Nero and Elagabalus watched the building burn in the parking lot across the four lane. It was a dorm of the small university, insignificant state school where Elagabalus had been deployed to make his way to an American citizenship. The EMTs and firefighters herded the cowering and phone-wielding huddle of students surrounding in the grass and parking lots, some with smoke burns on their face and hair clutching the small totebags of the few valuables they could scrounge from the horrible oven. Two firefighters dragged one girl out, naked, pudgy like baby with the body of an adult, pale and sooty, from the womblike sunheat of the near-windowless brick building. EMTs desperately worked on her. She had already died and began to turn grey as weeping mourners flung themselves upon her. Student council president, valedictorian, high achievements from birth to high school to freshman rushing a sorority between three sports teams... countless organizations lost their poster-girl that day. Nero and Elagabalus slowly drove out and through residential streets to the interstate as the flames died down, mourners calling parents, friends, family...
Nero was cold. He drove as they made their way beyond the edges and borders to the wilderness where space lost orientation to all but up-down and the poles. They slowed down, amidst the pothole flecked roads of the wasteland where wandering lost souls made their desolation in the few remaining spaces between where electricity had long been fried away. Nero was the kind of boy to hold his hand in flame to feel a forceful intrusion of warmth at his long deprived skin. Nero grew up here, the children of bitter colonialists disintegrated into a bonecult of divine emptiness, huddled in the corner of tiny wooden churches watching the ancient figures of the isolated world that had reared up hymn and chant.
Elagabalus was afraid. Small and pathetic, he had forced himself to imbibe deeper than all the rest, forcing himself to the top of every competition and petty hatred. He sipped whiskey and did a bump on their drive. The water flowed over him, through him. He only ever bottomed when he fucked. He cut his tongue on his knife bloodied in atrocities. His nails were clawlike of his own volition. He envied dogs with owners.
Nero and Elagabalus exited from their lead of the convoy, decamping at the head of the small town cut into the trees. A flag rose from the well in the center of the streets long torn up to make a public square where once was highway. It was the wrong flag. They had received payment back in the city to make it go away. No one drew hard borders out here, but little parcels on the fuzzy edges were traded back and forth at reasonably fair rates, cut by 50% by Nero and Elagabalus and then passed out amongst the masked men who pulled up behind.
Hundreds of years ago, the cousins of the ancestors of this town had descended from across the ocean and put the natives to fire and sword. They, the smart ones, did it to drink blood and collect a paycheck, riding in emptiness and then returning to build lives whole in the city. The ancestors of this town had settled, still in the old tribal mindset of petty patch-of-dirt squabbles in interior Europe, as though the purpose of genocide and war were to acquire anything as vulgar as physical goods. Now, they stained faintly still with the blood of that ancient conquest, waited in horror as Nero and Elagabalus stalked amongst their town. They shrank, as the natives they held the blood of did long ago. Degenerated to natives in their own right, they could only muster awed running and mute horror as Nero waved his hand and the men opened fire.
Elagabalus ran up the proper flag, photographing it for evidence. Elagabalus rubbed himself through his pants. Nero stood still, cocked on one leg, as his men piled bodies in the center. They didn’t bother to be complete, only firing at the witnesses and letting those who should run, run. This wasn’t a massacre. They were beyond that. This was a higher calling, war for the love of the ultimate liquor.
Nero sat down, reading a map as his man idled beside him. Elgabalus was being fucked within an empty building nearby, screaming a little too loud, acting to himself, to prove that maybe he can feel something, that maybe he is capable of receiving something worth receiving. The sky was grey and carrionfeeders began to descend. They didn’t bother to burn the bodies. The men had no need to scavenge from the pathetic trinkets the victims called home. Elgabalus would be here for a while. A few of the men were taking turns with him. Nero continued reading his map, checking his silent satphone. Muzzles cooled. A dog barked up the road and fell dead. Nero waved away the annoyance of flies. Elgabalus was trying some new humiliation and a few of the men were laughing as he desperately submitted in hopes of thawing, opening. Bodies began to stink. A cold breeze gusted down the road. Nero was only cold. The villagers had fled into the woods. Nero rarely realized how frozen the ground was. The sun slowly drew down behind the clouds. The first maggots were laid in the flesh.
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