“How do you reconcile being a blunt instrument of The Establishment with oppressing your own class interests?”
It was Officer Chock Fistwell’s first day.
Chock was of average IQ for a cop, and the final question on the entry exam had confused him to the point of violence.
The squat, coiled pink knot of rage in the all-black boiler suit had wrenched a leg off his chair and assailed his test paper, reducing the desk beneath to splinters.
The department’s personality tests indicated he fit the required profile perfectly.
Psychopath.
Chock passed on the spot and was inducted immediately.
Officer Fistwell was assigned crowd control out at the Urtabarkkenoo orgone reserves.
A rabble of filthy art students and ferals had blockaded the train line to the port.
Chock was kinky for power. He tugged his shirtsleeve down over his thorny ARBEIT MACHT FREI tatt and rasped a callused palm over his freshly shaved skull.
Officer Fistwell strapped on his beetle-like peacekeeping carapace:
How good was this opportunity to stomp on dissent, to bring the mighty boot of The State down on the skulls of the rabble?
Of course, Chock was incapable of framing a sentence that complex – he’d passed the force language test by failing spectacularly – he just got off on the prospect of unchecked violence.
Chock strained to buckle his tactical codpiece.
He’d drawn water cannon detail.
That wasn’t as good as being up in this coven of perverts’ grills, getting fisty and spunking hot raw capsicum spray down their throats... but it was good enough.
The force’s arrival in Urtabarkkenoo was announced by a column of police armaments rolling in behind the mounted division, all bulletproof and bristling. The rank and file, the blokes who got to mix it up mano-a-hippy, blood and broken teeth style, thudded in lock step up back.
Chock envied them.
His mood brightened, though, when he discovered that the Water Cartels’ H20 monopoly meant the cannons now pumped raw effluent.
He’d topped up at the sewage station – this was going to be fucking great.
The battalion of cops scuttled, a tide of lethal roaches.
The sun set, ugly and clotted.
Tension, begat by imminent, inevitable violence, settled.
A few hundred yards up the road was the blockaded rail junction, just past a sign that read
CRUSADER-EXCALIBUR HOLDINGS PTY LTD | TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED
The hippies were dancing, for fuck’s sake, around a glowing pile of orgone crystals stacked a storey high at the nexus of the junction. A snaking diesel freight train was stopped further north, its headlights punching dimly into the twilight.
Commanding Officer Drongo “Shovelhead” Dutton was in the vanguard of the advancing columns of cops.
Every officer under Dutton’s command had been cloned from his curdled DNA.
As such, they all shared his propensity for undiluted Fascism.
Chock sized up the battalion from his vantage atop the cannon.
They were Legion, and they were all him.
It was a fleeting consideration.
Chock was rigid as he trained his cannon on a green haired dirt-farmer and adjusted the pressure to “grievous bodily harm”.
The prospect of caving in some hippy skulls pulled him into sharp focus.
The raggedy crew of malnourished protesters locked in a circle around the junction were begging for 100% legal and justifiable obliteration under the laws of the state, he reckoned.Dutton unhooked his squealing loud hailer and held it up to his congenital sneer.
Feedback scraped the scene.
Chock’s trigger finger twitched, chipped teeth gritted.
Sweat stung the nicks in his zero-bladed skull.
Dutton’s monotone rumbled across the expanse.
“Crush them.”
There were 36 protesters in total – all good and very numerological. The coven had been firing up a particularly juicy Working for the approaching fash.
Orgone crystals, a spicy natural resource unique to Arcadia, weren’t just a next-gen fuel source set to power the economy into the next millennium; they also had wild supernatural properties.
The CRUSADER-EXCALIBUR mine site was, in fact, a turbocharged locus for hefty loads of mind-bending etheric energies.
An oil slick of pigs surged, thirsty for a reckoning.
Jade orgone power wreathed the coven, locked together elbow to elbow in a containment circle around the crystal haul. They chanted wordlessly and the red rock beneath them growled.
Chock Fistwell’s trigger finger seized. He felt the surge of the cannon’s pumps as toxic sludge was fed into the cannon –
The ground in front of the coven – the green-haired one muttered “This is going to be fucking great” through a malicious slash of a grin – split apart, spraying an umbra of orgone jizz skyward.
The gouge in the earth’s mantle raced at the looming regiment.
A screaming infant could be heard from below, volume escalating rapidly.
The first line of filth seized, bewildered.
Chock’s trigger finger choked. His receding jaw slackened at the unfolding spectacle.
His inert cannon leaked a thick trickle of effluent.
Look, we don’t do subtlety around here.
The racing void in the desert floor gaped and swallowed the middle of the frontline. Cops on the fringe tumbled in, wailing.
The shrieking intensified along with the coven’s alien chanting, almost subsuming the rending of earth.
Dutton’s panicked order to retreat was lost in the cacophony.
The void swelled, making way for the screeching thing.
Dutton’s Legion advanced, genetic programming overwhelming their urge to flee.
They continued to tumble into the widening earthen maw, which looked precisely like a giant vulva to the police helicopter humming uselessly overhead.
We don’t do subtlety around here.
The thing beneath the earth crowned, erupted onto the surface in a shower of red dirt and chunks of cloned fascist.
It was bipedal, fifteen feet tall.
A scorpion’s tail whipped.
Six arms with hooked pincers snapped.
Blessed black wings folded across its armored back.
Its screeching, six eyed head, a toddler’s, was wreathed in fire.
This, then, was the first recorded earth-dimensional appearance of the BABALÖN force in fifty years.
It ended satisfyingly badly for the cops.