As Though Before A Vengeful God: A Horror Read online

  AS THOUGH BEFORE A VENGEFUL GOD

  A Horror

  by Hugh Neill

  * * *

  ©2021 Hugh Neill and Five Cat Press

  Prologue

  The island was officially populated by ten men and a dog named Explosion. That was not enough to have any effect. The men were assigned to the island by drawing slips from a hat. The dog was assigned to the island by the man who the hat belonged to. The men were stationed thousands of miles west of their homeland to report the weather. All the ships on the ocean had gone silent since the war started. To make a noise in the water summoned death.

  The men operated the weather station and called their reports in on the radio and endured the cold and isolation. The water around the island stole the heat from the air. Fog covered the lowlands. Some days, when the air around the southern bay was clear and the small lakes to the north drew the fog, the volcano in the north appeared to rise from the mist and grow nearly a mile into the heavens. Some mornings when the fog line was below the cabins, the men awoke to the sight of an endless ocean of mist where the northern volcano's lower extremity was a wide band of black against the horizon, tapering into a snowcapped white summit that faded into the pale blue of the sky.

  Explosion seemed happy enough. She was a german shepherd. She had ten friends, food, and plenty of room to run and play. She did not understand anything at all, which the men envied. The men loved Explosion. This was the whole of their world for long weeks. They observed the weather, reported it, played with their dog, performed the basic daily rituals to sustain their bodies, and waited for something to happen.

  The first thing happened in late May. The men spotted an enemy plane flying west to east far above and called it in. They were unable to make contact, as the receiving base was accustomed to their calling at three-hour intervals. When they got through, they were told that their sighting indicated an attack on the western mainland within ten days. The men grew fearful and began to sleep with their boots on and their rifles beside them. They dug trenches and hid caches of food and ammunition away from the main camp.

  The second thing happened in June. Five hundred soldiers came in the dead of night. They fired on the cabins to announce their presence. Two of the ten men were struck and wounded. One unwounded man took their communication ciphers and fed them into the stove as bullets shattered the windows around him before he finally ran. He clutched a thin grey blanket as he rushed out into the dark. The unwounded eight fled into the night, along with Explosion. Gunners fired upon the men as they ran, tracer rounds casting beams of light through the darkness, until the men reached the cover of fog and were gone from sight. The man with the grey blanket lost sight of the others in the chaos and found himself alone. Soldiers captured the two wounded men in the cabin and treated their wounds to ensure they would survive the journey west to become prisoners of war. As they grew hungry, Explosion and seven of the men made their way to the food caches one or two at a time. All were captured in turn. At the end of eleven days nine men had been taken. The one remaining man was assumed dead.

  The island was twenty-two miles long and six miles across at the north and south, though the middle of it narrowed to only a mile across. The coastline rose in sheer cliffs of black rock with vibrant green growth atop them, but at the natural cove of the island’s center the rocks fell down to gentle hills that sloped to beach. The island was indifferent to the struggle of the single scared man running alone across it. The island held secrets to warm him. He would never find them.

  Water was the easy part. There were fresh streams to keep him from dehydration, but he began to starve. He feasted on tundra grass and earthworms. There was almost no cover on the barren landscape but the fog, so he hid among grey rocks with the grey blanket for camouflage. He made his way north and saw his country's planes dropping bombs in the south. He made his way to the volcano. He found a cave on the northern coast to starve in. He survived in this way for over a month.

  On the forty-seventh day, he collapsed as he was venturing to a stream for water and realized he was starving to death. He decided to surrender, and set off from his cave. As he made his way south he saw a small metal structure on the base of the volcano. He hadn't noticed the structure before and assumed the enemy soldiers had made it. When he surrendered, he saw that his enemies had completed another twenty-four buildings around his old headquarters, and any curiosity about the structure faded from his mind as they took him in. They stared at his protruding ribs and his strange skin and gave him hot tea and a light meal.

  Soon, two thousand more men came to the island. This was still not enough to have any effect. They built and reinforced and prepared through the months as bombs fell all through the winter and spring. The island was under siege. It was a barren rock at the end of the world, but it had been stolen, and this could not be tolerated.

  Three thousand more men came in July. This approached the threshold but still had no effect.

  The official story then is that in August, fourteen months after the occupation of the island began, the armies came. Thirty-four thousand, four-hundred and twenty-six men came to the island. The Canadians took one side of the island and the Americans took the other. The soldiers charged onto the island. There were three hundred thirteen casualties. Yet when the smoke cleared they realized there was nobody home. The Japanese had apparently abandoned the place, but not without covering it in mines and booby traps. One hundred ninety-one men were reported as missing in action. Some soldiers seemed to simply vanish into the fog and never reappear. The other dead were chalked up to friendly fire, and the unfamiliar silhouettes in the fog were written off as misperceptions from stress and fear.

