Posted by Rachael on May 14, 2002 at 01:03:23:
Author's note: This was the original story "I Am Zero" which was perhaps half-finished when I changed my mind and wrote another piece with the same title. I knew what I had in mind initially, and this final, completed version is fairly close to that. The two stories make for an interesting contrast I think in what the song (by Smashing Pumpkins) brings to me at different times. I'd rather listen to music than eat, what can I say?
I am Zero (2002 remix)
Fiction by Rachael
Emptiness is loneliness
and
Loneliness is cleanliness
and
Cleanliness is Godliness
and
God is empty just like me.
"Car trouble?"
Rachael looked up from the magazine she was reading. "Yeah."
She couldn't quite see the guys face; the bright desert sun was shining off the side of his car right into her eyes. She put a hand over her eyes, but it didn't help very much. She was sitting in the driver's seat with the door open.
"I don't know much about 'em. Maybe I can give you a ride? There's a Wally-Pump just a couple miles down the road there."
Rachael smiled, "No thanks, my boyfriend left awhile ago. He'll be back any minute now, I'm sure."
"Well shoot, I don't think my momma would let me sit at her table on Sunday if I left a woman out here all alone."
"I'm fine really, tell your mom from me that you're a perfect gentleman."
Rachael smiled again and looked back down at her magazine.
"I'm afraid I'm gonna have to insist." The man shot her with a stun gun, filling Rachael's suddenly jerking body with 50,000 volts of electricity. She dropped the magazine and fell back on the seat unconscious. The man picked her up and put her in the trunk of his car and drove away.
A few minutes later he passed Rachael's boyfriend sitting in the passenger seat of Wally's old tow truck coming from the other direction. Neither of them really noticed each other.
Rachael woke up in the stifling heat and darkness. Her body felt vaguely sore and she sat up banging her forehead on the trunk with a loud hollow thud. "OWWW!!" She rubbed her head and realized that she was moving, the sound of the car and road passing under the wheels. The girl began to panic unable to remember how she'd gotten there, wherever there was.
The man heard the thud and smiled. She was awake, that was good. Just a little bit farther and he could let her out for a stretch. No reason to keep her cooped up back there. He'd turned off the highway long ago and was now on an unmarked road in the middle of the flat barren wilderness that was the Pueron Desert in southeastern Washington. It was hot this time of year and desolate always. The heat shimmered in waves and in the distance the gray-blue Rocky Mountains merged into the sky. The man loved it out here.
He was on his way with Rachael to his secret place. His cleansing place which was where he'd been heading anyway. Having found Rachael on his journey was a good omen, a sign, he thought. He would offer her to God and reap the richness of His blessings. He hadn't made an offering in nearly a year and that was probably why things hadn't been as good as they should have been. Zero was a very demanding God.
He parked the car in a spot not marked by anything in particular. The man just knew when to stop. He grabbed his old army knapsack out of the backseat and put on his wide brimmed hat and adjusted his sunglasses. It was going to be a long hot walk.
He opened the trunk and looked down at the girl squinting up at him. She was kind of pretty, about 20 he guessed. Maybe a little younger with black hair and big brown eyes. Thin and pale. The sun would eat her up, he thought.
"Come on, you can get out now."
Rachael climbed out, her legs and back were stiff and she stretched while she looked around. Her first plan had been to run, but where? There was nothing here; it was flat as far as she could see. A light dusty brownish yellow emptiness. She turned in a full circle, nothing.
The man gave her a bottle of water out of knapsack. "Take a drink, we have a long ways to go." He looked down at her feet; she was wearing tennis shoes, well better than nothing he thought. He slammed the trunk closed and locked the car with a push of a button on his little key chain. He took the water back and put it in his bag, and then he turned and started walking away.
"Hey!" Rachael stood there, confused.
"You come with me, I've got the only food and water for 50 miles. You wanna stay here, it's okay too. Just don't die too close to the car; I have to drive it later. No sense getting buzzard crap all over the windshield."
Rachael was in a daze. She rubbed the small bump on her head and wondered if it were some kind of dream. She looked around again but it was no use, there was nothing. She started walking behind the man, following in his footsteps and shading her eyes from the glaring sun as best she could. The silence was only broken by the sound of their footsteps crunching on the dry barren ground. The wind hardly stirred at all and Rachael thought she'd never seen a more lonely place in her whole life.
After about an hour Rachael had caught up a little closer. She could hear him talking, like a low muttering of nonsense. She couldn't make out the words.
"Hey!" Rachael called out. "Hey! Where are we going?"
The man answered. "We're going to the place of cleansing."
"What? What the hell does that mean? And who are you?"
