Sorry for another thread on this. I'm getting back into bass guitar after being mostly an upright player, and I feel a little overwhelmed/confused by the post-amp era. Scientists thawed me out, and then I went to bass school. So... some questions.
Audio interface for headphone practicing and recording: UA Volt 2? Focusrite?
Do you recommend a DI for that? And is a DI needed in addition to an amp modeler for going straight to PA, or is the DI built into the modeler?
Shorter question: what do I need for headphone practicing, recording, and going into a PA?
Me: ahhh, bass guitars are so much cheaper than uprights, this is awesome. Also me: oh, but the money you spend on the electronics....

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I think psychics attract clients not because they have a connection with the spiritual realm, but because clients feel the need to transfer their responsibility to an abstract higher power and fate. “Someone wiser knows better” However, there is no way to predict the future mathematically, and it’s very easy to explain. Please follow up:
There is the great scientist Dr. Stephen Wolfram. He is the creator of many things that power up our smartphones, including Mathematica and the Wolfram language. He has a number of theories, the latest of which, such as the Ruliad concept and the theory of everything, are truly amazing and might connect general relativity and the standard model.
One of his early studies brought up the irreducible computation theory. He looked into Cellular Automatons - the Turing machine visualization where you set up simple rules at the beginning and then see how the layout of white and black squares evolves through each step. He discovered that particularly Rule 30 automaton looked simple at the start but led to endless complicated patterns. Most other combinations of simple rules brought about patterns that were boring and “dead,” but this “Rule 30” evolved continually. This pattern can be seen everywhere in nature, on the back of a snail shell, and we use it to code “random” machines in our electronics.
All random calculations in your computer – are Rule 30. They are not random.
What Dr. Stephen suggested is that there is no way to predict and calculate the result of the upcoming row of squares with the help of some kind of formula. Instead, you must go through each step one at a time. Many tried; there was even a cash prize for a person who could predict what layout comes on the next step using all existing data, but there is no way to do that as of now. Nobody succeeded.
Now let’s return to psychic activity. How can they predict the future of anything if there is no way to predict even simple mathematical setups? Systems need time and step-by-step evolution to reach results. So, any psychic activity is very reliant on the skill and virtuosity of the psychic themselves and the person who “orders their service.”
They sell by signifying the transfer of responsibility for a person’s life and fate.
All clients want from their certified psychic is the feeling of “transferring the responsibility.” If a psychic told me I will get married only after 25 years old, that’s not my problem now. I don’t need to look for a man while I am still 23. The universe has approved it like that. And all that “Pidgeon religion” proves like “but how could he know that my grandpa was a carpenter?!” are just a tricks of mind that client agree and want to believe. Experiments with pigeons showed that randomly fed, different pigeons worked out some personal ritual that led to “getting food”. Some pigeons danced around and though that caused the food coming, others bit jumped and so on.
It’s understandable why people need psychics. Just as nicotine addicts need cigarettes for a number of reasons they approve of, a person with a lack of self-esteem might seek that “commander” in a psychic. They pathologically need to follow some logic in this life they can’t create themselves. It’s a personality life crisis. A person with strong willpower and legitimate goals to reach usually doesn’t follow the advice of a psychic.
So if you feel you need some supernatural assistance, check yourself what problems you have that cause that desire. Only your actions effect reality. Nothing said is real till you make it so. Check the book about basics of quantum dramaturgy to see how other supernatural things are broken into simple forms. Just google quantum dramaturgy to see more thought experiments that deconstruct stories till quantum states.

I think psychics attract clients not because they have a connection with the spiritual realm, but because clients feel the need to transfer their responsibility to an abstract higher power and fate. “Someone wiser knows better” However, there is no way to predict the future mathematically, and it’s very easy to explain. Please follow up:
There is the great scientist Dr. Stephen Wolfram. He is the creator of many things that power up our smartphones, including Mathematica and the Wolfram language. He has a number of theories, the latest of which, such as the Ruliad concept and the theory of everything, are truly amazing and might connect general relativity and the standard model.
One of his early studies brought up the irreducible computation theory. He looked into Cellular Automatons - the Turing machine visualization where you set up simple rules at the beginning and then see how the layout of white and black squares evolves through each step. He discovered that particularly Rule 30 automaton looked simple at the start but led to endless complicated patterns. Most other combinations of simple rules brought about patterns that were boring and “dead,” but this “Rule 30” evolved continually. This pattern can be seen everywhere in nature, on the back of a snail shell, and we use it to code “random” machines in our electronics.
All random calculations in your computer – are Rule 30. They are not random.
What Dr. Stephen suggested is that there is no way to predict and calculate the result of the upcoming row of squares with the help of some kind of formula. Instead, you must go through each step one at a time. Many tried; there was even a cash prize for a person who could predict what layout comes on the next step using all existing data, but there is no way to do that as of now. Nobody succeeded.
Now let’s return to psychic activity. How can they predict the future of anything if there is no way to predict even simple mathematical setups? Systems need time and step-by-step evolution to reach results. So, any psychic activity is very reliant on the skill and virtuosity of the psychic themselves and the person who “orders their service.”
They sell by signifying the transfer of responsibility for a person’s life and fate.
All clients want from their certified psychic is the feeling of “transferring the responsibility.” If a psychic told me I will get married only after 25 years old, that’s not my problem now. I don’t need to look for a man while I am still 23. The universe has approved it like that. And all that “Pidgeon religion” proves like “but how could he know that my grandpa was a carpenter?!” are just a tricks of mind that client agree and want to believe. Experiments with pigeons showed that randomly fed, different pigeons worked out some personal ritual that led to “getting food”. Some pigeons danced around and though that caused the food coming, others bit jumped and so on.
It’s understandable why people need psychics. Just as nicotine addicts need cigarettes for a number of reasons they approve of, a person with a lack of self-esteem might seek that “commander” in a psychic. They pathologically need to follow some logic in this life they can’t create themselves. It’s a personality life crisis. A person with strong willpower and legitimate goals to reach usually doesn’t follow the advice of a psychic.
So if you feel you need some supernatural assistance, check yourself what problems you have that cause that desire. Only your actions effect reality. Nothing said is real till you make it so. Check the book about quantum dramaturgy to see how other supernatural things are broken into simple forms. It is about thought experiments based on deconstructing different complex stories.

36f, 10stone, light use of electronic cigarette, currently taking mirtazapine, diazepam and zopiclone. All started 1 week ago.
Complaint- since starting these meds I've been getting very dark smelly urine in the mornings( smells like infection) urine dipped but doesnt show infection. Also since starting I've been getting pain in my side below ( not underneath) right ribs.
Should I stop taking these medications?

Smoking Attestation

"$1,000.00 Penalty
Penalty is assessed if you attest to using tobacco/nicotine, or the __________ deadline has passed without attesting.
Tell us if you have used tobacco or nicotine products in the last 90 days. If you haven't, you'll automatically avoid the surcharge."

1K USD penalty (for people who make less than 50K per year after taxes).

"Tobacco/nicotine products include cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, vape pens, cigars, pipe smoking, snuff, chewing tobacco, nicotine patches, nicotine gum and other nicotine supplements."

If this were about lung health, nicotine patches would not be included. This suggests moralism.
Provider Screening Form

"A patient's waist measurement is considered if the patient does not pass the wellness program BMI goal".

This says "don't be fat" in nice language. This is the more interesting part as it expands beyond smoking policies.
Company Details
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravowell
Legal

1. Reputational Damage: "Your not hurting their reputation. They did that to themselves".
2. Legality of policy: Everything here is legal. That is what makes it interesting.
3. Fair Use: This is evidence related to my informal journalism.

I hope this post is useful for the discussion around health insurance in America.

Smoked cigarettes for twenty years but not like crazy one pack a month guy. Few a day.,sometimes Id quit, sometimes smoke more, no biggie. Not married to any brand either, I'd switch every few months like a disloyal cigarette slut.
Then I switched to vaping, not because I wanted to quit but I was bored of the smell and taste and shit.
After two years, one day, recently, I did mushrooms, looked at my vape, and felt fully disgusted with it. Why was I putting this electronic shit into my mouth full of OIL. I removed its head, and threw it in my drawer, and it still lies there.
I had no craving (since I did smoke weed) but I was bored. And I'm handling grief, so I wanted an excuse to keep moving, taking walks, etc. So first I would buy one little cigars every day from the neighborhood kiosk, go to the park, and smoke it, and man, would it hit the spot. What the fuck was I doing lying in bed and on the couch and on the shitter with that device in my mouth pressing a button? While I could slowly enjoy one cigar for like 10 minutes in a park, then go home, and be done.
Then I wanted to try rolling tobacco and didn't know what to buy, so the kiosk guy had a few choices and he recommended Golden Virginia and man, I'm fully back in the cigarette team guys. It tastes like old school shisha (hookah), not the fruity flavored ones, I mean the ones smoked by 90 year olds in middle eastern countries. Like TOBACCO. This is way more enjoyable than buying a packet of cigarettes and finishing each in 2 minutes. Each roll I make seems special, and I can smoke it at my pleasure. I even tried to purposely time it and take my time, and I saw I could nicely smoke one for twenty minutes.
It's so calming. I've either forgotten it, or maybe rolling tobacco is different, but I feel like I'm, for the first time ever, fully in love with tobacco. It's been only a few days, but I already fully accept my probable future addiction, but fuck it, this is seriously medicine. Like I said, I'm going through a really fucked up grief period (kid ded), and I've noticed that smoking tobacco is giving me a full body and mind and soul massage that none of those pills give.
So I'm like if a super global rolling tobacco is good, I bet smaller more local ones are probably even better, so I just now ordered four different 50 pouches from some local company who are doing their own blends.
Oh and btw everywhere on reddit they are like oh no don't mix weed and tobacco because tobacco spoils weed taste. I agree that they shouldn't be mixed but not because it spoils the taste of weed but because it spoils the tobacco.
I don't think weed actually tastes good. It's mostly psychological, since it gives us good feelings, we eventually associate it with good taste. Any herb that would give you a high would make you think it tastes good. But tobacco genuinely tastes good, and it seems perfect for smoking. Not vaping, not drinking it as tea, not chewing it, it seems like God created this plant specifically to be fucking smoked by guys.
Basically, this whole post is my show of appreciation and sign of worship to the God of Tobacco so he will put off my tolerance as much as possible. Pls God, let me enjoy this beautiful tobacco high for years to come amen.

Hi all,
Adding 2 SVS Prime Elevations to my system to get Atmos. They will be flushed mounted on the wall and I will be running the wires down the inside of the drywall and then underneath the baseboard molding to get to the AVR. SVS recommended in-wall 14/2 wire. I also want to add banana clips for the receiver side(not the speakers) to simplify things on the back of the AVR.
Will the following be sufficient?
​
Amazon.com: WGGE WG-009 Banana Plugs Audio Jack Connector 6 Pairs / 12 pcs, 24k Gold Dual Screw Lock Speaker Connector for Speaker Wire, Wall Plate, Home Theater, Audio/Video Receiver and Sound Systems : Electronics
Amazon.com: Voltive 14/2 Speaker Wire - 14 AWG/Gauge 2 Conductor - UL Listed in Wall Rated (CL2/CL3) - Oxygen-Free Copper (OFC) - 100 Foot Spool - White : Electronics

I'm seeing more and more kayak anglers experience dangerous deep water scenarios because their kayak has swamped and/or capsized.
In most of these scenarios, common denominators are extensive modifications and too much gear. Not only is this dangerous for the angler, but a fully loaded Hobie PA kayak with $4,000+ worth of gear, electronics, batteries and equipment getting submerged and likely destroyed, is an expensive loss. Batteries, graphs, reels, wiring, motors, electrical panels, tackleboxes can all be completely destroyed due to corrosion. A Motorguide Xi3 weighs 42lbs without the battery. A Dakota Lithium 12v 100Ah battery costs over $600 and weighs 28lbs, is half the weight of more affordable battery options. Because of all that weight, a capsized 12 foot kayak with 150lbs of gear strapped to it is impossible to right once full of water and capsized. If you need a trailer and boat ramp to get your fully loaded kayak into the water, and a car battery to run it, than this debate might intrigue you.
So are kayak fishing influencers, tourney pros and local dealers who specialize in wild modifications, whom are selling, pushing, installing all of this gear, leading the sport astray to maximize their profits? Have we come to a point where profits outweigh all other factors, from an industry standpoint? Are the "faces" of kayak fishing, who are pushing you to add 150lbs+ of gear to your kayak really concerned for your safety? Or are they trying to maximize their profits?
I feel like the sport of kayak fishing has forked; those who want to fish from a kayak, and those who want a kayak to fish like a boat.
Just my 2 cents.

Baka kabag lang ito and it's only been a day, but I miss them already?? But maybe I miss them cos I had a bad day today lol.
So last night was Snoh Aalegra's concert. The people I'm with, I met them from here on Reddit. They were 4 people. So before the concert, we got a little bit into talking, getting to know each other, and what not. Snoh came on stage, and of course, there were little to no chats during the concert as were vibing (Thank you Snoh 🥹🫶). After the concert, we were talking about how cool the concert was. At one point, I thought they were booking a Grab already (they're from QC and I'm the only one on South HAHAHA), so I booked too and may nagconfirm agad. Ayun pala, they were just checking the prices, but didn't book, so I canceled mine already. Good thing I canceled my Grab because from there, we had quality time, and we got to know each other more.
11 pm we decided to part ways and book a Grab (for real this time) and that time, I want to tell them, let's stay a little bit longer but of course, we have to go back to our own realities na ulit (aka back to work). So we all shared a hug and there we go, we went to our Grab and we went home. I did send them a message that I already got home and thank them for the night.
Siguro I'm feeling sad kasi I feel like I want to know them more. I have a lot of questions about them. Plus since they're from North and I'm the only one from South, I feel like the chances of seeing them again are slim. We did have talks if we'll ever see each other again though, but of course, we have different lives and priorities so the question of when is hard to answer. Though I'll be seeing the 2 of them again next year for Cigarettes After S** and Niki concerts, but the other 2, I don't know when I'll see them again.
The thing that makes me sad about last night is also what makes it beautiful? You spend a night with some strangers, then when the night is done, you move on. You could have said that we should have exchanged socials, but I guess we'll end the night the same way we started it: as strangers.
So if there's any chance that they will read this: I want to thank you all again for last night. It was nice to meet you all, though I must admit nabitin ako HAHAHA. I may come off as sort of nonchalant and silent to you all, but I really enjoyed your company last night. To the 2 people I will see for CAS and Niki concert, I guess I'll see you in 9-10 months HAHAHA hope you won't forget me. To the other 2, if ever that was the last time we'll see each other, I enjoyed meeting both of you.
I miss you 4, and I wish you well in your respective lives.
P.S To D (one of the 2 people I'll probably never see again), I really like you, as I was blown away by your beauty. Baka gusto mo baguhin isip mo about going to Niki's concert next year?? HAHAHA char. Replyan mo na ako, kulang pa ako ng bayad sayo pls.

