some of them booksmart sissy boys up the north country the time of they "Fear of Moans." I guess it's cause when you get to fuckin em, if it's they time, and they get to moanin, that's when you're gonna get whacked. By me or whoever's there

Valery was one of the last girls on Earth, each genetically identical member of her breed intentionally designed and grown and propagated as the last remaining representatives of the female species left on the planet. And in their genes was written men's apocalypse, and in their fertile wombs was planted the seeds of men's destruction. She and her ilk were not the progeny of women, and from their wombs would not come men, but the destroyers of men, and this according to the plans of their creators.

I heard it told once, these two old boys had one of em, red bitch I think it was (they say they're the horniest, the mean-fuckingest) in a spit roast and didn't hardly have time to even spurt before they was set to killin each other, screaming and snarling and clawin at each other's eyes and throats. And kill each other they did, right there with the red bitch still moanin and suckin in between em. No, I never heard what came of it, if it resulted in a Birth or no

Valery wanted to die because she loved men and she hated them. In many ways had she loved the men who created her, with her mind and with her body, and with that which was neither mind nor body, and now she hated them.

First, she'd wanted them dead; then, herself. But she had been afraid to die, afraid to kill herself.

The day by the Falls had changed that.

And now, here in this diner truck stop, here she'd finally, on the spur of a pure and deadly whim, accomplished this goal, and here comes this idiot waggling his fingers and here I am alive again and did I dream what I just did or did I really do it I did not dream I did I do it I don't care whatever I still want to kill kill kill kill kill myself and him too, why the fuck not, my time is coming around again, should be any day now, so what the fuck, one last roll in the hay for you buddy boy, and you got any buddies you know want to get fucked real good? not all us white girls are so pure, it's all myths, you know, what they say about us, why, the dirtiest, fuckingest, suckingest cunt I ever saw was just as blue as they come, blue as the ocean. Her name was Mandy

***

The white girl looked blankly up at M. He seemed to see something warm, something of red pass beneath the grey irises of her eyes.

Suddenly, through the tears, she smiled up at him.

He sat down heavily across from her in the booth.

***

Anxiety in the trees, the bare winter trees, the spindly, spidery filaments of their branches. a solitary house in a barren field. This is where we must go; this is where I must take her. snow falling, softly plummetting from a hard white sky, the same color as the white girl's hair, her skin the exact shade of the gently falling snow, a dry, papery snow softly filling in the barren field's yellow scrub

He swung open the heavy glass door and stepped into the shabby truck stop diner just as the white girl seated in the booth directly in front of him was jamming a steak knife into her milky throat, her streaking right hand jamming it hard.

M's vision traced the silvery flash and he saw the point of the short, serrated blade passing fast and burying deeply into the girl's thin, corded neck. Then the first terrible spurt and shock of bright blood spurting thin and spindly, frenetic; the sudden initial spiderweb-thin strands of blood looping and splattering and quickly billowing into sodden dots falling heavily on the crushed paper napkins, the crusts of wheat toast, the mucous remnants of egg, a bright glistening globe of blood splattering heavily on the chipped dingy plate there before her on the booth's table.

M. froze in the doorway. Without thinking, he made a move for the Device. He felt a rapid shifting and a swirling pause to his right; the fingers of his right hand snapped out straight and rigid from a rapid cracking movement of his right wrist. His extended fingers pointed through the restaurant's long wall of plate glass windows, pointing out into the night, toward the trucks lined up at the pumps of the fueling station.

The heavy glass door of the restaurant in its closing motion fell into him, banging into his backside, forcing him stumbling toward the girl in the booth, where the scene had changed. The white girl now sat, softly crying, tears streaming down from the dark circles under her pale gray eyes staring into the plate. He focused on the tears, the clear fluid consistency of them, and as he did so, her tears grew in volume, but she did not utter a sound. Not a sob or even a sniffle. The knife was not there.

***

Outside by the filling station where the big trucks sat idling, a scream pierced the night. One of the truckers, a dingy, heavy man with frizzy black hair and enormous black mustaches, fell wailing from his perch in his cab, dumping heavily from behind the wheel to kibbey and claw on the battered concrete fueling platform, his pudgy hands scrabbling at the black plastic handle of the steak knife he'd just jammed through his government-issue olive drab wool dickey collar and directly into his carotid artery for no reason he could think of. His blood making a purple sponge of the dickey under dun-colored lights of the station.

The other truckers howled at the spectacle. A tall one with waxy yellow skin and a wild yellow shock of hair ran over from where he'd stood smoking and gamboling by the pumps, double-stepping fast in a wide capering gait, to the unbridled vocal delight of his now rapidly assembling colleagues. Unbuttoning his fly as he did so, he pissed on the dying man as he died. One by one, the rest of the truckers open their flies to follow in suit, to take part in the hallowed ritual.

***

Anxiety in the trees, the bare winter trees, the spindly, spidery filaments of their branches. A solitary house in a barren field. This is where we must go, thought M., this is where I must take her. Snow falling, softly plummetting from a hard white sky, the same color as the white girl's hair, her white skin the exact hue of the gently falling snow, a dry, papery snow softly filling in the barren field's yellow scrub.