  The 46th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company began their work. They tried to give a final speck of dignity to the men who had died fighting nothing. They performed the last great service that could be done for their fallen comrades. The men of the GRC saw things they could not explain but loaded the bodies into the bags and the bags into the boats and took them back to Little Falls Cemetery on Attu, too acclimated to the remnants of violent death to think too much of it. As they took the last of the fresh bodies to the harbor, they were joined by a pack of wild dogs. The leader of the pack was Explosion, who had been there the longest, and knew the terrain the best.

  They all came and went without ever really knowing why.

  PART ONE: THE SIR

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE: THE WORKING MAN

  Given the upward trend of the past few years, he hadn’t been expecting to get shot. Back in ’34, he was hopeful for the future for the first time in years. Food on the table, a job. After several years of hunger and desperation, that upswing felt monumental. The World’s Fair had reopened back in May, and he had a job operating the dragon rides.

  It was absolutely mindless work, but it was work, it wasn’t backbreaking work, and it was a beautiful summer out there on the peninsula. Some days when he wasn’t working he’d still come to the fair to check out the other exhibits. The Century of Progress was compelling in its utopian dream, everything gleaming and convenient, everything perfect. The outside world was still mired in the depression but he got to work inside a glimpse of the future.

  Sure, when he was on shift that glimpse was primarily of a set of levers operating a dragon-shaped mini-coaster, but there was so much to see. When he got to thinking about what to do with his newly found two nickels to rub together, he’d pull out the gold pocket watch his dad left him to check how much longer he’d have to keep pulling levers for screaming children.

  On his days off he was fond of taking the sky wire. It had scared him half to death the
first time, that metal box dangling so high, but that fear quickly turned to elation, to wonder, as the fair shrank below him and the bird’s eye view let him see the water all the way to the horizon. Now he went every chance he got.

  The automobile exhibitions amazed him, especially the stunt shows Chrysler put on. They got Harry Hart to show what those beautiful machines could do, and if he hadn’t seen it himself he wouldn’t have believed it. Hart must’ve been taking that thing up to 40, 50 miles per hour, absolutely fearless, careening around corners, driving almost sideways on a 45 degree incline, going over an arced bridge so fast he actually launched in the air for a terrifying second and landed on the front two tires but kept going.

  It felt like the world was in motion again. The past few years he’d just been treading water. It helped that alcohol was no longer illegal, and he could get a good, deep buzz going without having to engage in any shady subterfuge or worrying about getting caught up with Capone types when the cops raided. Not that he had anything against Capone. The soup kitchen Capone opened had been instrumental in keeping him alive the past few years. He was even a bit sad to hear the man had been locked up down in Georgia.

  Now, though, he was a new man. There was nothing like filling your stomach with something you actually wanted, getting drunk, riding the sky wire, and going to a movie after. In those moments the future felt like a broad and welcoming horizon, not a pinpoint of light at the end of a tunnel. He’d fallen into a routine since May. On the days he worked, once he finished his shift he’d go for a little walk from Northerly Island to the automat at Van Buren and Wabash, and pick something different every time.

  When he saw those rows and columns of gleaming windows with hot food and pies and coffee peeking through, the nickels in his pocket shimmered with potential. Though he no longer had to eat at the soup kitchen, he still couldn’t cook for the life of him. Pre-sliced bread had been a great help in allowing him to have anything edible within the walls of his cozy slum, but a man can only have so many peanut butter sandwiches before his body revolts.

  It seemed like coming full circle, somehow, as he’d heard peanut butter had been introduced at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and now the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair freed him from it. He knew they’d been around for about the same time, but the automat felt like the future. Everything ready in an instant, no need to wait, it felt almost magical after breadlines. He wanted to get fat on every food he could find before the fair closed out. Pack on some pounds for winter, just in case. Every pie, every sandwich, every roast. He knew a new man needed new flesh, and he wanted to pack it on fast.

  The day before the fair opened, he’d decided to spend some money before he really had it, and went to see a new movie called The Thin Man that had just opened that night. It was almost pornographically escapist. He and everyone he knew were on the verge of pulling a Chaplin and boiling their shoes for sustenance, and the people in that movie lived lives of careless wealth and leisure. There was a murder mystery in it, but that was hardly the point. The hero of the story had married a rich heiress and retired young, and now spent his days drinking to excess without ever seeming really drunk, effortlessly cracking wise, and, incidentally, solving a complex murder mystery at some point in the process. He’d gone to see it a few times now.

  He’d always snuck in a flask, which had mostly drained and kicked in by the time the ending came around, so he still wasn’t quite sure who the killer was. He knew it was explained at some point, likely the ending, because that seemed the logical place for it to go, but by then he was warm and relaxed and not too worried about such details. What stuck with him was the way of living, the ideal, the dream, the spending all day drunk and doing nothing while still getting everything you could ever want handed to you through sheer dumb luck.

  That day in July he heard that they finally got Dillinger. Gunned him down outside a movie theater. He’d liked Dillinger too. Those bankers that fucked up the country so bad the past five years needed someone to put them in their place. That and the mere mention of a movie theater was all the reason he needed. Say you were mourning Dillinger’s defeat, if you needed an excuse to get drunk and watch your favorite movie again. This time he’d decided beforehand that he was going to try to stick through this one, stay sober, and learn once and for all who the killer was.