As always, thank you to u/SpacePaladin15 for the wonderful universe that is NoP! Thank you to u/cruisingNWfor proof reading and helping me make this chapter as good as it can be, you're the man! Honestly LoM wouldn't have gone very far without him! If you haven't you should absolutely go read Foundations of Humanity! It's very good! :D
A big thanks to u/Saint-Andros for helping with proofreading! He writes Out of Our Elements which is a very good one! If you like a good fic in the wilderness and a pair of cute 'friends' ;) you'll love OOE!
Also thank you to u/brotanics! For this wonderful fanart of Taisa. And this one! She's so cute I'm gonna die
And thank you to u/Jimdandy117! For this adorable fanart of Chris and Renkel! Dear god help he's adorable I love him so much
Thank you u/SlimyRage, or AsciiSquid on Discord, for makin' Vengineer Taisa Gamin'. She's absolutely adorable, I love her lil' workers apron. She looks so excited to get to work!
Thank you u/Braquen! For this astounding Pixel Art of Taisa after a few range day dates with Chris! Her little hat and gunbelt are absolutely astounding!
Thank you u/VeryUnluckyDice! For this Artwork of Taisa and Chris as characters from One Piece! I've never seen or read it before but it's incredibly cute!
Thank you to u/creditmission for their wonderful work of several LoM fanfics!
First Prev. Next
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Memory Transcription Subject: Taikel, Venlil Farmer, Venlil-Human Exchange Host
Date [Standardized Human Time]: October 18th, 2136
Polani guide her light… please.
My heart hurt as I awoke to the familiar clatter of the window’s auto blinds snapping me to consciousness, rousing me from my sleep as golden twilight rays filled the room, forcing me to follow through. Everything felt tighter, stiffer, more painful as I slowly rose upright, my paws finding and pressing into the tension at the base of my neck, my eyes squeezing shut as I did everything I could to push past the tide of reality falling on my shoulders.
Rensa laid at my side while her occasional muffled beep drifted from her as she was lost in whatever dreams her medicine had brought to her mind this time. She’d cried into my shoulder when she’d broken from them after the accident, wailing about the horrid events and images she’d been forced to endure, or relive, in the nights of her dreams. All I could hope was that her stillness was a good sign that she wasn’t haunted by those horrors again; old, or new.
The heavy weight hanging on my eyelids beckoned me to give in, to turn over and bury myself back into the covers, to hide from the thought of what we’d los-
No. Not yet.
The thought of losing them. The UN hadn’t confirmed anything and wouldn’t for a few more paws - or ever, Stars willing - but Taisa’s silence set ice in my veins. Until then, I had to push forward to help Rensa and to keep Renkel’s spirits up. Even if it meant I’d have an even farther fall.
And if they are gone, they wouldn’t want you to sit and rot away in bed. Keep everything together, gray coat, for them-
A tight, high whimper from my love, my life beside me all but shattered my heart.
And for her.
I leaned over, gently licking Rensa’s cheek before tucking the blankets a little tighter around her and slipping myself free from beneath their enticing embrace. I wasn’t entirely alright; wouldn’t be until I knew, for better or worse. Until then… Until then I’d do everything I could to make them proud.
The wood beneath my paws let out a long, sighing creak as I rose from the bed, pushing myself out into the hall before gently sliding the door closed behind me. This waking, for Renkel at least, would be no different than any other waking he had off from school. Not if I had anything to say about it.
The stairs were silent as I descended, turning into the open living room and staring at the hearth for a long moment, doing my best to keep my attention off of Chris’ empty room and onto the task at hand. I let out a long sigh, flapping my ears to try and batter the thoughts away as I padded into the kitchen. Warm pops and wet hisses of my cooking soon filled the air as I set about making first-meal with a hearty helping of Human vegetables.
Before I knew it the soft click-clack of pup-claws sounded from the stairs as Renkel followed his tongue to find a steaming bowl of scramble waiting for him.
“Good waking, Rekan.” I whistled, doing my best to shear the melancholy from my voice as he clambered up into his seat, clutching one of his Human ‘Animal Encyclopedias’ close to his chest. “How was your rest?”
“Good! I dream’d’d of fishies!” He exclaimed before thumping the book on the table and flicking it open to a page with the dull, speckled flanks of some massive fish that dwarfed the Human swimming next to it. “That one! It’s my favorite!”
A small titter of amusement slipped from my snout at the fickleness of a pup’s interests. “Oh really now? I thought you said the Manta Ray was your favorite!”
“Muh-uh! Whale sharks is way cooler! Look how big it is! And it swims around with its mouth open like the manta but way bigger!” Renkel groaned, tossing his arms as wide as his maw in imitation of the gargantuan fish.
“Well you’ll have to tell me all about them!” I whistled in return, serving myself a steaming bowl of the mix before knocking the heat down to keep it warm for Rensa… whenever she woke up.
“What’s wrong, Papa?” >Alright?< My son asked with his, curious, worried eyes staring up at me past the wisps of steam drifting from his food. “Is Mama ok?”
“She’s… She’s alright, son. Her leg’s hurting her a lot lately. Everything going on has got her real worried, is all.” >Everything Fine.< I answered, my voice sounding far more sure of the words than I felt as I paused for a moment. >Eat Up!<
His attention hung on me for a few moments longer before he let out a happy, satisfied beep and launched into an explanation of everything he found interesting about these ‘Whale Sharks’, only pausing to breathe and stuff whole skewers of vegetables into his mouth. The enthusiasm of a pup never did fail to amaze, and Renkel certainly had enough to go around! Our bowls were soon finished and empty, but Renkel kept going, happily whistling on about how their gills worked and how their coloring was to protect them from predators. Before long the dishes were cleared and in the sink, all except for one.
She needs to eat.
“Tell ya what, Rekan, you find yourself a few more facts and you can teach me even more about them after I give your Mama her first-meal. How’s that sound?”
“More fishie facts!” He exclaimed with glee, his paws in the air as he rocked back in his chair before plunging straight back into his book. My paw slipped beneath his bowl, scooping a fresh serving into it before gently nuzzling the studious pup’s crown on my way to the stairs. His happy whistles faded as I plodded up the old wooden steps, stopping for a moment at the door to mine and Rensa’s room, my paw hovering above the door-slide as I listened for any sign that she’d stirred.
I didn’t hear any.
The door whined as I gently slid the door aside and found her awake, staring at her cupped paws with a vacant expression. Her ears swung in my direction as I stepped in, only for a moment, while I did my best to keep my voice positive as I approached with food in paw. “Good Waking, Sweetheart.”
A small, grumbled ‘Good Waking, Love’ was all she could muster for me as she stared at the black bead cradled in her paw.
So soon?
“Your leg feeling any better?” I whispered as I set the bowl of scramble and glass of water on the bedside before gently taking my place at her side.
“Not really.” She hissed, her voice distant as an unladen paw kneaded at the border of her wool and the leg’s interface plate, squeezing her eyes shut and drawing in a long breath before shaking her head, her tail bobbing a succinct >Not at all.<
“Maybe some food will help.” I whispered, gently trading the bead for her bowl and skewer and setting it on the bedside before softly pressing my snout to her’s.
She was quiet, staring into her food for a long moment, her eyes puffy and orange. >Don’t think so. Gone.<
Tears pooled at the corner of my eyes, burning like firefruit oil as I twined my tail around what little of hers hung over the side of the bed, squeezing tight as I could to ground my wife to what of this world, of our family, we had left. Her paws moved, slowly poking the skewer into the food before raising it to her mouth, and then again and again before the bowl and glass were empty.
“I…” Rensa let out a small sigh, setting the bowl on the old bedside with a loud clunk before her tail squeezed, weakly, back into mine. “Th-Thank you, Love.”
“It’s ok, Sweetheart.” I replied, leaning into her side and soaking in the silence that stifled the space between us. She sucked in a pained gasp as her free paw found its way back to the remains of her leg, clutching the wool tight. “W-Were the meds helping any, last paw?”
>Yes.< Her tail flicked slowly, almost reluctantly as I watched tears gather in the folds of her squinted eyes.
I rose, gently nuzzling her crown with a forlorn mewl before guiding her paw back to mine for a moment, giving it a gentle squeeze. “I’ll be right back.”
I hate to see her like this, more than I hate seeing her drifting a while. At least then she’s not crying from the pain. Not suffering…
I rushed to the bathroom, ripping open the closet and retrieved the damned bottle. A single pill tumbled into my paw, the remainder clacking noisily against the sides as I slipped them back into the box they had been stowed in. The little tan capsule churned my stomach as I looked down at it, horrid memories sprouting in my mind. The memories of the paw of the accident and the herds after it where she was despondent, from the pills and the loss of her career.
If those two are gone…
My tail shuddered, trying to shake the creeping vines of despair free from my heart at the thought before I drew in a deep breath, steeling myself and stepping back into the bedroom. Rensa stared up at me as I approached, her eyes filled with worry as I settled back down on the bed beside her, holding the pill out on my paw. She hesitated, her tail curling as her attention slid from me down to the proffered pill before her eyes squeezed shut and her paw seized as hard as her leg, digging her claws into her pads with a low, pained mewl.
“Please, Sweetheart…” I trailed off, my paw sliding over hers to try and calm her squeezing claws from hurting herself further. I’d seen her draw her own blood far too many times.
A soft gasp sucked into her mouth as she leaned forward, wrapping her paws around me with a stifled cry before accepting the pill and downing it with a sip from her glass. “I-I’m sorry, Love.”
“It’s ok, Sweetheart.” I soothed, pulling her close to me as I ran my paws through her wool, doing my best to drive the sorrow burrowing in my heart away. “It’s ok…”
Her sobs began to fade as the medicine took hold, her arms slackening around me a little before she let out a harrowingly familiar, relieved sigh. “Thhhank you, Taikel…”
I couldn’t bring myself to answer in kind as I pulled her closer, fighting away the tears pooling at the corners of my eyes. Instead I settled on easing her back on the bed before gently nuzzling her snout, receiving a passive mumble of acknowledgement as I stood from the bedside, stopping to stare down at the black bead on the bedside, quietly pawing it before I padded through the door to the upper landing. I paused. Took a breath. And another. Willing myself to stifle the rattle in my throat before I faced my son again. There was little more I could do for her right now; at least the meds might let her sleep for a while longer.
The stairs beneath my paws clicked and creaked between the amazed whistles and beeps of Renkel still at the island meeting my ears; most certainly still enamored with his book. Quietly I found my way to the hearth, doing my best not to alert the pup as I gently opened the Heartwood box Rensa and I had made when we’d married, staring down into the void-black padding at the singular circle of white, Amarek wood at its center.
When we’d made it her father had insisted that, according to tradition, this was where it was meant to be, in the middle of everything else in your life. That the chest that held your darkest days should live with the rest of your joy until it would in turn join the others in the tapestry of your life.
We’d only ever used one since we’d married… I had hoped we wouldn’t need anot-
No. Not until you know.
My ears battered away the despair sprouting in my chest as the bead slipped into place, standing in stark contrast to the brilliant wood encircling it like an eye peering back up at me while the lid slowly closed over it, shielding the burrow from the pain it held. I pulled in a quiet breath before turning, squeezing my eyes shut again to hold back the tears I knew were just one bad assumption, one errant thought, one horrid message away from spilling forth.
The pup whirled around as I stepped behind him, peering over his shoulder to see what new tidbits of information he was foraging for this time. A new picture of the massive fish was spread across the page, this one taken from above the water looking over the side of some vessel staring down at the animal through glimmering, crystal clear waters.
“I wonder if Chris has ever seen a whale shark! That’d be so cool!” Renkel exclaimed, his tail zipping back and forth excitedly as he tapped at the page. “I bet he’s been all over the carry-bean!”
A pang of grief flashed through my heart at the mention of the missing pair, the feeling festering for a long, gut wrenching moment before I whispered to him over his shoulder. “I’ll bet he has, son, and I bet he’ll be happy to tell you all about it when they get back!”
Then if they c- When. WHEN they come home, I’m going to give them both ears so full the stars above will hear everything I’ve got to say.
And then some.
---
Memory Transcription Subject: Taisa, Venlil Starship Engineer, Crystal Star Shipping Co-Owner
Date [Standardized Human Time]: October 19th, 2136
Another paw of sun-scorched hell. Stars, I hope Mama and Papa are alright….
The pad in my paws was still harrowingly silent as I gazed down at the screen, a trail of my own messages dotting their way up the screen had gone unanswered these last two paws. Letting them know that we’d made it out safe, what we’d been doing, when I thought we’d be home…
Polani shook and shuddered as Chris brought her around again, shaking me from my thoughts as we passed over charred, smoldering tracts of forests on the eastern side of the crash site that looked like little more than blasted ashen sticks. It’d been a sleepless night as we rushed to help quench the fire the Glorious Pyre and the Twilight Star’s drives set when they’d crashed. The U.N. had leapt to invoke our contract again, putting us to work shuttling material, equipment and water to put out the inferno that threatened Chris’ home and the surrounding areas. Thankfully they hadn’t sent any Arxur for us to shuttle!
The fact that they were here. That they were helping. That they’d even showed up to Humanity’s defense in the first place was… it was unthinkable!
Every stray glance I was forced to see them, every plodding step they took, every reverberating growl of their horrid language and every time I caught one of them staring at me like I was little more than a cut of meat to hunt, to chase, to toy with… Sent shivers down my spine and out my tail.
I hated it.
Hated them.
Hated what I’d seen them do on the Cradle, what one of them had done to me. What one of them had made Chris do to protect me. Hated what they’d made us have to see, hear, and live through. It didn’t matter what they were here for, it bought no good will of mine. Chris promised to protect me again if we got assigned to moving any of them, that he’d happily put another bullet in one of them before chancing the possibility of losing someone else.
Annabelle.
He, and the rest of his family, were still holding out hope that they’d find her and the rest of her bunker beneath what little was left of what had been the outskirts of London. I wanted to be hopeful with them, to pray and call and beg to every star I could see, every star I could name for her to have been spared but… but the pictures didn’t look good. The scattered rubble that had once been so many Human cities left the bitter taste of bile and sorrow in my mouth as I thought about the millions of lives the federation I’d once believed in had snuffed out in a flash.
The monsters I’d once championed had tried to take everything from Chris, from his Family, from all of us. From Me. They’d stolen parents from their children, shattered families, people, communities and cultures that they’d turned to ash in the wake of their failure. So much gone, so much destroyed, so much lost, so much taken.
Taken.
Because of their fear. Because of their hatred. Because of their cowardice.
Because of their weakness.
“At least the fires are out.” Chris sighed, the long, forlorn sound gently pulling me from the anger simmering in my chest. “Ma, Pa, an’ Ryan’ll be alright, so long’s the Peacekeepers actually do their job with trackin’ down those… stragglers.”
“Let them burn or let them rot for all I care.” I grumbled, staring out the viewscreen down at the devastated countryside below; images of Chris’ family, tears in their eyes as they huddled around their TV looking for any information they could find about Annabelle. “It’s the least they’d wanted to do to us.”
“‘Much as they fuckin’ deserve it…” His voice cracked as a flash of concern passed over his face while he glanced over at me, hesitating for a moment before responding. “Probably for the best we don’t reinforce what everyone the arm over already thinks of us.”
>Fair.<
“‘Specially not the new friends we picked up, doubt the Zurulians would be particularly big fans of Humans doing… that to prisoners.” He sighed, righting Polani from her bank before guiding her nose around, across the horizon, and back towards Blacksburg, the hum of her thrusters building to a mournful, crackling wail as they pushed us onward. “For now though, let's get some food in us; Ma’s bound to have something good.”
My tail twitched at the idea of a belly full of Darlene’s wonderful red beans and rice to try and take my worried mind off of the world of ash and fire smoldering around us as a meek mewl slipped from my mouth. “Thank you, Love.”
I swear to the stars above:
I’ll get even for what they’ve done.
[Advance Transcription by Time Unit: 1.5 Hours]
The comfortingly warm weight of Darlene’s cooking settled in my stomach as I sunk back into the chair, my tail wrapped tight around Chris’ leg. Darlene stared through the window out at the pasture beyond, passively scrubbing grime and grit away from the white pot in her hands as the sound of running water filled the air.
“Where’s Ryan now?” Chris grumbled as he scooped another mouthful of meat, beans and rice from his bowl.
“Out ‘helping’ ‘gain.” Darlene sighed, setting the pot on her drying rack with a ringing clang as she turned to point a wooden spoon at an empty plaque on the wall. “At least Cobb’s gon’ go out with ‘im.”
“Boy went out an’ got hisself hurt on ‘nother planet and now he’s damned well set to go on ‘n get hurt again on this’n.” Michael grunted, anger in his voice as he flicked through article after article on the pad sitting on the counter in front of him. “‘Tween those fire-crazy exterminators and these god-damned lizards I ‘on’t find myself thinkin’ this shit’s hardly a good idea.”
“Pa’, come on, you know how he fe-” Chris started, swallowing his food as he leaned forward over the counter, his response cut short by the ringing chimes sounding out from both of our pads.
TO: CRYSTAL STAR SHIPPING
FROM: THOMAS ASHFORTH
NORFOLK AID PICKUP
Your services are required to move the personnel and material listed in the attached manifest from the subject port to the following aid sites:
U.N. COALITION NEW YORK AID AND RESCUE CAMP - 06
U.N. COALITION NEW YORK AID AND RESCUE CAMP - 11
U.N. COALITION NEW YORK AID AND RESCUE CAMP - 14
Thank you,
Thomas Ashforth
U.N. Logistics Coordinator
A manifest was attached, listing off everything from pallets of food, medical supplies, material for expanding the aid camps, a pawful of Zurulians and U.N. staff an-
Oh Stars.
My blood ran cold as my tail tightened around Chris’ ankle, a small, weak, terrified mewl weeping from my snout at the sight of the final thing on the list.
Arxur Volunteers.
A low growl built at my side as Chris stared down at his pad, his fists tightening around the pad until his knuckles were white with the strain. “Rat fucking bastards.”
>We have to.<
He nodded, his mouth tight with anger as the scrape of his stool sounded across the room while he rose to his feet. His hair tossed about as he shook his head, doing his best to drive off whatever thoughts were raging behind his eyes as he looked over to me, gently slipping his leg free from my tail before he marched to his room, Roscoe’s wagging tail close at his side. The comforting, familiar thump of his boots on hardwood marked his return just as fast as he’d left, the glint of his pistol holstered across his chest and the soft shine of the rifle hanging from his shoulder telling me everything I needed to know.
“Together?”
“Together.”
---
Memory Transcription Subject: Rensa, Venlil Farmer & Ex-Exterminator, Venlil-Human Exchange Host
Date [Standardized Human Time]: October 20th, 2136
Fire’s gone. Pain. Gone. Daughter. Taisa. Gone.
My mind swam as I stared at the stars high above the Warren, drifting in a sea of white, black, and gray, feeling little but the chill of the glass of gin resting in my paw alongside the whispering cold of twilight’s winds. The occasional drift of odd colors floated through the air, harvesting my attention from the morass of nothing that had filled this paw and the one before it. Warbling sound filled my ear, vibrating the left side of my vision and sending new waves of kaleidoscopic colors across the sky.
I was hallucinating again. It’d been a while.
Dr. Poreth had told me a long time ago not to mix; it hadn’t stopped me then and it certainly couldn’t stop me now. Besides, they were a far better distraction than anything else I had right now. So instead I sit and stare at the sky, watching the pretty colors.
They were just as real as anything else.
A tide of messages from Taisa had bolted through my pad early this waking, from before the bombing. Each one the last I’d ever hear from her. The last words I’d ever see from my darling daughter. Renkel still didn’t understand, the pup happily chirping away about when they’d be back, about his next paw at school and about going with Taikel to one of the shelters in a claw or so to try and help ‘keep their spirits up’. Through the haze I envied him, wishing and pleading to Polani that I could have that same youthful hope.
Even if it would just be cut down by the scythe of the real world.
The glass in my paws slips away as the wavering rays of the sun are blocked, quickly replaced by another, and a soft nuzzle on my crown. Taikel’s wavering voice floated across my ears, still filled with mournful sorrow. I can’t make out the words but Renkel’s upbeat whistles tell me enough; they’re off to the shelter.
Barely seems worth it with them gone.
I weakly return the nuzzle, barely leaving my chair with my leg feeling like little more than juicefruit pulp as Taikel’s shadow slips past me, Renkel asking something I can’t quite make out past the fog.
So strong, stronger than me.
The rumble of the truck’s engine shuddering to life sends waves of green across my vision, accompanied by the crunch of gravel following after it before it fades into the distant hum of tires on the road. Alone again. The fog falls back in around me, stifling the sounds of nature that had begun to creep in at the edges of my mind. I sink again, staring up at the sky, watching the drifting colors and clouds as I sip at the liquid fire in my glass.
At least it helped smother the fire eating my leg and dull the storm in my mind.
The sound of my pad letting out a painfully familiar chime on the table split the air, stirring me from my stupor to clumsily paw at it to go silent. The offending sound faded, replaced by the isolating silence that I’d craved; at least in it I didn’t have to think about what I’d lost.
About the tricks my mind was playing on me.
A long, deliberate sigh fell from my snout as I pressed my paw into the thready wool near the stump that’d once been my leg, trying to push the pain away as best I could before reaching, once again, for my gin. Before my paw met the star-slicked glass flanks my pad bleated out the same, mocking chime.
A growl built in my throat as I grasped at it, angrily hurling the offending electronic phantom what few tails my numb shoulder could manage.
Another trick of my mind
Another message from Taisa’s ghost.
Another claim that the Arxur were ‘helping’ them.
Another promise of them coming home when they were done.
Another mote of hope sprouted before being ripped from my grasp.
Another paw of despair.
Another river of tears.
Another dose.
---
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Looking for a way to power your electronics on the go? The NAOEDEAH Car Power Inverter might be the solution for you! This inverter converts your car's 12v DC battery power into 110v AC household current, allowing you to plug in devices like laptops, tablets, TVs, and more. It boasts a continuous power output of 1000 watts, with a surge capacity of 2000 watts to handle short bursts of higher power.
In everyday use, the NAOEDEAH Car Power Inverter seems to perform well. However, there's one key area for improvement: the length of the power cables. Both the cigarette lighter plug and the clamp connectors have cables that are only about 13-17 inches long. This short length can make it difficult to position the inverter securely and conveniently in your vehicle. Ideally, the cables would be at least 3-4 feet long to provide more flexibility for placement. For instance, a longer cable would allow you to mount the inverter under a seat or in the trunk, keeping it out of the way while still being able to reach the cigarette lighter or connect directly to the battery. With slightly longer cables, the NAOEDEAH Car Power Inverter would be an even more versatile option for powering your devices on the road.
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Need some help here
My 05 suburban recently started having issues with starting and stalling at idle when in gear. Once the vehicle is moving it will not stall, but whenever coming to a stop the rpms will dip below 500 try to stall save but eventually stall.
At first it would happen extremely rarely like once every 6 months but it eventually got worse and happens every single time now. Can barely get it to start and stay running
It drives perfect once it's moving.
Replaced the throttle body and still have the same issue.
One thing I noticed today is the volt gauge is showing 13v on the dash when the battery is 14.6v and even my cigarette lighter is showing 14.4v
Is this an ecm issue, electronics issue, or a transmission issue?

Guess what's back! Finally home from NCED - regarding the absence, fuck if I'm editing all this text on my phone. There's a TON of city carrier jobs, naturally I'd still reco' Maintenance.
Good afternoon. Brief listing of CAREER JOBS pulled from usps.com/careers/ for your convenience. Tell HR User_3971 sent you, let's see if they pay more than .25¢ per head.
Some jobs may be part-time regular however all listed jobs should qualify for federal benefits from day one. To save text I have only listed the location and date of posting for each. Use the posting number for your search term. LC and MM are entry-level Maintenance. Here is a Maint overview and here and here are Exam 955 infos. You can DO it!
Laborer Custodial:
FAIRFIELD TX NC11735916 05/25/2024
JACKSON WY NC11736010 05/25/2024
MEMPHIS TN NC11736154 05/25/2024
WILLMAR MN NC11735956 05/25/2024
VENICE FL NC11735974 05/25/2024
BELMONT MA NC11736003 05/25/2024
WAKEFIELD RI NC11736006 05/25/2024
WEST FARGO ND NC11736069 05/25/2024
WINDOM MN NC11738399 05/25/2024
PALATINE IL NC11738403 05/25/2024
SAINT PAUL MN NC11738406 05/25/2024
WINDBER PA NC11738430 05/25/2024
CAIRO IL NC11738431 05/25/2024
Maintenance Mechanic:
WARRENDALE PA NC11733778 05/25/2024
SAINT LOUIS MO NC11734241 05/25/2024
OAKLAND CA NC11728664 05/25/2024
MILAN IL NC11736284 05/25/2024
MEMPHIS TN NC11733324 05/25/2024
GOLETA CA NC11731081 05/25/2024
DES MOINES IA NC11736287 05/25/2024
DALLAS TX NC11736401 05/25/2024
CAROL STREAM IL NC11736281 05/25/2024
BEDFORD PARK IL NC11728419 05/25/2024
PHILADELPHIA PA NC11721906 05/25/2024
SAN FRANCISCO CA NC11737818 05/25/2024
RICHMOND CA NC11731692 05/25/2024
PALATINE IL NC11734252 05/25/2024
INDIANAPOLIS IN NC11738294 05/25/2024
DES MOINES IA NC11737528 05/25/2024
BALTIMORE MD NC11734579 05/25/2024
WEST PALM BEACH FL NC11734260 05/25/2024
NEW YORK NY NC11738297 05/25/2024
GREENSBORO NC NC11737730 05/25/2024
KANSAS CITY KS NC11735723 05/25/2024
SHREWSBURY MA NC11736056 05/25/2024
NORTH HOUSTON TX NC11734573 05/25/2024
FEDERAL WAY WA NC11736133 05/25/2024
DULLES VA NC11734578 05/25/2024
CHICAGO IL NC11728508 05/25/2024
Special! Interesting Maintenance Jobs: (may be skills required)
Area Maintenance Technician:
SAN FRANCISCO CA NC11737626 05/25/2024
Maintenance Mechanic MPE:
SEATTLE WA NC11736371 05/25/2024
PORTLAND OR NC11737348 05/25/2024
BETHLEHEM PA NC11737527 05/25/2024
KANSAS CITY KS NC11736383 05/25/2024
TAMPA FL NC11735963 05/25/2024
SHREWSBURY MA NC11734558 05/25/2024
MISSOURI CITY TX NC11735813 05/25/2024
PHILADELPHIA PA NC11734577 05/25/2024
JERSEY CITY NJ NC11737727 05/25/2024
General Clerk VMF:
BOSTON MA NC11737531 05/25/2024
LYNN MA NC11740584 05/30/2024
Garage Assistant:
PEORIA IL NC11737500 05/24/2024
BOSTON MA NC11737587 05/25/2024
Building Equipment Mechanic:
FACILITY MAINTENANCE MECHANIC - WASHINGTON DC NC11739041 05/25/2024
OAKLAND CA NC11734352 05/25/2024
SHREWSBURY MA NC11735572 05/25/2024
MELVILLE NY NC11736151 05/25/2024
NORTH READING MA NC11735573 05/25/2024
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION NC11736326 05/25/2024
Electronic Technician:
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION VT NC11736429 05/25/2024
SEATTLE WA NC11736406 05/25/2024
SAINT LOUIS MO NC11731875 05/25/2024
PEORIA IL NC11736275 05/25/2024
CAPITOL HEIGHTS MD NC11734725 05/25/2024
SAN JOSE CA NC11734288 05/25/2024
OAKLAND CA NC11731065 05/25/2024
HARRISBURG PA NC11728517 05/25/2024
GARDEN CITY NY NC11736173 05/25/2024
FAYETTEVILLE AR NC11735721 05/25/2024
MILAN IL NC11737578 05/25/2024
INDIANAPOLIS IN NC11738389 05/25/2024
FOREST PARK IL NC11728884 05/25/2024
DAYTON OH NC11738372 05/25/2024
BROCKTON MA NC11735715 05/25/2024
NON-Maintenance jerbs:
SALES,SVCS/DISTRIBUTION ASSOC:
SOUTHBRIDGE MA NC11735933 05/23/2024
PINEHURST TX NC11738370 05/25/2024
OSCEOLA WI NC11733408 05/21/2024
NEW TOWN ND NC11738028 05/25/2024
NASHVILLE IL NC11729939 05/16/2024
KIEL WI NC11736017 05/23/2024
FLORA IL NC11729929 05/16/2024
FLOMATON AL NC11737461 05/25/2024
EAST WALPOLE MA NC11735927 05/23/2024
SIDNEY NY NC11740027 05/28/2024
EDWARDS CO NC11741213 05/30/2024
SAUCIER MS NC11737463 05/25/2024
COTUIT MA NC11735720 05/23/2024
BRISBANE CA NC11741630 05/30/2024
NANTUCKET MA NC11735872 05/23/2024
LORMAN MS NC11737414 05/25/2024
KAPAAU HI NC11729735 05/16/2024
HAMPTON TN NC11738582 05/26/2024
GAP PA NC11735923 05/23/2024
ASPEN CO NC11741220 05/30/2024
W YELLOWSTONE MT NC11736385 05/24/2024
City Carrier:
NEWTONVILLE MA NC11734704 05/27/2024
BILLERICA MA NC11740369 05/28/2024
HOPKINS MN NC11733303 05/29/2024
MILLERSVILLE PA NC11741349 05/30/2024
ROCK ISLAND IL NC11736380 05/24/2024
VAIL CO NC11738433 05/27/2024
YORK PA NC11741218 05/30/2024
ASPEN CO NC11741221 05/30/2024
BELMONT MA NC11734312 05/27/2024
BRIGHTON MA NC11734440 05/27/2024
CHARLOTTESVILLE VA NC11741438 05/30/2024
DENVER CO NC11735009 05/27/2024
DES MOINES IA NC11735053 05/27/2024
DOWNINGTOWN PA NC11734561 05/28/2024
FORT ATKINSON WI NC11735493 05/23/2024
FRAMINGHAM MA NC11740412 05/28/2024
FREMONT CA NC11740971 05/30/2024
HAVERHILL MA NC11740414 05/28/2024
HAYWARD CA NC11740999 05/30/2024
KANSAS CITY KS NC11738595 05/28/2024
LANCASTER PA NC11741212 05/30/2024
LAWRENCE MA NC11740347 05/28/2024
LOWELL MA NC11740415 05/28/2024
MATTAPAN MA NC11734554 05/27/2024
MINNEAPOLIS MN NC11735003 05/27/2024
PEABODY MA NC11740406 05/28/2024
QUINCY MA NC11734690 05/27/2024
RAVENA NY NC11738661 05/29/2024
REDMOND WA NC11734692 05/27/2024
ROXBURY MA NC11734686 05/27/2024
SANTA BARBARA CA NC11741303 05/30/2024
WALTHAM MA NC11734803 05/27/2024
WELLESLEY HILLS MA NC11734688 05/27/2024
WILLISTON ND NC11737418 05/25/2024
CONCORD MA NC11740370 05/28/2024
FARMINGDALE NY NC11741159 05/30/2024
NANTUCKET MA NC11740456 05/28/2024
OAKLAND CA NC11734959 05/27/2024
SAINT PAUL MN NC11734954 05/27/2024
DELMAR NY NC11741314 05/30/2024
DENVER CO NC11735062 05/27/2024
LOS ALTOS CA NC11725711 05/30/2024
MALVERN PA NC11733204 05/24/2024
MOUNTAIN VIEW CA NC11725720 05/30/2024
SAN FRANCISCO CA NC11734998 05/27/2024
SAN JOSE CA NC11734991 05/27/2024
SUNNYVALE CA NC11725718 05/30/2024
ALLENTOWN PA NC11736346 05/24/2024
BELLEVUE WA NC11735556 05/27/2024
BOSTON MA NC11734381 05/27/2024
BOSTON MA NC11734397 05/27/2024
CHELSEA MA NC11734389 05/27/2024
EAST PALO ALTO CA NC11725713 05/30/2024
ELLENVILLE NY NC11741162 05/30/2024
GREENWOOD VILLAGE CO NC11737450 05/27/2024
JAMAICA PLAIN MA NC11734390 05/27/2024
LYNN MA NC11740409 05/28/2024
MOLINE IL NC11737397 05/24/2024
NEEDHAM MA NC11734591 05/27/2024
PITTSBURGH PA NC11734914 05/27/2024
WALTHAM MA NC11734720 05/27/2024
BARRINGTON IL NC11737890 05/25/2024
CAMBRIDGE MA NC11740413 05/28/2024
GLEN COVE NY NC11741169 05/30/2024
MADISON WI NC11735029 05/27/2024
MISSION KS NC11734948 05/27/2024
REDWOOD CITY CA NC11735570 05/26/2024
SOUTH BOSTON MA NC11734586 05/27/2024
SOUTHEASTERN PA NC11726078 05/29/2024
WEST CHESTER PA NC11718568 05/25/2024
ALBANY NY NC11729725 05/29/2024
AMITYVILLE NY NC11741193 05/30/2024
ASPEN CO NC11729741 05/29/2024
AURORA CO NC11734958 05/27/2024
BOSTON MA NC11734505 05/27/2024
BRAINTREE MA NC11734500 05/27/2024
DENVER CO NC11734960 05/27/2024
GLENSHAW PA NC11741278 05/30/2024
GOSHEN IN NC11733402 05/29/2024
HANOVER PARK IL NC11737897 05/25/2024
KEY WEST FL NC11736292 05/28/2024
LAKEWOOD CO NC11734957 05/27/2024
LEXINGTON MA NC11734626 05/27/2024
LINCOLN ME NC11738416 05/26/2024
MC LEAN VA NC11737451 05/24/2024
MEDFORD MA NC11734656 05/27/2024
MILWAUKEE WI NC11734956 05/27/2024
READING PA NC11718633 05/23/2024
RENTON WA NC11735496 05/28/2024
CENTRAL SEATTLE WA NC11734961 05/27/2024
NORTH SEATTLE WA NC11735073 05/27/2024
Rural Carrier:
SAINT PAUL MN NC11736361 05/24/2024
LOVELOCK NV NC11736366 05/24/2024
BEND OR NC11737545 05/25/2024
SALIDA CO NC11740127 05/28/2024
WATERTOWN SD NC11741372 05/30/2024
WORTHINGTON MN NC11736342 05/24/2024
LONGMONT CO NC11737362 05/24/2024
GWINNER ND NC11733633 05/20/2024
DISPUTANTA VA NC11738488 05/25/2024
BEMIDJI MN NC11741426 05/30/2024
BASALT CO NC11741332 05/30/2024
WILLISTON VT NC11737535 05/25/2024
CARBONDALE CO NC11741356 05/30/2024
Motor Vehicle Operator:
SYRACUSE NY P&DC NC11738759 05/25/2024
SPRINGFIELD IL P&DC NC11738508 05/25/2024
SEATTLE WA P&DC NC11738950 05/25/2024
MORGAN NY P&DC NC11738760 05/25/2024
MARGARET SELLERS P&DC NC11738876 05/25/2024
CHATTANOOGA TN P&DC NC11738504 05/25/2024
ALBANY NY P&DC NC11738758 05/25/2024
PORTLAND OR P&DC NC11738951 05/25/2024
Tractor Trailer Operator:
NORTH READING P&DC NC11738515 05/25/2024
SUBURBAN MD P&DC NC11738511 05/25/2024
SPRINGFIELD NDC NC11738520 05/25/2024
SAN FRANCISCO P&DC NC11739032 05/25/2024
SALT LAKE CITY P&DC NC11738952 05/25/2024
SACRAMENTO CA P&DC NC11738955 05/25/2024
OAKLAND CA P&DC NC11739035 05/25/2024
NORFOLK VA P&DC NC11738750 05/25/2024
MILWAUKEE WI P&DC NC11738509 05/25/2024
LOS ANGELES CA P&DC NC11738953 05/25/2024
JACKSONVILLE FL P&DC NC11738503 05/25/2024
DES MOINES IA P&DC NC11738510 05/25/2024
CENTRAL MA P&DC NC11738512 05/25/2024
SAN FRANCISCO NDC NC11739027 05/25/2024
SEATTLE NDC NC11738954 05/25/2024
IT nerds (all remote):
COMPUTER ANLYST/PRGMR ASSOC - NC11738458 05/29/2024
No experience necessary for the laborer custodial or maintenance mechanic positions. It helps on the interview but you can surely think of maintenance related experience to relay for an interview. Based on fixing things around your house, the car etc. Always mention working safely.
Pro tip: You can apply for any job that has an exam opening and the test is administered local to yourself. Make sure you're serious and score decently; you can turn down the job offer. Keep a physical copy of your exam score, I believe they are good for two years.
The reason is: These job postings can be posted externally at capacity for testing, meaning they will not allow you to take the exam if they have enough qualified applicants. However, if you have a test score on the books, you are a qualified applicant.
Explanation of MVO/TTO to save time:
MVO= CDL B Can only drive box trucks on public roads, can drive anything for moves on postal property.
TTO= CDL A Can drive anything.
USPS provides the training. (Maintenance jobs at least. Management...GOOD LUCK)

