Kristin (12 page)

The remaining humans left
the space.

The bony protrusions inside
her oral cavity ground against each other:
What was happening
? It was impossible that only
one of the humans in this space had fallen under her control, her will was too
strong for that.
Why
was human integrity degrading so slowly here
?
Why wasn
’
t there more malice aforethought
,
cruelty
,
killing
?
Why did so many
here waste time thinking of the consequences of their actions
,
why didn
’
t they simply
pick up a weapon and kill
,
as the non-obese being had done
?

The shrivelled human was
dead, it wasn’t a problem anymore, but the obese leader had insufficient hatred
within its soul, it was using the high end of its organ of thought too much for
her liking. She would put this right. She probed the obese leader’s mind for
anything she could exploit, and inadvertently stumbled upon the phenomenon of
human sexuality and procreation:
Her father had designed the race in two parts
,
male and female
!
One was strongly attracted to the other and when they reached a certain level
of maturity they would join. The male would inseminate the female and she would
eventually produce
  
young.
Her father had incorporated a fail-safe mechanism — intense physical pleasure
— into the species to ensure that the process was ongoing. But the
fail-safe could also be used purely for pleasure;
this was the sensation she
’
d felt while
astride the great weapon of death in the Middle Eastern lands
, even though
no male had been present. It was a stroke of genius! She now yearned for a male
to give her pleasure, to inseminate her. She wished to produce offspring;
she would raise
them well.

She drifted towards the
vacant, lifeblood-soaked resting place and as she settled, a single word leapt
from the obese leader’s mind into hers — love.
Love
; the antithesis of hate. The obese
leader
loved
his
young. A base idea evolved inside her and she made it become reality.

For an instant of
immeasurably short duration, she imagined that she herself had once loved
passionately, and that
 
this love
had been returned. But if it had actually happened it had been long ago, far
from this place. She could no longer recall, nor cared, what her loved one had
looked like, what his title had been. She once believed her father loved her,
but she’d been mistaken. Now all she wanted to do was to defile and destroy his
precious creation. She sought this more than anything else in existence.
Love?
  
There was no room for such a
pointless, weak emotion in her soul. It was already full — full of
hatred.

The obese leader raised his
head abruptly, sensing movement. A feint displacement of extraordinarily cold
air made him shiver and he locked his eyes on the empty resting place, knowing
intuitively that it was now occupied by something unintelligibly bad.

Out of the vacuum in
dimensional space in which she moved a thread of khaki fibre appeared in
mid-air, long strands of shining, black hair. He shrieked, pushing his resting
place away and heard the wheezing intake of air, slow exhalation, smelt a
rancid odour.

‘I breath thy fear,’ she
whispered into his auditory organ. ‘It is entire.’

He turned white, his organs
of vision wide with terror.

‘ ...
What ... what are you
?’ he stammered.

Her materialization
gathered momentum. Through pieces of fast growing outer membrane and forming
bone he could see an organ of circulation pumping lifeblood around translucent
veins. ‘ ... Leave me be, bitch ... return to the realm of nightmare!’

‘Regrettably, we must open
a physical dialogue, pitiable sack of fat!’ she hissed.

She watched him prod
desperately beneath the piece of organic material. ‘Thy device is disabled,
thine attendants dead. Every mortal within this edifice is dead, apart from the
non-obese being. He will soon return and thou wilt concur with his plans.’

‘Get
out of my head ... you are not real!’

Organs of vision,
glistening with evil, solidified like two perfect onyx beads and she settled by
his side, her reformation complete. ‘Then touch me, if thou believest thy
vision deceives thee.’

Fearfully, he reached out a
side-limb and brushed the side of her face with the tips of his digits, felt
the reality of her presence, the frigid temperature of her outer membrane, the
nada of her soul, its unadulterated enmity.

‘ ...
What ... in the name of God ... are you
?’
he choked, withdrawing the limb with a gasp.

‘
In the name of God
? In the name of God,
I am his child.’

‘But in Christianity the
son of God was ... ’

‘Not that fucking imposter!
I am outcast, despised, but his child nevertheless. I am thy past, thy present
and thy future.’

‘But you appear ... as a
woman.’

‘My physical gender is
immaterial.’

‘ ... You are she of whom
we are told?’

‘I am the true essence of
humankind. For now I am Kwang.’

‘
Kwang
? Why are you here?’

‘I have always been here.’

‘ ... But why ... why have
you come to Korea?’

‘I seek assurance.’

‘
Assurance
?’

‘The certainty that thou
shalt use the destructive means at thy disposal. Thus far, I have only found such
a guarantee within the soul of the non-obese being.’

‘
The
non-obese being
?’

‘He killed here, in this
space.’

‘ ... General Choi?’

‘ Yes, generalchoi. Why did
you have him taken from here?’

‘
Why
? Because he murdered my minister for
science, he is insane.’

‘How does one measure
insanity? It was thee who authorized the design, the construction of the great
weapons of death, now it seems thou hast not the conviction to use them.’

‘They were built as a
deterrent, the ultimate bargaining chip. Everybody, on all sides, knows that if
a nuclear war were to actually start the world would take a hundred years to
recover.’

‘Generalchoi knows better,
he appreciates that this would not be an end, but a beginning.’

She eyed him angrily. ‘
How
hast thou
resisted me
?’

‘I have a conscience.’

‘Thy conscience belongs to
me, it has ever been so.’

