The Eighth Plague: A Narrative of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll

Chapter 6: Castles on the Ground

Colonel Van Bach awoke to find his spine bent at a fifty-degree angle. They had been driving well into the night, and it would seem that that in their sleep, Margie, Spade, the Arab, the Chinese and the Confederate were all leaning in his direction, so that all their combined weight was rested upon his ninety-year-old pure-blooded aryan spine.

"Om Mani Padme Hum." he whispered softly.

Suddenly, a dull green energy enveloped the others in the back seat, pushing them over so that they instead leaned into the Confederate, who was of a sturdier frame. The Colonel then shimmied himself about semi-tantrically until his bones were all in place.

"What was that supposed to be?" called a voice from the front of the car, mockingly.

Van Bach looked up at the rear view mirror and saw Major Collins, taking his eyes briefly off the road to stare back at him.

"The secret knowledge of the East, American. Something your people know nothing of."

"Oh yeah? I'll have you know I trained directly under the Council of Seven back in the war! Before they were killed, that is."

"Oh? I was apprentice to Doctor Faust himself." Van Bach said, an air of superiority more than apparent in his words.

"Really?" Collins asked, maintaining his tone of mockery.

"Did you meet the Pied Piper of Hamelin, too?"

The colonel laughed.

"I did more than meet him. I beat the Piper, American! Bested him at his own game! I used his own pipe to lure him dancing into the very bowels of Hades and left him to burn!"

Collins nodded his head.

"Cool, cool. Well, I oversaw the coverup of the Pepperinge Eye anomaly and the assasination of Benzino Napaloni."

The Colonel laughed a raspy, coughing laugh. "Yes! Napaloni! I remember him. Yes. That was probably the moment I lost faith in the cause. How could the Fuhrer truly believe in the Aryan ideal if he allied us with such scum? And then there were the camps..."

The colonel paused and looked at the floor.

"I was nineteen when I-- Ach. The things I saw, Collins. The things that I saw," he said as he wiped his eyes with his hands, "The jews, they... they did not deserve that. Nobody could deserve that."

Van Bach looked down at Doris as she slept on the floor. A long silence followed.

"How about you Collins?" Van Bach finally asked, "What made you lose faith?"

The Major cracked a slight smile.

"What makes you think I lost faith?"

Van Bach laughed again in that coughing old-man way.

"Come now, Major. Everyone loses faith."

Collins frowned.

"I don't know that I ever had faith in anything. I went looking for it in Tibet with the Council of Seven, but even then..."

Collins made a face meant to convey pensiveness, however his face was too fucked up for this to come across.

"I remember the night the Council fell. I watched as the protective wall around their temple vibrated into dust, and as the vampire huns began to rush in. The Seven were the first to go, rended apart by the same vibrations that got the walls. Then they went after the students. The vampires de-corporealized into a mist and began tearing them apart. Only two of us escaped. Me and another student. A girl. I'll never forget her words. As soon as we reached safety she said: 'Do you know what this means Collins? We are the only ones who know their secrets now. We can do anything. We could rule the world.'"

Major Collins's eyes had begun to tear up.

"Then she planted a kiss on my cheek. Understand, Colonel, that I had been training in a Lamasery for years. It was little more than a slight peck, but it was the closest kind of physical intimacy I had experienced up to that point. I was tempted, Colonel, I really was."

His hands shaking, Collins pulled the car over to the side of the road. A crescent moon hung in the sky. He began to break down crying.

"I snapped her neck with my bare hands, Van Bach. She was guilty of nothing more than being a stupid girl who said something stupid and for it I snapped her stupid neck."

Colonel Van Bach reached his hand onto Collins's shoulder.

"We are both guilty," he said.

He reached into one of his boots and pulled out a long, black drawstring bag. From it, he removed an ebony recorder. All down the length of the thing were intricate etchings of skeletons and demons and the like. They were antique in style, suggesting origins long before the supposed invention of the recorder.

"Behold the single most powerful sonic weapon in existence. This was the pipe that drove the rats from Hamelin, and later slaughtered its children. This is the pipe that killed the Piper of myth... and later the Council of Seven."

Major Collins bore an expression of nameless dread.

"You!"

"Yes, me." Van Bach said, opening wide his mouth to reveal that his incisors were increasing in length.

"Keep looking at the pipe, Collins. Just keep looking at the pipe."

Collins could not help but obey. As he looked at the pipe, he could see a strange grey aura emanate from the carvings, and hear what sounded like the screaming and moaning of thousands of tiny people trapped inside the instrument.

The Colonel bit down on his neck, and he could feel his vitality begin to drain away...