Chapters
Some self-important son of a bitch from about 2200 years ago stumbled upon one of the secrets of nature and got it in his fool head that he could kill the world. That's the thing about... people. That word makes my teeth go bitter. The thing about people is they think there's anything in and of this planet that can get rid of everything, or even a good part of everything. Hell, I guess when you live in a village with a population of 50 just north of some muddy river it seems possible that the whole world could get destroyed. But it can't. No force short of a moon-sized rock from space has the power to end our existence once and for all. Try telling that to Sonny, though. Bumpkin never did learn how to listen.
I found the prophecy written on some old parchment at a client's house a couple years back. Real creepy fella called himself Yewman. Anyway, I'd been delivering Canadian pinkhairs to him for about seven months when he just up and died one day. Looked like a stroke the way his face was. The house was crawling with stoics, all living off bits of wallpaper and old clothes. The one place they wouldn't go, though, was Yewman's basement. I've always been a curious guy, so I did the stupid thing and went down there. Two minutes later I was standing over the bloody corpse of a stoic gone not just wild, but downright crazy. The place was full of all these funky statues and tools. I never did find out what Yewman had going on in that basement and I never did care to. I just took whatever looked valuable or interesting as payment for that last delivery, plus extra for the mess.
It was only a month later when I took the parchment to a university jerk who told me it was in Sanskrit. I gave him an extra thousand to translate it for me and then stay quiet. It described a ritual, something unnatural and kinda sick. It also described what happened the first time some idiot put it to the test. The result was enough death and destruction to end the Vatsa Mahajanapada.
The real rub of the ritual is that the poor son of a bitch who the queen stoic takes as its mate will never get to live in regular society again. It takes him down to the caverns and he disappears. Maybe they eat him, but more than likely he's the bull for a new generation. Nobody ever asks about it, but it only makes sense. Where else do they all come from? I sure as hell wasn't gonna be the one to do the deed. That's where Sonny came in. I clocked that bumpkin for what he was the minute I saw him at that gas station. Sure, he pretends to be all sensitive and salt-of-the-earth and all that bullshit. Him and every third jackass ever walked the gray roads of the American Midwest. But underneath it all, he's no different than every slobbering monkey who ever tucked a bill into a stripper's g-string. The problem isn't being too rough with the stoics, it's being too gentle. Guys like Sonny, they convince themselves there's some secret love between them and the stoics. It's no better than the creeps who buy from me.
So, yeah, I screwed Sonny twice over. And yeah, I used the ritual to get my hands on a fortune. But that's only a fair price for saving a species. Those pricks from the Malman corporation, they were set to ruin the whole damn North American population. How long before the bastards made them extinct just for a few more years of high sales and cheap labor? I guess I should feel bad about doing so much collateral damage to the world, but then again maybe the folks in the mall food courts of this country ought to ask what's in their Crispy Beef Sticks instead of being surprised when the Crispy Beef bites back.
I let the queen take Sonny wherever it planned on keeping him and I let it bring all the domestics in the house into the forest. I'll miss the convenience, but I guess I'll just have to manage with my mansion and my 250 million dollars in gold. Whatever lies I've told, whatever blood's on my hands, I'll sleep easy knowing I set things right. I don't want to live in a world that thinks it's okay to use naked stoic lesbians to sell me shit I don't even want, to make everyone feel like there's love and prosperity where there's nothing but greed. Things'll settle down sooner or later. The cleanup crews are already salvaging the bent cities. This isn't the end of the age of man, it's just a messy economic downturn.
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