Killers of Light (part 1; revised from a manuscript circa summer 2021)

Armies of scab-clad blackguards gather in crooked files under dim little exhaust off last skein of light before the one who wrote MOT so was the halcyon thousandfold at a zenith for all varieties of phosphene kiln killers to try and take flight. Behind them, cities and towns and terrain alike all lie razed, ablaze high, outlines of blackened rubble cast low.

The mighty Mahmud, the victorious Lord,

That all the misbelieving and black Horde

Of Fears and Sorrows infest the Soul

Scatters and slays with his enchanted sword

-from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

-Are you ready to join those you knew and perish among them as squalid livestock unusable? One of the blackguard soldiers asks a child captive, roped and quivering in the blood spilt out from his family sprayed over half of the boy’s naked length.

-There is no one to join if brought from your remorseless hand. The child answers wisely, leaving his own fear for the killers and his pity to be suppressed honorably instead of gone to waste in his final moments of perseverance.

I

THE NIGHTWORLD BEELINE

VaE(Vector alighting Eternity)

4994

IN THE BRILLIANT RED CRESCENDO WINDSWEPT COOL radiance brought down from summertime parachute sunrise, men uniformed in concolorous fatigues wore dark sheets of sweat as indigo hoods, fatigues of whitening raiment translucent beneath bluish flame dot supernal and many-colored from the rising cataracts shorn off invading heat. Interim the men broke into the drowsy screen concealing the habitations of the townsfolk therein lived, clandestine each deployment dives in a crash of glass lake top erupt from surfacing typhoon of sinuous blade drawn, gunshot wounding indwelling and corner of ceiling alike across the dark hiding nothing but an identical site for the autopsy of the cul-de-sac leftover: breaking a long fan where shells and explosion pulverizing bottles smashed against finial, against corner of floor until flaming shrouds swallow a ceiling shut over the demure gasps, almost frozen ataxic before that animal outcry signaling fear can escape from myriad footwork clamoring across a burst artery where finial and filigree was an open ocean spray of hissing copper was in severance, the homestead's quickening destruction pose a resemblance to the somber reception of the recumbent who lay, speechless, unable to reply except a twitch of tongue clawing over hands cold clasp fingers like teeth where there was no more head for the slain to shudder from the inimical pangs belonging to none other than grave shock, that awoke a heart severed and cut free from the armada of morning hours without disturbance. Block after block, the pavement sluices afar rivulets of gathering bloodstained tributaries that the sewers become vessels of, where metal gridiron siphon darkness from the passenger expulsion of light never to be gleaned. 

The view trembles as the men march passing through buildings surgically like lateral pinpricks shrapnel will scuttle into piles of discarded room after room, and outside there one could espy heavy hellfire rains outside windows as hands suppress the shrieking of glass after the surface shrivels itself at the oiled-silhouette opalescent reflection cast large, pitched amorphous night until shattering itself shut, interiors descend furtive in the fragments the alloyed-exoskeletal armored shell-cast caught within hollow spaced pikemen, slender protuberance of a killer will turn away from all yearning for brilliance a lesser amount of fibrous braindead thoughtlessness that would be a series of evils brought by all what humanity does nothing for the arching, serrated jetpack-equipped frontline of the interplanetary terrorist confederation of satellite worlds third-party to the all-incorporated mythic purpose in the senselsss proliferation of the USA civilization, a world plated back to the heaves of Pangea thwarted a midwife as the door for progress is a door an enormous child must take his leave behind. The sunlight too is discarded underside the roaming of vicious omnibuses vituperative with bloodsport among the standard banner of brethren weathered by lunar inclement, now surrounded by the same darkling verve, the recurrent monsoon of almost amorphous destruction plow a pathway toward a hole below bucolic grove and collapsing electrical pole now only fencing a massacre so total that bodies pile at the doorstep awaiting not recognition of human worth made nugatory by merciless maneuvering, but as if the white mounds of flesh unable to even lay at a peaceful point for departure, seeing that the individual barrage cut and beaten and lowered by torch-lit tongue until no person was lifted above their piles of debris: white mounds of corpses mesh together indistinct like a silted memory brought into the clean preparations for the underworld while wealth nor beauty nor any frailer assemblage while still alive could prevent this capricious passage unto the shoals bottomless without the dead to be shoveled out, spat from the mouths who taste the grit from whence death paid them handsomely before admittance, leaving what only few remnants of lifelessness that can face a gateway into unseeing underworld of prisoners smooth alongside the rising swill, trellises of petrified limbs cough bone in a soundless breeze of soot caught and lit by subterranean cherubim fraught with not liturgical spark shone bright off murderous armies burying all alarm flared by the coruscating shimmy of sepulchral leaves heave tessellations of delicate ivory warp, the eyes of the besieged pululluating imminent cumulus gathering desolation of moonlit angels without a source for their souls to pretend clemency, feign stoicism amid perfect riptide of slaughter. Where no words left an alibi for the dying left behind was only permitted the bacchanalian thunderstorm of bored laughter, emanating from where the nightfall was syncopated to catch up and reach what the tidal outpouring of devils plated by soldered chunks of aluminum, rags of grey goose feather resplendence are stitched together, pantomiming the surface of skin that wore no home in what work they sought to complete in full. Above the groundwork ablaze, red skies did not disperse without the contrasted departure of vestigial shade. The sun blew out a fuse, leaving the surface world a deep blue turf daubed by acrylic hues, velutinous. 

