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Someone broke a seal. 

***

Far away and away and away, down below, a man was standing at an artillery emplacement.  He was not manning it.  He was talking to the OTHER man standing at the artillery emplacement. 

“-and that’s how the computer works,” he finished.  “Now will you PLEASE go away?”
“Yes, yes, yes, of course, of course,” muttered the other man.  He scratched at his long, sweaty bird and adjusted his tall, sweaty crown a hair.  “So it’s like a REALLY big bow then, right?  Right?”
The artilleryman sighed like his soul was being sucked out through his face. 

“Oops.  No more time!  I thank you for your efforts, bowperson.”  

And lo, he whistled to his white horse that had been standing there watching everything, hopped atop it, and rode away waving his bow overhead in excitement.

***

Someone broke a seal

***

All too close and yet distant, a man sat at a computer.  He hunched too low in his chair and he tucked his elbows too close in; everything about him screamed discomfort and inside him a barely-contained rage festered and rotted like the fattest grapes on the thickest vines.  Finally he sighed, stepped back, and looked at the fruits of the last fifteen minutes. 

ybo shuld klil  eechothar

Carefully, delicately, his finger hovered above the enter key, and just as he began to press it there was a DING and fifteen thousand more tweets filled his screen, explaining that nothing mattered and fighting anything done to anyone was pointless and everything was the same everywhere so who cared who did what. 

“God-damned botfarms,” muttered the man.  Outside his window his big red horse grazed untroubled in the pasture on green grass and unmown weeds.  A giant sword made the breeze whistle softly around it, lodged to the hilt in a tree due to a particularly troubling troll. 

“DICKS,” shouted the horseman.  “Goat-begatters!  Well, to hades with it all!”  And he threw his computer out the window and marched to the field and jumped onto his horse and was bucked off his horse and yelled at his horse and jumped onto his horse again and rode away, fuming. 

Ten minutes later he came back for the sword.

***

Someone broke a seal.

***

The man stood by the edge of the fields and watched the crops grow. 

They were fat.  They were fine.  They were strong. 

They were also being fed by irreplaceable groundwater from an aquifer that had been so overdrawn it was turning into dry gravel far underneath his feet.   A thousand years of carefully-trickled rainwater undone every half-hour, gone to nourish a field of nut-trees growing ten thousand miles away from their optimum habitat.

The man scratched his beard.  Beneath him his black horse snorted and leaned closer to the trees, hoping for a snack. 

“So…if it’s a denarius for a quart of wheat…and the denarius is…about a hundred dollars?  Maybe?  …and it’s however-many nuts to the wheat grain…. And the cost of the water and the land is…”

The tiny set of scales in the man’s free hand wobbled like an arthritic drunk with inner ear damage. 

“And if the aquifer isn’t being recharged because of anthro-po-geenic climate…change?”
The scales exploded, one bowl bouncing off a tree and the other very much not bouncing as it smacked into the man’s forehead. 

“FUCK,” said the man, and by the time he’d pulled himself upright and finished swearing he knew the seal was broken and it was time. 

“Oh thank goodness,” he muttered, as he scraped bits of scale from the ground and peeled it from his forehead.  “You know,” he told his horse, “this used to be an art.”

The horse stared at him, then tried to eat the scales. 

He was delayed again. 

***

Someone broke a seal.

***

Death was busy, as he had been and was and would be forever.  But he paid attention, and the big pale horse whose legs never stopped moving changed course for a long-awaited appointment. 

***

They met up somewhere just before what passed for dawn around there.  It was the closest place, and it had coffee and a gas station and some of those little overpriced bags of chips. 

No grass though.  The horses were properly irritated.

“Maybe we could go to Megiddo?” asked the man on the white horse.  “I’m pretty sure this was all meant to go down near Megiddo.”

“They flattened it,” said the man on the red horse shortly.
“I thought they rebuilt it.”
“Oh they did.  Then they flattened it again.”
“I meant after that.”
“They flattened it again after that.”
“And-”

“And again after that too.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“If you two are quite finished,” said the man atop the black horse, “perhaps we could move on?  I doubt Armageddon is still happening near Megiddo.  There are more important places these days.”

“Armageddon is really less of a place and more of a mindset,” said Death philosophically.

“And it’s just arrived?” asked the man on the black horse.
“Oh no, it’s always been around.  It just doesn’t matter much.  I think some folks were expecting it a few years ago, and some a few decades back, and others centuries before that.  As long as folks want it it’ll be there for them.  Like a nice comfy blanket.”
“So shall we just… ride around then?” asked the man on the white horse.