"It's a place the native peoples used long ago, it's a sacred place. I'm going to cleanse my spirit."
"Right." Great, a religious psycho, Rachael thought to herself. "So why did you kidnap me? I mean if you don't care whether or not I come to this cleansing place with you?"
"I do care. I knew you would come. I need you to witness my cleansing."
"Witness huh?" Rachael was looking around for a big rock or a stick she could hit him with. But there wasn't anything bigger or harder than chunks of baked sand. "And then I can go?"
"Oh yes." said the man. "Then you'll be free."
"Great."
The pair trudged a while longer, finally the man paused so they could drink some of the lukewarm water in his pack. He looked at Rachael; her fine pale skin was already turning red where it was exposed to the sun. A girl like that should never go out without a lot of sun block, he thought, she would be feeling it soon. But that was part of it wasn't it? The cleansing. He smiled at Rache as she drank and he started walking again with the girl close behind.
Rachael's feet were burning; she could feel the blisters and had long ago given up trying to empty the dust and sand from her shoes. Almost better to go barefoot she thought, but she didn't, that sand had to be hot. The sun was bright, washing the blue out of the sky so that everything seemed to be the same blinding shade of yellow. Her eyes hurt and she kept them closed as much as she could, opening them only briefly to squint at the next few yards as they trudged endlessly onward.
Only when they crested a small rise and dropped down the shifting steep slope of the other side did the man finally pause again. He dug out his water and took a drink, waiting for Rachael to catch up before handing the bottle to her. The water was warm now, but still refreshing as it passed her dried and chapped lips. She held it in her mouth a long moment, letting the wetness bathe her tongue before swallowing it.
"This is it. The place of cleansing." It was a small area, almost a valley but not quite, surrounded on all sides by the high sand dune they had just crossed. In the center stood a massive, ancient tree. It's leafless gnarled limbs growing in every, seemingly random, direction. What kind of tree it was, Rachael couldn't tell, nor did she care. A tree was a tree, and this one had less shade than most.
"A tree?" Rachael looked at the man. "You brought me out her for a stupid tree?"
"No." And that was all he said as he set his backpack down on the ground. He opened it, pulling out various things and arranging them carefully on the ground.
Rachael ignored him and walked closer to the tree. It was huge; it would take three of her, stretching their arms to reach around the base. There was a little shade on the Northeast side and Rachael sat down, feeling the temperature drop only slightly, but enough. It felt better just to have the sun out of her eyes. She leaned up against it and lifted her feet, carefully removing her shoes and making soft "ohhh's" and "ahhh's" as she brushed the sand clinging to her hot sticky soles. She moaned over the blisters and finally closed her eyes. She felt so tired, so confused. The guy didn't want to kill her, okay...So she'd just hang out and watch him do whatever he'd do. She started imagining how much fun it was going to be testifying at his trial, and that thought comforted her as she began to doze fitfully, shaded from that awful sun.
The man had laid out his prized possessions and now he bowed low, praying over them, asking his God Zero to bless this occasion and give him the strength he would need to complete his journey. He lifted the spikes one by one, raising them to the four corners of the universe. They were long, heavy nails of forged iron, not steel. He'd kept them in wrapped oiled skins, protected from moisture and free from rust. He hefted the hammer of Zero in his two hands, displaying it to sun and earth. The handle was roughly hewn from the timber of Golgotha, wood from the cross of Jesus himself, he believed. The Prophet of Zero and the first to teach the cleansing way. The head was formed of iron that had likewise been preserved and it had a dark oily sheen that caught the light and dispersed it with a weak reflection.
His ritual was short, the prayers were simple and spoken into the wind so that the words would reach the hawk and the coyote. They would come, the man new, just as Zero would come and he would be cleansed. He began undressing as the sun began fell lower. There wasn't a lot of time, he'd been tardy and that thought made him frown. When he rose, the man was naked, his scarred flesh was bared to the sky and he felt the strong sun drying the sweat from his back. He picked up his knife from the backpack, long and sharp with a curved stainless blade. He stood with his legs apart, lifting it to heaven and whispering a prayer long ago committed to memory.
As he pulled the blade across his skin he felt the weakness washing out of him with his blood. Long thin lines of crimson painted an intricate design on his chest. He traced the old pale scars without looking, trusting the memory in his hands, in the knife itself, to weave the symbols of his faith. His body responded to the pain, shivering as he struggled to complete it. His heart raced and his chest cramped with the effort to breath. But he didn't cry out, he didn't give in to the temptation of weakness. His mind filled with pleasure, the ecstasy of serving Zero. He was freeing himself, giving himself to that which is greater. His body became straighter, his back arching, pushing himself against the blade. He felt the strength of Zero filling him. He became aware of his erection as it strained aching from his body. Reminding him that he still had another temptation to be purged.
