The Damn Disciples (15 page)

“Now you must water it with this hose,” the Group Leader said, showing Stone how to aim the stream down and get all the powder
evenly wet. “The elephant will be adding dry powder; you must wet it enough to stir. And then just enough so it is the consistency
of the Golden Nectar.” It was all too much for Stone’s brain. He felt a pounding headache surge through his skull. How could
they expect him to remember all this? But he watched and then tried to imitate the Group Leader. He aimed the hose, though
his hand shook. Everything shook from the drugs. It was hard.

He stepped out of the way as the elephant came back with a load—this time black chunks of stuff that had a sour smell.

“That is the opium,” the Group Leader said. “Make sure to break it up fine. Sometimes you must smash it with the paddle.”
Stone tried to do what the Group Leader said, lifting the paddle and forcing the chunks against the side of the vat. Yes,
it worked. Even a useless worm like him could do something. Stone felt a surge of infantile pride surge through his zombie
brain.

It took nearly ten minutes for the elephant to fill the vat up again. Under Group Leader’s watchful eyes, Stone kept watering
the gunk down until it looked about right. He reached down and turned the gas jets, and they sprang into flames below. Within
minutes the huge vat was starting to puff and boil, and Stone had to move fast, walking around the cauldron with the long
paddle dug deep into the drug soup. The Group Leader watched the whole operation two more times and then finally left, satisfied
that the pod knew how to handle it.

For hours Stone stirred the stew of ten of the most powerful mind-altering drugs known to man. He had no idea in his 40-IQ-level
brain what it was he was making. Just that it was important. The Guru was depending on him. And the Transformer, with his
red eyes. So he concentrated all the mental power he could generate and walked around the vat, stirring for his life. For
Stone had still a tiny speck of imagination somewhere within the “cleansed” brain. And that dark vision kept visualizing the
elephant turning on him if he made even a single mistake. It would lift him high in its trunk, then dash him into the boiling
chemicals. Even a zombie brain didn’t want to go out like that.

Stone was exhausted by the time he was relieved that night. He could hardly move a muscle. But at last the Group Leader came
and collected him, and he joined the line of other pods. They were all marched back to the mess hall for more Golden Nectar
before a hearty meal of unknown meat and overcooked dumplings. Every time Stone even vaguely started coming out of his trancelike
state, they were right there with more of the potent brew.
The Guru knew exactly
how much to give his disciples—and then a little more, just to be on the safe side.

So by the time Stone actually got to eating
, the drug was already in his bloodstream, and instead of eating gustily he just stared blankly down, like all the others,
and took one slow forkful at a time, as if he could take or leave the slop set before him. When they were done, the Group
Leader called them to their feet and marched them to the Temple of the Aura, where Stone had first been “initiated” into the
cult.

When they walked inside, there were already a number of pods and gray robes around the floor. The Transformer him-self sat
in his robe on a great throne made of skulls in the center of the room. Even from across the floor, Stone could see those
ruby eyes burning, and a shiver shot down his backbone. There is a fear even among the comatose. The Group Leader led them
to form a circle around the High Priest, joining in with several dozen others who had already started moving in a slow line.

Drums and rasping hornlike instruments sounded from the shadows, and the Group Leader motioned for them to bend down and pick
up what was at their feet. Skulls. Stone shuddered inside and his hand twitched a little even as it followed the command.
The thing had been dead for a while. It was mostly bone, though there were still clumps of flesh, a few matted little pieces
of scalp still attached to the surface, as if the thing had been scraped but was not entirely clean of its former covering
of flesh. Stone was far more terrified of the Transformer—or even the Group Leader—than the cold skull he held in his hands.

“Dance, dance around the High Priest,” the Group Leader screamed, smacking at them with his stick. They began turning, holding
the skulls out in front of them, waving them up and down. The drums grew faster, and suddenly they were all zooming around,
and Stone felt dizzy and as if his legs were about to collapse under him. The High Priest stood up on his throne of shimmering
ivory bones and exhorted them on. And under Stone’s drugged gaze he seemed to grow, to rise into the air right above them
until he was as tall as the ceiling itself. And again Stone didn’t know what was real, what was not. The question didn’t even
have meaning. Just that he was in a world where he understood nothing and dumbly feared everything.