“If you’d like.”
“If we’d LIKE?” demanded the man on the red horse.  “We’re meant to bring forth war!  And conquest!”

“And famine,” chimed in the man on the black horse.

“And famine, if that matters,” said the man on the red horse.
“Tell me, and tell me honest,” said Death, “does it seem like they need help with those sorts of things?”

There was a sad and very very honest silence.

“I didn’t think so.”
“I was trying,” muttered the man on the red horse.
“Me too!” said the man on the white horse.

“I was trying real hard.”

“Me too!”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”
“So what are we meant to do?” demanded the man on  the black horse.  “Just… stand here and let you go off and do all  our jobs for us?”
“I haven’t done anything in a thousand years,” said Death.  “It’s really just supervising these days.  You can do it too.”
“What, just WATCH?”
“It’s all a bit big for a single artisan now.  It’s all in the mass production.  And THAT means management.”
“Management.  Management.  Management.  Yes, I do like the sound of management.”  The man on the black horse twiddled his scales around his finger.  “Tell me, do they still not touch the wine and oil these days?”
“Oh yes, oh very much yes.  But the oil’s a bit different than what you remember.”
“I’m willing to learn.”
“Learn?” scoffed Death.  “We’re management, remember.  And I’d better not see you boys rushing this one.   This is their Apocalypse, we’re just living in it, and they want a nice long slow one.   Take it as it comes and appreciate the view.

“Oh absolutely!  You should see the size of the bows they have now.”
“Shaddup.”
“Okay!”

Outside there was a clink. 

The shuffle had been ignorable – a stirring of the breeze, perhaps.  The creak had been dismissible – a tree settling into its bed?  But the clink?  That was metal on metal.  That was something scrabbling.  Something moving.  Something searching. 

Moe gave herself three precious seconds to pretend it was her imagination, then the clink clanked again and she pulled herself upright; slowly, so as to allow the speculation time to marinate into the meat of fear. 

Maybe it was a burglar.  Maybe it was a drunk.  Maybe it was a drunk burglar and the drunk burglar was a serial killer rapist cannibal arsonist fly fisherman.  Maybe it was a ghost.  Maybe it was a killer clown.  Maybe it was the ghost of a killer clown and the killer clown was an anatomically incorrect giant Velociraptor.  Maybe it was Mrs. Wallace from grade 10 math hauled herself out of the grave to finally get her for cheating on her final exam and getting away with it.  Unfortunately, Moe’s body was acting without her and had already made its way to her front door, where it flicked on the porch lights. 

Dazzling brightness flashed, and the being perched atop her garbage froze, illuminated now by both the light of the full moon and the light of the LED.  It was not human.  It was not an animal.  It was naked, furry, man-shaped, torso sheathed in fuzzy white and little black flip-flaps of ears.  A long muzzle protruded, and its lips peeled back from a mouthful of so many pointed teeth that it seemed absurd to imagine them fitting in its jaws at all.  Baleful eyes glared at her above the fangs, and around the trash can a long, sinuous tail lashed, bare of hair. 

“Oh,” said Moe in great disgust.  “Oh.  It’s just Wally.  Fuck off, Wally.”

Wally gaped his mouth at her, silent and unmoved.  Moe pulled off her left slipper and threw it at him. 

***

Clive stood outside in the dying embers of the afternoon as a soft breeze played around his feet and the warm sun brushed its lips against his skin and he knew that all forty-three years of his life had been preparing him for this moment. 

It had been well worth waiting for. 

Above him an early moonrise sat low in the sky, surrounded by purple and red fire in the clouds.  Inside, condiments were waiting, toppings were being sliced and pan-fried and prepared.  In his left fist dangled a big paper bag of home-baked burger buns.  In his right hand the shining steel of his mother’s razor-edged meat spatula, older than he was and twice as strong as he’d ever been.  On the lawn his children ran and laughed and bickered and flirted with their friends. 

Time to get it started. 

Clive breathed deeply of air that tasted of flowers  and warm-growing trees, lifted the lid on the barbecue, and shouted “OH GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MOTHER SHIT COCK ASS.”

A gurgling snarl rattled from under the grill, crawling free of the sleepiest, groggiest face he’d ever encountered. 

“Wally!  GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THERE RIGHT THIS GODDAMNED SECOND!”

Wally hissed and coiled himself deeper, wrapping his tail around the propane tank and clinging to the stored barbeque cover with all four limbs. 

“Sweetheart?” Clive called indoors.  “Get me a bottle of bleach and the tongs.  The big tongs.”

***

The bells had rung, the buses had left, and the playground was not quite empty.  A faint whisper of the moon peered down from a pale blue cloudless sky. 

