Daniel was fully aware then, drunk on whatever chemicals raced through the blood of this outrageous psychopath. Peeking into this head was like the mortals who dared look into the eyes of the most terrible deities—it was impossible without pain and you risked losing your mind.
Feel this! Can you feel this? Like a fire the God of Mayhem had set at the center of Daniel’s mind.It was impossible to say how many were killed or maimed during the God’s venture north. Nor did the God care in the least. When they reached the vast parking lot, a sea of metal vehicles frozen within a sheen of rust and filth, Daniel felt the God’s body pulsing with even more energy.
He roamed through the parking lot on his way to the buildings beyond, the vehicles missing tires, batteries, windows, seats. Now and then the God would stop at a car and peer inside. Most of them were empty but occasionally he’d spy a sleeping form stretched across the upholstery, and sometimes two or three people who looked terrified when the God tapped on their window. He always wondered if they could tell by the look of him that he was skilled at turning living things into dead things.
The building ahead appeared to have been some sort of department store. The front of it had fallen onto the sidewalk, an enormous G, a twisted S rising out of the rubble. As he came closer he saw that several floors of the building had been exposed.
A man with a yellow bottle was standing by the entrance. He staggered, holding the bottle out as an offering. “You find something… maybe we can trade.” The God of Mayhem reached inside his coat, stepped up to the drunk and stuck him below the waistline with a hunter’s curved gut hook, then dragged it up quickly while stepping back. The drunk stared at him blankly, then fell back with a spray of blood. Some splashed on the God’s coat, but he didn’t mind. It was dark and besides he wanted a little blood on his coat. The thought made him slightly light-headed. He breathed in sharply and licked his lips.
He had not yet tried tasting any of his kills, although he’d thought about it. Once he’d killed four in a one day frenzy, with gun and knife and holding one fellow under his bath water and bludgeoning another to death—he’d put his nose against the dead flesh, and his open mouth, and breathed in whatever aromas he could, and licked one corpse along the small of the back, and found it to be unusually salty but not unusually foul. Why… Daniel said from somewhere lost within the God’s tangle of hunger, rage, and passion.
The fellow asked me a question, the God of Mayhem thought, at Daniel. Daniel, shocked to be spoken to directly by the God like this, was desperate to hide. The God’s inner voice roared with astonishment and laughter. My conscience, you nag me!
This had never happened before. Daniel hadn’t thought it possible. He was supposed to be a silent passenger, a listener, not a participant.
The God muddied his coat on the damp ground to obscure some of the blood, not wanting to telegraph his intentions to the crowd. Swaddled in a rainbow of rags covering everything but his eyes he strolled inside.
The sheer number of squatters surprised him. As he went room to room and floor to floor he was overwhelmed by the mass of them, filling every available space except for a few cleared pathways, and with entire families jammed even into the spaces under the stairs. And the stairs and frozen escalators had people sitting to one side of each step. Had they noticed the rust flaking off the beams? And the crumbling concrete, the borders of each room layered in gray chips of the stuff? It wasn’t safe to live here.
Violent young men and lazy females, sprawling families, orphans, criminals, all jammed together with their limited belongings, bodies on top of bodies, acts of theft and violence and degradation seeping out between layers upon layers of human stink.
He didn’t care who he killed, as long as they weren’t children. It was hardly his fault that people had become furniture. The God of Mayhem wasn’t obligated to feel guilt over the death of furniture.
Several potential targets of his rage became obvious. There was the thin man wearing the high collar that hid his mouth. His eyes constantly scanned the crowd as he rubbed up against one female after another, particularly the young frightened ones, the exhausted ones, reminding the God that even during the lean times there were predators of different appetite.
Another candidate was that fellow with the bushy black beard that had been half burnt from his face (one of the God of Mayhem’s own fires, perhaps?). It appeared that no beard would be growing anytime soon on that side, but the fellow had made no attempt to modify the damage to his appearance by trimming the beard. As far as the God was concerned that was in his favor. But he didn’t like the way the fellow stared. He noticed too much.
Off in a corner a crazy looking fellow did comical impressions of anyone who passed. He’d suck in his belly and bloat his belly, allow his tongue to loll and cross his eyes.
An old man sat by one of the many fires up on raised bricks. Now and then he would toss a burning stick at a child and laugh. The old man was layered in burn scars up and down his arms and on his face.
Others were guilty of some simpler form of rudeness. A woman who insisted on her right to public defecation, and who did not hesitate to demonstrate; a fellow who enjoyed showing his rotted teeth to strangers; a fellow whose constant monologue mourned everything lost to time and society’s poor choices. Everything he said was true, of course, but it brought those around him no peace.
All no more than rude behaviors, but a desperate and overcrowded world had no place for the rude. The toilet-rights lady received an iron bar across the base of the skull while everyone’s head was turned in disgust. A large rag stuffed into the rotted maw of the dentally-impaired, his jaws held shut by the God’s powerful hands, the two of them huddled against the wall like lovers: the man’s eyes fixed on the face of his new deity until the light burned out of them. A quick shove sent the body out an open window.
The God of Mayhem decided to take his time with his next subject—that vocal mourner of all things lost to the world. “Here, I want to show you something,” he said to the mourner, his arm around the man’s shoulders, squeezing them. “I hear what you’ve been saying, and I am deeply in tune with it. You, my friend, are the voice of a generation.
“I have a gift for you and I think you will find that it greatly clarifies your situation. I think, in fact, that you will find this quite healing.”
At first the man quivered, looking up at the God of Mayhem as if he were the monster that he was, but the God had a way of making his eyes soft and welcoming. The man actually smiled and looked surprisingly eager.
“Yes,” he replied, and the God led him out of that crowd, and down the stairs, and outside. He walked around the exterior of the building, his arm still over the man’s shoulders, which had started trembling again. “What—what is it exactly we’re looking for?” the man asked.