After high school, having no better ideas, I joined the Navy SEALs. I never really liked any of it, but it was a job, after all. I loved the guns and airplanes and grenades, but having to run all the time while some scumbag with a chip on his shoulder yells in my face isn’t my idea of fun.
Things got a lot more interesting after my term of service ended. I still had a high-security clearance, so I used it to take temporary jobs as a mercenary, a hired gun. I did some stints in Iraq with Blackwater, where they set me out in the middle of the desert. A watchtower and oil refinery loomed over the burning sands. Along with a few other guys, they told us, “Guard this area with your life.” While better than the SEALs, working for Blackwater was extremely boring. The other mercenaries and I would mostly just chainsmoke cigarettes and drink coffee all night, staring out across the dead, empty desert.
Over time, I worked my way up. Things started to get more interesting when a job offer arrived in my email one freezing cold winter’s morning. This is what it said.
“Mr. Chase,
“I am the head of security for a private group of entrepreneurs and investors. Through some mutual contacts, I have heard of your professionalism and experience. We are currently putting together a small crew to guard a private event on [REDACTED] Island out in the Pacific Ocean that will run from January 9th to January 26th. Would you be interested in this job? The pay rate is $900 a day.
“Once you are on the island, it will be impossible to leave until the period of employment has ended. If you are interested, please respond to this email as soon as possible.
“Sincerely,
“Mario Antonin, Head of Security.”
I was working piecemeal jobs like this one at the time, but none of them were paying that well. At most, I would usually get $350 to $500 a day, which was still good money when I was working seven days a week until the job finished. I instantly responded and said that yes, I was interested. In response, they sent me a non-disclosure agreement that was the size of a small novel that I had to sign.
That was how I found myself on a private jet, flying out to an island in the middle of the vast blue ocean. I was never told the coordinates of the island or saw it on a map. It was all kept very secret.
A few hours later, we landed on a private airstrip. I looked out the window of the jet, seeing the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching off to the horizon in every direction. Below me stood an island with palm trees and sandy white beaches. An enormous Victorian mansion loomed directly in the center of it all. The mansion was painted black and looked like something straight out of a horror movie. It had no windows, and the turrets spiraled into blade-like points.
That was my first inkling that something might not be quite right about this trip.
***
As the stairs from the private jet descended, I looked out on this strange new world. Employees waited to greet us, looking like beaten dogs. Some had their heads down, their eyes blankly scanning the ground. Most of them were women wearing red dresses, reminding me of stewardesses on a plane. The jet strip was surrounded by palm trees and tropical brush. The chirping of insects sounded all around us, high and resonant.
I saw a strange patch engraved on all of the employees’ uniforms and jackets. It looked almost like a stick figure drawing of a man, the bottom of its body ending in a C. Its arms were long and jointed, almost spidery. Three symbols like repeated iron crosses connected to the left side of its body in a line. I wondered if it was the logo of some company. I put it out of my mind for now, but I would see that symbol again all over the island, painted on the sides of the mansion and even cut into the trees with a knife. It would only be later that night that I realized its connection to Moloch.
“Good day, sir, and welcome to the Island,” the server on my left said with glassy eyes and a fake smile plastered across her face. They all looked up at once, but it was like the workers all looked through me rather than at me. Their eyes looked flat and dead, like the painted-on eyes of a doll.
“The Island, huh?” I asked, curious. “They wouldn’t tell me where I was going. They said it was a secret. Is that what you call it?” The woman just nodded, the doll-like smile never leaving her lips.
“Officially, this island is unnamed and uninhabited,” the woman said. “In fact, all traces of it have been scrubbed from the internet. You won’t find it on Google Maps or in any publicly available satellite imagery.” She leaned forward towards me with heavily mascaraed eyes and ruby-red lipstick slashed across her lips. “This is a very special place. Only very special people are allowed here. You should be honored to work here under our Savior.”
“I hope you’re talking about Jesus or something,” I said jokingly. She just smiled blankly and motioned me forward.
“Just follow that trail for a few hundred feet-” she said, pointing at an opening in the palm trees where logs were laid down horizontally over the muggy jungle- “and you’ll find the mansion. Good luck!” I thought it was a somewhat strange thing to say, wishing a random stranger good luck.
But, by the end of that night, I realized that simply to make it off this island alive, I would need lots of it.
***
I followed the woman’s directions to the back of the brutalist mansion. A heavy metal door stood there with a small bullet-proof window built in the top. A tanned, Spanish face glowered out at me then rapidly drew back and disappeared. A few heartbeats later, the door slid to the side with a grinding of hidden gears.
The head of security at the Island was a heavily-tattooed ex-Marine named Mario. He wore a dark Kevlar vest over a black outfit, making him look like a walking shadow. I found the security had their own private complex in the mansion as he showed me around the site. Hundreds of hidden cameras covered every angle of the mansion and the surrounding parts of the island. Dozens of black-clad security agents swarmed over the screens, checking the monitors and computers constantly.
“Quite a set-up you have here,” I said to Mario, nodding at him. He smacked me on the shoulder, giving a confident grin.
“Money is no issue here, Richard,” he responded. “Security is paramount. There are things on this island that could rip apart the world if they ever escaped.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Like what?” I asked. “Nuclear weapons or something?” He laughed at that.
“You’ll see for yourself tonight,” he said, his dark eyes flashing with something cold and alien.
***
Mario led me and a couple other new hired guns around the Island. The place was certainly strange. It reminded me of some combination of a secret black-ops site and a playboy billionaire’s private heaven. All of the doors in the mansion looked like they were made of thick steel. They had wheels that would spin, like those on a submarine door. The mansion also had no windows at all that I could see, except for the small, shatter-proof glass openings on the steel doors. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, however. I couldn’t resist asking him about a couple small things, however- or at least, they seemed small to me at the time.
“What are those hatchways?” I asked Mario, pointing to rectangular covers built into the concrete walkway. They had heavy handles. “Are those manholes or something?”
“There are tunnels under the Island,” he responded vaguely. “Just for maintenance and security, you understand.”
“Wow, this place is certainly… well-developed,” I said. We came out through a grove of palm trees. A stone walkway led down to a white beach. Dozens of yachts were moored all across the shore, some of them looking like they must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“There’s a lot of money and power here,” Mario said. “That’s why it’s important you never talk about what you see here. These are the people who control the world, the ones behind the government and the media. Not the elected officials who the people see, but the actual power.”
“Like who?” I asked. “You mean the Rothschilds and Soros?” He laughed again, a sarcastic, grinding laugh that grated my nerves.
“Trust me, the truly powerful ones don’t even have public personas. If you know their name, then they’re just one of the puppets.” I just shook my head at that, then asked the real question that had been bothering me since I first arrived here.
“Who is the Savior?” I asked. “Is that some codename or something?” Mario froze in place.
“He’s the one who runs everything here,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking around nervously. “But don’t be mentioning that kind of shit. You’ll probably see him tonight anyway. He’s the one who runs the show. He’ll be on the stage in his normal outfit.”
***
By the end of the day, I was suited up like the rest of the security staff, wearing the pure black pants and shirt with the symbol of Moloch engraved over the heart. Hundreds of the world’s most famous politicians, actors, businessmen and artists had gathered, streaming in the front doors with a soft, diffident susurration.
I stood by the open doorway of a side exit with an AR-15 and full body armor, next to one other soldier. They had also given me a sidearm. Every entrance or exit was manned by at least two armed men. The security at this place was some of the most intense I had ever seen. Beyond the door, there were rows and rows of the most comfortable seats, all gathered in a semi-circle around a massive stage made of pure mahogany. Blood-red curtains stood closed at the front of the room, concealing their secrets- for now, at least.
“Hail Satan!” I heard the elites cry inside in unison. I didn’t want to look in at the rows of high-ranking politicians, celebrities, influencers and artists, but my curiosity was high. I peeked around the corner of the stone archway, seeing the red curtains on the stage drawing apart. I saw one of my favorite actors standing in the front row, clapping excitedly and jumping up and down.
The crowd cheered as a naked female strapped to an obsidian altar lay there. She was beautiful and blonde, probably no older than twenty with the face of a supermodel. Her mouth was gagged, her arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. Thin leather cords were tied around her wrists and ankles, biting deeply into the skin. Her eyes rolled wildly as she shook her head from side to side. She froze, and her eyes met mine for a brief moment. I saw the pleading expression there, the mortal terror and absolute horror.
A man in a goat mask wearing black robes slunk out from the side of the stage, carrying a wavy silver dagger engraved with strange symbols. The crowd erupted into a primal roar of pleasure and excitement that sounded like it came from one monstrous mouth.
“Worthy is the Lamb!” the man in the goat mask screamed with electronic amplification. He had a deep voice, as if he had rocks rolling around in his throat. The crowd roared and clapped. Scattered cries of “Hail Lucifer!” and “Ave Satanas!” echoed down the massive auditorium.
“Hey, pay attention,” the other security agent at my side said in a thick Finnish accent. He was a tall Scandinavian-looking guy named Kolmek. “You’re not getting paid to watch the show, new guy.” I tried to rip my gaze away from the stage, but it held my attention with an obsessive horror.
“The burnt bones of children and women have been offered to the ancient ones, to Moloch,” the man on the stage cried. “Under our feet, the burnt bodies of hundreds lay dreaming. This victim will be the 666th. Her blood will bring about the Gnosis that we seek, the direct experience of the divine held by the gods, by Lucifer and Moloch and Baal…” The roaring of the crowd temporarily drowned out his electronically-magnified voice. “Tonight, we will rip open the veil!”
I had stopped watching the show, instead staring blankly out at the beach and palm trees. At that moment, another black-clad security agent came up to my partner, whispered something in his ear, then immediately disappeared, heading off back in the direction of the main security office. Kolmek shook his head grimly.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move from this door no matter what. And pay attention.” I nodded and watched as he walked off in the same direction.
I immediately took the opportunity to continue watching the ceremony. I had missed something important, apparently. The woman now laid dead on the sacrificial table, a gaping hole in her chest. Blood spurted from the crater as the man in the goat mask held her beating heart grasped tightly in his hand, letting the blood stream down his naked fingers. The crowd cheered with a rising bloodlust and insanity. Most of them were standing, their eyes gleaming and wide with fanatical adoration. The entire spectacle reminded me of some kind of ancient Aztec ritual.
As the woman’s sightless eyes stared vacantly up in death, the man in a goat mask pulled out a can of gasoline. The clear liquid gurgled as he up-ended the canister over her pale, bloodless face, over her naked stomach and long legs. A moment later, he lit a match and dropped it. I heard the whooshing of the flames as they rose up.
The crowd went deathly silent as they watched the rippling flames. The man in the goat mask began chanting in some strange language I had never heard before. It sounded Semitic, but I knew it wasn’t Arabic or Hebrew. I felt something like electricity ripple through the air, almost like a feeling of falling pressure before a storm. I looked down at the hairs on my arms, seeing them rise up. I looked back up at the stage, and my eyes widened in horror.
The flaming body of the sacrificial victim had started to morph before my eyes and the eyes of the crowd. The dripping, blackening flesh jumped up and down, as if there were rats trapped in her body trying to escape the fire. There was a deafening hissing as if thousands of snakes were being burned alive.
The dead woman’s arms jerked up, the skin splitting open as if she had seams running along her skin. Something dark and muscular with curving, black talons ripped its way out of the dead, burning flesh. Behind it, a head appeared with long, curving horns and eyes that spun with whorls of fire. It looked like the offspring of a bull and a demon. Its imposing body rose up from the inferno, appearing like magic from the solid stone. It raised itself to its full height, looming over the crowd. The last of the woman’s blood hissed and boiled away, her flesh dissolving into ashes.
“Behold, Moloch rises!” the man in the goat mask screamed in a fanatical voice. The crowd’s cheering had stopped, though. Many of the faces in the crowd looked chalk-white with terror. The bull-god surveyed the crowd, its horns nearly scraping the ceiling twenty feet above the stage.
At that moment, I knew death was on its way with eyes of fire and a grin like a skull, ready to reap a field of human bodies.
***
I heard running behind me, but I didn’t dare turn away from the horrific sight in front of me. The last of the fire’s embers died, sending up thin wisps of gray smoke that spiraled around the bull-god’s monstrous face. Moloch stood as still as a statue, and if it weren’t for one thing, I might’ve thought it was some sort of sculpture or art project. He had two nostrils like a serpent’s. As his great lungs inhaled, the smoke billowed in and out of his mouth and nose.
Some of the people at the edges of the crowd had gotten up, hurrying towards the doors. Moloch’s head ratcheted to face them, his fiery eyes narrowing into slits.
“Do not leave!” the man in the goat mask pleaded. “Those who have fear are not worthy of life. Do not prove yourselves unworthy of life!” As the first of the fleeing men and women got to within a few steps of the door, Moloch gave a primal roar. In a blur of primal strength, he reached down and ripped the blackened sacrificial altar off the stage. It ripped from the wooden stage with a tremendous crack like a bullwhip. He hurled the heavy mass of stone at those heading towards the opposite exit from the one I guarded.
I watched it curve through the air. The people started screaming and clawing to escape as it smashed down on their heads with a grating crash. I could feel the floor shake from where I stood outside. Blood exploded from their smashed bodies. I saw arms and legs jerking and seizing under the heavy stone, but within a few moments, they slowed and then stopped.
Others were running towards the door I guarded, but Moloch leapt off the stage in a blur. In a few bounding steps, he reached the pale, terrified faces on the other side of the threshold. His massive clawed hand came down. I heard bones shatter as blood sprayed my face and the wall. Bone splinters and pieces of brain exploded from the screaming bodies. I backpedaled, wiping at my eyes, trying to get the blood off so I could see. No one had told me what to do in this situation. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot that massive abomination, or if this was all just part of the show.
“Richard!” a familiar voice cried from behind me. Panic oozed from every word. I spun, seeing Mario and Kolmek standing side by side, their pupils dilated and expressions grim.
“We have a major problem.” It was Mario. I recognized that voice, the one that sounded as if he had been gargling with rocks.
“I know,” I said, holding my rifle tightly. I pointed behind me at the scene of rampant death and destruction.
I had seen bloodshed and war before, but this was different. The Island itself seemed to feel it. The wind, which had been calm when I first landed, now whipped the Island in fast, circular currents. The breeze smelled of burnt matches and coppery blood. The static electricity which had caused the hairs on my arms to rise rippled over everything with tiny blue flashes, increasing in power by the second.
“No, no, not Moloch,” Kolmek said, looking much calmer than I felt. “The Savior lets Moloch thin the herd every year.”
“It’s Leviathan,” Mario continued grimly, “the beast from the waters. The smell of blood is drawing it from the depths of the ocean. We picked up the first blips on radar a few minutes ago. When it gets here, it won’t stop until everything is rubble. It will kill every single person on the Island.”
“All security personnel must report to the south beach immediately,” a cool robotic voice cried out over hidden loudspeakers all over the Island. The screaming from the auditorium had quieted behind me. I was afraid to look inside.
“There it is,” Kolmek said, his head jerking up as the emergency alert read. He motioned for me to follow. “It’s time to fight.”
***
We sprinted over curving trails of smooth logs between deathly quiet forests. All the insects and birds had gone silent. Ahead of us, the palm trees opened up onto the Pacific Ocean. But it was no longer a beautiful tropical blue. A black, swirling whirlpool like an ulcerous wound had opened up on its surface. It stretched hundreds of feet across, drawing closer to the shore by the second. Dead fish, sharks, dolphins, squids and even whales spun in the filthy, dark water.
Twenty black-clad security agents waited for the three of us on the beach, their eyes wide, their faces pale with terror. Like myself, they all had AR-15s and Glock 22s with extra magazines for both. I guess the Glock might be useful for blowing my brains out as a last resort if some beast from Hell rose out of the simmering waters, but I didn’t think it would stop anything from another dimension.
The clouds swirled overhead in a thick curtain as black as smoke. Flashes of blue lightning detonated every couple seconds. Mario raised his hands, screaming over the roaring of the wind. Kolmek stood by my side, his face grim and eyes narrowed.
“Your job is to fight off anything that tries to get on the Island,” he said, looking from one face to another with rapt attention. “Nothing can stand against high-caliber rifle fire. Shoot at the face and eyes when it comes up. We’ve dealt with creatures like this before, and they will retreat if you injure them badly enough.” I had the sense of being fed a line of bullshit as my mind processed this.
“What exactly is coming up?” one of the doe-eyed security men asked. He barely looked old enough to drink, a young, muscular hulk with a Marine Corps tattoo on his neck.
“They call it Leviathan,” Mario responded. “Sometimes the rituals here and the smell of blood can draw… strange things. Leviathan is one of those. We have encountered it before. The most important thing to remember is…” His voice was suddenly drowned out by a terrible cacophony that came from the center of the black whirlpool.
A screech like the detonation of a nuclear missile shook the ground. The ocean jumped and bubbled frantically. The beach heaved and cracked, the white sands disappearing in fissures that opened up like greedy mouths underneath my feet. I lost my balance, falling forwards. The screeching continued rising into a primal roar.
A green dragon head the color of an infected wound erupted from the surface of the thrashing water, rising up dozens of feet in the air. It had two enormous slitted eyes that dilated and constricted quickly as it glowered down at us. The screeching abruptly stopped, the pointed mouth of the dragon slamming shut with a sound like a gunshot.
Within moments, another cancerous green head shot up in a blur, its skin looking as hard as stone. Ridges that looked as sharp as swords ran the length of its reptilian skull, arcing over its eyes and pointed snout. More heads erupted from the ocean until all seven heads of Leviathan loomed over us.
Not one of us fired. No one even seemed to breathe as we surveyed the beast across the no-man’s land of the white sands. The slitted eyes and yellow irises of the seven heads had a demonic hunger, a reptilian coldness. Far behind us, I heard distant screams still echoing from the auditorium where Moloch held sway.
“Fire!” Mario cried. Instantly, a cacophony of gunshots exploded all around me. I jumped up on my feet, scrambling up as the seven-headed dragon leapt forward. Thousands of gallons of saltwater streamed down its massive body as it came up on the beach. Long, black paws with bone-white talons shot out of the surging ocean, followed by a tapering tail like that of a water snake.
I brought the rifle up and emptied my magazine as fast as I could, pulling the trigger over and over as I aimed at the many slitted eyes of Leviathan. But the bullets seemed to ping harmlessly off of its hard, obsidian-like scales.
It scrabbled onto the shore, the heads coming down in a blur. Rows and rows of vampiric fangs gleamed dully in each of the mouths. One security agent was bitten in half, the spurting stump of his lower body still standing for a long moment even as the rest of the body disappeared down the throat of the dragon.
Mario ran forwards, slamming another magazine in his rifle and opening fire point-blank. One of the heads came down in a blur towards him. Its great, staring eyes exploded in a shower of blue blood and thick vitreous fluid. The dragon head pulled back, its mouth opening in a primal scream of agony.
As I reloaded, I scanned the area around me, realizing that nearly half of the security agents were either dead or critically injured. I backpedaled away, keeping my eyes on the dragon. It continuously drew forward, killing more of its enemies with every step. I turned and ran into the forest, the sounds of shattering bones and dying men ringing through the air with a sickening clarity behind me.
Once I had reached the border of the trail, I heard Mario yell, “Retreat!” behind me. But by that point, it was far too late.
***
“Hey! Wait up!” a voice whispered from behind me. I turned my head, seeing Kolmek. Spatters of drying blood covered his face and uniform. As far as I could tell, none of it was his. “Mario’s dead. They’re all dead. We need to get out of here. We need to get off the Island.”
“How?” I asked.
“Find the Savior,” he answered, panting and out of breath. “We must find him. He can get us out of here.”
“I don’t even know what the guy looks like,” I muttered. “He was wearing a goat mask.”
“You’ll know him when you see him,” Kolmek said. “His body is covered in scars. Everything except his face. Stay close to me. We need to watch each other’s backs. It’s our only chance of survival.”
***
A trail of twisted, broken bodies led from the mansion to the surrounding trails and beaches. A decapitated woman with solid gold necklaces embedded with diamonds lay in front of me. It was strange on the Island, the way oblivion and ineffable wealth coexisted side by side. But everything was deathly silent, even in the mansion’s auditorium.
“Where’s the Savior?” I asked through gritted teeth. I peeked my head into the auditorium, but nothing moved. Hundreds of smashed and bloody bodies littered the floor.
“He’s around somewhere,” Kolmek answered. We started circling the mansion, looking for any signs of life. Kolmek went in the lead. As he turned the corner, an enormous black hand with sharp claws of fingers flitted forward in a blur, wrapping itself around his chest. Kolmek gave a strangled cry as it closed around him. I heard his bones crush as a spout of blood and gore flew from his mouth and nose, as if he were a toothpaste tube being squeezed.
I backpedaled away as Moloch threw the twitching corpse aside like a discarded toy. It smashed into the wall of the mansion, exploding wetly. A human-shaped, bloody stain languidly dripped down the wall above Kolmek’s mangled body.
Moloch slowly turned his head towards me, the fiery eyes flashing with hunger. He gnashed his fangs together, taking a step forward with a leg the size and shape of a tree trunk. With every step he took, I felt the ground tremble.
“Stop!” I cried, moving away from the monstrous creature. “Why are you doing this?”
“There is no why,” he gurgled, his voice monstrous and inhumanly slow. “There is only power. The weak deserve to die. Only the strong are worthy of life.” I raised my rifle in a last-ditch effort to save myself. Moloch saw it and started running towards me, every footstep crushing the paved walkway around the mansion into rubble and dust.
I aimed for his eyes and nose, emptying the entire magazine as quickly as I could. The bullets smashed into Moloch’s face. Dark red, clotted blood dripped out of the wounds, writhing with maggots. Drops of it fell around me, landing on my hair and face. I felt the small larvae twisting all over my skin. Moloch’s blood smelled nauseating, like some combination of stinkbugs and rotting bodies. He slowed, giving a roar of pain. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but as I looked out in the direction of the beach, my heart dropped.
Leviathan was moving in our direction, the giant dragon heads looming over the trees. Quickly, it swept towards me like a dark wind.
***
“You will suffer for that, worthless slave,” Moloch growled, wiping blood from his fiery eyes with his sharp talons of fingers. A sudden idea came to me. I ran in the direction of Leviathan. Moloch followed closely at my heels, only a few steps behind me.
Leviathan slithered forward over the sands and trees, its enormous body undulating like a water snake’s. I screamed at it, an incomprehensible wail of terror. Its seven heads snapped towards me. Its slitted eyes widened as it saw Moloch.
I heard the crashing of Moloch’s footsteps stop behind me, only feet away from crushing me into a paste. His massive lungs breathed quickly, exhaling the odor of sulfur and smoke.
“Leviathan,” Moloch growled in his demonic voice. “These are my tributes.” Leviathan’s dragon heads looked straight up at the Sun and screamed in response, their many voices rising and falling in a dissonant wail. As I sprinted into the trees, Leviathan and Moloch ran at each other, colliding with an ear-splitting crash. I glanced back, seeing Moloch ripping one of the dragon heads off its neck with his sharp fingers. The head screamed as blue blood exploded from the spurting stump. After a long moment, the neck fell limply forward.
The other dragon heads bit Moloch in a unified attack. They ripped deep holes in his shoulders and arms, snapping over and over like rabid dogs. As the two eldritch monstrosities attacked each other in fierce combat, I lost sight of them, but the sounds of fighting echoed over the entire island, crashing like lightning.
***
I felt like the survivor of an Apocalypse. I couldn’t find a single other living person on the Island. Hundreds of crushed, broken and decapitated bodies surrounded me. Over the cacophony of fighting, I heard a new noise: the whirring of helicopter blades nearby. It was coming from the other side of the mansion.
Frantically, I sprinted around the other side, seeing a Black Hawk helicopter getting ready to leave. A man in black robes sat at the pilot’s seat, his green eyes gleaming and a wide smile plastered across his face. I smashed my fist into the door over and over until he opened it.
“Holy shit, you’re still alive?” he asked. I hadn’t seen this man before. He had a face like a Calvin Klein model, all sharp angles and high cheekbones, perfectly proportioned in every way. But his scalp looked melted and scarred, as if someone had thrown gasoline on his hair and ignited it. His ears were stunted, twisted growths of scar tissue. His hands, too, were covered in deep, folding burn scars.
“Are you the Savior?” I responded quickly. “Please, get me out of here.”
“They do call me that,” he said wistfully. “The Savior. Yes, I guess I am. Get in.”
***
The Savior stared at me with his strange green eyes, the color of swamps where monstrous things swam under the surface.
“Some people just need to learn the hard way,” he said. The helicopter took off into a dark night covered with bright, twinkling stars. “There is no great power without great responsibility, after all. Those of us who seek the ancient ones know it comes with a cost.” I just stared out the window, gazing down at the countless mutilated, broken bodies that littered the beach.
Below us, the face of a bull stared up with eyes of fiery cyclones. The broken, still body of Leviathan lay at his feet. As we made it over the great waters of the Pacific Ocean, the bull-god raised a hand and waved. At that moment, I thought I could almost see a hurricane of translucent souls circling around him, spiraling up into the sky.

