The Apocalypse and Satan's Glory Hole! (1) (19 page)

“Sir,”
 
the small voice reminds him, “we are awaiting orders.”

Without standing, Pestilence focuses his sunken bloodshot eyes at the Army captain staring at him. Recognizing the man as living, Pestilence stands straight and notices the line of military vehicles and tanks. Hundreds of soldiers mill about; piled in the shade playing cards, napping, and a few cleaning their weapons.

“Who are you?”
 
Pestilence hisses.

“Captain W.B. Firepot, United States Army,”
 
the captain says with a snappy salute.

“How long have you been out here?”
 

“A few days.
 
General O’Coddle got his brains splattered, and he never gave us our next orders.”

“Sooooo,”
 
Pestilence says, the throb in his throat nearly choking him, “Where is the junk?”

“Sir?”

“The smack. The crack. The wack. Something to get me high!”
 

“Sorry, sir,”
 
the captain frowns. “We dumped our supplies of drugs, recreational or otherwise, a few hours ago.”

“Bullshit,”
 
Pestilence says in a terrible booming voice that draws all the soldiers’
 
attention. He sniffs the air and addresses the lot of them. “I know someone is holding. DO NOT hold out on ME!”

His eyes roll wildly in their sockets, scanning the crowd of frightened sunburned faces and falling at length on the petrified captain.

“You?”
 
Pestilence asks, his hiss shaking with need and his lower jaw moving back and forth.

The soldier shakes his head frantically and realizes too late he should be backing up. Pestilence leans forward and hacks thick orange goo all over Captain Firepot’s face and chest. Huge sizzling blisters rise where the acid hit, and the bubbles swell and convulse on his face as the panicked man runs toward his fellows. The other soldiers take aim at Pestilence, and he smiles, his rotted teeth looking like an ancient graveyard. He mimics a gun with his right hand and points it at the captain.

He pulls his thumb back, and the blisters on the captain’s face and chest pop, spewing putrid acid down the soldier’s body.

Pestilence follows the man, looking down his finger, until his run becomes a stagger. A spilt second before the captain collapses into the crowd of his fellow
soldiers,
Pestilence slams his thumb forward and says “bang.”
 
Captain Firepot explodes, spewing the orange goo on dozens of soldiers. The soldiers scream as the painful burning blisters rise, and they turn and run at other soldiers. The uninfected open fire on the infected, which only quickens the spray of blood. This helps, because only the initial carrier explodes.
 

Pestilence doesn’t wait for the screams or gunfire to stop before rifling through the first of the dead soldiers’
 
uniforms looking for something to get high on. He hears the heavy breathing of two different beasts
,
and he knows Famine is approaching.

He rolls his red eyes and squints into the morning sun at the fat Horsewoman on her eternally starved horse.

“What the fuck, Pestilence?”
 
she asks in her half-muffled voice, which is very whiney for such a large woman.

“What the fuck yourself, fat ass,”
 
he tells her without looking up from the soldier he is ransacking. She huffs while he digs in the back pockets and comes up empty.
 
Pestilence rolls to his knees and crawls to the next body to continue his search.

“Ummmmmm,”
 
she says, and he does a fine job ignoring her.

“Where is War?”
 
Famine asks as her horse’s legs finally give out, dropping her to the sand with a thud. Pestilence snickers under his hood. She rolls to one knee and stands to face him, face flushed and breathing heavy. “Where is Death?”
 

“I don’t know and I don’t care,”
 
Pestilence tells her, moving on to the next corpse. His cloak sticks to his slender frame with sweat.

Dark hair clings to Famine’s flabby cheeks, and she peels it off while whining at him, “I can’t believe
you
are the first Horseman. Once War gets here we can get started, I assume. That is, if you can stop rolling around
fondling dead guys long enough.”

“What’s to start?”
 
Pestilence asks
,
sighing as yet another pocket turns up empty.

“Uh, hello? The Apocalypse.”

“Where have you been? In a fucking cheeseburger cave?”
 
Pestilence pauses his search to look at Famine. His own long greasy hair is plastered to his sweaty face, and his bloodshot eyes squint in the morning sun.

“The Antichrist is dead, you fat twat. An old Betty got him right in the eye.”

He jerks a thumb at the heaving, smoking mass of stinking corpses, “That’s not your Dark Lord down there fighting to get up. Nope, his boy died, and he split to Vegas. That, you stupid f
at whore, is all the demons in H
ell fighting to get out.”
 

Famine crosses her chubby arms across her gigantic bosom and tells him, “You are such a rude junkie fuck. I have no idea what you are talking about. Other than that you are a rude junkie fuck!”

She screams the last, and Pestilence whimpers as the sound echoes in his already ringing head. He covers his ears and then looks at her as if to ask if she is done.

“I’m saying Satan rose without us.”
 

She stares at him with impatient and confused eyes.

“WE were supposed to bring the world to its knees before Satan rose and the great battle, yada, yada, who really gives a shit …” He trails off as the need cracks through him like electricity, making his body twitch. He doesn’t care to wait for her to understand, so he goes back to rifling through pockets. She watches him search the soldiers, and then she watches him curl up in the fetal position for twenty minutes, kicking and screaming at various intervals.

“Soooooo …” she starts, but he interrupts her.

“So fucking nothing, Butterface, waddle off …”
 
he pauses and dry heaves before continuing, “Back to the cheeseburger cave.”
 

She thunders to his kneeling form and kicks him with her tree trunk of a leg. He doubles over and rolls ass over ankles a full ten feet away. She stomps to him, her entire body jiggling, and wraps her thick hands around his neck.