The dance seemed to become a tornado of motion until they were all whirling around the room, their robes spinning out wide
and the drums pounding, their heads all twisting around as if there was thunder in their skulls. And just when Stone was sure
he was going to fall down and smash his face into the floor, the Transformer suddenly screamed “stop” and held both of his
long skeletal arms up. The dancing scores of pods came to a stop, though many of them collapsed immediately from the dizziness
or kept going around like psychotic tops, smashing right into the walls, cracking their faces into bloody pies.

“Fast comes the holding of the skull,” the Transformer intoned, his voice booming out over them making their very bones rattle.
“Then comes the holding of the flesh.” With the word
flesh
, dozens of women came streaming out of curtains on each side of the room. They were all young, beautiful, though none of
the drugged men could particularly recognize the aesthetic charms of the young creatures. The unclothed women came running
up to the pods, each one picking out her particular Love Pod. Instantly they were all over them, wrapping their arms, their
legs around their chosen man. Kissing him, making cooing and aching noises. A petite blonde not older than twenty and wearing
nothing but bones over her breasts and loins wrapped herself to Stone like wallpaper to a wall and dragged him down to the
ground. Stone didn’t know what the hell was going on—but it was the High Priest’s orders.

The woman stroked him and fondled him and groped him, and in spite of himself, in spite of not knowing where the hell he was,
who he was, or what was going on, Pod #47 suddenly felt his pulse quickening and his manhood stiffening. And before he knew
it, she was atop him and riding him as she writhed and made weird sounds. And though Stone’s brain was in another dimension,
his body was in
this
one. For the body is an animal. It doesn’t need the brain around for it to take care of business.

And so it went for days, perhaps weeks. Stone didn’t even know time was passing. In the zombie mindset of his drug-induced
trance, he was able to carry out basic functions—eat, sleep, shit—and perform his work at the drug plant, where he stirred
the huge vat for long hours at a time, feeling himself grow even headier from the fumes that some-times threatened to topple
him over into the boiling muck. Not that he knew real fear under the Golden Nectar. Nor pleasure, nor pain. There was just
obedience. Like ants carrying out their duties without question. Guru Yasgar had successfully turned men into an army of the
living dead. And he had only begun.

Although Stone had no sense of mortality in his state, still he didn’t want to fall into the great vat of drugs he paddled.
But the fumes made it such hard going that he had to turn his head as he walked around the high wooden platform stirring.
Had to turn away, trying to breathe in what little air there was coming from cracks in the wooden walls. The building had
no aeration system, no safety features of any kind. The very thought was laughable. Men were expendable. Every-thing else
was not. They were like light bulbs, used until they popped and then replaced.

On the fifth day of his tending to the drug pot, Stone suddenly heard a scream in the late afternoon and glanced over toward
the other vat and .his fellow stirrer, just in time to see him slipping over the side of the steel cauldron—and right into
the thing. His screams only lasted a second, and then he went under. Stone could see from his vantage point the man’s hands
waving wildly above the boiling mixture. Then it, too, went under, and within seconds the whole mess began boiling over.

“Emergency, emergency overflow,” the foreman screamed as he rushed down from his overseeing station on an even higher platform
above. He ran over to the boiling stew pot and slammed the Emergency Off switch on the gas jets beneath the pot. The flames
went out—but the liquid didn’t. The stuff cascaded right over the top of the great iron container, splashing down the sides—and
over the foreman. He screamed as Stone watched, still walking around, for he knew if he stopped for even seconds his might
go the same route. The stuff was hot as boiling tar and stuck all over the foreman’s flesh and face like smoking napalm. He
raced around the floor smashing into things as other supervisors yelled and ran around, the whole place had erupted into a
mad chaos.

