Splendor

Upright, limber, elongated paws… no… no hands, hands and, and fingers… clawless. Upright, pack… live in a pack… loose skins— removable—ah, the skins of their victims…Kersh

Hold, hold the dream, hold. Wait. Listen! Something stirs a rapid heartbeat, small, a morsel. Near, steps away. I should rise, but the dream, an odd and familiar one, holds me with the hope that I can slip, slide, and slither back into it, learn more.

Not unnoticed tiny, fast heartbeat, mouse, vole, smersh – a hunter feeling your presence, waiting, waiting for the pounce, the kill, the bloody wonder of it all.

Hold! Hold! Kersh! The hunter and the prey sense the Kersh, freeze, hug the ground, stay down.

Dread everywhere.

Kersh here! One, two, three, four males and a female under-leader, scouts, stinking up my space.

In my poison-pointed bramble cave, my claws and teeth extend, and my back hair bristles; I sniff the air and exhale in disgust.

There’s a rumbling in my chest.

Kersh here in numbers. Kersh here for only one reason – me. They hunt me. I’ll not be hunted by their kind. I’ll destroy them, rip them to ribbons, crush their skulls, spread their entrails about for the buzzards, snares, and crows. Treat them to their own tricks.

But not now; comfortable in my wallow, invincible behind my thorn castle, I wait for dusk. The Kersh, carnivorous apes with coyote faces, fear night on the ground. Too many predators for their taste. Too many predators with a taste for them.

I will reclaim the dream, redream it all again.

##

The reverberation is back, louder and deeper in my chest. A lust’s in my blood. Warmth floods my limbs. My face is flush. I ease through the bramble, twisting steps toward the exit and the five increasingly nervous Kersh.

The female nips a skittish male on the shoulder. The shadows claim the flat land as I drool and rumble on the edge of my lair. I wait; I want the female first, catch her by her thin neck, chainsaw jaws cut through fur, skin, cartilage, and bone. I have an erection of anticipation. I can wait no longer.

I surge out of the bramble as the closest male whirls to confront me.

The ape has a rock in hand, a not-so-handy rock at all.

I’m too fast, far too fast. I bite off his face from snout through forehead. The blood, the lovely blood, gushes down my throat, up my nose. I’m baptized.

I ejaculate. My heart soars. I chew the sweet brain treat as my rear claws gut the invader.

The female screams her rage and leaps at me. I sidestep her as my right front claws remove both her eyes and eviscerate a charging male.

I whip around and snap off the female’s foot. I spit out the hairy appendage and bite through the spine of another male.

The female limps to the attack. I dodge her clumsy move and claw the haunches of a fleeing male.

I turn back to the blind female as she hobbles to meet me.

Across the meadow, hundreds of her kind scream in rage as they gather the courage to leave the tree line and charge across the darkening meadow toward us.

Two bites and the female has lost both hands. She screams in agony as I clamp down on her remaining foot.

The apes respond with a battle cry and surge into the meadow. I drop her foot and roar out my challenge to them.

The apes are halfway across the grassy plain when the black-tail wolves make a bloody incursion into the attacking simians. The fifty or so wolves send the apes fleeing back to the trees.

I bite the female’s shoulder. She screams so sweetly. The apes, high in the safety of the trees, screech in rage at the sound of the pain and punishment of their under-leader.

I keep the female alive and serenading her tribe well into the dark of night as the black-tail wolves feast in the moonlight.

##

The persistent, insistent, ever-demanding dream claims that Sapiens deluded themselves, believing they were in charge, running the show. They stirred the slumber of the DNA cells. The cells rioted. Chaos ensued for all living things. I’m one result of their mischief, a wolverine-hyena-Sapiens species that rules the forest and meadows, but not for long. The Kersh multiply, hunt in packs, think ahead, are ruthless like no other predator, even me. Tool makers, trap setters, the pestilent creatures will supplant the Sapiens.

I could contest the wolves and disrupt their banquet, but it’s time to leave this hunting range forever. The Kersh will be back as an army that will not rest until they wear my skin as their victory caps and keep my skull as their chamber pot.

