PETITE MERDE ROUGE
Long before the cataclysm, the population went through a slow period of decay and then annihilation. Even if some of them dared to resist the corruption and insane domination of the rulers, most, helpless and desperate, sank into resignation and degeneration.
The decline lasted some thirty years during which civilization decayed progressively. It was at first destructured by the terrifying cybernetic planetary hegemony and the absolute control of programmed media by the fascist Mafia causing galloping inflation followed by a world Stock Market crash. The incidents were unprecedented and populations underwent the worst ordeals: the generalization of terrorism and the extremism of sects, then monstrous ethnic and religious wars across all the continents, with systematic pounding, massacres, collective orgies, barbarity, internment, daily terror, extreme chemical and bacteriological contamination, proslavery, large scale genetic manipulation, serial transplantation, torture, unprecedented mutilation, genocide, permanent savagery, famine, and chain epidemics causing devastation and absolute degeneracy. The disaster had spread out endlessly unhinging even the most vigorous who became too disgusted and hallucinated by the chaos, the contagious decomposition, the devastating riots. An ultimate delirious movement was yet attempted by a group of fanatical and psychopathic oppressors in reaction to the inescapable collapse of the civilization, but their means were too insufficient and the equipment too damaged to efficiently organize a global totalitarian regime. This final violent operation which used up the last resources turned out to be an even more destructive failure. The entire planet, devastated by turmoil and madness, became a huge shamble of ruins, refuse, and filth, of dazed, sick, and insane creatures. The frantic population, completely annihilated by so many years of misery, pullulated in post-urban zones like a hoard of scattered zombies. They searched for the slightest squalid shelter among the piles of waste, stripping each other of their miserable rags. In sparse and contorted groups, creatures pitted with scabs and contagious pus wanderestaggering through the putrid crevices to try to escape hell. But there was no end to this devastation, and the dull and hazy horizon only revealed the same sinister and desperate mass everywhere.
Sometimes less horrifying sounds, more familiar than the usual hysterical screams, were a reminder of human existence. Then the moaning of th agonizing poor devils swollen with abscesses and putrefaction seemed morereassuring to them because they knew that ultimate suffering offered deliverance and the dull rumbling of the viscous waste slipping slowly into the holes would once again cover the lamentations as if what was left of the human race was but a slimy, bulging mass among carcasses and rubble.
Huddled up and shivering at the bottom of former catacombs and destroyed tunnels, buried in this infernal abyss like furious moles lost in piping, each for himself but united in this nightmare, they slowly adapted themselves to the unbearable conditions of this sordid and frightening new existence. In spite of the advanced collective madness, sharing the life of rats and worms, these poor devils, forced cruel cannibals, seemed to feel a need for some form of organization. Some even reproduced and the larvae shrivelling in the darkness developed weakly like those of animals of the abyssal zone, sucking more wildly than leeches at the clots from the gangrenous nipples of the poor females who had given birth as they would have vomited their foetus. The blind and puny specimens were a sought-after prey. The abominably bestial creatures were so voracious that no offspring seemed to escape their rapacity. Holes were also grounds for covetousness.
At each landslide, the survivors had to look for new holes which led to still more frenetic battles to plunge into these occupied entrails. The underground shanty towns were precarious and to live in them was extremely perilous. Organization under ground was so hard that some more courageous creatures preferred to voluntarily die on the surface. They then climbed to the top of the giant piles of discharge, making their way through the heaps of debris and rusted scoria, scraping themselves on each unstable and protruding pile that squirted a coagulative dark brown liquid, and then, never reaching the extremity of the monstrous accumulations, they collapsed exhausted against the steep slopes, still stumbling on the cutting excavations formed during the ascent, and then disappeared engulfed, swallowed up by some unpredictable fissure that brutally closed in as soon as the absorption was complete and thus ended up back in the hole that they were escaping. These absurd and troubling suicides showed that the creatures in the depth of their despair were not totally lacking hope. The attempts demonstrated a certain sense of dignity in this terrifying universe.