The Nectar-coated foreman, his whole body smoking from the superhot coating of a dozen different mind drugs, ran right into
Stone’s gas jets below, and his stomach hit against the steel side of the burner system. His face and chest folded over forward
into the rows of flame, and he burst into fire himself, as the stuff in the state it was in was highly inflammable. Now he
was on fire and screaming, a human torch rushing around the floor threatening to take the whole place down, as every square
inch of it was made of wood.

“Burndown! Burndown!” the second foreman screamed out, rushing over past the burning torch of smoking flesh and turning off
Stone’s flames as well. Two other robed cultees came rushing over from across the floor and splashed buckets of water from
the water tank that fed the drug mix. The burning man slammed facedown onto the floor, where he continued to writhe around
like a snake on fire. The others splashed their ten-gallon buckets over the whole mess. And within seconds the fire was out.
The flesh-bubbling dying thing on the floor mewed like a squashed kitten.

The operation was shut down for about an hour while the whole thing got sorted out. The body of the other stirrer was dragged
out of the muck. He looked about as bad as the burned husk of foreman on the floor, his whole body blackened now with a charcoallike
substance that coated him from hairless head to fleshless toe. Both bodies were put into a wheelbarrow, and Stone, while his
pot was being emptied and cleaned, was told to take the load over to C building. The new foreman was going to take the time
to clean out both cauldrons. Make sure there were no further problems. Guru Yasgar would make heads roll if there were. Or
worse.

One of the slightly higher-ranking pods—a class-C pod as compared to Stone’s own Pod D status—helped him with the foul-smelling
barrow and guided them to the north side of town. Stone hadn’t been in this section before, and he saw that it was empty of
buildings after they had gone about four blocks. There was a large field, then a hill, and on the other side, a long two-story-high
log structure. Only, this one looked more finely carpentered than many of the other buildings in the camp. The walls were
sealed and tight, the roof without leaks.

Stone and Pod #83 came to the door, where two guards were armed with submachine guns, the only place in the town other than
Yasgar’s own palatial residence where there were armed men.

“Delivery of two terminated pods,” said Pod #83, holding the right handle of the wheelbarrow.

“All right, bring them in,” the guard replied in a bored manner, pushing back the door and pointing to the ramp to one side
of the building. They walked over and, getting a good start as there was nearly five hundred pounds of human sludge in the
barrow, rushed it up the ramp and inside. It smelled inside. Stone, even in his somnambulent mental state, noticed it instantly.
Or rather, his nose did, which began twitching and snorting all on its own, so foul and distasteful was the odor. And in his
dim-witted brain Stone knew as well what the smell was.

“Over here, over here,” the guard said impatiently, pointing to a crude conveyer belt. It was about a yard wide and had foot-high
walls of tin-covered slats on each side of it so nothing could pop up off of it. Which was a good idea, considering the kind
of load Stone and Pod #83 were carrying. As they lifted the decomposing bodies, softened by the flame so that big slabs of
them fell off, Stone and his helper swung the bodies up and onto the conveyer belt. Blood and slime and charred gunk splashed
up onto the tin sides and some came up and got them in the face. Though neither man was noticing such things.

“Good, now back off,” the guard said, as he motioned for the two to get out of the way. He walked over to a small gas-powered
generator and pulled the cord on it hard. The engine didn’t catch the first time, but on the second try it burped to life
and gave out with a loud thumping sound. The conveyer belt began to move, and within Stone’s mindlessness there was a ripple
of curiosity. He hadn’t even known these things still existed anymore.

The conveyer belt took the two still-smoking bodies down along the wooden canal about ten feet, where they disappeared inside
a large metal box about ten feet long and six wide. There was a loud grinding sound from inside and then sounds of all kinds
of things being snapped and crushed as the whole tin structure vibrated around on its supports. It only took about a minute,
when the guard motioned them to walk to the other end and put the wheelbarrow under a round opening at the far end of the
metal box. They placed the barrow right beneath the opening and the guard pulled a lever on the side. The round hole began
extruding a ground-up burgerlike substance from its multiple holes. The bloody tendrils of
human
flesh poured out of the grinding machine and into the wheelbarrow. It only took about a minute for both corpses to be completely
ground down into the same texture of chopped meat—bones, brains, eyeballs, fingernails, and all.