Wan, killers of the light arrive toward another pending mass grave of ruptured stucco and plasterboard wall crumbles downward columnar like the women sealed inside cement paved from the ground up and densified at where their confusion stood in the vexation of comeuppance manifest without a single pithy jape made at a holy tyrant's own sake of Providence; some are not even corpses beneath the earthquake of thunderous belligerence nameless but are just strands of a former self shuddering ashen sieves into top-heavy pillars: all become the texture of coarsening saline under the warning of the kingdom where there is no ordinance to be extolled but the equidistant cleansing of cities too wanton and corrupt, too venal for moral redress of any pretense other than to be made bereft from all shrouds of corporeal existence; their multitudinous ranks are now crowding in the ruins of sight brought next day as blight permeating horizons without a mooring to reign inward with portentous skyline, that demarcation between daybreak and penumbrae darkness build like crepe over the wasteland behind the advance, the cavorting tide of alloy fused facient with surrendered vessels of full-bodied ventricles, infantrymen nearing toward screams fired sporadic, abruptly, as if gasping a series of hyperventilating ballistics poured over calisthenics porch light glare widening until shut, the walls of homes covered by gnarled wisteria and lazy porticoes, and so when landing, synchrony following jackboot instep, sent indoors full and burst open doorways with the indiscretion of twig-bladed epaulets who slammed lavender-fisted solicitations mortar-brick flanked adobes after thrown together in droves. The invasion party came uninvited, carrying the hushed clamor of flaming cars that other screams, frightened, rush inside to hide, embankment where bodies lay beached roadside, between this pizzicato of fearful misgivings about a gentry afterlife once entertained in reveries of oscillating silence windswept like the rarefied rhapsodies strung mellifluously underside the plucked succulence apart angel hair strands orangish fitted against an ulcerous washboard that was the harpsichord of sound.

The embers glisten Stygian luster of killers decked in luminous and alien bodysuit in the surrounding uniforms belonging to unflinching satin many-climbed and limber, final judgment glow a rancid yellowing-vermilion brightening beneath the smoldering hearth they left behind.

People amass as wires across the driveways, skeletal, partially decomposed by the dark.

The killers of light wore corrugated kimonos, face masquerade facsimile faceless where underneath alien invasion stem lifeless from their punctured order of eyes; men who were all anger and castigation densified in dytactyl-extruded shells cast in pliant translucence. Arms long, double jointed, akimbo yet fragile cascades of segmented lines piercing like the archery of silvered bramble thorns.

Brokenly, cumulus of supplicant bones knelt below the ex cathedra massacre, slapdash. Men are sprinting without noise. Pure thunderbolt, bound gambol across enamel diameters. 

The area is mullioned by the invention of flame in the disemboweled lot. Forward marching tandem, their terror and recombine tabor, the figures bore fists inside the dim bloodstained screens, thin rib cages quivering with emulsifying seraphs of premonitory heat. All threads scurry until limbs are traveling forward, tergiversation entire took away the sudden egress, morning came alongside a dazzling assault as the wounded summertide beats down on timorous red homesteads, flung open door jambs, and went throughout the infernal countryside asking for answers, interrogating the Hellenistic vivisection imprinted by this world knowable only to those culprits who permit, knowingly, intermissions of hideous laughter to quell the high rise of sewage in their sorted back-alleys, high and shuttered in rooftops gaping like torn windpipes.  

Later on, during newcomer July’s paused simmer toward autumnal zenith herewith territories the detumescence in the humidity greening a provincial settlement not far, maybe half a kilometer or so, from the desolate explosion made by the killers of light; authorities assemble an investigation team to further measure the extent of the destruction these n’er’do’wells have paved in their nugatory wake. 