After high school, having no better ideas, I joined the Navy SEALs. I never really liked any of it, but it was a job, after all. I loved the guns and airplanes and grenades, but having to run all the time while some scumbag with a chip on his shoulder yells in my face isn’t my idea of fun.
Things got a lot more interesting after my term of service ended. I still had a high-security clearance, so I used it to take temporary jobs as a mercenary, a hired gun. I did some stints in Iraq with Blackwater, where they set me out in the middle of the desert. A watchtower and oil refinery loomed over the burning sands. Along with a few other guys, they told us, “Guard this area with your life.” While better than the SEALs, working for Blackwater was extremely boring. The other mercenaries and I would mostly just chainsmoke cigarettes and drink coffee all night, staring out across the dead, empty desert.
Over time, I worked my way up. Things started to get more interesting when a job offer arrived in my email one freezing cold winter’s morning. This is what it said.
“Mr. Chase,
“I am the head of security for a private group of entrepreneurs and investors. Through some mutual contacts, I have heard of your professionalism and experience. We are currently putting together a small crew to guard a private event on [REDACTED] Island out in the Pacific Ocean that will run from January 9th to January 26th. Would you be interested in this job? The pay rate is $900 a day.
“Once you are on the island, it will be impossible to leave until the period of employment has ended. If you are interested, please respond to this email as soon as possible.
“Sincerely,
“Mario Antonin, Head of Security.”
I was working piecemeal jobs like this one at the time, but none of them were paying that well. At most, I would usually get $350 to $500 a day, which was still good money when I was working seven days a week until the job finished. I instantly responded and said that yes, I was interested. In response, they sent me a non-disclosure agreement that was the size of a small novel that I had to sign.
That was how I found myself on a private jet, flying out to an island in the middle of the vast blue ocean. I was never told the coordinates of the island or saw it on a map. It was all kept very secret.
A few hours later, we landed on a private airstrip. I looked out the window of the jet, seeing the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching off to the horizon in every direction. Below me stood an island with palm trees and sandy white beaches. An enormous Victorian mansion loomed directly in the center of it all. The mansion was painted black and looked like something straight out of a horror movie. It had no windows, and the turrets spiraled into blade-like points.
That was my first inkling that something might not be quite right about this trip.
***
As the stairs from the private jet descended, I looked out on this strange new world. Employees waited to greet us, looking like beaten dogs. Some had their heads down, their eyes blankly scanning the ground. Most of them were women wearing red dresses, reminding me of stewardesses on a plane. The jet strip was surrounded by palm trees and tropical brush. The chirping of insects sounded all around us, high and resonant.
I saw a strange patch engraved on all of the employees’ uniforms and jackets. It looked almost like a stick figure drawing of a man, the bottom of its body ending in a C. Its arms were long and jointed, almost spidery. Three symbols like repeated iron crosses connected to the left side of its body in a line. I wondered if it was the logo of some company. I put it out of my mind for now, but I would see that symbol again all over the island, painted on the sides of the mansion and even cut into the trees with a knife. It would only be later that night that I realized its connection to Moloch.
“Good day, sir, and welcome to the Island,” the server on my left said with glassy eyes and a fake smile plastered across her face. They all looked up at once, but it was like the workers all looked through me rather than at me. Their eyes looked flat and dead, like the painted-on eyes of a doll.
“The Island, huh?” I asked, curious. “They wouldn’t tell me where I was going. They said it was a secret. Is that what you call it?” The woman just nodded, the doll-like smile never leaving her lips.
“Officially, this island is unnamed and uninhabited,” the woman said. “In fact, all traces of it have been scrubbed from the internet. You won’t find it on Google Maps or in any publicly available satellite imagery.” She leaned forward towards me with heavily mascaraed eyes and ruby-red lipstick slashed across her lips. “This is a very special place. Only very special people are allowed here. You should be honored to work here under our Savior.”
“I hope you’re talking about Jesus or something,” I said jokingly. She just smiled blankly and motioned me forward.
“Just follow that trail for a few hundred feet-” she said, pointing at an opening in the palm trees where logs were laid down horizontally over the muggy jungle- “and you’ll find the mansion. Good luck!” I thought it was a somewhat strange thing to say, wishing a random stranger good luck.
But, by the end of that night, I realized that simply to make it off this island alive, I would need lots of it.
***
I followed the woman’s directions to the back of the brutalist mansion. A heavy metal door stood there with a small bullet-proof window built in the top. A tanned, Spanish face glowered out at me then rapidly drew back and disappeared. A few heartbeats later, the door slid to the side with a grinding of hidden gears.
The head of security at the Island was a heavily-tattooed ex-Marine named Mario. He wore a dark Kevlar vest over a black outfit, making him look like a walking shadow. I found the security had their own private complex in the mansion as he showed me around the site. Hundreds of hidden cameras covered every angle of the mansion and the surrounding parts of the island. Dozens of black-clad security agents swarmed over the screens, checking the monitors and computers constantly.
“Quite a set-up you have here,” I said to Mario, nodding at him. He smacked me on the shoulder, giving a confident grin.
“Money is no issue here, Richard,” he responded. “Security is paramount. There are things on this island that could rip apart the world if they ever escaped.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Like what?” I asked. “Nuclear weapons or something?” He laughed at that.
“You’ll see for yourself tonight,” he said, his dark eyes flashing with something cold and alien.
***
Mario led me and a couple other new hired guns around the Island. The place was certainly strange. It reminded me of some combination of a secret black-ops site and a playboy billionaire’s private heaven. All of the doors in the mansion looked like they were made of thick steel. They had wheels that would spin, like those on a submarine door. The mansion also had no windows at all that I could see, except for the small, shatter-proof glass openings on the steel doors. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, however. I couldn’t resist asking him about a couple small things, however- or at least, they seemed small to me at the time.
“What are those hatchways?” I asked Mario, pointing to rectangular covers built into the concrete walkway. They had heavy handles. “Are those manholes or something?”
“There are tunnels under the Island,” he responded vaguely. “Just for maintenance and security, you understand.”
“Wow, this place is certainly… well-developed,” I said. We came out through a grove of palm trees. A stone walkway led down to a white beach. Dozens of yachts were moored all across the shore, some of them looking like they must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“There’s a lot of money and power here,” Mario said. “That’s why it’s important you never talk about what you see here. These are the people who control the world, the ones behind the government and the media. Not the elected officials who the people see, but the actual power.”
“Like who?” I asked. “You mean the Rothschilds and Soros?” He laughed again, a sarcastic, grinding laugh that grated my nerves.
“Trust me, the truly powerful ones don’t even have public personas. If you know their name, then they’re just one of the puppets.” I just shook my head at that, then asked the real question that had been bothering me since I first arrived here.
“Who is the Savior?” I asked. “Is that some codename or something?” Mario froze in place.
“He’s the one who runs everything here,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking around nervously. “But don’t be mentioning that kind of shit. You’ll probably see him tonight anyway. He’s the one who runs the show. He’ll be on the stage in his normal outfit.”
***
By the end of the day, I was suited up like the rest of the security staff, wearing the pure black pants and shirt with the symbol of Moloch engraved over the heart. Hundreds of the world’s most famous politicians, actors, businessmen and artists had gathered, streaming in the front doors with a soft, diffident susurration.
I stood by the open doorway of a side exit with an AR-15 and full body armor, next to one other soldier. They had also given me a sidearm. Every entrance or exit was manned by at least two armed men. The security at this place was some of the most intense I had ever seen. Beyond the door, there were rows and rows of the most comfortable seats, all gathered in a semi-circle around a massive stage made of pure mahogany. Blood-red curtains stood closed at the front of the room, concealing their secrets- for now, at least.
“Hail Satan!” I heard the elites cry inside in unison. I didn’t want to look in at the rows of high-ranking politicians, celebrities, influencers and artists, but my curiosity was high. I peeked around the corner of the stone archway, seeing the red curtains on the stage drawing apart. I saw one of my favorite actors standing in the front row, clapping excitedly and jumping up and down.
The crowd cheered as a naked female strapped to an obsidian altar lay there. She was beautiful and blonde, probably no older than twenty with the face of a supermodel. Her mouth was gagged, her arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. Thin leather cords were tied around her wrists and ankles, biting deeply into the skin. Her eyes rolled wildly as she shook her head from side to side. She froze, and her eyes met mine for a brief moment. I saw the pleading expression there, the mortal terror and absolute horror.
A man in a goat mask wearing black robes slunk out from the side of the stage, carrying a wavy silver dagger engraved with strange symbols. The crowd erupted into a primal roar of pleasure and excitement that sounded like it came from one monstrous mouth.
“Worthy is the Lamb!” the man in the goat mask screamed with electronic amplification. He had a deep voice, as if he had rocks rolling around in his throat. The crowd roared and clapped. Scattered cries of “Hail Lucifer!” and “Ave Satanas!” echoed down the massive auditorium.
“Hey, pay attention,” the other security agent at my side said in a thick Finnish accent. He was a tall Scandinavian-looking guy named Kolmek. “You’re not getting paid to watch the show, new guy.” I tried to rip my gaze away from the stage, but it held my attention with an obsessive horror.
“The burnt bones of children and women have been offered to the ancient ones, to Moloch,” the man on the stage cried. “Under our feet, the burnt bodies of hundreds lay dreaming. This victim will be the 666th. Her blood will bring about the Gnosis that we seek, the direct experience of the divine held by the gods, by Lucifer and Moloch and Baal…” The roaring of the crowd temporarily drowned out his electronically-magnified voice. “Tonight, we will rip open the veil!”
I had stopped watching the show, instead staring blankly out at the beach and palm trees. At that moment, another black-clad security agent came up to my partner, whispered something in his ear, then immediately disappeared, heading off back in the direction of the main security office. Kolmek shook his head grimly.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move from this door no matter what. And pay attention.” I nodded and watched as he walked off in the same direction.
I immediately took the opportunity to continue watching the ceremony. I had missed something important, apparently. The woman now laid dead on the sacrificial table, a gaping hole in her chest. Blood spurted from the crater as the man in the goat mask held her beating heart grasped tightly in his hand, letting the blood stream down his naked fingers. The crowd cheered with a rising bloodlust and insanity. Most of them were standing, their eyes gleaming and wide with fanatical adoration. The entire spectacle reminded me of some kind of ancient Aztec ritual.
As the woman’s sightless eyes stared vacantly up in death, the man in a goat mask pulled out a can of gasoline. The clear liquid gurgled as he up-ended the canister over her pale, bloodless face, over her naked stomach and long legs. A moment later, he lit a match and dropped it. I heard the whooshing of the flames as they rose up.
The crowd went deathly silent as they watched the rippling flames. The man in the goat mask began chanting in some strange language I had never heard before. It sounded Semitic, but I knew it wasn’t Arabic or Hebrew. I felt something like electricity ripple through the air, almost like a feeling of falling pressure before a storm. I looked down at the hairs on my arms, seeing them rise up. I looked back up at the stage, and my eyes widened in horror.
The flaming body of the sacrificial victim had started to morph before my eyes and the eyes of the crowd. The dripping, blackening flesh jumped up and down, as if there were rats trapped in her body trying to escape the fire. There was a deafening hissing as if thousands of snakes were being burned alive.
The dead woman’s arms jerked up, the skin splitting open as if she had seams running along her skin. Something dark and muscular with curving, black talons ripped its way out of the dead, burning flesh. Behind it, a head appeared with long, curving horns and eyes that spun with whorls of fire. It looked like the offspring of a bull and a demon. Its imposing body rose up from the inferno, appearing like magic from the solid stone. It raised itself to its full height, looming over the crowd. The last of the woman’s blood hissed and boiled away, her flesh dissolving into ashes.
“Behold, Moloch rises!” the man in the goat mask screamed in a fanatical voice. The crowd’s cheering had stopped, though. Many of the faces in the crowd looked chalk-white with terror. The bull-god surveyed the crowd, its horns nearly scraping the ceiling twenty feet above the stage.
At that moment, I knew death was on its way with eyes of fire and a grin like a skull, ready to reap a field of human bodies.
***
I heard running behind me, but I didn’t dare turn away from the horrific sight in front of me. The last of the fire’s embers died, sending up thin wisps of gray smoke that spiraled around the bull-god’s monstrous face. Moloch stood as still as a statue, and if it weren’t for one thing, I might’ve thought it was some sort of sculpture or art project. He had two nostrils like a serpent’s. As his great lungs inhaled, the smoke billowed in and out of his mouth and nose.
Some of the people at the edges of the crowd had gotten up, hurrying towards the doors. Moloch’s head ratcheted to face them, his fiery eyes narrowing into slits.
“Do not leave!” the man in the goat mask pleaded. “Those who have fear are not worthy of life. Do not prove yourselves unworthy of life!” As the first of the fleeing men and women got to within a few steps of the door, Moloch gave a primal roar. In a blur of primal strength, he reached down and ripped the blackened sacrificial altar off the stage. It ripped from the wooden stage with a tremendous crack like a bullwhip. He hurled the heavy mass of stone at those heading towards the opposite exit from the one I guarded.
I watched it curve through the air. The people started screaming and clawing to escape as it smashed down on their heads with a grating crash. I could feel the floor shake from where I stood outside. Blood exploded from their smashed bodies. I saw arms and legs jerking and seizing under the heavy stone, but within a few moments, they slowed and then stopped.
Others were running towards the door I guarded, but Moloch leapt off the stage in a blur. In a few bounding steps, he reached the pale, terrified faces on the other side of the threshold. His massive clawed hand came down. I heard bones shatter as blood sprayed my face and the wall. Bone splinters and pieces of brain exploded from the screaming bodies. I backpedaled, wiping at my eyes, trying to get the blood off so I could see. No one had told me what to do in this situation. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot that massive abomination, or if this was all just part of the show.
“Richard!” a familiar voice cried from behind me. Panic oozed from every word. I spun, seeing Mario and Kolmek standing side by side, their pupils dilated and expressions grim.
“We have a major problem.” It was Mario. I recognized that voice, the one that sounded as if he had been gargling with rocks.
“I know,” I said, holding my rifle tightly. I pointed behind me at the scene of rampant death and destruction.
I had seen bloodshed and war before, but this was different. The Island itself seemed to feel it. The wind, which had been calm when I first landed, now whipped the Island in fast, circular currents. The breeze smelled of burnt matches and coppery blood. The static electricity which had caused the hairs on my arms to rise rippled over everything with tiny blue flashes, increasing in power by the second.
“No, no, not Moloch,” Kolmek said, looking much calmer than I felt. “The Savior lets Moloch thin the herd every year.”
“It’s Leviathan,” Mario continued grimly, “the beast from the waters. The smell of blood is drawing it from the depths of the ocean. We picked up the first blips on radar a few minutes ago. When it gets here, it won’t stop until everything is rubble. It will kill every single person on the Island.”
“All security personnel must report to the south beach immediately,” a cool robotic voice cried out over hidden loudspeakers all over the Island. The screaming from the auditorium had quieted behind me. I was afraid to look inside.
“There it is,” Kolmek said, his head jerking up as the emergency alert read. He motioned for me to follow. “It’s time to fight.”
***
We sprinted over curving trails of smooth logs between deathly quiet forests. All the insects and birds had gone silent. Ahead of us, the palm trees opened up onto the Pacific Ocean. But it was no longer a beautiful tropical blue. A black, swirling whirlpool like an ulcerous wound had opened up on its surface. It stretched hundreds of feet across, drawing closer to the shore by the second. Dead fish, sharks, dolphins, squids and even whales spun in the filthy, dark water.
Twenty black-clad security agents waited for the three of us on the beach, their eyes wide, their faces pale with terror. Like myself, they all had AR-15s and Glock 22s with extra magazines for both. I guess the Glock might be useful for blowing my brains out as a last resort if some beast from Hell rose out of the simmering waters, but I didn’t think it would stop anything from another dimension.
The clouds swirled overhead in a thick curtain as black as smoke. Flashes of blue lightning detonated every couple seconds. Mario raised his hands, screaming over the roaring of the wind. Kolmek stood by my side, his face grim and eyes narrowed.
“Your job is to fight off anything that tries to get on the Island,” he said, looking from one face to another with rapt attention. “Nothing can stand against high-caliber rifle fire. Shoot at the face and eyes when it comes up. We’ve dealt with creatures like this before, and they will retreat if you injure them badly enough.” I had the sense of being fed a line of bullshit as my mind processed this.
“What exactly is coming up?” one of the doe-eyed security men asked. He barely looked old enough to drink, a young, muscular hulk with a Marine Corps tattoo on his neck.
“They call it Leviathan,” Mario responded. “Sometimes the rituals here and the smell of blood can draw… strange things. Leviathan is one of those. We have encountered it before. The most important thing to remember is…” His voice was suddenly drowned out by a terrible cacophony that came from the center of the black whirlpool.
A screech like the detonation of a nuclear missile shook the ground. The ocean jumped and bubbled frantically. The beach heaved and cracked, the white sands disappearing in fissures that opened up like greedy mouths underneath my feet. I lost my balance, falling forwards. The screeching continued rising into a primal roar.
A green dragon head the color of an infected wound erupted from the surface of the thrashing water, rising up dozens of feet in the air. It had two enormous slitted eyes that dilated and constricted quickly as it glowered down at us. The screeching abruptly stopped, the pointed mouth of the dragon slamming shut with a sound like a gunshot.
Within moments, another cancerous green head shot up in a blur, its skin looking as hard as stone. Ridges that looked as sharp as swords ran the length of its reptilian skull, arcing over its eyes and pointed snout. More heads erupted from the ocean until all seven heads of Leviathan loomed over us.
Not one of us fired. No one even seemed to breathe as we surveyed the beast across the no-man’s land of the white sands. The slitted eyes and yellow irises of the seven heads had a demonic hunger, a reptilian coldness. Far behind us, I heard distant screams still echoing from the auditorium where Moloch held sway.
“Fire!” Mario cried. Instantly, a cacophony of gunshots exploded all around me. I jumped up on my feet, scrambling up as the seven-headed dragon leapt forward. Thousands of gallons of saltwater streamed down its massive body as it came up on the beach. Long, black paws with bone-white talons shot out of the surging ocean, followed by a tapering tail like that of a water snake.
I brought the rifle up and emptied my magazine as fast as I could, pulling the trigger over and over as I aimed at the many slitted eyes of Leviathan. But the bullets seemed to ping harmlessly off of its hard, obsidian-like scales.
It scrabbled onto the shore, the heads coming down in a blur. Rows and rows of vampiric fangs gleamed dully in each of the mouths. One security agent was bitten in half, the spurting stump of his lower body still standing for a long moment even as the rest of the body disappeared down the throat of the dragon.
Mario ran forwards, slamming another magazine in his rifle and opening fire point-blank. One of the heads came down in a blur towards him. Its great, staring eyes exploded in a shower of blue blood and thick vitreous fluid. The dragon head pulled back, its mouth opening in a primal scream of agony.
As I reloaded, I scanned the area around me, realizing that nearly half of the security agents were either dead or critically injured. I backpedaled away, keeping my eyes on the dragon. It continuously drew forward, killing more of its enemies with every step. I turned and ran into the forest, the sounds of shattering bones and dying men ringing through the air with a sickening clarity behind me.
Once I had reached the border of the trail, I heard Mario yell, “Retreat!” behind me. But by that point, it was far too late.
***
“Hey! Wait up!” a voice whispered from behind me. I turned my head, seeing Kolmek. Spatters of drying blood covered his face and uniform. As far as I could tell, none of it was his. “Mario’s dead. They’re all dead. We need to get out of here. We need to get off the Island.”
“How?” I asked.
“Find the Savior,” he answered, panting and out of breath. “We must find him. He can get us out of here.”
“I don’t even know what the guy looks like,” I muttered. “He was wearing a goat mask.”
“You’ll know him when you see him,” Kolmek said. “His body is covered in scars. Everything except his face. Stay close to me. We need to watch each other’s backs. It’s our only chance of survival.”
***
A trail of twisted, broken bodies led from the mansion to the surrounding trails and beaches. A decapitated woman with solid gold necklaces embedded with diamonds lay in front of me. It was strange on the Island, the way oblivion and ineffable wealth coexisted side by side. But everything was deathly silent, even in the mansion’s auditorium.
“Where’s the Savior?” I asked through gritted teeth. I peeked my head into the auditorium, but nothing moved. Hundreds of smashed and bloody bodies littered the floor.
“He’s around somewhere,” Kolmek answered. We started circling the mansion, looking for any signs of life. Kolmek went in the lead. As he turned the corner, an enormous black hand with sharp claws of fingers flitted forward in a blur, wrapping itself around his chest. Kolmek gave a strangled cry as it closed around him. I heard his bones crush as a spout of blood and gore flew from his mouth and nose, as if he were a toothpaste tube being squeezed.
I backpedaled away as Moloch threw the twitching corpse aside like a discarded toy. It smashed into the wall of the mansion, exploding wetly. A human-shaped, bloody stain languidly dripped down the wall above Kolmek’s mangled body.
Moloch slowly turned his head towards me, the fiery eyes flashing with hunger. He gnashed his fangs together, taking a step forward with a leg the size and shape of a tree trunk. With every step he took, I felt the ground tremble.
“Stop!” I cried, moving away from the monstrous creature. “Why are you doing this?”
“There is no why,” he gurgled, his voice monstrous and inhumanly slow. “There is only power. The weak deserve to die. Only the strong are worthy of life.” I raised my rifle in a last-ditch effort to save myself. Moloch saw it and started running towards me, every footstep crushing the paved walkway around the mansion into rubble and dust.
I aimed for his eyes and nose, emptying the entire magazine as quickly as I could. The bullets smashed into Moloch’s face. Dark red, clotted blood dripped out of the wounds, writhing with maggots. Drops of it fell around me, landing on my hair and face. I felt the small larvae twisting all over my skin. Moloch’s blood smelled nauseating, like some combination of stinkbugs and rotting bodies. He slowed, giving a roar of pain. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but as I looked out in the direction of the beach, my heart dropped.
Leviathan was moving in our direction, the giant dragon heads looming over the trees. Quickly, it swept towards me like a dark wind.
***
“You will suffer for that, worthless slave,” Moloch growled, wiping blood from his fiery eyes with his sharp talons of fingers. A sudden idea came to me. I ran in the direction of Leviathan. Moloch followed closely at my heels, only a few steps behind me.
Leviathan slithered forward over the sands and trees, its enormous body undulating like a water snake’s. I screamed at it, an incomprehensible wail of terror. Its seven heads snapped towards me. Its slitted eyes widened as it saw Moloch.
I heard the crashing of Moloch’s footsteps stop behind me, only feet away from crushing me into a paste. His massive lungs breathed quickly, exhaling the odor of sulfur and smoke.
“Leviathan,” Moloch growled in his demonic voice. “These are my tributes.” Leviathan’s dragon heads looked straight up at the Sun and screamed in response, their many voices rising and falling in a dissonant wail. As I sprinted into the trees, Leviathan and Moloch ran at each other, colliding with an ear-splitting crash. I glanced back, seeing Moloch ripping one of the dragon heads off its neck with his sharp fingers. The head screamed as blue blood exploded from the spurting stump. After a long moment, the neck fell limply forward.
The other dragon heads bit Moloch in a unified attack. They ripped deep holes in his shoulders and arms, snapping over and over like rabid dogs. As the two eldritch monstrosities attacked each other in fierce combat, I lost sight of them, but the sounds of fighting echoed over the entire island, crashing like lightning.
***
I felt like the survivor of an Apocalypse. I couldn’t find a single other living person on the Island. Hundreds of crushed, broken and decapitated bodies surrounded me. Over the cacophony of fighting, I heard a new noise: the whirring of helicopter blades nearby. It was coming from the other side of the mansion.
Frantically, I sprinted around the other side, seeing a Black Hawk helicopter getting ready to leave. A man in black robes sat at the pilot’s seat, his green eyes gleaming and a wide smile plastered across his face. I smashed my fist into the door over and over until he opened it.
“Holy shit, you’re still alive?” he asked. I hadn’t seen this man before. He had a face like a Calvin Klein model, all sharp angles and high cheekbones, perfectly proportioned in every way. But his scalp looked melted and scarred, as if someone had thrown gasoline on his hair and ignited it. His ears were stunted, twisted growths of scar tissue. His hands, too, were covered in deep, folding burn scars.
“Are you the Savior?” I responded quickly. “Please, get me out of here.”
“They do call me that,” he said wistfully. “The Savior. Yes, I guess I am. Get in.”
***
The Savior stared at me with his strange green eyes, the color of swamps where monstrous things swam under the surface.
“Some people just need to learn the hard way,” he said. The helicopter took off into a dark night covered with bright, twinkling stars. “There is no great power without great responsibility, after all. Those of us who seek the ancient ones know it comes with a cost.” I just stared out the window, gazing down at the countless mutilated, broken bodies that littered the beach.
Below us, the face of a bull stared up with eyes of fiery cyclones. The broken, still body of Leviathan lay at his feet. As we made it over the great waters of the Pacific Ocean, the bull-god raised a hand and waved. At that moment, I thought I could almost see a hurricane of translucent souls circling around him, spiraling up into the sky.