Infernal life went on from one impromptu burying to the next, night after night. At the bottom of the swarming cavities, obscene creatures squirmed, pawing at each other among the scraps, fornicating in their seedy mean beds among puddles of excrements where delirious and convulsed, they collapsed with ardor from impulsive fights so violent that their agonizing screams resounded in the neighboring pits provoking hysterical uncontrollable riots that caused abundant and useless losses in this condemned herd. Time flowed like urine evaporated from the gaps and holes. By now the creatures had invaded every fistula of the basement spaces, and the dark labyrinths filled with debris of the fallen civilization had been searched relentlessly. Yet sometimes the creatures still discovered some fragments of recognizable objects among the general deterioration, leaving them in awe.
Then suddenly there was a horrifying shock. Thunder and lightening caused a dreadful dust storm. The distant explosion discharged unbearable heat. The catastrophe had spread with such force that everything had been hurled, bombarded or molten. The devastation was so complete that the surroundings were completely transformed, unrecognizable. The desolate landscape, turned upside down, was laminated by rocks in fusion and their flow penetrated the craters. What had previously seemed chaotic was now subject for nostalgia.
Thick dark smoke hung over the dislocated heaps floating heavily like a terrifying undulating mass. All that remained was an apocalyptic desert. The toxic typhoon had unleashed the elements inducing phenomena never heard of until then. The resulting chemical reactions had given rise to deviant processes, imperceptibly changing the already crippled living matter. The energy was degraded to such an extent that it disrupted the natural oxydization, inhibiting every organism by phenomenal growths or swellings.
The constant cloud was so dense that it modified the gaseous state and destroyed the cycles until it destabilized the air of the troposphere. It was triatomic oxygen that was especially subject to the effects of the explosion: the whole chain of combinations was stricken and compounds of sulfurous and carbon anhybrid had damaged the structures. Ammonia had spread to the detriment of nitrogen and the radiations deviated by the mass no longer guaranteed an efficient photosynthesis.
In spite of the atomic deflagration, the shock waves and the surge of irradiated muck that had buried most of them, some creatures managed to survive, saved by better situated caves. In the darkness of these dreadful abysses the creatures spent endless nights exploring the gaping veins of disrupted magma. The holes occupied by small groups of creatures seemed without openings. The movement of warm sticky rocks had masked the fissures, sometimes blocking them in such a way that the creatures were buried alive while still getting sufficient oxygen. At the bottom of the burrows, wells were dug. The bubbling and the cloaca of the mush that trickled along the walls covered with cave-dwellers, impregnated then flask and infected flesh of the creatures. The stinking excrements of the cavern beasts were indistinguishable from the vile stumps of the hungry creatures that jointed with their mutilated limbs heaps of quartering collected for the meals. Like hideous wild puppets, they plowed the guts tangled with putrid entrails to tear away black shreds that they scraped before ingurgitating them without any repugnance, for their survival now depended on the micro-organisms found on rot and in the pierced blisters of decaying carcasses. This layer of moss formed by the chemical reaction of the stinking blemishes foaming at the surface of the remains had become vital. The creatures survived with the help of this proliferating muck. The mutation that had begun to transform these beings during the events prior to the cataclysm enabled them to endure this unbearable and pathogenic means of sustenance without any mortal consequences. At the height of the regression they had reached a new stage of sinister evolution and become the particular hosts of this extreme darkness while retaining their original abilities. With the help of this double nature they made their Îway out of the holes but did not stay on the outside for long because the predators, also adapted to the new conditions, were mercilessly ferocious.
A group of mutants had managed to extract from the exterior shambles of the explosion some debris that they transformed into rudimentary tools. They made strange devices to trim the tunnels and sometimes, when they went through a less resistant wall, they were surprised to discover new cavities, some of which were filled with unseemly objects that they carefully studied. The oldest of them, when they were not tetanized, had vague recollections but memory gushed forth so brutally and with such incoherence that once the flashes calmed down, quivering and surprised by this sudden dive into time, they would run away into the darkness bawling unfinished or glossolalic words like mongolians. Sometimes also, they wept before being taken by diabolical convulsions that were fatal to them. Among one of the groups, a younger mutant girl had drawn strang˘e shapes that the hybrid creatures seemed to appreciate. The superior opening of the tunnel was entirely decorated with elementary signs - circles, crosses, squares, sticks - that she nervously scratched with the help of a sliver of broken glass. She had also engraved arrows and spirals that could be distinguished in spite of the thick vapour that filled the space. She seemed different. The mutants called her "petite merde rouge"(little red shit)...
(TO BE CONTINUED)