“Enough fat jokes,”
 
she screams in his face, showering him with warm spittle. “I’ll
fucking
squash you!”

“Then you stop first,”
 
he wheezes. “Stop threatening me with your fucking fat if you want me to stop making fun of your fat fucking ass!”
 

She slams his head into the ground, screaming unintelligible curse words and head butting him after every few slams. After a minute, she sobs and stands up, leaving him sprawled and semiconscious. “It’s easy for a junkie to stay so fucking skinny,”
 
she whines.

Pestilence turns his head to the side and spits a mouthful of blood across the sand. “It’s easy for a fat bitch to represent gluttony during the Apocalypse.”

She heaves him up off the ground by the back of his hood and hurls him through the air before he can crack smart again. He flies through the air, propelled by her super strength, past a number of tanks and trucks. He lands with a series of crunches and cracks next to the corpse of a general. He rolls over, realizing he has left one body unchecked. His long, narrow finger disappears into the man’s dirty green slacks, and a smile worms its way across his face.

“Ha!”
 
he shouts through chapped lips. He pulls a tiny baggie from the general’s pocket. The need is warping into anticipation, and his dry mouth begins to salivate. Almost as an afterthought, he leans forward and looks at the general’s nametag. “General O’Coddle. So you’re the reason these boys were just hanging out.”
 
The skin pulled tight on the general’s face is grayish green, and his head is open like a half pipe with chunks of sundried brain caked to the sand above it. “Well, General O’Fondle, time for you to wake up
,
and time for me to nod out.”
 

Pestilence spots a Cockbug hiding in the shade of the General’s corpse. He holds his finger down in front of the dick-shaped critter, and it wiggles into his hand. Pestilence leans in as if for a closer look, and with a smirk he exhales a black puff of smoke. The cute little Cockbug twitches and turns gray. The veins that run along it blacken, and it hisses at Pestilence.

He sets the diseased Cockbug on the sand, where it immediately stabs an
o
ther normal Cockbug. Within seconds, the second Cockbug has taken on the same ashen color. Pestilence points at the general’s open head, and the two bugs crawl through the sand and begin carrying half-decayed brain matter back into the skull. Three more Cockbugs wiggle over to see what’s going on, and all three get pricked and turn gray. One joins his fellows in stuffing General O’Coddle’s
 
brains back in, one scuttles towards the two hundred soldiers Pestilence killed, and the last wiggles into the throbbing corpse hole, where it infects thousands of others.

By the time Pestilence pulls his tightly wrapped kit out of his robes, the corpses are swimming around one another as the diseased Cockbugs reanimate every relatively intact human body they find.

Pestilence unrolls his kit with a grin and removes his needle and spoon. He leans on the general and dumps the entire contents of the baggie onto the well-worn spoon. The Cockbugs tuck all of the general’s brains back in his skull and use strands of his own bushy white hair to sew the wound shut. As Pestilence fills his needle, General O’Coddle begins to twitch.

The ground rumbles as Famine stomps over to them. “So now you’re
just gonna tie off and …”
 
Any further words are lost when Pestilence pulls up the sleeve of his robe with his teeth, revealing his pale arm. Thick veins and arteries run the length of the visible arm, each swollen and discolored and stretching hard against the milky skin. He winks at Famine and jabs the needle deep into a dark orange vein. His skin tints yellow, and his bloodshot eyes roll back in his head. The need and the anticipation within him give way to the needle full of bliss.

Famine recovers from the shock of Pestilence’s disgusting arm and resumes yelling at him, “You junkie piece of shit! YOU fucked up everything! The only reason we exist and YOU fucked it off for all of us! War will kill you, and I will hold Death’s hand as he reaps your sorry-ass soul!”

Her massive chest heaves with each shout, and a vengeful grin spreads across her fat face, making her eyes squint and the corners of her mouth turn up. Pestilence closes his eyes and tells her, “You are so fat your horse is trying to kill itself.”
 

The smile dissolves under the flesh of her cheeks, and she raises a foot above his head. “Enough of your mouth, you junkie asshole. If Satan has already risen, we don’t need you.”

Pestilence smiles his graveyard grin without opening his eyes and tells her, “I’m not playing.”

Famine turns to see her
emaciated
horse climbing on the ever-shifting corpse hole. It screams as the reanimated bodies below shift and give. Large jets of hellfire shoot through the bodies, sending smoke and gore into the air. Famine shrieks and follows her weakened steed. Pestilence squints and sees her dark shape stomping through the mob of corpses.

“Careful, fatso,”
 
he mumbles. “All the demons in hell are under there … including the wicked things from hell 133 … oh, fuck us, hell 78 is gonna set loose …”

She continues screeching even as a reanimated hippy wraps his filthy arms around the horse’s neck and starts chewing on its throat. Famine jumps and tackles the dead man. A jet of hellfire explodes nearby, weakening the clog. Famine, her dying horse, and the tackled zombie fall down through the corpse hole and into Hell. A colossal jet of fire erupts, sending loose limbs and gore skyward. Behind the fire come legions of winged demons darkening the sky, laughing and shrieking at their long-awaited freedom.

“Shit,”
 
Pestilence mumbles as he strains to sit up, “there goes the neighborhood.”
 

He does his best to snap his fingers. The most he can manage is a weak rub, but his steed understands and walks from the shade of a transport truck, drawing the hungry eyes of the hundreds of risen soldiers, to Pestilence’s side. Pestilence reaches up for his reins. He misses the first
few times, but finally catches them. Once he has a firm grip, the horse tosses its head and tugs him to his feet.
 
Pestilence throws his body onto its back.