After high school, having no better ideas, I joined the Navy SEALs. I never really liked any of it, but it was a job, after all. I loved the guns and airplanes and grenades, but having to run all the time while some scumbag with a chip on his shoulder yells in my face isn’t my idea of fun.
Things got a lot more interesting after my term of service ended. I still had a high-security clearance, so I used it to take temporary jobs as a mercenary, a hired gun. I did some stints in Iraq with Blackwater, where they set me out in the middle of the desert. A watchtower and oil refinery loomed over the burning sands. Along with a few other guys, they told us, “Guard this area with your life.” While better than the SEALs, working for Blackwater was extremely boring. The other mercenaries and I would mostly just chainsmoke cigarettes and drink coffee all night, staring out across the dead, empty desert.
Over time, I worked my way up. Things started to get more interesting when a job offer arrived in my email one freezing cold winter’s morning. This is what it said.
“Mr. Chase,
“I am the head of security for a private group of entrepreneurs and investors. Through some mutual contacts, I have heard of your professionalism and experience. We are currently putting together a small crew to guard a private event on [REDACTED] Island out in the Pacific Ocean that will run from January 9th to January 26th. Would you be interested in this job? The pay rate is $900 a day.
“Once you are on the island, it will be impossible to leave until the period of employment has ended. If you are interested, please respond to this email as soon as possible.
“Sincerely,
“Mario Antonin, Head of Security.”
I was working piecemeal jobs like this one at the time, but none of them were paying that well. At most, I would usually get $350 to $500 a day, which was still good money when I was working seven days a week until the job finished. I instantly responded and said that yes, I was interested. In response, they sent me a non-disclosure agreement that was the size of a small novel that I had to sign.
That was how I found myself on a private jet, flying out to an island in the middle of the vast blue ocean. I was never told the coordinates of the island or saw it on a map. It was all kept very secret.
A few hours later, we landed on a private airstrip. I looked out the window of the jet, seeing the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching off to the horizon in every direction. Below me stood an island with palm trees and sandy white beaches. An enormous Victorian mansion loomed directly in the center of it all. The mansion was painted black and looked like something straight out of a horror movie. It had no windows, and the turrets spiraled into blade-like points.
That was my first inkling that something might not be quite right about this trip.
***
As the stairs from the private jet descended, I looked out on this strange new world. Employees waited to greet us, looking like beaten dogs. Some had their heads down, their eyes blankly scanning the ground. Most of them were women wearing red dresses, reminding me of stewardesses on a plane. The jet strip was surrounded by palm trees and tropical brush. The chirping of insects sounded all around us, high and resonant.
I saw a strange patch engraved on all of the employees’ uniforms and jackets. It looked almost like a stick figure drawing of a man, the bottom of its body ending in a C. Its arms were long and jointed, almost spidery. Three symbols like repeated iron crosses connected to the left side of its body in a line. I wondered if it was the logo of some company. I put it out of my mind for now, but I would see that symbol again all over the island, painted on the sides of the mansion and even cut into the trees with a knife. It would only be later that night that I realized its connection to Moloch.
“Good day, sir, and welcome to the Island,” the server on my left said with glassy eyes and a fake smile plastered across her face. They all looked up at once, but it was like the workers all looked through me rather than at me. Their eyes looked flat and dead, like the painted-on eyes of a doll.
“The Island, huh?” I asked, curious. “They wouldn’t tell me where I was going. They said it was a secret. Is that what you call it?” The woman just nodded, the doll-like smile never leaving her lips.
“Officially, this island is unnamed and uninhabited,” the woman said. “In fact, all traces of it have been scrubbed from the internet. You won’t find it on Google Maps or in any publicly available satellite imagery.” She leaned forward towards me with heavily mascaraed eyes and ruby-red lipstick slashed across her lips. “This is a very special place. Only very special people are allowed here. You should be honored to work here under our Savior.”
“I hope you’re talking about Jesus or something,” I said jokingly. She just smiled blankly and motioned me forward.
“Just follow that trail for a few hundred feet-” she said, pointing at an opening in the palm trees where logs were laid down horizontally over the muggy jungle- “and you’ll find the mansion. Good luck!” I thought it was a somewhat strange thing to say, wishing a random stranger good luck.
But, by the end of that night, I realized that simply to make it off this island alive, I would need lots of it.
***
I followed the woman’s directions to the back of the brutalist mansion. A heavy metal door stood there with a small bullet-proof window built in the top. A tanned, Spanish face glowered out at me then rapidly drew back and disappeared. A few heartbeats later, the door slid to the side with a grinding of hidden gears.
The head of security at the Island was a heavily-tattooed ex-Marine named Mario. He wore a dark Kevlar vest over a black outfit, making him look like a walking shadow. I found the security had their own private complex in the mansion as he showed me around the site. Hundreds of hidden cameras covered every angle of the mansion and the surrounding parts of the island. Dozens of black-clad security agents swarmed over the screens, checking the monitors and computers constantly.
“Quite a set-up you have here,” I said to Mario, nodding at him. He smacked me on the shoulder, giving a confident grin.
“Money is no issue here, Richard,” he responded. “Security is paramount. There are things on this island that could rip apart the world if they ever escaped.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Like what?” I asked. “Nuclear weapons or something?” He laughed at that.
“You’ll see for yourself tonight,” he said, his dark eyes flashing with something cold and alien.
***
Mario led me and a couple other new hired guns around the Island. The place was certainly strange. It reminded me of some combination of a secret black-ops site and a playboy billionaire’s private heaven. All of the doors in the mansion looked like they were made of thick steel. They had wheels that would spin, like those on a submarine door. The mansion also had no windows at all that I could see, except for the small, shatter-proof glass openings on the steel doors. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, however. I couldn’t resist asking him about a couple small things, however- or at least, they seemed small to me at the time.
“What are those hatchways?” I asked Mario, pointing to rectangular covers built into the concrete walkway. They had heavy handles. “Are those manholes or something?”
“There are tunnels under the Island,” he responded vaguely. “Just for maintenance and security, you understand.”
“Wow, this place is certainly… well-developed,” I said. We came out through a grove of palm trees. A stone walkway led down to a white beach. Dozens of yachts were moored all across the shore, some of them looking like they must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“There’s a lot of money and power here,” Mario said. “That’s why it’s important you never talk about what you see here. These are the people who control the world, the ones behind the government and the media. Not the elected officials who the people see, but the actual power.”
“Like who?” I asked. “You mean the Rothschilds and Soros?” He laughed again, a sarcastic, grinding laugh that grated my nerves.
“Trust me, the truly powerful ones don’t even have public personas. If you know their name, then they’re just one of the puppets.” I just shook my head at that, then asked the real question that had been bothering me since I first arrived here.
“Who is the Savior?” I asked. “Is that some codename or something?” Mario froze in place.
“He’s the one who runs everything here,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking around nervously. “But don’t be mentioning that kind of shit. You’ll probably see him tonight anyway. He’s the one who runs the show. He’ll be on the stage in his normal outfit.”
***
By the end of the day, I was suited up like the rest of the security staff, wearing the pure black pants and shirt with the symbol of Moloch engraved over the heart. Hundreds of the world’s most famous politicians, actors, businessmen and artists had gathered, streaming in the front doors with a soft, diffident susurration.
I stood by the open doorway of a side exit with an AR-15 and full body armor, next to one other soldier. They had also given me a sidearm. Every entrance or exit was manned by at least two armed men. The security at this place was some of the most intense I had ever seen. Beyond the door, there were rows and rows of the most comfortable seats, all gathered in a semi-circle around a massive stage made of pure mahogany. Blood-red curtains stood closed at the front of the room, concealing their secrets- for now, at least.
“Hail Satan!” I heard the elites cry inside in unison. I didn’t want to look in at the rows of high-ranking politicians, celebrities, influencers and artists, but my curiosity was high. I peeked around the corner of the stone archway, seeing the red curtains on the stage drawing apart. I saw one of my favorite actors standing in the front row, clapping excitedly and jumping up and down.
The crowd cheered as a naked female strapped to an obsidian altar lay there. She was beautiful and blonde, probably no older than twenty with the face of a supermodel. Her mouth was gagged, her arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. Thin leather cords were tied around her wrists and ankles, biting deeply into the skin. Her eyes rolled wildly as she shook her head from side to side. She froze, and her eyes met mine for a brief moment. I saw the pleading expression there, the mortal terror and absolute horror.
A man in a goat mask wearing black robes slunk out from the side of the stage, carrying a wavy silver dagger engraved with strange symbols. The crowd erupted into a primal roar of pleasure and excitement that sounded like it came from one monstrous mouth.
“Worthy is the Lamb!” the man in the goat mask screamed with electronic amplification. He had a deep voice, as if he had rocks rolling around in his throat. The crowd roared and clapped. Scattered cries of “Hail Lucifer!” and “Ave Satanas!” echoed down the massive auditorium.
“Hey, pay attention,” the other security agent at my side said in a thick Finnish accent. He was a tall Scandinavian-looking guy named Kolmek. “You’re not getting paid to watch the show, new guy.” I tried to rip my gaze away from the stage, but it held my attention with an obsessive horror.
“The burnt bones of children and women have been offered to the ancient ones, to Moloch,” the man on the stage cried. “Under our feet, the burnt bodies of hundreds lay dreaming. This victim will be the 666th. Her blood will bring about the Gnosis that we seek, the direct experience of the divine held by the gods, by Lucifer and Moloch and Baal…” The roaring of the crowd temporarily drowned out his electronically-magnified voice. “Tonight, we will rip open the veil!”
I had stopped watching the show, instead staring blankly out at the beach and palm trees. At that moment, another black-clad security agent came up to my partner, whispered something in his ear, then immediately disappeared, heading off back in the direction of the main security office. Kolmek shook his head grimly.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move from this door no matter what. And pay attention.” I nodded and watched as he walked off in the same direction.
I immediately took the opportunity to continue watching the ceremony. I had missed something important, apparently. The woman now laid dead on the sacrificial table, a gaping hole in her chest. Blood spurted from the crater as the man in the goat mask held her beating heart grasped tightly in his hand, letting the blood stream down his naked fingers. The crowd cheered with a rising bloodlust and insanity. Most of them were standing, their eyes gleaming and wide with fanatical adoration. The entire spectacle reminded me of some kind of ancient Aztec ritual.
As the woman’s sightless eyes stared vacantly up in death, the man in a goat mask pulled out a can of gasoline. The clear liquid gurgled as he up-ended the canister over her pale, bloodless face, over her naked stomach and long legs. A moment later, he lit a match and dropped it. I heard the whooshing of the flames as they rose up.
The crowd went deathly silent as they watched the rippling flames. The man in the goat mask began chanting in some strange language I had never heard before. It sounded Semitic, but I knew it wasn’t Arabic or Hebrew. I felt something like electricity ripple through the air, almost like a feeling of falling pressure before a storm. I looked down at the hairs on my arms, seeing them rise up. I looked back up at the stage, and my eyes widened in horror.
The flaming body of the sacrificial victim had started to morph before my eyes and the eyes of the crowd. The dripping, blackening flesh jumped up and down, as if there were rats trapped in her body trying to escape the fire. There was a deafening hissing as if thousands of snakes were being burned alive.
The dead woman’s arms jerked up, the skin splitting open as if she had seams running along her skin. Something dark and muscular with curving, black talons ripped its way out of the dead, burning flesh. Behind it, a head appeared with long, curving horns and eyes that spun with whorls of fire. It looked like the offspring of a bull and a demon. Its imposing body rose up from the inferno, appearing like magic from the solid stone. It raised itself to its full height, looming over the crowd. The last of the woman’s blood hissed and boiled away, her flesh dissolving into ashes.
“Behold, Moloch rises!” the man in the goat mask screamed in a fanatical voice. The crowd’s cheering had stopped, though. Many of the faces in the crowd looked chalk-white with terror. The bull-god surveyed the crowd, its horns nearly scraping the ceiling twenty feet above the stage.
At that moment, I knew death was on its way with eyes of fire and a grin like a skull, ready to reap a field of human bodies.
***
I heard running behind me, but I didn’t dare turn away from the horrific sight in front of me. The last of the fire’s embers died, sending up thin wisps of gray smoke that spiraled around the bull-god’s monstrous face. Moloch stood as still as a statue, and if it weren’t for one thing, I might’ve thought it was some sort of sculpture or art project. He had two nostrils like a serpent’s. As his great lungs inhaled, the smoke billowed in and out of his mouth and nose.
Some of the people at the edges of the crowd had gotten up, hurrying towards the doors. Moloch’s head ratcheted to face them, his fiery eyes narrowing into slits.
“Do not leave!” the man in the goat mask pleaded. “Those who have fear are not worthy of life. Do not prove yourselves unworthy of life!” As the first of the fleeing men and women got to within a few steps of the door, Moloch gave a primal roar. In a blur of primal strength, he reached down and ripped the blackened sacrificial altar off the stage. It ripped from the wooden stage with a tremendous crack like a bullwhip. He hurled the heavy mass of stone at those heading towards the opposite exit from the one I guarded.
I watched it curve through the air. The people started screaming and clawing to escape as it smashed down on their heads with a grating crash. I could feel the floor shake from where I stood outside. Blood exploded from their smashed bodies. I saw arms and legs jerking and seizing under the heavy stone, but within a few moments, they slowed and then stopped.
Others were running towards the door I guarded, but Moloch leapt off the stage in a blur. In a few bounding steps, he reached the pale, terrified faces on the other side of the threshold. His massive clawed hand came down. I heard bones shatter as blood sprayed my face and the wall. Bone splinters and pieces of brain exploded from the screaming bodies. I backpedaled, wiping at my eyes, trying to get the blood off so I could see. No one had told me what to do in this situation. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot that massive abomination, or if this was all just part of the show.
“Richard!” a familiar voice cried from behind me. Panic oozed from every word. I spun, seeing Mario and Kolmek standing side by side, their pupils dilated and expressions grim.
“We have a major problem.” It was Mario. I recognized that voice, the one that sounded as if he had been gargling with rocks.
“I know,” I said, holding my rifle tightly. I pointed behind me at the scene of rampant death and destruction.
I had seen bloodshed and war before, but this was different. The Island itself seemed to feel it. The wind, which had been calm when I first landed, now whipped the Island in fast, circular currents. The breeze smelled of burnt matches and coppery blood. The static electricity which had caused the hairs on my arms to rise rippled over everything with tiny blue flashes, increasing in power by the second.
“No, no, not Moloch,” Kolmek said, looking much calmer than I felt. “The Savior lets Moloch thin the herd every year.”
“It’s Leviathan,” Mario continued grimly, “the beast from the waters. The smell of blood is drawing it from the depths of the ocean. We picked up the first blips on radar a few minutes ago. When it gets here, it won’t stop until everything is rubble. It will kill every single person on the Island.”
“All security personnel must report to the south beach immediately,” a cool robotic voice cried out over hidden loudspeakers all over the Island. The screaming from the auditorium had quieted behind me. I was afraid to look inside.
“There it is,” Kolmek said, his head jerking up as the emergency alert read. He motioned for me to follow. “It’s time to fight.”
***
We sprinted over curving trails of smooth logs between deathly quiet forests. All the insects and birds had gone silent. Ahead of us, the palm trees opened up onto the Pacific Ocean. But it was no longer a beautiful tropical blue. A black, swirling whirlpool like an ulcerous wound had opened up on its surface. It stretched hundreds of feet across, drawing closer to the shore by the second. Dead fish, sharks, dolphins, squids and even whales spun in the filthy, dark water.
Twenty black-clad security agents waited for the three of us on the beach, their eyes wide, their faces pale with terror. Like myself, they all had AR-15s and Glock 22s with extra magazines for both. I guess the Glock might be useful for blowing my brains out as a last resort if some beast from Hell rose out of the simmering waters, but I didn’t think it would stop anything from another dimension.
The clouds swirled overhead in a thick curtain as black as smoke. Flashes of blue lightning detonated every couple seconds. Mario raised his hands, screaming over the roaring of the wind. Kolmek stood by my side, his face grim and eyes narrowed.
“Your job is to fight off anything that tries to get on the Island,” he said, looking from one face to another with rapt attention. “Nothing can stand against high-caliber rifle fire. Shoot at the face and eyes when it comes up. We’ve dealt with creatures like this before, and they will retreat if you injure them badly enough.” I had the sense of being fed a line of bullshit as my mind processed this.
“What exactly is coming up?” one of the doe-eyed security men asked. He barely looked old enough to drink, a young, muscular hulk with a Marine Corps tattoo on his neck.
“They call it Leviathan,” Mario responded. “Sometimes the rituals here and the smell of blood can draw… strange things. Leviathan is one of those. We have encountered it before. The most important thing to remember is…” His voice was suddenly drowned out by a terrible cacophony that came from the center of the black whirlpool.
A screech like the detonation of a nuclear missile shook the ground. The ocean jumped and bubbled frantically. The beach heaved and cracked, the white sands disappearing in fissures that opened up like greedy mouths underneath my feet. I lost my balance, falling forwards. The screeching continued rising into a primal roar.
A green dragon head the color of an infected wound erupted from the surface of the thrashing water, rising up dozens of feet in the air. It had two enormous slitted eyes that dilated and constricted quickly as it glowered down at us. The screeching abruptly stopped, the pointed mouth of the dragon slamming shut with a sound like a gunshot.
Within moments, another cancerous green head shot up in a blur, its skin looking as hard as stone. Ridges that looked as sharp as swords ran the length of its reptilian skull, arcing over its eyes and pointed snout. More heads erupted from the ocean until all seven heads of Leviathan loomed over us.
Not one of us fired. No one even seemed to breathe as we surveyed the beast across the no-man’s land of the white sands. The slitted eyes and yellow irises of the seven heads had a demonic hunger, a reptilian coldness. Far behind us, I heard distant screams still echoing from the auditorium where Moloch held sway.
“Fire!” Mario cried. Instantly, a cacophony of gunshots exploded all around me. I jumped up on my feet, scrambling up as the seven-headed dragon leapt forward. Thousands of gallons of saltwater streamed down its massive body as it came up on the beach. Long, black paws with bone-white talons shot out of the surging ocean, followed by a tapering tail like that of a water snake.
I brought the rifle up and emptied my magazine as fast as I could, pulling the trigger over and over as I aimed at the many slitted eyes of Leviathan. But the bullets seemed to ping harmlessly off of its hard, obsidian-like scales.
It scrabbled onto the shore, the heads coming down in a blur. Rows and rows of vampiric fangs gleamed dully in each of the mouths. One security agent was bitten in half, the spurting stump of his lower body still standing for a long moment even as the rest of the body disappeared down the throat of the dragon.
Mario ran forwards, slamming another magazine in his rifle and opening fire point-blank. One of the heads came down in a blur towards him. Its great, staring eyes exploded in a shower of blue blood and thick vitreous fluid. The dragon head pulled back, its mouth opening in a primal scream of agony.
As I reloaded, I scanned the area around me, realizing that nearly half of the security agents were either dead or critically injured. I backpedaled away, keeping my eyes on the dragon. It continuously drew forward, killing more of its enemies with every step. I turned and ran into the forest, the sounds of shattering bones and dying men ringing through the air with a sickening clarity behind me.
Once I had reached the border of the trail, I heard Mario yell, “Retreat!” behind me. But by that point, it was far too late.
***
“Hey! Wait up!” a voice whispered from behind me. I turned my head, seeing Kolmek. Spatters of drying blood covered his face and uniform. As far as I could tell, none of it was his. “Mario’s dead. They’re all dead. We need to get out of here. We need to get off the Island.”
“How?” I asked.
“Find the Savior,” he answered, panting and out of breath. “We must find him. He can get us out of here.”
“I don’t even know what the guy looks like,” I muttered. “He was wearing a goat mask.”
“You’ll know him when you see him,” Kolmek said. “His body is covered in scars. Everything except his face. Stay close to me. We need to watch each other’s backs. It’s our only chance of survival.”
***
A trail of twisted, broken bodies led from the mansion to the surrounding trails and beaches. A decapitated woman with solid gold necklaces embedded with diamonds lay in front of me. It was strange on the Island, the way oblivion and ineffable wealth coexisted side by side. But everything was deathly silent, even in the mansion’s auditorium.
“Where’s the Savior?” I asked through gritted teeth. I peeked my head into the auditorium, but nothing moved. Hundreds of smashed and bloody bodies littered the floor.
“He’s around somewhere,” Kolmek answered. We started circling the mansion, looking for any signs of life. Kolmek went in the lead. As he turned the corner, an enormous black hand with sharp claws of fingers flitted forward in a blur, wrapping itself around his chest. Kolmek gave a strangled cry as it closed around him. I heard his bones crush as a spout of blood and gore flew from his mouth and nose, as if he were a toothpaste tube being squeezed.
I backpedaled away as Moloch threw the twitching corpse aside like a discarded toy. It smashed into the wall of the mansion, exploding wetly. A human-shaped, bloody stain languidly dripped down the wall above Kolmek’s mangled body.
Moloch slowly turned his head towards me, the fiery eyes flashing with hunger. He gnashed his fangs together, taking a step forward with a leg the size and shape of a tree trunk. With every step he took, I felt the ground tremble.
“Stop!” I cried, moving away from the monstrous creature. “Why are you doing this?”
“There is no why,” he gurgled, his voice monstrous and inhumanly slow. “There is only power. The weak deserve to die. Only the strong are worthy of life.” I raised my rifle in a last-ditch effort to save myself. Moloch saw it and started running towards me, every footstep crushing the paved walkway around the mansion into rubble and dust.
I aimed for his eyes and nose, emptying the entire magazine as quickly as I could. The bullets smashed into Moloch’s face. Dark red, clotted blood dripped out of the wounds, writhing with maggots. Drops of it fell around me, landing on my hair and face. I felt the small larvae twisting all over my skin. Moloch’s blood smelled nauseating, like some combination of stinkbugs and rotting bodies. He slowed, giving a roar of pain. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but as I looked out in the direction of the beach, my heart dropped.
Leviathan was moving in our direction, the giant dragon heads looming over the trees. Quickly, it swept towards me like a dark wind.
***
“You will suffer for that, worthless slave,” Moloch growled, wiping blood from his fiery eyes with his sharp talons of fingers. A sudden idea came to me. I ran in the direction of Leviathan. Moloch followed closely at my heels, only a few steps behind me.
Leviathan slithered forward over the sands and trees, its enormous body undulating like a water snake’s. I screamed at it, an incomprehensible wail of terror. Its seven heads snapped towards me. Its slitted eyes widened as it saw Moloch.
I heard the crashing of Moloch’s footsteps stop behind me, only feet away from crushing me into a paste. His massive lungs breathed quickly, exhaling the odor of sulfur and smoke.
“Leviathan,” Moloch growled in his demonic voice. “These are my tributes.” Leviathan’s dragon heads looked straight up at the Sun and screamed in response, their many voices rising and falling in a dissonant wail. As I sprinted into the trees, Leviathan and Moloch ran at each other, colliding with an ear-splitting crash. I glanced back, seeing Moloch ripping one of the dragon heads off its neck with his sharp fingers. The head screamed as blue blood exploded from the spurting stump. After a long moment, the neck fell limply forward.
The other dragon heads bit Moloch in a unified attack. They ripped deep holes in his shoulders and arms, snapping over and over like rabid dogs. As the two eldritch monstrosities attacked each other in fierce combat, I lost sight of them, but the sounds of fighting echoed over the entire island, crashing like lightning.
***
I felt like the survivor of an Apocalypse. I couldn’t find a single other living person on the Island. Hundreds of crushed, broken and decapitated bodies surrounded me. Over the cacophony of fighting, I heard a new noise: the whirring of helicopter blades nearby. It was coming from the other side of the mansion.
Frantically, I sprinted around the other side, seeing a Black Hawk helicopter getting ready to leave. A man in black robes sat at the pilot’s seat, his green eyes gleaming and a wide smile plastered across his face. I smashed my fist into the door over and over until he opened it.
“Holy shit, you’re still alive?” he asked. I hadn’t seen this man before. He had a face like a Calvin Klein model, all sharp angles and high cheekbones, perfectly proportioned in every way. But his scalp looked melted and scarred, as if someone had thrown gasoline on his hair and ignited it. His ears were stunted, twisted growths of scar tissue. His hands, too, were covered in deep, folding burn scars.
“Are you the Savior?” I responded quickly. “Please, get me out of here.”
“They do call me that,” he said wistfully. “The Savior. Yes, I guess I am. Get in.”
***
The Savior stared at me with his strange green eyes, the color of swamps where monstrous things swam under the surface.
“Some people just need to learn the hard way,” he said. The helicopter took off into a dark night covered with bright, twinkling stars. “There is no great power without great responsibility, after all. Those of us who seek the ancient ones know it comes with a cost.” I just stared out the window, gazing down at the countless mutilated, broken bodies that littered the beach.
Below us, the face of a bull stared up with eyes of fiery cyclones. The broken, still body of Leviathan lay at his feet. As we made it over the great waters of the Pacific Ocean, the bull-god raised a hand and waved. At that moment, I thought I could almost see a hurricane of translucent souls circling around him, spiraling up into the sky.