Sure, living next to school sucked for Toby in some ways, but it also meant free recess time whenever you wanted.  The seesaws were useless but the jungle gym was the best it’d ever get and there would never, ever, ever be a lineup on the slides.  Up and down and up and down until her lungs ached.  Her mother kept saying she’d be the first six-pack-year-old. 

She wanted a break, and as she sat there on the base of the slide, breathing heavily, the air felt funny.  Not thick or heavy or damp or breezy or anything else that might herald a storm; no, it felt…inhabited.  Someone was nearby.

Someone was watching her. 

Toby thought of her options: the fox that lived under her house; the raccoon family that lived on top of the gymnasium, a big snarling alien, a cannibal serial killer arsonist fly fisherman, or worst of all, Susan.  Susan was such a bitchface. 

The slide creaked under her, and something landed nearby with a thud.  Something much bigger than Susan. 

Uh-oh. 

“Shit,” said Toby, relishing the opportunity.  The swings rustled in the wind. 

Wait.  There was no wind. 

Cautiously, slowly, aware that this was precisely the sort of thing she’d seen in movies, Toby peered around the corner of the slide, and was (at a twenty-foot distance) eyeball-to-eyeball with a fuzzy, humanoid mess hanging upside-down from the swingset by its naked prehensile tail. 

“Wally!” she exclaimed in delight. 

Wally hissed and gurgled at her, waved his limbs too enthusiastically, lost his grip, fell to the ground, and played dead until she left.

***

It was a bright, beautiful July morning when Wally Fittons woke up naked and cold behind a dumpster.  Again.

“Piss,” he said irritably.  A good three-mile walk home starkers.  At least he had a full stomach, although he didn’t like to imagine what was in it. 

Well, he’d cut through the park and be home faster.  Down the lost trails where people’s eyes didn’t pry and nobody would phone the police for public indecency AGAIN.  A charge a month was costing him a fortune. 

Off he scurried into the undergrowth, big pale buttcheeks jiggling like a drunken moon. 

***

“And you thought it was a rabbit?” asked Officer North to the sobbing third-grader.

Jeremy nodded his head.  “I just saw a flash of white and then…and then…”
“It’s alright,” said North.  Really, he shouldn’t be shooting at rabbits either, but given what the kid had seen happen he didn’t need the grief right now.  “It could’ve happened to anybody.”  He examined the little spud gun in his palm.  “We’ll have to take this as evidence, I’m sorry to say.  You’ll be reimbursed.”
“It was just a p-p-p-piece of p-potato,” whimpered Jeremy. 

“Yes, well, silver takes out a werewolf in one shot, and now it seems we’ve discovered what it is that kills a werepossum.  Some scientists may want to interview you someday.  But only if you want to.  Now let’s get you home.”

“Hello and welcome back to ‘Monster SALES of History TM,’ on the HISTORY channel!  We’ve got a fabulous line-up of freshly-cloned monsters for you in the supermarket, but their own crimes are NOTHING compared to the prices they’re going to get if they win this challenge!  Watch dictators, strongmen, warlords, generals, and tyrants struggler in the supermarket in history’s GREATEST food fight!  Here’s my co-host, Timothy Nutts!”

“Thanks Tiffany.  We’ve got all the cameras rigged up: this supermarket is under more surveillance than a Google campus!  We won’t have time to show you all the footage, but if you like share and subscribe and SMASH that donation button you can get the opportunity to buy sponsorship tiers that’ll get you access to uncut clips and slo-mo playbacks – heck, at ‘conqueror’ tier you can  even add your own custom effects to videos and meme while you stream!  Now back to Tiffany Tibbles.”

“Thanks Timothy.  Let’s cut back to the action: our shoppers are now ransacking the isles and plundering for prices!  How’s Andrew doing?”
“Not so hot, Tiffany.  At first we had high hopes for ol’ hickory but it seems ex-president Jackson has dropped out of the contest entirely!”

“Oh no!  What an upset, what an overturn.  What happened?”
“I’ve received word from the medical team that he was just passing aisle 8, read that it contained ‘Indian food,’ and burst into a screaming breakdown before every blood vessel in his brain exploded at once.”
“Aw, shucks.  Well, plenty more fish in the sea, and plenty more monsters looking for MONSTER DEALS!  Shall we check in on Josef?”

