Steve Tem - Ubo

He couldn’t control the weather. He couldn’t control starvation or the invasion of disease. But he could control who he killed and how. The first time he’d killed—a shovel to the back of another boy’s head—it was just to see how it felt. But it hadn’t been an impulse—they were always saying he was impulsive when he was a kid—but he’d been planning it forever.

He could control his fires by how he placed the fuel, and where he started them, and pretty much how they spread. And sometimes who they burned.

Farther south and near the old docks was the quarantine area. “Unidentified Biological Organisms” was the name they used. UBO painted on all the buildings. It meant “If you come here, you will die.” So even if you couldn’t read, you recognized those three letters, and you stayed away. The worst kind of diseases, if they were telling the truth, which was rare. Whole neighborhoods flattened to the ground, and in the middle that big building like a castle on a hill. He remembered it had been a mental hospital for a long time. Rumors were that years ago they kept the worst of the plague victims there. No problem—creepy thing like that, who’d want to go there? What a world. A world that could make something like him deserved to be killed.

The God didn’t think he’d been born to do evil, but it had been too long ago for him to remember for sure.

He let some ash fall on his tongue. He tasted it but couldn’t identify it. One day if he got good enough at what he did he’d be able to figure out the sex, the race, maybe even the nationality of the body they’d burned.

Sharp insect legs and brittle antennae massaged his brain, working their way into his plans. He thought of dead bodies underground shedding their underwear. He wobbled his head to shake the crap out. He’d always been part bug. He had bug needs and bug appetite. That was part of what made him a god.

The trash and the waste was always talking about him, what he had done. But when they saw him they had no idea he was the one. They talked about the fires, and they talked about the murders, but they weren’t smart enough to tell that the same one did both. He thought maybe he was almost as old as time. The bug who would inherit the earth.

He went back inside and stood in his living room with what he had saved over the years. The walls were covered with photographs, none of them of people he knew. Some were of adults he had killed, not that he liked collecting trophies, but just because he thought they should be in his collection. Many were family pictures he’d taken from the abandoned homes he looted: people on vacation, young men in their graduation gowns, couples at dances, family picnics and barbeques, nameless people straining to grin into the camera lens.

All night long the savage shadow people had rioted, beating on their non-working appliances, their motionless automobiles, drinking their poisonous hooch, screaming out their lungs, setting their pitiful fires and dancing until their brains shut down. He’d waited, listening from his thin pad of a bed, thinking about what he’d charge them for his loss of sleep.

Somebody new was inside him, but it was afraid, and had no voice. It made him grin. He’d finally begun to scare his own demons.

Each morning the God of Mayhem rose with the sleepless insect chatter eating its way through his brain. Each morning he could feel the heat spreading through his blood. Each morning the God of Mayhem stepped out into his backyard to see a tumble and a collision of houses falling down the slope behind his home, a collection of closed-down, boarded-up, scribbled-over buildings sitting in mounds of garbage and discarded furniture, housewares, the worn-out and the broken, the last sorry pieces of America.

The ground near the bottom of the hill was soggy with a dark and poisonous-looking liquid. People didn’t live in the houses there. What was left of the police never came around.

Sometimes swastikas appeared on walls, but it was hard to tell what people meant by them. Sometimes it was just a complaint about everything. He’d seen both the whites and the brownskins painting them.

He pulled on his overcoat and hid his insect eyes under a hat and trundled out the door, jogging down the street narrowed between piles of rubble until he reached the backside of a row of low shacks. He found the one that had made the loudest screaming the night before. Five bodies were sleeping under a window propped open for air. He reached in and grabbed a clump of black hair at random, yanked the head back and drew his knife across the throat. The blade was gratifyingly sharp and the new opening in the body quickly filled with blood.No one even stirred. He jogged back to his house, whistling.

Buried inside the God of Mayhem, Daniel was only occasionally aware that he had ever had his own life. At best his self-awareness was muted—this was a scenario unlike any he had experienced. He’d been swallowed whole and digested.

The God’s gray beard softened his face, made him look less fierce, less brutal. He drew no one’s notice when he moved through the Boston ruin. He’d stoop and limp to exaggerate his age. If anyone did think he was weak, well, he’d just kill them.

But this morning he needed to take care of things at home. He heard the scream close by and ran out into his backyard. He could see the top of the boy’s head above the fence next to the alley. “You! I told you not to come around here anymore!”

He could hear the boy laughing in the alley. Then there was a whining noise, and then another scream. It sounded like a child or a wounded animal. The God of Mayhem moved to his back gate, flung it open, and stepped into the lane. He saw the boy about ten yards down, waving the leash with the empty collar.

“I said stay away!” the God of Mayhem shouted. The boy smirked and turned his back, walked away.

The bloody mess of dog lay in the middle of the pavement. At least the boy didn’t set the animal on fire this time. After considering whether to take care of the corpse or not, the God of Mayhem went back into his house. If this was a message he had no idea what the boy was trying to say.

He had never killed a child, but if the boy came back he would have to reconsider. Clearly the boy must know who, what the God of Mayhem was. So why wasn’t he frightened?

The God of Mayhem was bothered by vivid memories of the first creatures he had ever killed—an assortment of pets and countless birds, a few snakes, dozens of frogs. When he was just a boy he had called them his experiments. They had been good practice, so he didn’t understand why the memories were so troublesome, but they embarrassed him.

He’d discovered the pleasures of fire when he was a boy, too. The beauty of it, the shape of the flames, and how efficiently it consumed and transformed. It calmed him, filling him with undeniable pleasure as he watched. So pleasurable the fires had been that for a while he didn’t feel the need to kill anything at all.

Once he killed an entire family of adults, planted them around the circular kitchen table, soaked their heads in oil and set them on fire. He’d called it “his birthday cake.”

Daniel had brief moments of self-awareness when the God of Mayhem entered more deeply into a ruminative mode. So compartmentalized was the man, so disconnected from the voices that drove him, Daniel discovered he was able to ride quietly inside this monster for some time.

The God of Mayhem had come to understand that his was a religion best practiced at night, when not so many curious eyes were watching.But the terrain was treacherous—he had to scout things out during the day. Broken building facades were typical in most neighborhoods, wall sheathings sloughed off, timbers rotted and fragile décor disintegrated and liquefied, spilling out of empty windows and past ruptured doors hanging from their shattered frames. That didn’t necessarily mean no one lived there.