After high school, having no better ideas, I joined the Navy SEALs. I never really liked any of it, but it was a job, after all. I loved the guns and airplanes and grenades, but having to run all the time while some scumbag with a chip on his shoulder yells in my face isn’t my idea of fun.
Things got a lot more interesting after my term of service ended. I still had a high-security clearance, so I used it to take temporary jobs as a mercenary, a hired gun. I did some stints in Iraq with Blackwater, where they set me out in the middle of the desert. A watchtower and oil refinery loomed over the burning sands. Along with a few other guys, they told us, “Guard this area with your life.” While better than the SEALs, working for Blackwater was extremely boring. The other mercenaries and I would mostly just chainsmoke cigarettes and drink coffee all night, staring out across the dead, empty desert.
Over time, I worked my way up. Things started to get more interesting when a job offer arrived in my email one freezing cold winter’s morning. This is what it said.
“Mr. Chase,
“I am the head of security for a private group of entrepreneurs and investors. Through some mutual contacts, I have heard of your professionalism and experience. We are currently putting together a small crew to guard a private event on [REDACTED] Island out in the Pacific Ocean that will run from January 9th to January 26th. Would you be interested in this job? The pay rate is $900 a day.
“Once you are on the island, it will be impossible to leave until the period of employment has ended. If you are interested, please respond to this email as soon as possible.
“Sincerely,
“Mario Antonin, Head of Security.”
I was working piecemeal jobs like this one at the time, but none of them were paying that well. At most, I would usually get $350 to $500 a day, which was still good money when I was working seven days a week until the job finished. I instantly responded and said that yes, I was interested. In response, they sent me a non-disclosure agreement that was the size of a small novel that I had to sign.
That was how I found myself on a private jet, flying out to an island in the middle of the vast blue ocean. I was never told the coordinates of the island or saw it on a map. It was all kept very secret.
A few hours later, we landed on a private airstrip. I looked out the window of the jet, seeing the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching off to the horizon in every direction. Below me stood an island with palm trees and sandy white beaches. An enormous Victorian mansion loomed directly in the center of it all. The mansion was painted black and looked like something straight out of a horror movie. It had no windows, and the turrets spiraled into blade-like points.
That was my first inkling that something might not be quite right about this trip.
***
As the stairs from the private jet descended, I looked out on this strange new world. Employees waited to greet us, looking like beaten dogs. Some had their heads down, their eyes blankly scanning the ground. Most of them were women wearing red dresses, reminding me of stewardesses on a plane. The jet strip was surrounded by palm trees and tropical brush. The chirping of insects sounded all around us, high and resonant.
I saw a strange patch engraved on all of the employees’ uniforms and jackets. It looked almost like a stick figure drawing of a man, the bottom of its body ending in a C. Its arms were long and jointed, almost spidery. Three symbols like repeated iron crosses connected to the left side of its body in a line. I wondered if it was the logo of some company. I put it out of my mind for now, but I would see that symbol again all over the island, painted on the sides of the mansion and even cut into the trees with a knife. It would only be later that night that I realized its connection to Moloch.
“Good day, sir, and welcome to the Island,” the server on my left said with glassy eyes and a fake smile plastered across her face. They all looked up at once, but it was like the workers all looked through me rather than at me. Their eyes looked flat and dead, like the painted-on eyes of a doll.
“The Island, huh?” I asked, curious. “They wouldn’t tell me where I was going. They said it was a secret. Is that what you call it?” The woman just nodded, the doll-like smile never leaving her lips.
“Officially, this island is unnamed and uninhabited,” the woman said. “In fact, all traces of it have been scrubbed from the internet. You won’t find it on Google Maps or in any publicly available satellite imagery.” She leaned forward towards me with heavily mascaraed eyes and ruby-red lipstick slashed across her lips. “This is a very special place. Only very special people are allowed here. You should be honored to work here under our Savior.”
“I hope you’re talking about Jesus or something,” I said jokingly. She just smiled blankly and motioned me forward.
“Just follow that trail for a few hundred feet-” she said, pointing at an opening in the palm trees where logs were laid down horizontally over the muggy jungle- “and you’ll find the mansion. Good luck!” I thought it was a somewhat strange thing to say, wishing a random stranger good luck.
But, by the end of that night, I realized that simply to make it off this island alive, I would need lots of it.
***
I followed the woman’s directions to the back of the brutalist mansion. A heavy metal door stood there with a small bullet-proof window built in the top. A tanned, Spanish face glowered out at me then rapidly drew back and disappeared. A few heartbeats later, the door slid to the side with a grinding of hidden gears.
The head of security at the Island was a heavily-tattooed ex-Marine named Mario. He wore a dark Kevlar vest over a black outfit, making him look like a walking shadow. I found the security had their own private complex in the mansion as he showed me around the site. Hundreds of hidden cameras covered every angle of the mansion and the surrounding parts of the island. Dozens of black-clad security agents swarmed over the screens, checking the monitors and computers constantly.
“Quite a set-up you have here,” I said to Mario, nodding at him. He smacked me on the shoulder, giving a confident grin.
“Money is no issue here, Richard,” he responded. “Security is paramount. There are things on this island that could rip apart the world if they ever escaped.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Like what?” I asked. “Nuclear weapons or something?” He laughed at that.
“You’ll see for yourself tonight,” he said, his dark eyes flashing with something cold and alien.
***
Mario led me and a couple other new hired guns around the Island. The place was certainly strange. It reminded me of some combination of a secret black-ops site and a playboy billionaire’s private heaven. All of the doors in the mansion looked like they were made of thick steel. They had wheels that would spin, like those on a submarine door. The mansion also had no windows at all that I could see, except for the small, shatter-proof glass openings on the steel doors. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, however. I couldn’t resist asking him about a couple small things, however- or at least, they seemed small to me at the time.
“What are those hatchways?” I asked Mario, pointing to rectangular covers built into the concrete walkway. They had heavy handles. “Are those manholes or something?”
“There are tunnels under the Island,” he responded vaguely. “Just for maintenance and security, you understand.”
“Wow, this place is certainly… well-developed,” I said. We came out through a grove of palm trees. A stone walkway led down to a white beach. Dozens of yachts were moored all across the shore, some of them looking like they must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“There’s a lot of money and power here,” Mario said. “That’s why it’s important you never talk about what you see here. These are the people who control the world, the ones behind the government and the media. Not the elected officials who the people see, but the actual power.”
“Like who?” I asked. “You mean the Rothschilds and Soros?” He laughed again, a sarcastic, grinding laugh that grated my nerves.
“Trust me, the truly powerful ones don’t even have public personas. If you know their name, then they’re just one of the puppets.” I just shook my head at that, then asked the real question that had been bothering me since I first arrived here.
“Who is the Savior?” I asked. “Is that some codename or something?” Mario froze in place.
“He’s the one who runs everything here,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking around nervously. “But don’t be mentioning that kind of shit. You’ll probably see him tonight anyway. He’s the one who runs the show. He’ll be on the stage in his normal outfit.”
***
By the end of the day, I was suited up like the rest of the security staff, wearing the pure black pants and shirt with the symbol of Moloch engraved over the heart. Hundreds of the world’s most famous politicians, actors, businessmen and artists had gathered, streaming in the front doors with a soft, diffident susurration.
I stood by the open doorway of a side exit with an AR-15 and full body armor, next to one other soldier. They had also given me a sidearm. Every entrance or exit was manned by at least two armed men. The security at this place was some of the most intense I had ever seen. Beyond the door, there were rows and rows of the most comfortable seats, all gathered in a semi-circle around a massive stage made of pure mahogany. Blood-red curtains stood closed at the front of the room, concealing their secrets- for now, at least.
“Hail Satan!” I heard the elites cry inside in unison. I didn’t want to look in at the rows of high-ranking politicians, celebrities, influencers and artists, but my curiosity was high. I peeked around the corner of the stone archway, seeing the red curtains on the stage drawing apart. I saw one of my favorite actors standing in the front row, clapping excitedly and jumping up and down.
The crowd cheered as a naked female strapped to an obsidian altar lay there. She was beautiful and blonde, probably no older than twenty with the face of a supermodel. Her mouth was gagged, her arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. Thin leather cords were tied around her wrists and ankles, biting deeply into the skin. Her eyes rolled wildly as she shook her head from side to side. She froze, and her eyes met mine for a brief moment. I saw the pleading expression there, the mortal terror and absolute horror.
A man in a goat mask wearing black robes slunk out from the side of the stage, carrying a wavy silver dagger engraved with strange symbols. The crowd erupted into a primal roar of pleasure and excitement that sounded like it came from one monstrous mouth.
“Worthy is the Lamb!” the man in the goat mask screamed with electronic amplification. He had a deep voice, as if he had rocks rolling around in his throat. The crowd roared and clapped. Scattered cries of “Hail Lucifer!” and “Ave Satanas!” echoed down the massive auditorium.
“Hey, pay attention,” the other security agent at my side said in a thick Finnish accent. He was a tall Scandinavian-looking guy named Kolmek. “You’re not getting paid to watch the show, new guy.” I tried to rip my gaze away from the stage, but it held my attention with an obsessive horror.
“The burnt bones of children and women have been offered to the ancient ones, to Moloch,” the man on the stage cried. “Under our feet, the burnt bodies of hundreds lay dreaming. This victim will be the 666th. Her blood will bring about the Gnosis that we seek, the direct experience of the divine held by the gods, by Lucifer and Moloch and Baal…” The roaring of the crowd temporarily drowned out his electronically-magnified voice. “Tonight, we will rip open the veil!”
I had stopped watching the show, instead staring blankly out at the beach and palm trees. At that moment, another black-clad security agent came up to my partner, whispered something in his ear, then immediately disappeared, heading off back in the direction of the main security office. Kolmek shook his head grimly.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move from this door no matter what. And pay attention.” I nodded and watched as he walked off in the same direction.
I immediately took the opportunity to continue watching the ceremony. I had missed something important, apparently. The woman now laid dead on the sacrificial table, a gaping hole in her chest. Blood spurted from the crater as the man in the goat mask held her beating heart grasped tightly in his hand, letting the blood stream down his naked fingers. The crowd cheered with a rising bloodlust and insanity. Most of them were standing, their eyes gleaming and wide with fanatical adoration. The entire spectacle reminded me of some kind of ancient Aztec ritual.
As the woman’s sightless eyes stared vacantly up in death, the man in a goat mask pulled out a can of gasoline. The clear liquid gurgled as he up-ended the canister over her pale, bloodless face, over her naked stomach and long legs. A moment later, he lit a match and dropped it. I heard the whooshing of the flames as they rose up.
The crowd went deathly silent as they watched the rippling flames. The man in the goat mask began chanting in some strange language I had never heard before. It sounded Semitic, but I knew it wasn’t Arabic or Hebrew. I felt something like electricity ripple through the air, almost like a feeling of falling pressure before a storm. I looked down at the hairs on my arms, seeing them rise up. I looked back up at the stage, and my eyes widened in horror.
The flaming body of the sacrificial victim had started to morph before my eyes and the eyes of the crowd. The dripping, blackening flesh jumped up and down, as if there were rats trapped in her body trying to escape the fire. There was a deafening hissing as if thousands of snakes were being burned alive.
The dead woman’s arms jerked up, the skin splitting open as if she had seams running along her skin. Something dark and muscular with curving, black talons ripped its way out of the dead, burning flesh. Behind it, a head appeared with long, curving horns and eyes that spun with whorls of fire. It looked like the offspring of a bull and a demon. Its imposing body rose up from the inferno, appearing like magic from the solid stone. It raised itself to its full height, looming over the crowd. The last of the woman’s blood hissed and boiled away, her flesh dissolving into ashes.
“Behold, Moloch rises!” the man in the goat mask screamed in a fanatical voice. The crowd’s cheering had stopped, though. Many of the faces in the crowd looked chalk-white with terror. The bull-god surveyed the crowd, its horns nearly scraping the ceiling twenty feet above the stage.
At that moment, I knew death was on its way with eyes of fire and a grin like a skull, ready to reap a field of human bodies.
***
I heard running behind me, but I didn’t dare turn away from the horrific sight in front of me. The last of the fire’s embers died, sending up thin wisps of gray smoke that spiraled around the bull-god’s monstrous face. Moloch stood as still as a statue, and if it weren’t for one thing, I might’ve thought it was some sort of sculpture or art project. He had two nostrils like a serpent’s. As his great lungs inhaled, the smoke billowed in and out of his mouth and nose.
Some of the people at the edges of the crowd had gotten up, hurrying towards the doors. Moloch’s head ratcheted to face them, his fiery eyes narrowing into slits.
“Do not leave!” the man in the goat mask pleaded. “Those who have fear are not worthy of life. Do not prove yourselves unworthy of life!” As the first of the fleeing men and women got to within a few steps of the door, Moloch gave a primal roar. In a blur of primal strength, he reached down and ripped the blackened sacrificial altar off the stage. It ripped from the wooden stage with a tremendous crack like a bullwhip. He hurled the heavy mass of stone at those heading towards the opposite exit from the one I guarded.
I watched it curve through the air. The people started screaming and clawing to escape as it smashed down on their heads with a grating crash. I could feel the floor shake from where I stood outside. Blood exploded from their smashed bodies. I saw arms and legs jerking and seizing under the heavy stone, but within a few moments, they slowed and then stopped.
Others were running towards the door I guarded, but Moloch leapt off the stage in a blur. In a few bounding steps, he reached the pale, terrified faces on the other side of the threshold. His massive clawed hand came down. I heard bones shatter as blood sprayed my face and the wall. Bone splinters and pieces of brain exploded from the screaming bodies. I backpedaled, wiping at my eyes, trying to get the blood off so I could see. No one had told me what to do in this situation. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot that massive abomination, or if this was all just part of the show.
“Richard!” a familiar voice cried from behind me. Panic oozed from every word. I spun, seeing Mario and Kolmek standing side by side, their pupils dilated and expressions grim.
“We have a major problem.” It was Mario. I recognized that voice, the one that sounded as if he had been gargling with rocks.
“I know,” I said, holding my rifle tightly. I pointed behind me at the scene of rampant death and destruction.
I had seen bloodshed and war before, but this was different. The Island itself seemed to feel it. The wind, which had been calm when I first landed, now whipped the Island in fast, circular currents. The breeze smelled of burnt matches and coppery blood. The static electricity which had caused the hairs on my arms to rise rippled over everything with tiny blue flashes, increasing in power by the second.
“No, no, not Moloch,” Kolmek said, looking much calmer than I felt. “The Savior lets Moloch thin the herd every year.”
“It’s Leviathan,” Mario continued grimly, “the beast from the waters. The smell of blood is drawing it from the depths of the ocean. We picked up the first blips on radar a few minutes ago. When it gets here, it won’t stop until everything is rubble. It will kill every single person on the Island.”
“All security personnel must report to the south beach immediately,” a cool robotic voice cried out over hidden loudspeakers all over the Island. The screaming from the auditorium had quieted behind me. I was afraid to look inside.
“There it is,” Kolmek said, his head jerking up as the emergency alert read. He motioned for me to follow. “It’s time to fight.”
***
We sprinted over curving trails of smooth logs between deathly quiet forests. All the insects and birds had gone silent. Ahead of us, the palm trees opened up onto the Pacific Ocean. But it was no longer a beautiful tropical blue. A black, swirling whirlpool like an ulcerous wound had opened up on its surface. It stretched hundreds of feet across, drawing closer to the shore by the second. Dead fish, sharks, dolphins, squids and even whales spun in the filthy, dark water.
Twenty black-clad security agents waited for the three of us on the beach, their eyes wide, their faces pale with terror. Like myself, they all had AR-15s and Glock 22s with extra magazines for both. I guess the Glock might be useful for blowing my brains out as a last resort if some beast from Hell rose out of the simmering waters, but I didn’t think it would stop anything from another dimension.
The clouds swirled overhead in a thick curtain as black as smoke. Flashes of blue lightning detonated every couple seconds. Mario raised his hands, screaming over the roaring of the wind. Kolmek stood by my side, his face grim and eyes narrowed.
“Your job is to fight off anything that tries to get on the Island,” he said, looking from one face to another with rapt attention. “Nothing can stand against high-caliber rifle fire. Shoot at the face and eyes when it comes up. We’ve dealt with creatures like this before, and they will retreat if you injure them badly enough.” I had the sense of being fed a line of bullshit as my mind processed this.
“What exactly is coming up?” one of the doe-eyed security men asked. He barely looked old enough to drink, a young, muscular hulk with a Marine Corps tattoo on his neck.
“They call it Leviathan,” Mario responded. “Sometimes the rituals here and the smell of blood can draw… strange things. Leviathan is one of those. We have encountered it before. The most important thing to remember is…” His voice was suddenly drowned out by a terrible cacophony that came from the center of the black whirlpool.
A screech like the detonation of a nuclear missile shook the ground. The ocean jumped and bubbled frantically. The beach heaved and cracked, the white sands disappearing in fissures that opened up like greedy mouths underneath my feet. I lost my balance, falling forwards. The screeching continued rising into a primal roar.
A green dragon head the color of an infected wound erupted from the surface of the thrashing water, rising up dozens of feet in the air. It had two enormous slitted eyes that dilated and constricted quickly as it glowered down at us. The screeching abruptly stopped, the pointed mouth of the dragon slamming shut with a sound like a gunshot.
Within moments, another cancerous green head shot up in a blur, its skin looking as hard as stone. Ridges that looked as sharp as swords ran the length of its reptilian skull, arcing over its eyes and pointed snout. More heads erupted from the ocean until all seven heads of Leviathan loomed over us.
Not one of us fired. No one even seemed to breathe as we surveyed the beast across the no-man’s land of the white sands. The slitted eyes and yellow irises of the seven heads had a demonic hunger, a reptilian coldness. Far behind us, I heard distant screams still echoing from the auditorium where Moloch held sway.
“Fire!” Mario cried. Instantly, a cacophony of gunshots exploded all around me. I jumped up on my feet, scrambling up as the seven-headed dragon leapt forward. Thousands of gallons of saltwater streamed down its massive body as it came up on the beach. Long, black paws with bone-white talons shot out of the surging ocean, followed by a tapering tail like that of a water snake.
I brought the rifle up and emptied my magazine as fast as I could, pulling the trigger over and over as I aimed at the many slitted eyes of Leviathan. But the bullets seemed to ping harmlessly off of its hard, obsidian-like scales.
It scrabbled onto the shore, the heads coming down in a blur. Rows and rows of vampiric fangs gleamed dully in each of the mouths. One security agent was bitten in half, the spurting stump of his lower body still standing for a long moment even as the rest of the body disappeared down the throat of the dragon.
Mario ran forwards, slamming another magazine in his rifle and opening fire point-blank. One of the heads came down in a blur towards him. Its great, staring eyes exploded in a shower of blue blood and thick vitreous fluid. The dragon head pulled back, its mouth opening in a primal scream of agony.
As I reloaded, I scanned the area around me, realizing that nearly half of the security agents were either dead or critically injured. I backpedaled away, keeping my eyes on the dragon. It continuously drew forward, killing more of its enemies with every step. I turned and ran into the forest, the sounds of shattering bones and dying men ringing through the air with a sickening clarity behind me.
Once I had reached the border of the trail, I heard Mario yell, “Retreat!” behind me. But by that point, it was far too late.
***
“Hey! Wait up!” a voice whispered from behind me. I turned my head, seeing Kolmek. Spatters of drying blood covered his face and uniform. As far as I could tell, none of it was his. “Mario’s dead. They’re all dead. We need to get out of here. We need to get off the Island.”
“How?” I asked.
“Find the Savior,” he answered, panting and out of breath. “We must find him. He can get us out of here.”
“I don’t even know what the guy looks like,” I muttered. “He was wearing a goat mask.”
“You’ll know him when you see him,” Kolmek said. “His body is covered in scars. Everything except his face. Stay close to me. We need to watch each other’s backs. It’s our only chance of survival.”
***
A trail of twisted, broken bodies led from the mansion to the surrounding trails and beaches. A decapitated woman with solid gold necklaces embedded with diamonds lay in front of me. It was strange on the Island, the way oblivion and ineffable wealth coexisted side by side. But everything was deathly silent, even in the mansion’s auditorium.
“Where’s the Savior?” I asked through gritted teeth. I peeked my head into the auditorium, but nothing moved. Hundreds of smashed and bloody bodies littered the floor.
“He’s around somewhere,” Kolmek answered. We started circling the mansion, looking for any signs of life. Kolmek went in the lead. As he turned the corner, an enormous black hand with sharp claws of fingers flitted forward in a blur, wrapping itself around his chest. Kolmek gave a strangled cry as it closed around him. I heard his bones crush as a spout of blood and gore flew from his mouth and nose, as if he were a toothpaste tube being squeezed.
I backpedaled away as Moloch threw the twitching corpse aside like a discarded toy. It smashed into the wall of the mansion, exploding wetly. A human-shaped, bloody stain languidly dripped down the wall above Kolmek’s mangled body.
Moloch slowly turned his head towards me, the fiery eyes flashing with hunger. He gnashed his fangs together, taking a step forward with a leg the size and shape of a tree trunk. With every step he took, I felt the ground tremble.
“Stop!” I cried, moving away from the monstrous creature. “Why are you doing this?”
“There is no why,” he gurgled, his voice monstrous and inhumanly slow. “There is only power. The weak deserve to die. Only the strong are worthy of life.” I raised my rifle in a last-ditch effort to save myself. Moloch saw it and started running towards me, every footstep crushing the paved walkway around the mansion into rubble and dust.
I aimed for his eyes and nose, emptying the entire magazine as quickly as I could. The bullets smashed into Moloch’s face. Dark red, clotted blood dripped out of the wounds, writhing with maggots. Drops of it fell around me, landing on my hair and face. I felt the small larvae twisting all over my skin. Moloch’s blood smelled nauseating, like some combination of stinkbugs and rotting bodies. He slowed, giving a roar of pain. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but as I looked out in the direction of the beach, my heart dropped.
Leviathan was moving in our direction, the giant dragon heads looming over the trees. Quickly, it swept towards me like a dark wind.
***
“You will suffer for that, worthless slave,” Moloch growled, wiping blood from his fiery eyes with his sharp talons of fingers. A sudden idea came to me. I ran in the direction of Leviathan. Moloch followed closely at my heels, only a few steps behind me.
Leviathan slithered forward over the sands and trees, its enormous body undulating like a water snake’s. I screamed at it, an incomprehensible wail of terror. Its seven heads snapped towards me. Its slitted eyes widened as it saw Moloch.
I heard the crashing of Moloch’s footsteps stop behind me, only feet away from crushing me into a paste. His massive lungs breathed quickly, exhaling the odor of sulfur and smoke.
“Leviathan,” Moloch growled in his demonic voice. “These are my tributes.” Leviathan’s dragon heads looked straight up at the Sun and screamed in response, their many voices rising and falling in a dissonant wail. As I sprinted into the trees, Leviathan and Moloch ran at each other, colliding with an ear-splitting crash. I glanced back, seeing Moloch ripping one of the dragon heads off its neck with his sharp fingers. The head screamed as blue blood exploded from the spurting stump. After a long moment, the neck fell limply forward.
The other dragon heads bit Moloch in a unified attack. They ripped deep holes in his shoulders and arms, snapping over and over like rabid dogs. As the two eldritch monstrosities attacked each other in fierce combat, I lost sight of them, but the sounds of fighting echoed over the entire island, crashing like lightning.
***
I felt like the survivor of an Apocalypse. I couldn’t find a single other living person on the Island. Hundreds of crushed, broken and decapitated bodies surrounded me. Over the cacophony of fighting, I heard a new noise: the whirring of helicopter blades nearby. It was coming from the other side of the mansion.
Frantically, I sprinted around the other side, seeing a Black Hawk helicopter getting ready to leave. A man in black robes sat at the pilot’s seat, his green eyes gleaming and a wide smile plastered across his face. I smashed my fist into the door over and over until he opened it.
“Holy shit, you’re still alive?” he asked. I hadn’t seen this man before. He had a face like a Calvin Klein model, all sharp angles and high cheekbones, perfectly proportioned in every way. But his scalp looked melted and scarred, as if someone had thrown gasoline on his hair and ignited it. His ears were stunted, twisted growths of scar tissue. His hands, too, were covered in deep, folding burn scars.
“Are you the Savior?” I responded quickly. “Please, get me out of here.”
“They do call me that,” he said wistfully. “The Savior. Yes, I guess I am. Get in.”
***
The Savior stared at me with his strange green eyes, the color of swamps where monstrous things swam under the surface.
“Some people just need to learn the hard way,” he said. The helicopter took off into a dark night covered with bright, twinkling stars. “There is no great power without great responsibility, after all. Those of us who seek the ancient ones know it comes with a cost.” I just stared out the window, gazing down at the countless mutilated, broken bodies that littered the beach.
Below us, the face of a bull stared up with eyes of fiery cyclones. The broken, still body of Leviathan lay at his feet. As we made it over the great waters of the Pacific Ocean, the bull-god raised a hand and waved. At that moment, I thought I could almost see a hurricane of translucent souls circling around him, spiraling up into the sky.