“The ‘man of steel’ himself!  After a commanding early lead, he seems to have gotten bogged down in the produce section.  It looks like a momentary stumble over explaining the price tags got his first translator purged by a carrot to the throat, and now we’re on number six, with each replacement afforded less and less time to prove their loyalty and worth!”
“Not a leadership style I’d recommend, Timothy.”
“True, but it worked for decades last time, so I can see why he’s bringing back the old favorites.  He’ll have to speed up his purge-pace if he wants to get moving again and overtake Henry!”
“Not so fast!  Kissinger’s been disqualified while we were on commercial break.”
“What?  Why?  How?  He was the crowd favourite – and as the most contemporary figure, he was statistically the most likely to understand the relative pricing of goods!”
“Seems he isn’t dead.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“He’s not dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Wow.  Looks like only the good die young indeed, eh Tiffany?”

“Well, some would dispute that – such as our next contestant, Mr. Edward Teach, who passed from this world well before his three score and ten were up!”
“Decapitation isn’t usually a natural end to a long life, you’re absolutely right.  The Big B-beard himself is still a little shaky on his feet – those land legs must be fresh – but he’s making his way through the fresh fish as we speak.  Sushi stumped him but he’s got a fine eye for a fresh catch and the deals are simply….MONSTROUS.”
“Nice title drop, Tim.  But that eye twitch I’m seeing on the camera suggests Eddie might have had more than enough fish in his life already.  Which will crack first: the competition or his nerves?  Let’s find out…. in ten commercial-free minutes!”

“Right you are, Tiff!  Maybe even sooner: yet another contestant might forfeit soon!  The Khan of Khans is STILL in the starting area making a speech to the cart attendants!  Not quite sure what the gameplan is there.”
“Well, Genghis was always good at the bigger picture.  What shops harder than one monster?  One monster and a horde!  But that’s against contest rules, so…”
“Yes, I’m thinking this isn’t looking good.  And I note Adolf has left the gate!”
“The wrong way, sadly.  He quit.”
“Yes, tragically the writing was on the wall the moment he started yelling on the set.  We’ve done our best, folks, but some monsters just won’t cooperate.  Especially when they’re convinced everyone around them is a member of a jewish conspiracy plotting against them personally.”

“We’ve actually got quite a diverse selection of beliefs here now that you mention it, Tim – everything from atheism to Christianity to Tengrism!  They may agree that the corpses of others are cheap and that no mountain of bodies is too small to fulfill your personal ambitions, but when it comes to matters of faith our monsters are a truly split crowd!”
“Speak of the split, it seems that Blackbeard’s cracked up a bit just now – looking a swordfish in the eye was a step too far from him and he laid about his handlers with the bill until the security team could be called in.  His run is over, and every other contestant has disqualified, forfeited, or died!  Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach is approaching the till and will soon be qualified as History’s Greatest MONSTER SHOPPER!”

“Yes indeed!  The card’s been swiped – no pieces of eight needed here, hahahaha.”
“Ha ha ha!”
“Ahaha!  He’s putting in his password!  Wonder if it’s just eight over and over!”
“Ha ha ha!  We already made that joke, Tiffany!  Ha ha ha!”
“Shut up it’s APPROVED, yes folks, it’s APPROVED!  Now here come the bags!”

“here they come!”
“The bags!”
“Any second now!”
“The bags!”
“They should be right there!”
“The bags!”
“They should’ve been there!”
“Where ARE the bags?”
“Wait wait wait the bags are there but where are the baggers?  Where’s the attendants?  The staff are gone!  Get me eyes on the floor, where are the staff?!”

***

And onward, outside the set, outside the supermarket, past the end of the parking lot, Temujin rolled at the head of a hundred shopping carts, astride each a rogue attendant, a wallet at every hip and ferocity in every heart. 

Why constrain yourself to just one store?

Bruce!  It’s been ages, how you been man?  Me, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine and fit and fighting mad!  Yessir, life’s never been better!

Look at these delts!  These lats!  These quads!  This bod!

I got all this and a clean brain too!  Why nickles and spit, I’m a new man in every way, a better way, ever since I discovered Dr. Peter Dickenson’s much-meat diet!

Glad you asked!  It works like this:

You eat much meat.

And that’s it!  One rule, one thumb, one rule of thumb.  Simple and pure and perfect.  I love it dearly and it loves me, and I love meat and the meat loves me. 

You see, humans are carnivorous (male) creatures, and that’s at war with our herbivorous (female) selves, so it’s of material benefit to avoid vegetables in case you get cooties, which will sap and suck away your life essence and leave you feeling dead and drained inside.  That’s what gives you cooties: girl stuff.  Like vitamins. 