Tra-la-la (trampling the ground outdoors with earthworm tiles rubbed by dirty fingers both dismembered and moist under a big bunion of toe like toy mice, hands clubbed underfoot, innards all a bruised orchard from farmyard squeeze, air heavy). Our sunless design oscillates forward, no needle in the desert can ignite cheer nor admonition. Only refreshing skywater. (Everyone shouts, hands stretched and clawing indignant next to the neighbor, now tumescent with disingenuous genuflections). God forgive us our lessons! We sent praise under a blustery howl. We are not our intonations!

*

Cries of bedrooms flung to the wayside. Shiny spatter, entrails of buildings torched obsidian, eucalyptus semidarkness. The town was wet with overflowing terror. The windows spat out rumpled lineaments, smashed furniture into scatterings strewn outdoors, bilious and porous like hissing rain torrential. Vicious conflagrations afoot. 

-We will continue the slaughter, the voice barks below a flamethrower tongue, kerosene invective, snarling. Many nightwatchmen scramble amid the clamor of carnage, the intensities of wreckage and incendiary detonations. -Our cloaks will suture the dead without slump. And he vanishes, echolalia eddying spritely fireworks tonight, guns brought nascent downward into perdition. Slugs whish below. Careful little flames blink hushed mid-sentence. Abrupt. Teeth impetuous as they peel flight, fanged awnings, gore a scrawl for the men to press paws freely in. Discreet, dropsical, advancing quarter wise in factitious halves they separate walls and corridors, partitioning the sites by thundering headlong rampage. 

Palmistry carve readings for the marauders, unleash encryption overnight. Recumbent was their excrement. The congregation of their marauding, elegant armor grafted over each foot soldier nothing except a divine leverage severed, a clump of vermilion nerves wired behind a

 Becoming cold, the neighborhood was flushed out under a granular fuselage intermittent off the gouged eyes of an electrical vein, long and ruptured yet antiseptic against dawn the next day. 

To dance with the bloodstained men rib-boned in daggerlike aluminum.

Those wanton killers of light. So delicate in their transparency, fraught with glyphic visions and vagrant celibacy enforced in masochistic order among the fragile hum inside ineluctable rank as hands grab ankles, teeth piercingly bright fenced within moon-faced sentinels naked in dark crepuscular screen, still unlit. 

Who else but them would eat from the famished sun?

Beyond the carnal piles of splintered structural fragments almost suffused in tarpaint with the scorched body parts of the slain, the couture of human living flesh extinguished unrecognizeable as a specimen that is separate from the kingdom of architectural remains; a pastureland milling in the hard, maedemic, violent plow against febrile ground that grew without nourishing zenith, sunless uplifted amid the flowering carnage. The massacre wore on through the dying limbs and the languishing chasm that soaked up the exhumed surface of lifelessness pale without someone inhabiting it. 

Shadows ran angular to the uniformed policemen’s emergence, statuesque, the bodies motionless and screened as thick as the arriving sheriff’s inflexible visor shade that without light, blur his scentless stare tonsured like charcoal searchlights toward the gutted ruins.

Presently the investigator surveys the laughing cesspool and the embers that flew down loose, glistening in small inflamed rings, quieting as if rendered toothless under the opalescent glare of his visored gaze as if his eyes strained themselves colorless from making them grimace inside his deboned face.

 His words were lambent under the torchlight of his cigarette, omitting yellow while his diction summoned marbling of blue tracery for the invention of reddening obituary. 

-Looks as if whoever is responsible for all this mess, he opined softly as if sifting green from each step in formulating his first observation of the scene, -That they had enough of a good time to bring down the house toward total smithereens. Had too much of a fun time outside. Didn’t their parents ever scream for the devils they bore about what happens when you stay outdoors and play around too long? Truants, his jocularity now solidifies into the severity of admonishing remonstration, -Returning to their dens, their warrens where, cowardly and shriveling cramped with low-limbed with absent pleasure toward their works, seldom caught in the act, and then snickering obscenely at what stays glaring yet unseen. It is our nation’s lifeblood that these killers serve at the behest of our honourable paradigm of justice and punishment. Justice will never abstain when it is the beholder of these monsters masquerading furtive as men! 

His scornful shout hollering flashlights in scurrying flotillas, like fireflies skydiving. -Be not squandered! Go forth, be swift! Be vehement in your corporeal administration!  

Leashed dogs prowl the scented roads reeking with death like a tantalizing aphrodisiac, beseeching the bipedal bodies which they are bound against as if braced, their nostrils molesting the wounds of the soil seratim as if they had no master for which they were bound except for the stench of death ubiquitous, yet unbound beneath daybreak covered beneath a screen of soot.