After high school, having no better ideas, I joined the Navy SEALs. I never really liked any of it, but it was a job, after all. I loved the guns and airplanes and grenades, but having to run all the time while some scumbag with a chip on his shoulder yells in my face isn’t my idea of fun.
Things got a lot more interesting after my term of service ended. I still had a high-security clearance, so I used it to take temporary jobs as a mercenary, a hired gun. I did some stints in Iraq with Blackwater, where they set me out in the middle of the desert. A watchtower and oil refinery loomed over the burning sands. Along with a few other guys, they told us, “Guard this area with your life.” While better than the SEALs, working for Blackwater was extremely boring. The other mercenaries and I would mostly just chainsmoke cigarettes and drink coffee all night, staring out across the dead, empty desert.
Over time, I worked my way up. Things started to get more interesting when a job offer arrived in my email one freezing cold winter’s morning. This is what it said.
“Mr. Chase,
“I am the head of security for a private group of entrepreneurs and investors. Through some mutual contacts, I have heard of your professionalism and experience. We are currently putting together a small crew to guard a private event on [REDACTED] Island out in the Pacific Ocean that will run from January 9th to January 26th. Would you be interested in this job? The pay rate is $900 a day.
“Once you are on the island, it will be impossible to leave until the period of employment has ended. If you are interested, please respond to this email as soon as possible.
“Sincerely,
“Mario Antonin, Head of Security.”
I was working piecemeal jobs like this one at the time, but none of them were paying that well. At most, I would usually get $350 to $500 a day, which was still good money when I was working seven days a week until the job finished. I instantly responded and said that yes, I was interested. In response, they sent me a non-disclosure agreement that was the size of a small novel that I had to sign.
That was how I found myself on a private jet, flying out to an island in the middle of the vast blue ocean. I was never told the coordinates of the island or saw it on a map. It was all kept very secret.
A few hours later, we landed on a private airstrip. I looked out the window of the jet, seeing the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching off to the horizon in every direction. Below me stood an island with palm trees and sandy white beaches. An enormous Victorian mansion loomed directly in the center of it all. The mansion was painted black and looked like something straight out of a horror movie. It had no windows, and the turrets spiraled into blade-like points.
That was my first inkling that something might not be quite right about this trip.
***
As the stairs from the private jet descended, I looked out on this strange new world. Employees waited to greet us, looking like beaten dogs. Some had their heads down, their eyes blankly scanning the ground. Most of them were women wearing red dresses, reminding me of stewardesses on a plane. The jet strip was surrounded by palm trees and tropical brush. The chirping of insects sounded all around us, high and resonant.
I saw a strange patch engraved on all of the employees’ uniforms and jackets. It looked almost like a stick figure drawing of a man, the bottom of its body ending in a C. Its arms were long and jointed, almost spidery. Three symbols like repeated iron crosses connected to the left side of its body in a line. I wondered if it was the logo of some company. I put it out of my mind for now, but I would see that symbol again all over the island, painted on the sides of the mansion and even cut into the trees with a knife. It would only be later that night that I realized its connection to Moloch.
“Good day, sir, and welcome to the Island,” the server on my left said with glassy eyes and a fake smile plastered across her face. They all looked up at once, but it was like the workers all looked through me rather than at me. Their eyes looked flat and dead, like the painted-on eyes of a doll.
“The Island, huh?” I asked, curious. “They wouldn’t tell me where I was going. They said it was a secret. Is that what you call it?” The woman just nodded, the doll-like smile never leaving her lips.
“Officially, this island is unnamed and uninhabited,” the woman said. “In fact, all traces of it have been scrubbed from the internet. You won’t find it on Google Maps or in any publicly available satellite imagery.” She leaned forward towards me with heavily mascaraed eyes and ruby-red lipstick slashed across her lips. “This is a very special place. Only very special people are allowed here. You should be honored to work here under our Savior.”
“I hope you’re talking about Jesus or something,” I said jokingly. She just smiled blankly and motioned me forward.
“Just follow that trail for a few hundred feet-” she said, pointing at an opening in the palm trees where logs were laid down horizontally over the muggy jungle- “and you’ll find the mansion. Good luck!” I thought it was a somewhat strange thing to say, wishing a random stranger good luck.
But, by the end of that night, I realized that simply to make it off this island alive, I would need lots of it.
***
I followed the woman’s directions to the back of the brutalist mansion. A heavy metal door stood there with a small bullet-proof window built in the top. A tanned, Spanish face glowered out at me then rapidly drew back and disappeared. A few heartbeats later, the door slid to the side with a grinding of hidden gears.
The head of security at the Island was a heavily-tattooed ex-Marine named Mario. He wore a dark Kevlar vest over a black outfit, making him look like a walking shadow. I found the security had their own private complex in the mansion as he showed me around the site. Hundreds of hidden cameras covered every angle of the mansion and the surrounding parts of the island. Dozens of black-clad security agents swarmed over the screens, checking the monitors and computers constantly.
“Quite a set-up you have here,” I said to Mario, nodding at him. He smacked me on the shoulder, giving a confident grin.
“Money is no issue here, Richard,” he responded. “Security is paramount. There are things on this island that could rip apart the world if they ever escaped.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Like what?” I asked. “Nuclear weapons or something?” He laughed at that.
“You’ll see for yourself tonight,” he said, his dark eyes flashing with something cold and alien.
***
Mario led me and a couple other new hired guns around the Island. The place was certainly strange. It reminded me of some combination of a secret black-ops site and a playboy billionaire’s private heaven. All of the doors in the mansion looked like they were made of thick steel. They had wheels that would spin, like those on a submarine door. The mansion also had no windows at all that I could see, except for the small, shatter-proof glass openings on the steel doors. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, however. I couldn’t resist asking him about a couple small things, however- or at least, they seemed small to me at the time.
“What are those hatchways?” I asked Mario, pointing to rectangular covers built into the concrete walkway. They had heavy handles. “Are those manholes or something?”
“There are tunnels under the Island,” he responded vaguely. “Just for maintenance and security, you understand.”
“Wow, this place is certainly… well-developed,” I said. We came out through a grove of palm trees. A stone walkway led down to a white beach. Dozens of yachts were moored all across the shore, some of them looking like they must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“There’s a lot of money and power here,” Mario said. “That’s why it’s important you never talk about what you see here. These are the people who control the world, the ones behind the government and the media. Not the elected officials who the people see, but the actual power.”
“Like who?” I asked. “You mean the Rothschilds and Soros?” He laughed again, a sarcastic, grinding laugh that grated my nerves.
“Trust me, the truly powerful ones don’t even have public personas. If you know their name, then they’re just one of the puppets.” I just shook my head at that, then asked the real question that had been bothering me since I first arrived here.
“Who is the Savior?” I asked. “Is that some codename or something?” Mario froze in place.
“He’s the one who runs everything here,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking around nervously. “But don’t be mentioning that kind of shit. You’ll probably see him tonight anyway. He’s the one who runs the show. He’ll be on the stage in his normal outfit.”
***
By the end of the day, I was suited up like the rest of the security staff, wearing the pure black pants and shirt with the symbol of Moloch engraved over the heart. Hundreds of the world’s most famous politicians, actors, businessmen and artists had gathered, streaming in the front doors with a soft, diffident susurration.
I stood by the open doorway of a side exit with an AR-15 and full body armor, next to one other soldier. They had also given me a sidearm. Every entrance or exit was manned by at least two armed men. The security at this place was some of the most intense I had ever seen. Beyond the door, there were rows and rows of the most comfortable seats, all gathered in a semi-circle around a massive stage made of pure mahogany. Blood-red curtains stood closed at the front of the room, concealing their secrets- for now, at least.
“Hail Satan!” I heard the elites cry inside in unison. I didn’t want to look in at the rows of high-ranking politicians, celebrities, influencers and artists, but my curiosity was high. I peeked around the corner of the stone archway, seeing the red curtains on the stage drawing apart. I saw one of my favorite actors standing in the front row, clapping excitedly and jumping up and down.
The crowd cheered as a naked female strapped to an obsidian altar lay there. She was beautiful and blonde, probably no older than twenty with the face of a supermodel. Her mouth was gagged, her arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. Thin leather cords were tied around her wrists and ankles, biting deeply into the skin. Her eyes rolled wildly as she shook her head from side to side. She froze, and her eyes met mine for a brief moment. I saw the pleading expression there, the mortal terror and absolute horror.
A man in a goat mask wearing black robes slunk out from the side of the stage, carrying a wavy silver dagger engraved with strange symbols. The crowd erupted into a primal roar of pleasure and excitement that sounded like it came from one monstrous mouth.
“Worthy is the Lamb!” the man in the goat mask screamed with electronic amplification. He had a deep voice, as if he had rocks rolling around in his throat. The crowd roared and clapped. Scattered cries of “Hail Lucifer!” and “Ave Satanas!” echoed down the massive auditorium.
“Hey, pay attention,” the other security agent at my side said in a thick Finnish accent. He was a tall Scandinavian-looking guy named Kolmek. “You’re not getting paid to watch the show, new guy.” I tried to rip my gaze away from the stage, but it held my attention with an obsessive horror.
“The burnt bones of children and women have been offered to the ancient ones, to Moloch,” the man on the stage cried. “Under our feet, the burnt bodies of hundreds lay dreaming. This victim will be the 666th. Her blood will bring about the Gnosis that we seek, the direct experience of the divine held by the gods, by Lucifer and Moloch and Baal…” The roaring of the crowd temporarily drowned out his electronically-magnified voice. “Tonight, we will rip open the veil!”
I had stopped watching the show, instead staring blankly out at the beach and palm trees. At that moment, another black-clad security agent came up to my partner, whispered something in his ear, then immediately disappeared, heading off back in the direction of the main security office. Kolmek shook his head grimly.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move from this door no matter what. And pay attention.” I nodded and watched as he walked off in the same direction.
I immediately took the opportunity to continue watching the ceremony. I had missed something important, apparently. The woman now laid dead on the sacrificial table, a gaping hole in her chest. Blood spurted from the crater as the man in the goat mask held her beating heart grasped tightly in his hand, letting the blood stream down his naked fingers. The crowd cheered with a rising bloodlust and insanity. Most of them were standing, their eyes gleaming and wide with fanatical adoration. The entire spectacle reminded me of some kind of ancient Aztec ritual.
As the woman’s sightless eyes stared vacantly up in death, the man in a goat mask pulled out a can of gasoline. The clear liquid gurgled as he up-ended the canister over her pale, bloodless face, over her naked stomach and long legs. A moment later, he lit a match and dropped it. I heard the whooshing of the flames as they rose up.
The crowd went deathly silent as they watched the rippling flames. The man in the goat mask began chanting in some strange language I had never heard before. It sounded Semitic, but I knew it wasn’t Arabic or Hebrew. I felt something like electricity ripple through the air, almost like a feeling of falling pressure before a storm. I looked down at the hairs on my arms, seeing them rise up. I looked back up at the stage, and my eyes widened in horror.
The flaming body of the sacrificial victim had started to morph before my eyes and the eyes of the crowd. The dripping, blackening flesh jumped up and down, as if there were rats trapped in her body trying to escape the fire. There was a deafening hissing as if thousands of snakes were being burned alive.
The dead woman’s arms jerked up, the skin splitting open as if she had seams running along her skin. Something dark and muscular with curving, black talons ripped its way out of the dead, burning flesh. Behind it, a head appeared with long, curving horns and eyes that spun with whorls of fire. It looked like the offspring of a bull and a demon. Its imposing body rose up from the inferno, appearing like magic from the solid stone. It raised itself to its full height, looming over the crowd. The last of the woman’s blood hissed and boiled away, her flesh dissolving into ashes.
“Behold, Moloch rises!” the man in the goat mask screamed in a fanatical voice. The crowd’s cheering had stopped, though. Many of the faces in the crowd looked chalk-white with terror. The bull-god surveyed the crowd, its horns nearly scraping the ceiling twenty feet above the stage.
At that moment, I knew death was on its way with eyes of fire and a grin like a skull, ready to reap a field of human bodies.
***
I heard running behind me, but I didn’t dare turn away from the horrific sight in front of me. The last of the fire’s embers died, sending up thin wisps of gray smoke that spiraled around the bull-god’s monstrous face. Moloch stood as still as a statue, and if it weren’t for one thing, I might’ve thought it was some sort of sculpture or art project. He had two nostrils like a serpent’s. As his great lungs inhaled, the smoke billowed in and out of his mouth and nose.
Some of the people at the edges of the crowd had gotten up, hurrying towards the doors. Moloch’s head ratcheted to face them, his fiery eyes narrowing into slits.
“Do not leave!” the man in the goat mask pleaded. “Those who have fear are not worthy of life. Do not prove yourselves unworthy of life!” As the first of the fleeing men and women got to within a few steps of the door, Moloch gave a primal roar. In a blur of primal strength, he reached down and ripped the blackened sacrificial altar off the stage. It ripped from the wooden stage with a tremendous crack like a bullwhip. He hurled the heavy mass of stone at those heading towards the opposite exit from the one I guarded.
I watched it curve through the air. The people started screaming and clawing to escape as it smashed down on their heads with a grating crash. I could feel the floor shake from where I stood outside. Blood exploded from their smashed bodies. I saw arms and legs jerking and seizing under the heavy stone, but within a few moments, they slowed and then stopped.
Others were running towards the door I guarded, but Moloch leapt off the stage in a blur. In a few bounding steps, he reached the pale, terrified faces on the other side of the threshold. His massive clawed hand came down. I heard bones shatter as blood sprayed my face and the wall. Bone splinters and pieces of brain exploded from the screaming bodies. I backpedaled, wiping at my eyes, trying to get the blood off so I could see. No one had told me what to do in this situation. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot that massive abomination, or if this was all just part of the show.
“Richard!” a familiar voice cried from behind me. Panic oozed from every word. I spun, seeing Mario and Kolmek standing side by side, their pupils dilated and expressions grim.
“We have a major problem.” It was Mario. I recognized that voice, the one that sounded as if he had been gargling with rocks.
“I know,” I said, holding my rifle tightly. I pointed behind me at the scene of rampant death and destruction.
I had seen bloodshed and war before, but this was different. The Island itself seemed to feel it. The wind, which had been calm when I first landed, now whipped the Island in fast, circular currents. The breeze smelled of burnt matches and coppery blood. The static electricity which had caused the hairs on my arms to rise rippled over everything with tiny blue flashes, increasing in power by the second.
“No, no, not Moloch,” Kolmek said, looking much calmer than I felt. “The Savior lets Moloch thin the herd every year.”
“It’s Leviathan,” Mario continued grimly, “the beast from the waters. The smell of blood is drawing it from the depths of the ocean. We picked up the first blips on radar a few minutes ago. When it gets here, it won’t stop until everything is rubble. It will kill every single person on the Island.”
“All security personnel must report to the south beach immediately,” a cool robotic voice cried out over hidden loudspeakers all over the Island. The screaming from the auditorium had quieted behind me. I was afraid to look inside.
“There it is,” Kolmek said, his head jerking up as the emergency alert read. He motioned for me to follow. “It’s time to fight.”
***
We sprinted over curving trails of smooth logs between deathly quiet forests. All the insects and birds had gone silent. Ahead of us, the palm trees opened up onto the Pacific Ocean. But it was no longer a beautiful tropical blue. A black, swirling whirlpool like an ulcerous wound had opened up on its surface. It stretched hundreds of feet across, drawing closer to the shore by the second. Dead fish, sharks, dolphins, squids and even whales spun in the filthy, dark water.
Twenty black-clad security agents waited for the three of us on the beach, their eyes wide, their faces pale with terror. Like myself, they all had AR-15s and Glock 22s with extra magazines for both. I guess the Glock might be useful for blowing my brains out as a last resort if some beast from Hell rose out of the simmering waters, but I didn’t think it would stop anything from another dimension.
The clouds swirled overhead in a thick curtain as black as smoke. Flashes of blue lightning detonated every couple seconds. Mario raised his hands, screaming over the roaring of the wind. Kolmek stood by my side, his face grim and eyes narrowed.
“Your job is to fight off anything that tries to get on the Island,” he said, looking from one face to another with rapt attention. “Nothing can stand against high-caliber rifle fire. Shoot at the face and eyes when it comes up. We’ve dealt with creatures like this before, and they will retreat if you injure them badly enough.” I had the sense of being fed a line of bullshit as my mind processed this.
“What exactly is coming up?” one of the doe-eyed security men asked. He barely looked old enough to drink, a young, muscular hulk with a Marine Corps tattoo on his neck.
“They call it Leviathan,” Mario responded. “Sometimes the rituals here and the smell of blood can draw… strange things. Leviathan is one of those. We have encountered it before. The most important thing to remember is…” His voice was suddenly drowned out by a terrible cacophony that came from the center of the black whirlpool.
A screech like the detonation of a nuclear missile shook the ground. The ocean jumped and bubbled frantically. The beach heaved and cracked, the white sands disappearing in fissures that opened up like greedy mouths underneath my feet. I lost my balance, falling forwards. The screeching continued rising into a primal roar.
A green dragon head the color of an infected wound erupted from the surface of the thrashing water, rising up dozens of feet in the air. It had two enormous slitted eyes that dilated and constricted quickly as it glowered down at us. The screeching abruptly stopped, the pointed mouth of the dragon slamming shut with a sound like a gunshot.
Within moments, another cancerous green head shot up in a blur, its skin looking as hard as stone. Ridges that looked as sharp as swords ran the length of its reptilian skull, arcing over its eyes and pointed snout. More heads erupted from the ocean until all seven heads of Leviathan loomed over us.
Not one of us fired. No one even seemed to breathe as we surveyed the beast across the no-man’s land of the white sands. The slitted eyes and yellow irises of the seven heads had a demonic hunger, a reptilian coldness. Far behind us, I heard distant screams still echoing from the auditorium where Moloch held sway.
“Fire!” Mario cried. Instantly, a cacophony of gunshots exploded all around me. I jumped up on my feet, scrambling up as the seven-headed dragon leapt forward. Thousands of gallons of saltwater streamed down its massive body as it came up on the beach. Long, black paws with bone-white talons shot out of the surging ocean, followed by a tapering tail like that of a water snake.
I brought the rifle up and emptied my magazine as fast as I could, pulling the trigger over and over as I aimed at the many slitted eyes of Leviathan. But the bullets seemed to ping harmlessly off of its hard, obsidian-like scales.
It scrabbled onto the shore, the heads coming down in a blur. Rows and rows of vampiric fangs gleamed dully in each of the mouths. One security agent was bitten in half, the spurting stump of his lower body still standing for a long moment even as the rest of the body disappeared down the throat of the dragon.
Mario ran forwards, slamming another magazine in his rifle and opening fire point-blank. One of the heads came down in a blur towards him. Its great, staring eyes exploded in a shower of blue blood and thick vitreous fluid. The dragon head pulled back, its mouth opening in a primal scream of agony.
As I reloaded, I scanned the area around me, realizing that nearly half of the security agents were either dead or critically injured. I backpedaled away, keeping my eyes on the dragon. It continuously drew forward, killing more of its enemies with every step. I turned and ran into the forest, the sounds of shattering bones and dying men ringing through the air with a sickening clarity behind me.
Once I had reached the border of the trail, I heard Mario yell, “Retreat!” behind me. But by that point, it was far too late.
***
“Hey! Wait up!” a voice whispered from behind me. I turned my head, seeing Kolmek. Spatters of drying blood covered his face and uniform. As far as I could tell, none of it was his. “Mario’s dead. They’re all dead. We need to get out of here. We need to get off the Island.”
“How?” I asked.
“Find the Savior,” he answered, panting and out of breath. “We must find him. He can get us out of here.”
“I don’t even know what the guy looks like,” I muttered. “He was wearing a goat mask.”
“You’ll know him when you see him,” Kolmek said. “His body is covered in scars. Everything except his face. Stay close to me. We need to watch each other’s backs. It’s our only chance of survival.”
***
A trail of twisted, broken bodies led from the mansion to the surrounding trails and beaches. A decapitated woman with solid gold necklaces embedded with diamonds lay in front of me. It was strange on the Island, the way oblivion and ineffable wealth coexisted side by side. But everything was deathly silent, even in the mansion’s auditorium.
“Where’s the Savior?” I asked through gritted teeth. I peeked my head into the auditorium, but nothing moved. Hundreds of smashed and bloody bodies littered the floor.
“He’s around somewhere,” Kolmek answered. We started circling the mansion, looking for any signs of life. Kolmek went in the lead. As he turned the corner, an enormous black hand with sharp claws of fingers flitted forward in a blur, wrapping itself around his chest. Kolmek gave a strangled cry as it closed around him. I heard his bones crush as a spout of blood and gore flew from his mouth and nose, as if he were a toothpaste tube being squeezed.
I backpedaled away as Moloch threw the twitching corpse aside like a discarded toy. It smashed into the wall of the mansion, exploding wetly. A human-shaped, bloody stain languidly dripped down the wall above Kolmek’s mangled body.
Moloch slowly turned his head towards me, the fiery eyes flashing with hunger. He gnashed his fangs together, taking a step forward with a leg the size and shape of a tree trunk. With every step he took, I felt the ground tremble.
“Stop!” I cried, moving away from the monstrous creature. “Why are you doing this?”
“There is no why,” he gurgled, his voice monstrous and inhumanly slow. “There is only power. The weak deserve to die. Only the strong are worthy of life.” I raised my rifle in a last-ditch effort to save myself. Moloch saw it and started running towards me, every footstep crushing the paved walkway around the mansion into rubble and dust.
I aimed for his eyes and nose, emptying the entire magazine as quickly as I could. The bullets smashed into Moloch’s face. Dark red, clotted blood dripped out of the wounds, writhing with maggots. Drops of it fell around me, landing on my hair and face. I felt the small larvae twisting all over my skin. Moloch’s blood smelled nauseating, like some combination of stinkbugs and rotting bodies. He slowed, giving a roar of pain. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but as I looked out in the direction of the beach, my heart dropped.
Leviathan was moving in our direction, the giant dragon heads looming over the trees. Quickly, it swept towards me like a dark wind.
***
“You will suffer for that, worthless slave,” Moloch growled, wiping blood from his fiery eyes with his sharp talons of fingers. A sudden idea came to me. I ran in the direction of Leviathan. Moloch followed closely at my heels, only a few steps behind me.
Leviathan slithered forward over the sands and trees, its enormous body undulating like a water snake’s. I screamed at it, an incomprehensible wail of terror. Its seven heads snapped towards me. Its slitted eyes widened as it saw Moloch.
I heard the crashing of Moloch’s footsteps stop behind me, only feet away from crushing me into a paste. His massive lungs breathed quickly, exhaling the odor of sulfur and smoke.
“Leviathan,” Moloch growled in his demonic voice. “These are my tributes.” Leviathan’s dragon heads looked straight up at the Sun and screamed in response, their many voices rising and falling in a dissonant wail. As I sprinted into the trees, Leviathan and Moloch ran at each other, colliding with an ear-splitting crash. I glanced back, seeing Moloch ripping one of the dragon heads off its neck with his sharp fingers. The head screamed as blue blood exploded from the spurting stump. After a long moment, the neck fell limply forward.
The other dragon heads bit Moloch in a unified attack. They ripped deep holes in his shoulders and arms, snapping over and over like rabid dogs. As the two eldritch monstrosities attacked each other in fierce combat, I lost sight of them, but the sounds of fighting echoed over the entire island, crashing like lightning.
***
I felt like the survivor of an Apocalypse. I couldn’t find a single other living person on the Island. Hundreds of crushed, broken and decapitated bodies surrounded me. Over the cacophony of fighting, I heard a new noise: the whirring of helicopter blades nearby. It was coming from the other side of the mansion.
Frantically, I sprinted around the other side, seeing a Black Hawk helicopter getting ready to leave. A man in black robes sat at the pilot’s seat, his green eyes gleaming and a wide smile plastered across his face. I smashed my fist into the door over and over until he opened it.
“Holy shit, you’re still alive?” he asked. I hadn’t seen this man before. He had a face like a Calvin Klein model, all sharp angles and high cheekbones, perfectly proportioned in every way. But his scalp looked melted and scarred, as if someone had thrown gasoline on his hair and ignited it. His ears were stunted, twisted growths of scar tissue. His hands, too, were covered in deep, folding burn scars.
“Are you the Savior?” I responded quickly. “Please, get me out of here.”
“They do call me that,” he said wistfully. “The Savior. Yes, I guess I am. Get in.”
***
The Savior stared at me with his strange green eyes, the color of swamps where monstrous things swam under the surface.
“Some people just need to learn the hard way,” he said. The helicopter took off into a dark night covered with bright, twinkling stars. “There is no great power without great responsibility, after all. Those of us who seek the ancient ones know it comes with a cost.” I just stared out the window, gazing down at the countless mutilated, broken bodies that littered the beach.
Below us, the face of a bull stared up with eyes of fiery cyclones. The broken, still body of Leviathan lay at his feet. As we made it over the great waters of the Pacific Ocean, the bull-god raised a hand and waved. At that moment, I thought I could almost see a hurricane of translucent souls circling around him, spiraling up into the sky.