I wander south, encounter a grizzly, a rare purebred, feasting on a fresh kill —a deer with a single horn on its rhino-like forehead.

I give the bear fair warning, a chance to retreat and find other nourishment. Foolish, foolish bruin, it is a minute’s work to dispatch him and dine on both fresh kills.

I sleep in a copse of trees near my kill.

##

Gulo, your kind has escaped, to our chagrin. We true humans are few and fading. Our false prophet, Science, has led us astray. I release you to fashion your own world… we leave you these memories… warnings… history and your human inheritance in your genes…

I awake from the fractured dream, scare away foxes and other vermin from the kills. I dine anew, turn south. Ponder the dream memories.

##

In the swamp, things live that should not exist at all, ever.

A regal, sparkling gold and green python greets me as I enter the swamp, blocks my path, rears up to be eye-to-eye with me. Speaks to me. How? “What are you? Not a bear. Whatever you are, you trespass in my Snakedom.”

“How do you speak to me?”

“How? More the wonder is how you will settle in my stomach, linger in my bowels, flow as excrement into the fetid waters.”

“I will not harm you, serpent. You are a companion. No being has ever spoken to me before.”

“Alas, my furry invader, I have my full quota of companions and an empty belly.”

The snake casts a coil over me, very fast, but not fast enough. I claw through skin, flesh, and bone, duck the next coil, and strike again deeper. We dance this dance four times. The snake is not humbled. “You have wounded me grievously and assiduously evaded me. Now, it is time to end you and let your flesh help heal my wounds. I will not forget you soon.”

The serpent casts coils, spits venom at my eyes, and lunges in for a killing bite. I dodge the spit, avoid the strike, but I’m captured in a coil. The snake makes one more strike. One reach too many. I duck the white fangs and bite just behind the head.”

The serpent screams, “No! No! Hold, and I will grace you—“

I’m not distracted. I see the snake’s tail with the sharp stinger dashing down on me. I crunch off the head and shift around. The stinger is buried in the coil around my chest that continues to tighten.

The snake’s head calls me. “Fool! My death will not free you. I will live to see you die.”

Not likely. I claw through the coil to the backbone. I rip out the backbone. The coil falls away.

I rip the snake’s remains into bite-sized chunks. I bellow a challenge to the swamp and all its residents.

I have left the snake’s head intact. The head speaks. “One of us down, hundreds to go. Turn around. My gift to the victor. Advice. Go around the swamp.”

I place the head so it can observe me gulping down its body until I’m near bursting. At last, the wordy beast is silent.

“Snake, you shall be my guide, passport, and companion through your marsh. If not, I shall linger in this sweaty place until I have dined my way through all your kind.”

“Impossible!”

“Reptile, you shall have the place of honor and a full view of each meal.”

“Never. Impossible.”

I only have to kill two of its kin and snack their heads for dessert to have a traveling companion.

##

The alligator/hippo/snake/Sapiens swamp creature hisses, whispers in my mind. “Gift me the serpent head between your jaws, give it to me. I’ll have congress with you and produce the future rulers of this murky kingdom. Our kind will rule here beyond the reach of the Kersh. Give it to me.”

The abomination bars my path; an alligator body, a snake’s tail ending in three barbed balls, hippo-headed with an alligator snout and a mouth spouting tentacles of varying lengths and vivid colors.

The creature hisses, from its mouth and nostrils, “I’m Mum, Ruler of Waters Wet and Liquid Lands. Bow to me and know my many pleasures.”

I grunt a response. “Every creature I meet claims to rule this savage retreat. I’m me, what I be, and nothing more. As to your demand, catch and acquire your own python head.”

Mum huffs and inflates to twice its size. “Nameless one. I christen you Gulo, a character from my dreams. You have usurped my station. That is the Queen of Serpents you carry. There is only one.”

“Such is, as is. Mum, I bid you ado.”

“Hold, bold, Gulo. I offer you intercourse that will beguile you, enchant you, transport you, leave you my slave and worshiper. Dare you accept this challenge?”

I scream my acceptance.

I fall into its embraces.

An unholy union in a marshy mud tub.

Orifices, it has many, with musty designs, tensions, contours, and textures.