He'd been celibate since his last cleansing, spurning any physical contact as a weakness to be avoided, a temptation to resist. But now he knew it was necessary. He stood over the girl's resting form, the knife in his red right hand and his body stained crimson down his chest and stomach, across his straining penis, and over his thighs. He would cleanse this evil finally, using the girl as a vassal to hold his twisted seed. He moved his left hand down his chest and stomach, gathering his hardness and stroking it slowly within his fist, warm and sticky with blood. He offered her to Zero, begging Him to accept her and to find her worthy of cleansing him of his weak desires.
Rachael woke with a start, gasping as she felt herself dragged by her feet out of the shade and across the hard dry ground. She was confused momentarily, and blinded by the intense sunlight that kept her attacker dark and faceless. The sun was at his back as hunched over her, cutting away her clothes with primal grunts and growls. She tried to defend herself, to push him away with her hands, twisting her body to kick at him. Her own throat made sounds of desperation, soft cries carried on the wind to the hawk circling high above and the dozen or so coyotes pacing silently on the high dunes. But it was no use, he bent her to his newfound strength and Rachael screamed painfully as he thrust his swollen member into her tight dry sex.
He joined her, screaming as he ripped into his vassal, pinning her legs with his arms beneath her knees, his hands around her wrists. Rachael was bent double, on her back and vulnerable as he pumped into her painfully over and over again. The coyotes howled and leapt into the hot desert air as the heard the sounds of this violent mating. Rachael sobbed, shutting her eyes when she caught a glimpse of his bloodied chest heaving above her. She tried to forget the violation of her womb as his angry phallus stabbed inside her relentlessly. She tried to think about the million tiny pinpricks of pain digging into her bare back, the jagged pebbles and tiny stones upon which she was being impaled. She wanted to float away on them, a sea of familiar discomfort to wash away the unbearable pain between her legs.
When he finished, lifting his face to the sky and crying out as his lust spilled from his body into the girl's, he knew he was changed. The sexual need vanished as quickly as it had come upon him. He withdrew his shrinking penis and lifted himself off Rachael's prostrate, seemingly lifeless form. But she wasn't dead. She was in shock, her mind shut down to protect itself. Rachael's tear stained eyes were open, but glazed, her pupils dilated. His blood now covered them both, and he watched her breasts rise and fall slowly, glistening in the setting sun. It was going down quickly and he lifted her body easily.
Rachael didn't notice as the man perched her onto a natural outcropping, a large rough knot of stunted wood. She stayed in place, sitting on it, her feet dangling a foot off the ground, while he gathered his things. He'd done this many times, always the same, but always different. Sometimes he'd needed to beat them first, unconscious always worked best. It was pleasant for him at least that Rachael's eyes were open, even if she couldn't comprehend, at least she would see the coming of Zero. The cleansing. And that fueled his fervor such that he didn't notice his penis growing erect once again.
He stretched her arms one at a time, pulling her tightly against the rough thick bark of the tree. He nailed her hands first, driving the spikes one at a time through Rachael's wrists. He lifted her slightly; using his new found strength so that she would not have to rest on that stunted branch, not at first anyway. He knew that as the night wore on her body would sag, her flesh grow weak and slowly settle lower. He spread her legs, nailing each of them to the tree through the tops of her feet. She stirred slightly, groaning softy while he did this, but she refused to come awake. When he was done the man stepped back. His bleeding had stopped, but his sweat prevented the blood from drying completely. He wiped his brow with fingers wet from the blood that he'd drawn from Rachael's wounds. He looked at her naked, stained and perspiring body. Her hair was dirty, matted and hanging over her face, as she seemed to look down at her flattened breasts. Her arms and legs were spread eagle, her sex leaking wetness, a mixture of her own blood and his semen.
The man became aware of his erection, but this time he knew it wasn't driven by the temptation of impure lust. It was a sign of strength, of the virility of faith. He stroked himself slowly, backing away to sit in the last red rays of the setting sun. It was disappearing over the high sand piled around him by the centuries. He masturbated slowly as the moon rose and the coyotes danced, calling out in a chorus of howls. The scent of blood filled the air and he waited. When the beasts moved past him lightly, their soft warm coats brushing his shivering flesh, the man didn't move. He uttered not a sound as the first sniffed the base of the tree and quickly stretched it's lithe form to lick at Rachael's stirring body. She was waking, she was seeing Zero come, and her screams as the coyotes reached for her with tooth and claw were lost on the cold desert wind.
the end
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