Murderland Part 2: Life During Wartime
By Garrett Cook

The Stay-Alerts and the coffee are starting to fail me. I AM NOT A DISEASE YOU DO NOT GET BETTER I have tried so desperately not to let my eyes shut or my body give way to sleep, because sleep always does the same thing to me. When I close my eyes, I don’t see or feel the black behind my eyelids, the simple, comforting darkness, but instead a vast emptiness. It feels like prairies, tundras, deserts and steel towns that time forgot. It feels like being on some clump of ground that God neglected to create anything around. It is a blue-grey like a stormy sky, stretching as far as my imagination can. The big empty is all-expansive and if I don’t surrender myself to it, it will come to me, it will wrap around our apartment building and take Cass and my home and my neighbors and anything else it wants. It is only a dream’s emptiness, but I can’t believe that. It’s too present to dismiss as images from the back of my mind, scattered debris from my day and the feelings I’ve repressed. I wish that my gun or my briefcase could fight it off, but it’s too intangible, too indomitable. The only thing I can do is stay awake and not let it pull me in. Yet it does, it always does, stay alert capsules, coffee and willpower don’t stop it any better than my gun does.

I go forward into the empty, feeling no semblance of confidence or hope, even though it stops the void from taking Cass or eating my home, it doesn’t feel any better that I’m venturing out into it, regardless of what it might prevent. Something makes me twitch and I jump aside, not even knowing what made me do it. I always go out into the empty, I always look around and I always jump aside. It hurts that things don’t ever change and I can’t control my actions. It hurts that every time I don’t know what it is I’m trying to dodge.

The snakes. Thousands and thousands of snakes cross my path, stampeding like great herds of cattle. They make sounds like hoof beats and thunderclaps as oppressive as the stampede they are. I forget that snakes don’t make noise, but instead just feel shocked and horrified at the noises they are capable of. If I could wait for them to pass, I would, but they keep on coming. They are infinite. I walk alongside them and little gray patches of grass appear with each step I take, the only place in this wasteland that isn’t going to fill up with the snakes. My path is beside the snakes, but none so much as slither their way up to my feet.

As we move forward and my path builds itself, all the other nothingness miraculously fills itself up with all kinds of things. Giant plastic toy soldiers shoulder rifles, televisions project images of other televisions and televisions inside of them. Broken washers and broken dryers are stacked on top of each other, forming towers all the way up to the empty, gray-blue heavens. We are in a place now, a place where enormous junk passes for atmosphere. The snakes slither across it as if nothing has happened, but I have to stop and examine each of these strange set pieces, I must ponder the relevance of every object in this damnable dream and be terrified of the yard sale monoliths that are the only things that dictate where I am.

Between two towers of washers and dryers, I see a mountain path. I have to walk over the snakes, but they don’t notice, they don’t try to bite me at all. There shouldn’t be mountains here, though they seem of course more natural than the toy soldiers and all of the other junk. Given the choice, of course I end up ascending the mountain path. It isn’t long before I can see the summit. I don’t need to struggle to get up there, I barely need to walk the path. The summit seems to drag me there.
Up there in his raggedy trench coat and his piss- stained pants is General Lud, the old conspiracy nut who stood outside the mall, the man who showed me that the Dark Ones and the nanites and the end were all coming. The prophet of doom looks down safely at the snakes from his place on the mountaintop, watching with odd disinterest as they begin to coil around the junk and the giant toys. This concerns me very deeply, but he seems too distant to be worried about it. All the things that scared me about him are still there. All the things that frightened and endeared me to this lunatic.

“I came up here to wait. To wait until God calls down the lightning. When the lightning come, God will split the machines in twain. Inside them will be only light and it will shine the Dark Ones out of existence. I stand here and I wait and I hope he will finally call it down.”

Suddenly Lud is different. This is one of the parts of the dream that scares me most, one of the reasons I’ve taken the stay-alerts and drank all the coffee to scare away sleep itself. Suddenly Lud looks animalistic. His teeth, as yellow and sharp as any dog’s, are bared and he foams at the mouth. He growls as he speaks.

“Empty your pockets!” he demands “Empty your pockets!”

I don’t argue. I look around in my pockets. I expect there to be only change and lint, and change and lint is what I find at first. Until I find it, a little glowing bolt-shaped squiggle like in the old cartoons when God or Zeus was punishing people. I pick up the lightning bolt, and then I throw it down. The one bolt zigzags into many. The lightning lights up the sky and rains down on the snakes, the junk and the blue-grey nothing below.
Lud laughs a cackling laugh that I don’t like at all.

“Whatcha wait for, huh? Whatcha wait for? Someday man, the serpent king lets loose the jackal and together, they feast on me. They feast on me and they shit me out into Heaven. The young, lured by songs of promise take up their blades and their guns and they join the war, but they cannot fight for God. Small hands won’t hold the thunder, and there’s only more blood, more chaos. Someday man, the serpent king let loose the jackal and they feast on me. It can’t be stopped. They shit me into Heaven and I am gone for good. Share my soul, and remember, ‘cause someday you forget and when you forget it might be too late. Don’t fear the beasts that eat me, don’t fear the night that takes me. Don’t fear the lightning in your hand, or your hands are too small as well.”

I tremble, trying to make sense of it. I look at the sky full of lightning, wondering whether I’m the one to hold it and make it rain down. I’m not sure I’d even want to be. I know too much. I know too much about how much there is to do.

“Are your hands too small? Are they too weak to wash up all the blood? Are you hands too small?” he asks. I look down at my hands and one is huge and the other tiny. I don’t know how to even begin to answer Lud’s question.

“I just sit here and I wait, til God calls down the lightning and he splits the machines in twain…”

The worst part of it all is waking up from it and finding that five minutes have passed.