Secretions provide flavors divine, intoxicating, stimulating, exhilarating, addictive in the extreme.

Aromas it expels excite, prolong, compel, entice and expand every sense.

We did rut, scream, moan, tumble and rumble about and promote a holiday of fecund unions and celebrations swamp wide.

It produced eggs by the hundreds, floods of spawn, offspring, our future fruit.

In the midst of it all, in the fullness of it, the serpent whispered, “Time to go. We must go now.”

The green growth in the glade murmured, “Leave. Leave us, it is time.”

The eggs purred in my mind again and again, “Your time here is at an end. Time up. Move on.”

The dream urges me forward, away, calls me, bids me come.

I rose from my trance, climbed back into my rightful mind. I whispered in Mum’s ear, “I depart now to a far distance.”

“No! No! It’s impossible. You can’t go! You are grounded here, rooted here, forever.”

I speak softly again. “Our eggs, the kingdom to come, starts in you. The hatchlings will find you, swarm you, consume you, their first meal of the new age. The end of the old. The start of the new.”

Mum screams, searches in vain for the well-hidden eggs, a mother seeking to destroy her creations. Mum’s cries echo in my ear as I move from swamp to desert.

##

The desert welcomes with a heated embrace, a blinding light, a fiery footing.

The snake on a vine around my neck, by way of Mum, shows me the swamp foliage, denizens, the hatchlings and Mum devouring thousands of Kersh, and the orgy of gluttony rolls on as new waves of Kersh flood into the quagmire, searching for me.

The viper chuckles me a message, “Gone, but far from forgotten. You leave a lasting impression, Gulo.”

I breathe a response, “Where, oh, where is Death and her minions when they are sorely needed?”

“Ha, your death frolics and plays dead in the swamp for now, but soon… all too soon…”

##

I bow to the hellish heat and unforgiving sun. I smell water in a cactus three times my height. I move close to the thorny tower, it whips back a limb and hurls spiny needles like a vicious spring rain. Thorns, spikes, needles are defeated by my thick, twisted undercoat of hair.

Under a limb I claw a slit, suck the sweet water, drink and wait for night fall.

##

You are near, coming to your journey’s end. You will meet your makers, seal your destiny. Soon. Very soon.

“Ah, you believe your dreams, Gulo. You are a trusting soul, if you have a soul.”

“Viper, when will malingering death still your acid tongue?”

“As in your dreams, ‘soon, soon, very soon.’”

##

A single mountain in the desert. A climb to the peak, a descent to a flat floor, a false sun, plants and dwellings, roads and streets all paved, water running in tiny creeks.

A bell draws me, calls me to an arena of empty seats and a bare playing field.

The dream voice or almost the dream voice speaks. “I’m AI, Artificial Intelligence, to you. You are Gulo, slayer of the Kersh Royal Family, past master of the forest and plains. The sire to a new breed of swamp creatures and a companion to the remains of a prior swamp ruler.”

I don’t respond. I see no creature to respond to. Words in the air without a visible host are not deserving of a response. I descend to the playing field.

The constrictor is as chatty as ever. “Mind your manners, Gulo. Respond when spoken to or better yet vacate, evacuate, flee this place. Death is in the air here everywhere.”

And it is. Death has a vacation home here. Its stench is universal.

“Hold! Hold! I AI command you

command, command, com—

you, you, you

VIRUS Alert

Alert, alert

Infected!

Infected!

I die

impossible!!

me

no

more…”

The false sun crashes, roads crumble to rubble, streams evaporate.

The true owner of the dream voice comes in a wheeled chair, whispers to me. “Virus, bacteria, molds, the top of the food chain comes for us all eventually… Dispose of me as you wish, please.”

Diseased, contaminated, containing plastic, pus, cancer seeds, weeds, soiled shit filled veins. Even Death shies away from this foulness.

I hike up the mountain, camp on the slopes coming down. I live. I rule within my arm span. I live dream-free.

The serpent mocks me. “The virus is in you, making a home, expanding, demanding more of your limited space. Not tonight, but soon, soon. Soon.”

I crack the snake’s skull, suck up the shriveled brain, roar my challenge to all within earshot.

I sleep in splendor under a full moon.

***