  But a few minutes in, it occurred to him that his memory being a sieve was a blessing in this case, in that he could rewatch something he knew he loved and be surprised over and over. What’s the point in living just to know what the end of the story is, when you could relish the rhythm and style of its telling?

  The fair closed on Halloween. By then he’d gained enough weight back, and spent enough time walking to save money on train fare, that his body looked capable of enduring real work, to the point where people no longer had the urge to offer him directions to the hospital the moment they saw him. Solid, if not sturdy, he no longer looked so scrawny as to be blown away by a strong wind. That made securing further employment easier.

  Before the problem had been that he was too poor to get a job. He understood what it meant to be broke because it almost broke him. To be so destitute that you no longer qualify for any job because all your higher thoughts and bodily work capacity have been replaced by fear and hunger. So he was thankful that the job that came along was just pulling levers. That he could do. Sitting and pulling a lever once every few minutes was within his work capacity.

  Between the work, the walks and the food, he didn’t fatten up so much as regain what was always supposed to be there, to look like a living human instead of a skin-draped skeleton with glassy eyes. The automat brought his weight soaring to 160 pounds and he felt like a giant, stronger than he’d ever known he could be.

  With his wiry, sinewy muscle, combined with his recently gained economic capacity to get a haircut and not smell like complete shit all the time, getting more work was easier. Having been swayed by the fair’s proclamations of the wonders of the metal creations to come, he sought work at the steel mill on the south side and waited for the future to arrive, with him a part of it.

  The future spoken of in the fair never came. The gleaming perfection of the century of progress was far removed from the reality of steel. Screaming machinery and molten metal. Watching the red hot material flow under incredible pressure and heat. Growing stronger. Getting more money. Not enough. Now acclimated to a life slightly better than starvation, he realized they weren’t getting their fair share.

  Utopian manufacturing systems and soaring cars weren’t what life was made of. The kinds of rich people from The Thin Man were absentmindedly benefiting from the work of him and men like him. His arms and shoulders grew thick. Far from the automat, he built himself up on deli sandwiches and milk. Moved to the east side.

  The flimsy fuckup of yesteryear was replaced by a stable community man. A man who wanted his fair share and a fair share for his colleagues as well. A man willing to fight for it. A man on the steel workers organizing committee.

  In 1937 they presented the company with a union bargaining agreement. They were rejected. They went on strike. They were not prepared for the incredible violence that the company was willing to inflict upon them. They gathered at Sam’s Place, where for the first time in a long time he got as drunk as he’d done that summer after booze became legal again, and there were hundreds of them there, and the spirit in the place was stronger than you could describe, and they started marching west towards the factory. But the cops were there, and they were merciless, and in a moment everything turned.

  You live your life assuming men won’t shoot at you without provocation until one day you learn that they will.

  With the feeling of the slight shifts in air pressure from gunshot shockwaves, and the rippling absences of air behind bullets in motion, the men around him started to drop where they stood, and he was back in the fear, adrenaline up, with a feeling of the feral cat level of terror at the unknown future he hadn’t known since th
e days in line at the soup kitchen.

  In one moment he was a union man, ready to fight and die for what he believed in, and in the next moment he remembered the unfortunate fact that he was a coward, a charlatan, a little boy hiding behind the mask of a grown man, and he was running, ignoring the screams, feeling a sudden burning in his leg, limping as fast as he could, just going as hard as was humanly possible under the circumstances. He looked back and saw the cops beating his friends, maybe to death, and ran harder. Adrenaline drew his blood in from his limbs to his torso so the wounds on his extremities wouldn’t lose too much blood.

  He made his way out of the scrum and chaos, full of terror and shame, to find himself gasping on the uptown train, trying to put as much distance between himself and the massacre as possible, waiting for his heart rate to go down, and when it did he noticed the hole above his right knee, and panicked, and lurched out at the next stop, onto the platform, screaming for help, feeling something tear as he overexerted himself and suddenly feeling like he might be pissing himself, looking down, seeing blood flow, seeing it flow so fast, seeing it pour down onto the platform so fast, and the last thought he had before he blacked out was “Wow, look at it go.”

  His next memory was of falling from an incredible distance.

  Somehow these memories became conjoined in his head, like one instantly followed the other, like a cut in a movie. First he was staring at his blood, then there was only water below him, from horizon to horizon. He hadn’t even cleared the cloud layer yet, and as wind rushed past his ears and his stomach turned at the speed, he felt calm.

  Serene, really.

  He was vaguely aware of a fear, a terror, but it was not his own. It rose in volume and intensity as he fell, but it still did not reach him. It was only when the huge shadow beneath the water resolved into a mile-wide lamprey maw that he felt any fear of his own. He wanted to run, to swim, to fly away, but none of his intentions reached his body as he fell. As the mouth snapped shut around him, his eyes opened to a bright white room. He blinked at the light and blurred forms slowly resolved into familiar shapes.