Yes, that’s the beauty of it!  By eating nothing but raw, filthy meat, all vitamins are avoided!  Nutrition is a scam propped up by the decadent elites to keep us all as mutton-brains, the so-called ‘sheeple’ (‘woolly thinking’ means more than it seems, you know)!  Scurvy isn’t overcome by cheating with feminine carrots and tawdry Sapphic eggplants; it’s triumphed over by red-toothed red-meat rip-and-tearing masculinity!  If your teeth fall out, it’s a sign you’re winning – that’s why I got these dentures.  See?  See?
No, look up.  There.  See?

Yes indeed indeed, those are made from REAL high-grade bear teeth!  I ordered them from an ad on Dr. Peter Dickenson’s website, and those are trusted providers who provide trustworthy provisions, trustily.  Would a doctor lie?  And not a wussy doctor who fiddle-faddles around in boring baby fields like ‘biology’ or ‘sociology’ or ‘psychology’ – he has a REAL doctorate: math!  Now that’s a MAN’S field.  So long as you aren’t counting or adding or subtracting something feminine like bananas or cucumbers.  And you aren’t doing algebra.  Mixing numbers and letters is witchery and counter-masculinatural.  You might as well eat something like….an onion.

I almost ate an onion with my raw liver yesterday: someone snuck it onto my plate.  But my keen man-senses detected its malodorous presence (the odour of pure and overwhelming doom and dread) before it reached my tongue – I quivered and drooled and gurgled and hissed manfully before I threw it to the ground and stomped on it.  Nobody’s going to use vitamins to confiscate my penis while I’M on the job!  I, and of course Dr. Peter Dickenson’s Much Meat diet (trademarked), the one tool guaranteed to order your brain by excising the vaginas from it. 

No of course the doctor isn’t sexist.  Sounds like you’ve been brainwashed by low-testosterone high-vitamin ‘slut media’ (‘slut media’ is a completely neutral term used to describe the mainstream establishment children’s cartoons encouraging women that it’s okay to be women, and if you think that’s anything other than objective fact you’re obviously projecting).  Sounds like you need real meat.  Raw meat.  Filth-ridden meat.

Of course the meat has to be filthy.  The more rancid, the better.  Meat from a plate or a box or a bin is pristine, purified.  Clean.  The REAL world is rotting and putrid, a fallen place of lies and offal, and the manliest thing you can do is chew that world up and spit it back out through your no-no place.  Simply choke down the bloodiest rags of meat you can scrape out of the forest, the fields, the office, and chase it with a shot of Dr. Peter Dickenson’s nutrinectar manessence.  I bought it on his website because he used math on it to destroy it with facts and logic. 

Facts and logic are manly because they destroy, you see.  If they don’t destroy, they aren’t manly.  The world is, as we have established, rancid and rotten, so anyone creating things in it or adding to it or god forbid working to fix it can only become infested with ‘soul-maggots,’ which will wither up their testicles and make them low-t and vitamin-riddled.  But destruction!  Devastation!  Rampaging shredding crushing thrashing crashing snorting hacking slashing RIPPING EATING GNAWING excuse me sorry I get VERY excited.  It’s all this ‘tiger blood’ medicine I buy from Dr. Peter Dickenson’s website – no, no, it’s not a scam, that’s just a name.  It’s actually made from tiger scrotum, not blood.  Anyways I’m filled with manly vigor and power after I snort it but my thoughts sometimes run away without me AHAH HA HA HA HA HA HA ha. 

Speaking of which, I’m holding you up a bit here, sorry for that, I’m just sort of excited to see someone I knew because I need to tell EVERYONE about this it’s AMAZING the way things make sense when a REAL doctor tells you things.  For instance, did you know that most ‘domestic’ animals are actually normal ‘wild’ ‘masculine’ animals that have been ‘feminized’ by ‘vitamins’?  This is what awaits mankind if we continue to suffer ‘soul-maggots’!  Luckily, the solution is plain: we must eat each other until we feel better. 

Now stop gurgling now Bruce, you’ve been squirming around awfully hard during all this and I don’t know if you’re listening or just being a fussbudget but either way I’m pretty peeved off and cheesed up with you.  Your meat will be a wriggly bucket of twitchy worms just like you, which is good because GOD I’m hungry.  But I’ve got to keep eating meat!  I ejected forty-feet of ‘soul maggots’ from myself yesterday, which only look sort of like intestines shut up if you’re brainwashed by vitamins and even if shut up they WERE my intestines I ate them right back up so it’s fine shut up shut up shut UP. 

STOP GURGLING DAMNIT SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP FACTS AND LOGIC SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT

It is very hard to chew with real high-grade bear teeth.

Oh hey there Becky!  Haven’t seen you recently!  Wait, don’t run – I just HAVE to tell you about this new diet!