After high school, having no better ideas, I joined the Navy SEALs. I never really liked any of it, but it was a job, after all. I loved the guns and airplanes and grenades, but having to run all the time while some scumbag with a chip on his shoulder yells in my face isn’t my idea of fun.
Things got a lot more interesting after my term of service ended. I still had a high-security clearance, so I used it to take temporary jobs as a mercenary, a hired gun. I did some stints in Iraq with Blackwater, where they set me out in the middle of the desert. A watchtower and oil refinery loomed over the burning sands. Along with a few other guys, they told us, “Guard this area with your life.” While better than the SEALs, working for Blackwater was extremely boring. The other mercenaries and I would mostly just chainsmoke cigarettes and drink coffee all night, staring out across the dead, empty desert.
Over time, I worked my way up. Things started to get more interesting when a job offer arrived in my email one freezing cold winter’s morning. This is what it said.
“Mr. Chase,
“I am the head of security for a private group of entrepreneurs and investors. Through some mutual contacts, I have heard of your professionalism and experience. We are currently putting together a small crew to guard a private event on [REDACTED] Island out in the Pacific Ocean that will run from January 9th to January 26th. Would you be interested in this job? The pay rate is $900 a day.
“Once you are on the island, it will be impossible to leave until the period of employment has ended. If you are interested, please respond to this email as soon as possible.
“Sincerely,
“Mario Antonin, Head of Security.”
I was working piecemeal jobs like this one at the time, but none of them were paying that well. At most, I would usually get $350 to $500 a day, which was still good money when I was working seven days a week until the job finished. I instantly responded and said that yes, I was interested. In response, they sent me a non-disclosure agreement that was the size of a small novel that I had to sign.
That was how I found myself on a private jet, flying out to an island in the middle of the vast blue ocean. I was never told the coordinates of the island or saw it on a map. It was all kept very secret.
A few hours later, we landed on a private airstrip. I looked out the window of the jet, seeing the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean stretching off to the horizon in every direction. Below me stood an island with palm trees and sandy white beaches. An enormous Victorian mansion loomed directly in the center of it all. The mansion was painted black and looked like something straight out of a horror movie. It had no windows, and the turrets spiraled into blade-like points.
That was my first inkling that something might not be quite right about this trip.
***
As the stairs from the private jet descended, I looked out on this strange new world. Employees waited to greet us, looking like beaten dogs. Some had their heads down, their eyes blankly scanning the ground. Most of them were women wearing red dresses, reminding me of stewardesses on a plane. The jet strip was surrounded by palm trees and tropical brush. The chirping of insects sounded all around us, high and resonant.
I saw a strange patch engraved on all of the employees’ uniforms and jackets. It looked almost like a stick figure drawing of a man, the bottom of its body ending in a C. Its arms were long and jointed, almost spidery. Three symbols like repeated iron crosses connected to the left side of its body in a line. I wondered if it was the logo of some company. I put it out of my mind for now, but I would see that symbol again all over the island, painted on the sides of the mansion and even cut into the trees with a knife. It would only be later that night that I realized its connection to Moloch.
“Good day, sir, and welcome to the Island,” the server on my left said with glassy eyes and a fake smile plastered across her face. They all looked up at once, but it was like the workers all looked through me rather than at me. Their eyes looked flat and dead, like the painted-on eyes of a doll.
“The Island, huh?” I asked, curious. “They wouldn’t tell me where I was going. They said it was a secret. Is that what you call it?” The woman just nodded, the doll-like smile never leaving her lips.
“Officially, this island is unnamed and uninhabited,” the woman said. “In fact, all traces of it have been scrubbed from the internet. You won’t find it on Google Maps or in any publicly available satellite imagery.” She leaned forward towards me with heavily mascaraed eyes and ruby-red lipstick slashed across her lips. “This is a very special place. Only very special people are allowed here. You should be honored to work here under our Savior.”
“I hope you’re talking about Jesus or something,” I said jokingly. She just smiled blankly and motioned me forward.
“Just follow that trail for a few hundred feet-” she said, pointing at an opening in the palm trees where logs were laid down horizontally over the muggy jungle- “and you’ll find the mansion. Good luck!” I thought it was a somewhat strange thing to say, wishing a random stranger good luck.
But, by the end of that night, I realized that simply to make it off this island alive, I would need lots of it.
***
I followed the woman’s directions to the back of the brutalist mansion. A heavy metal door stood there with a small bullet-proof window built in the top. A tanned, Spanish face glowered out at me then rapidly drew back and disappeared. A few heartbeats later, the door slid to the side with a grinding of hidden gears.
The head of security at the Island was a heavily-tattooed ex-Marine named Mario. He wore a dark Kevlar vest over a black outfit, making him look like a walking shadow. I found the security had their own private complex in the mansion as he showed me around the site. Hundreds of hidden cameras covered every angle of the mansion and the surrounding parts of the island. Dozens of black-clad security agents swarmed over the screens, checking the monitors and computers constantly.
“Quite a set-up you have here,” I said to Mario, nodding at him. He smacked me on the shoulder, giving a confident grin.
“Money is no issue here, Richard,” he responded. “Security is paramount. There are things on this island that could rip apart the world if they ever escaped.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Like what?” I asked. “Nuclear weapons or something?” He laughed at that.
“You’ll see for yourself tonight,” he said, his dark eyes flashing with something cold and alien.
***
Mario led me and a couple other new hired guns around the Island. The place was certainly strange. It reminded me of some combination of a secret black-ops site and a playboy billionaire’s private heaven. All of the doors in the mansion looked like they were made of thick steel. They had wheels that would spin, like those on a submarine door. The mansion also had no windows at all that I could see, except for the small, shatter-proof glass openings on the steel doors. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, however. I couldn’t resist asking him about a couple small things, however- or at least, they seemed small to me at the time.
“What are those hatchways?” I asked Mario, pointing to rectangular covers built into the concrete walkway. They had heavy handles. “Are those manholes or something?”
“There are tunnels under the Island,” he responded vaguely. “Just for maintenance and security, you understand.”
“Wow, this place is certainly… well-developed,” I said. We came out through a grove of palm trees. A stone walkway led down to a white beach. Dozens of yachts were moored all across the shore, some of them looking like they must have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
“There’s a lot of money and power here,” Mario said. “That’s why it’s important you never talk about what you see here. These are the people who control the world, the ones behind the government and the media. Not the elected officials who the people see, but the actual power.”
“Like who?” I asked. “You mean the Rothschilds and Soros?” He laughed again, a sarcastic, grinding laugh that grated my nerves.
“Trust me, the truly powerful ones don’t even have public personas. If you know their name, then they’re just one of the puppets.” I just shook my head at that, then asked the real question that had been bothering me since I first arrived here.
“Who is the Savior?” I asked. “Is that some codename or something?” Mario froze in place.
“He’s the one who runs everything here,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking around nervously. “But don’t be mentioning that kind of shit. You’ll probably see him tonight anyway. He’s the one who runs the show. He’ll be on the stage in his normal outfit.”
***
By the end of the day, I was suited up like the rest of the security staff, wearing the pure black pants and shirt with the symbol of Moloch engraved over the heart. Hundreds of the world’s most famous politicians, actors, businessmen and artists had gathered, streaming in the front doors with a soft, diffident susurration.
I stood by the open doorway of a side exit with an AR-15 and full body armor, next to one other soldier. They had also given me a sidearm. Every entrance or exit was manned by at least two armed men. The security at this place was some of the most intense I had ever seen. Beyond the door, there were rows and rows of the most comfortable seats, all gathered in a semi-circle around a massive stage made of pure mahogany. Blood-red curtains stood closed at the front of the room, concealing their secrets- for now, at least.
“Hail Satan!” I heard the elites cry inside in unison. I didn’t want to look in at the rows of high-ranking politicians, celebrities, influencers and artists, but my curiosity was high. I peeked around the corner of the stone archway, seeing the red curtains on the stage drawing apart. I saw one of my favorite actors standing in the front row, clapping excitedly and jumping up and down.
The crowd cheered as a naked female strapped to an obsidian altar lay there. She was beautiful and blonde, probably no older than twenty with the face of a supermodel. Her mouth was gagged, her arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. Thin leather cords were tied around her wrists and ankles, biting deeply into the skin. Her eyes rolled wildly as she shook her head from side to side. She froze, and her eyes met mine for a brief moment. I saw the pleading expression there, the mortal terror and absolute horror.
A man in a goat mask wearing black robes slunk out from the side of the stage, carrying a wavy silver dagger engraved with strange symbols. The crowd erupted into a primal roar of pleasure and excitement that sounded like it came from one monstrous mouth.
“Worthy is the Lamb!” the man in the goat mask screamed with electronic amplification. He had a deep voice, as if he had rocks rolling around in his throat. The crowd roared and clapped. Scattered cries of “Hail Lucifer!” and “Ave Satanas!” echoed down the massive auditorium.
“Hey, pay attention,” the other security agent at my side said in a thick Finnish accent. He was a tall Scandinavian-looking guy named Kolmek. “You’re not getting paid to watch the show, new guy.” I tried to rip my gaze away from the stage, but it held my attention with an obsessive horror.
“The burnt bones of children and women have been offered to the ancient ones, to Moloch,” the man on the stage cried. “Under our feet, the burnt bodies of hundreds lay dreaming. This victim will be the 666th. Her blood will bring about the Gnosis that we seek, the direct experience of the divine held by the gods, by Lucifer and Moloch and Baal…” The roaring of the crowd temporarily drowned out his electronically-magnified voice. “Tonight, we will rip open the veil!”
I had stopped watching the show, instead staring blankly out at the beach and palm trees. At that moment, another black-clad security agent came up to my partner, whispered something in his ear, then immediately disappeared, heading off back in the direction of the main security office. Kolmek shook his head grimly.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Stay right here. Don’t move from this door no matter what. And pay attention.” I nodded and watched as he walked off in the same direction.
I immediately took the opportunity to continue watching the ceremony. I had missed something important, apparently. The woman now laid dead on the sacrificial table, a gaping hole in her chest. Blood spurted from the crater as the man in the goat mask held her beating heart grasped tightly in his hand, letting the blood stream down his naked fingers. The crowd cheered with a rising bloodlust and insanity. Most of them were standing, their eyes gleaming and wide with fanatical adoration. The entire spectacle reminded me of some kind of ancient Aztec ritual.
As the woman’s sightless eyes stared vacantly up in death, the man in a goat mask pulled out a can of gasoline. The clear liquid gurgled as he up-ended the canister over her pale, bloodless face, over her naked stomach and long legs. A moment later, he lit a match and dropped it. I heard the whooshing of the flames as they rose up.
The crowd went deathly silent as they watched the rippling flames. The man in the goat mask began chanting in some strange language I had never heard before. It sounded Semitic, but I knew it wasn’t Arabic or Hebrew. I felt something like electricity ripple through the air, almost like a feeling of falling pressure before a storm. I looked down at the hairs on my arms, seeing them rise up. I looked back up at the stage, and my eyes widened in horror.
The flaming body of the sacrificial victim had started to morph before my eyes and the eyes of the crowd. The dripping, blackening flesh jumped up and down, as if there were rats trapped in her body trying to escape the fire. There was a deafening hissing as if thousands of snakes were being burned alive.
The dead woman’s arms jerked up, the skin splitting open as if she had seams running along her skin. Something dark and muscular with curving, black talons ripped its way out of the dead, burning flesh. Behind it, a head appeared with long, curving horns and eyes that spun with whorls of fire. It looked like the offspring of a bull and a demon. Its imposing body rose up from the inferno, appearing like magic from the solid stone. It raised itself to its full height, looming over the crowd. The last of the woman’s blood hissed and boiled away, her flesh dissolving into ashes.
“Behold, Moloch rises!” the man in the goat mask screamed in a fanatical voice. The crowd’s cheering had stopped, though. Many of the faces in the crowd looked chalk-white with terror. The bull-god surveyed the crowd, its horns nearly scraping the ceiling twenty feet above the stage.
At that moment, I knew death was on its way with eyes of fire and a grin like a skull, ready to reap a field of human bodies.
***
I heard running behind me, but I didn’t dare turn away from the horrific sight in front of me. The last of the fire’s embers died, sending up thin wisps of gray smoke that spiraled around the bull-god’s monstrous face. Moloch stood as still as a statue, and if it weren’t for one thing, I might’ve thought it was some sort of sculpture or art project. He had two nostrils like a serpent’s. As his great lungs inhaled, the smoke billowed in and out of his mouth and nose.
Some of the people at the edges of the crowd had gotten up, hurrying towards the doors. Moloch’s head ratcheted to face them, his fiery eyes narrowing into slits.
“Do not leave!” the man in the goat mask pleaded. “Those who have fear are not worthy of life. Do not prove yourselves unworthy of life!” As the first of the fleeing men and women got to within a few steps of the door, Moloch gave a primal roar. In a blur of primal strength, he reached down and ripped the blackened sacrificial altar off the stage. It ripped from the wooden stage with a tremendous crack like a bullwhip. He hurled the heavy mass of stone at those heading towards the opposite exit from the one I guarded.
I watched it curve through the air. The people started screaming and clawing to escape as it smashed down on their heads with a grating crash. I could feel the floor shake from where I stood outside. Blood exploded from their smashed bodies. I saw arms and legs jerking and seizing under the heavy stone, but within a few moments, they slowed and then stopped.
Others were running towards the door I guarded, but Moloch leapt off the stage in a blur. In a few bounding steps, he reached the pale, terrified faces on the other side of the threshold. His massive clawed hand came down. I heard bones shatter as blood sprayed my face and the wall. Bone splinters and pieces of brain exploded from the screaming bodies. I backpedaled, wiping at my eyes, trying to get the blood off so I could see. No one had told me what to do in this situation. I didn’t know if I was supposed to shoot that massive abomination, or if this was all just part of the show.
“Richard!” a familiar voice cried from behind me. Panic oozed from every word. I spun, seeing Mario and Kolmek standing side by side, their pupils dilated and expressions grim.
“We have a major problem.” It was Mario. I recognized that voice, the one that sounded as if he had been gargling with rocks.
“I know,” I said, holding my rifle tightly. I pointed behind me at the scene of rampant death and destruction.
I had seen bloodshed and war before, but this was different. The Island itself seemed to feel it. The wind, which had been calm when I first landed, now whipped the Island in fast, circular currents. The breeze smelled of burnt matches and coppery blood. The static electricity which had caused the hairs on my arms to rise rippled over everything with tiny blue flashes, increasing in power by the second.
“No, no, not Moloch,” Kolmek said, looking much calmer than I felt. “The Savior lets Moloch thin the herd every year.”
“It’s Leviathan,” Mario continued grimly, “the beast from the waters. The smell of blood is drawing it from the depths of the ocean. We picked up the first blips on radar a few minutes ago. When it gets here, it won’t stop until everything is rubble. It will kill every single person on the Island.”
“All security personnel must report to the south beach immediately,” a cool robotic voice cried out over hidden loudspeakers all over the Island. The screaming from the auditorium had quieted behind me. I was afraid to look inside.
“There it is,” Kolmek said, his head jerking up as the emergency alert read. He motioned for me to follow. “It’s time to fight.”
***
We sprinted over curving trails of smooth logs between deathly quiet forests. All the insects and birds had gone silent. Ahead of us, the palm trees opened up onto the Pacific Ocean. But it was no longer a beautiful tropical blue. A black, swirling whirlpool like an ulcerous wound had opened up on its surface. It stretched hundreds of feet across, drawing closer to the shore by the second. Dead fish, sharks, dolphins, squids and even whales spun in the filthy, dark water.
Twenty black-clad security agents waited for the three of us on the beach, their eyes wide, their faces pale with terror. Like myself, they all had AR-15s and Glock 22s with extra magazines for both. I guess the Glock might be useful for blowing my brains out as a last resort if some beast from Hell rose out of the simmering waters, but I didn’t think it would stop anything from another dimension.
The clouds swirled overhead in a thick curtain as black as smoke. Flashes of blue lightning detonated every couple seconds. Mario raised his hands, screaming over the roaring of the wind. Kolmek stood by my side, his face grim and eyes narrowed.
“Your job is to fight off anything that tries to get on the Island,” he said, looking from one face to another with rapt attention. “Nothing can stand against high-caliber rifle fire. Shoot at the face and eyes when it comes up. We’ve dealt with creatures like this before, and they will retreat if you injure them badly enough.” I had the sense of being fed a line of bullshit as my mind processed this.
“What exactly is coming up?” one of the doe-eyed security men asked. He barely looked old enough to drink, a young, muscular hulk with a Marine Corps tattoo on his neck.
“They call it Leviathan,” Mario responded. “Sometimes the rituals here and the smell of blood can draw… strange things. Leviathan is one of those. We have encountered it before. The most important thing to remember is…” His voice was suddenly drowned out by a terrible cacophony that came from the center of the black whirlpool.
A screech like the detonation of a nuclear missile shook the ground. The ocean jumped and bubbled frantically. The beach heaved and cracked, the white sands disappearing in fissures that opened up like greedy mouths underneath my feet. I lost my balance, falling forwards. The screeching continued rising into a primal roar.
A green dragon head the color of an infected wound erupted from the surface of the thrashing water, rising up dozens of feet in the air. It had two enormous slitted eyes that dilated and constricted quickly as it glowered down at us. The screeching abruptly stopped, the pointed mouth of the dragon slamming shut with a sound like a gunshot.
Within moments, another cancerous green head shot up in a blur, its skin looking as hard as stone. Ridges that looked as sharp as swords ran the length of its reptilian skull, arcing over its eyes and pointed snout. More heads erupted from the ocean until all seven heads of Leviathan loomed over us.
Not one of us fired. No one even seemed to breathe as we surveyed the beast across the no-man’s land of the white sands. The slitted eyes and yellow irises of the seven heads had a demonic hunger, a reptilian coldness. Far behind us, I heard distant screams still echoing from the auditorium where Moloch held sway.
“Fire!” Mario cried. Instantly, a cacophony of gunshots exploded all around me. I jumped up on my feet, scrambling up as the seven-headed dragon leapt forward. Thousands of gallons of saltwater streamed down its massive body as it came up on the beach. Long, black paws with bone-white talons shot out of the surging ocean, followed by a tapering tail like that of a water snake.
I brought the rifle up and emptied my magazine as fast as I could, pulling the trigger over and over as I aimed at the many slitted eyes of Leviathan. But the bullets seemed to ping harmlessly off of its hard, obsidian-like scales.
It scrabbled onto the shore, the heads coming down in a blur. Rows and rows of vampiric fangs gleamed dully in each of the mouths. One security agent was bitten in half, the spurting stump of his lower body still standing for a long moment even as the rest of the body disappeared down the throat of the dragon.
Mario ran forwards, slamming another magazine in his rifle and opening fire point-blank. One of the heads came down in a blur towards him. Its great, staring eyes exploded in a shower of blue blood and thick vitreous fluid. The dragon head pulled back, its mouth opening in a primal scream of agony.
As I reloaded, I scanned the area around me, realizing that nearly half of the security agents were either dead or critically injured. I backpedaled away, keeping my eyes on the dragon. It continuously drew forward, killing more of its enemies with every step. I turned and ran into the forest, the sounds of shattering bones and dying men ringing through the air with a sickening clarity behind me.
Once I had reached the border of the trail, I heard Mario yell, “Retreat!” behind me. But by that point, it was far too late.
***
“Hey! Wait up!” a voice whispered from behind me. I turned my head, seeing Kolmek. Spatters of drying blood covered his face and uniform. As far as I could tell, none of it was his. “Mario’s dead. They’re all dead. We need to get out of here. We need to get off the Island.”
“How?” I asked.
“Find the Savior,” he answered, panting and out of breath. “We must find him. He can get us out of here.”
“I don’t even know what the guy looks like,” I muttered. “He was wearing a goat mask.”
“You’ll know him when you see him,” Kolmek said. “His body is covered in scars. Everything except his face. Stay close to me. We need to watch each other’s backs. It’s our only chance of survival.”
***
A trail of twisted, broken bodies led from the mansion to the surrounding trails and beaches. A decapitated woman with solid gold necklaces embedded with diamonds lay in front of me. It was strange on the Island, the way oblivion and ineffable wealth coexisted side by side. But everything was deathly silent, even in the mansion’s auditorium.
“Where’s the Savior?” I asked through gritted teeth. I peeked my head into the auditorium, but nothing moved. Hundreds of smashed and bloody bodies littered the floor.
“He’s around somewhere,” Kolmek answered. We started circling the mansion, looking for any signs of life. Kolmek went in the lead. As he turned the corner, an enormous black hand with sharp claws of fingers flitted forward in a blur, wrapping itself around his chest. Kolmek gave a strangled cry as it closed around him. I heard his bones crush as a spout of blood and gore flew from his mouth and nose, as if he were a toothpaste tube being squeezed.
I backpedaled away as Moloch threw the twitching corpse aside like a discarded toy. It smashed into the wall of the mansion, exploding wetly. A human-shaped, bloody stain languidly dripped down the wall above Kolmek’s mangled body.
Moloch slowly turned his head towards me, the fiery eyes flashing with hunger. He gnashed his fangs together, taking a step forward with a leg the size and shape of a tree trunk. With every step he took, I felt the ground tremble.
“Stop!” I cried, moving away from the monstrous creature. “Why are you doing this?”
“There is no why,” he gurgled, his voice monstrous and inhumanly slow. “There is only power. The weak deserve to die. Only the strong are worthy of life.” I raised my rifle in a last-ditch effort to save myself. Moloch saw it and started running towards me, every footstep crushing the paved walkway around the mansion into rubble and dust.
I aimed for his eyes and nose, emptying the entire magazine as quickly as I could. The bullets smashed into Moloch’s face. Dark red, clotted blood dripped out of the wounds, writhing with maggots. Drops of it fell around me, landing on my hair and face. I felt the small larvae twisting all over my skin. Moloch’s blood smelled nauseating, like some combination of stinkbugs and rotting bodies. He slowed, giving a roar of pain. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but as I looked out in the direction of the beach, my heart dropped.
Leviathan was moving in our direction, the giant dragon heads looming over the trees. Quickly, it swept towards me like a dark wind.
***
“You will suffer for that, worthless slave,” Moloch growled, wiping blood from his fiery eyes with his sharp talons of fingers. A sudden idea came to me. I ran in the direction of Leviathan. Moloch followed closely at my heels, only a few steps behind me.
Leviathan slithered forward over the sands and trees, its enormous body undulating like a water snake’s. I screamed at it, an incomprehensible wail of terror. Its seven heads snapped towards me. Its slitted eyes widened as it saw Moloch.
I heard the crashing of Moloch’s footsteps stop behind me, only feet away from crushing me into a paste. His massive lungs breathed quickly, exhaling the odor of sulfur and smoke.
“Leviathan,” Moloch growled in his demonic voice. “These are my tributes.” Leviathan’s dragon heads looked straight up at the Sun and screamed in response, their many voices rising and falling in a dissonant wail. As I sprinted into the trees, Leviathan and Moloch ran at each other, colliding with an ear-splitting crash. I glanced back, seeing Moloch ripping one of the dragon heads off its neck with his sharp fingers. The head screamed as blue blood exploded from the spurting stump. After a long moment, the neck fell limply forward.
The other dragon heads bit Moloch in a unified attack. They ripped deep holes in his shoulders and arms, snapping over and over like rabid dogs. As the two eldritch monstrosities attacked each other in fierce combat, I lost sight of them, but the sounds of fighting echoed over the entire island, crashing like lightning.
***
I felt like the survivor of an Apocalypse. I couldn’t find a single other living person on the Island. Hundreds of crushed, broken and decapitated bodies surrounded me. Over the cacophony of fighting, I heard a new noise: the whirring of helicopter blades nearby. It was coming from the other side of the mansion.
Frantically, I sprinted around the other side, seeing a Black Hawk helicopter getting ready to leave. A man in black robes sat at the pilot’s seat, his green eyes gleaming and a wide smile plastered across his face. I smashed my fist into the door over and over until he opened it.
“Holy shit, you’re still alive?” he asked. I hadn’t seen this man before. He had a face like a Calvin Klein model, all sharp angles and high cheekbones, perfectly proportioned in every way. But his scalp looked melted and scarred, as if someone had thrown gasoline on his hair and ignited it. His ears were stunted, twisted growths of scar tissue. His hands, too, were covered in deep, folding burn scars.
“Are you the Savior?” I responded quickly. “Please, get me out of here.”
“They do call me that,” he said wistfully. “The Savior. Yes, I guess I am. Get in.”
***
The Savior stared at me with his strange green eyes, the color of swamps where monstrous things swam under the surface.
“Some people just need to learn the hard way,” he said. The helicopter took off into a dark night covered with bright, twinkling stars. “There is no great power without great responsibility, after all. Those of us who seek the ancient ones know it comes with a cost.” I just stared out the window, gazing down at the countless mutilated, broken bodies that littered the beach.
Below us, the face of a bull stared up with eyes of fiery cyclones. The broken, still body of Leviathan lay at his feet. As we made it over the great waters of the Pacific Ocean, the bull-god raised a hand and waved. At that moment, I thought I could almost see a hurricane of translucent souls circling around him, spiraling up into the sky.