667

The lithe youth sprints across an endless battlefield scarred with a crooked maze of deep trenches, his thin crouched silhouette backlit by a pallid horizon. He leaps into a ditch, twin brother at his back like a shadow. And running ahead, he skids around a dark corner, but a clawed hand grabs his ankle, pulling him down to where a bloodied corpse, white hair caked with mud, raises itself from the earth, brandishing a rusty flintlock. The captive struggles to break free, and the elder bludgeons him with the gun then collapses into the mud from which he came, releasing one last sour breath. The slower brother sprints into the earthen corridor only to find his other half lying in a widening puddle. No longer split, he weeps alone, unaware of a woman floating from behind a gloomy wall. He looks up and sees her coming. A cold breeze follows her, rustling his hair. They lock eyes, but she does not stop. She dips her toes into the pool of blood then immerses herself completely. Alien, she bathes in the slain; the black dome of her scalp emerges from the warm pond as she studies the living sibling, cold moonlight glistening in her dead eyes. The survivor glares down at her, defiant, ready to die again. But suddenly he sees something else: in a nearby warehouse, a girl restrained, held above a long wooden table carved from the corpse of an ancient tree and positioned in the center of a dark and cavernous room. Blue strobe lights slice her naked flesh into strips. Blonde hair draped over breasts. Sweat dripping, muscles trembling. Behind her, unseen, a machine rumbles. The dark woman and the last brother stand in the shadows and watch, silent, as the machine contorts the girl with sudden jerky movements that suggest a set of programmed steps but also sometimes willful malice. Horror renders the man inert. He begs the woman to stop it, his face dripping with sweat and tears. He gathers every ounce of courage and readies himself to attack the machine, but the woman grabs his arm with her bloody hand and warns him, If you do so, all her pain will be for nothing. She releases his arm and turns her eyes back to the grim and cursed table. Not every beautiful thing can be saved. Her innocence is no longer needed. A black appendage with concave tip slithers, serpentine, from the dark and slides between the girl's pale legs. The tail, in segments like a scorpion's, attaches to her, extracting her sweetness. She tilts back her head in ecstasy or pain as the beast squeezes her ribs like an anaconda. She is trapped. Another ebony member hovers over her, the end like a helmet, fitting tightly over her skull, transmitting unspeakable visions from the depths as her mind shatters into something new, something necessary.