‘ ... And yet ... and yet
you find you cannot force me to execute your will. You say you’ve killed
everyone in this building, apart from Choi, and the horrors you’ve wrought upon
the world are undeniable, but you still wish
me
to give the order to fire the
missiles ... why? Why don’t you just do it ... ’

‘Thou shalt take each
other’s lives!’ She tasted a bitter, black fluid between the fleshy surrounds
of her oral cavity.
   

‘I would rather die than
give the order.’

‘I will gladly take life
from thee — ugly, swollen, slit-eyed, yellowfleshed cunt!’

‘ ... But if you kill me
then you will have failed to prove your will is stronger then mine, it will be
no victory.’

‘FUCK YOU!’ She dug the
hard tips of her digits into the surface and drew them towards her.
‘Generalchoi will return and thou wilt issue the command.’

‘ ... I will not. I refuse
to bring destruction upon my country, condemn its people to death for your fulfilment,
your entertainment.’

‘And this is thy final
word?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maybe thou canst be
persuaded to change thy mind? Thou hast produced offspring.’

‘ ...
Offspring
?’

‘Young.’

‘ ... Children? Yes, a boy
and a girl.’

‘They had not lived long on
this Earth.’

‘ ... They are ten and
twelve, respectively ... why do you speak of them?’

Her shoulders shook with
mirth when she learnt their
 
precise ages. ‘Generalchoi talked of thine enemy,
americans,
south of the border. I moved
two of the
troops
,
had them pay thy young
a visit in their place of learning. Thy female young has been
raped and butchered.

The obese leader jumped up.

‘And what a fucking and
butchering the troops dealt her … limb after limb. They reduced her body to a
raw stump. She experienced overwhelming pain, lost too much lifeblood to have
survived for very long. She soon passed from this life.’

‘ ... MY DAUGHTER ... !’

‘Raped her! Chopped her up!
Chopped her up!’

‘NO!’ he screamed, rattling
his vocal membrane in ang-uish, amusing her once more. He lifted her onto the
piece of organic material, closed his digited limb-ends around
 
her head-stem and squeezed until his
digit joints turned white.

‘Ah, yes!’ she spluttered.
‘That’s it ... hate me now ... grotesque, inflated motherfucker! Hate me ... avenge
thy young!’

‘I WILL KILL YOU, YOU
BASTARD ... I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU!’ he bawled, hanging his face close to
hers.

‘BUT WAIT!’ she spluttered,
stifling her laughter. ‘I have not ... yet told thee of ... thy male young.’

He relinquished his grip.

‘After he’d watched his
sibling abused, dismembered, scaled down to carrion, the troops kicked him to
the ground and beat him many, many times about his small, soft head with a
makeshift weapon of oxidized iron, until he too expired.’

The obese leader drew his head
back and smashed it into her face, splitting her olfactory organ wide open. She
found a broken bony protrusion inside her oral cavity and spat it out. ‘PAIN
... FUCKER! FOR THAT THOU SHALT PAY DEARLY!’

But quite suddenly the
obese leader seemed to lose the desire to inflict further retribution upon her.
His face contorted, turning crimson, and he began to shake, his organs of
vision shedding fluid that appeared to be associated with his psychological
state. She looked up at him and cocked her head to one side, wondering:
Could it really
be that he was even uglier
,
now that he
’
d learned the fate of his adored offspring
?

‘MY CHILDREN!’ he cried,
rolling onto his back.

‘Thy children,’ she echoed.

‘MY ...
SWEET ... CHILDREN!’

‘Thy sweet children. The
troops ended their lives brutally, as I willed them to do. They will not grow.
They will never know the exquisite pleasure of mature copulation. They will
never again experience the primitive, but comforting warmth of a human embrace,
the fondness of a kiss.
  
Their
final comprehension of life in this world will be riddled with confusion and
pain. They will never know love.
Just like me
.’

Bruised and bleeding, she
hovered over the grieving human, revelling in his misery. ‘So tell me, now that
thy progeny are cold and defunct, how dost thou feel about those who have
committed this act —
americans
?’ she asked, as her coal-black saliva swung down into his
face in a string. ‘How dost thou think troops should pay for what they have
done?’

The obese leader sprang up
and struck her hard, twice, around her head and she smirked, licking away the
lifeblood. ‘Thine anger is misdirected,
yellowflesh
, thou knowest what thee must do.’

‘This monstrous deed was
not the soldiers’, it was yours! You used them as your tool, made them swallow
the poison in your soul! Now you have taken five lives — those of my dear
children, the soldiers’, and my own.
It is you I will kill
!’

‘Exasperating mound of
shit! What must I do, pull off thy limbs one by one?’

She laid a digited limb-end
either side of his face, closed her oral cavity over his, and poked her organ
of speech and taste inside, elongating it like a worm down his respiratory
tube. He started to choke, tried to bite the invading organ off, but couldn’t
close his jaws, and her unspoken words entered its mind. ‘
I will find another way
,
time for thee to
join thy young.
’

‘THOU SHALT NOT MURDER!’
The voice sliced through her head, its decree irrevocable, and something tore
her away from her victim with fury and hurled her across the surface. Her head
impacted the barrier with a crack and her limbs of mobility buckled beneath
her, broken. The digited limb-ends of the obese leader’s young, those of all
she’d
  
murdered, directly or
indirectly, reached out in unison and began to throttle her.

Once more, she’d broken the
sixth commandment laid down by her father to the Hebrew lawgiver, Moses, on
Mount Sinai. She was bereft of power: Something had taken it from her and
wouldn’t give it back.
It was her father
,
he refused to let her exercise her will.
But she was stronger than
him, she knew it. When he created her, at the same time as he created her
brother, the Christ, he’d made a wholly evil entity of limitless capability.