Sewercide

The sludge has advanced another thirteen meters overnight. Half a block away now. The scent wafts through the window. It smells of polymeres and pustulence, ethylene and offal. That complex motley stench of solvents and sewage implicates the one who sniffs it in its madness. Its hideous waft dissolves a person’s individuality by some wild alchemy into the matrix of decompositions making up its noxious fragrance, ultimately working to convert smeller into smellee.

Giorgio Moroder the disco dachshund yaps urgent distress. Huralddo hurries to his laptop and grungles for the latest news on the sludge overspill. On GrungleEarth there’s an overlay including a projection for the next few days. Hurraldo zooms in to GrungleStreetView, toggles on Foresight Mode. The C-Future overlay projects his apartment building to be totally covered by sludge before Friday.

Further grungle searches on ‘sludge’ elicit a list of sexual content with sewage themes and a new AI companion called OoziQ that offers the subscriber ‘an unimaginable experience of sloppy orgasmic delight, and a wealth of self-affirmation among the slimy comforts of an authentic conversational interaction’.

His pulse quickens and his breath comes shallow and fast. No, not from sexual arousal, not this time, but from a growing panic. What’s being done to stop this slow-creeping disaster? He doesn’t know any of his neighbors; there’s literally nobody around here he could ask. He tries to shush Giorgio Moroder’s alarmed yapping and dials emergency services.

Your call is so welcome. Thank you for making it happen.
All calls to an automated care agent will be charged at premium rate and monitored for lawfulness by a federally-mandated AI special agent.
If you wish to speak to a qualified reassurance bot about overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, press 1.
If you have generalized anxiety issues and/or difficulty breathing, press 2.
If you have some other issue and would like to speak to a human operator, contact us at myemergencyservices_sponsoredbypalandrom_at_dotcom.dotcom.
Your call is so welcome. Thank you for mak-

Huralddo picks up Giorgio Moroder, goes to the window, and looks out again down the street. Over on the other side there’s a woman pulling her two children outta the sludge. The eldest one is arduously extracted with an unheard plop, which though inaudible from over here, could quite easily be added in post with some sick audio effects. Huralddo’s got his HooWee! Seezun¡9! cellphone out now, ready to video the second child’s rescue, so he can post the vid to SickSlop — but to his chagrin, he finds the phone’s just now run completely out of juice.

He starts to rummage around in the living room for the phonecharger but hears a thunk and a fizzing sound outside. Running again to the window, he notices that just up the street, on the nearside, the weighty glacier of sludge has just knocked down a power pole. Electric cables are sparking, singeing curious pigeons and sizzling down into the ooze. Hurraldo checks the lightswitches in his apartment. Sure enough, there’s no juice in the apartment. Sludgeout.

Only now does he think of how easy it was to hear that falling pole sound when the city noise should have drowned it out. Considering that the street and the entire barrio is menaced by imminent catastrophic disaster, there’s very little happening outside. The woman has pulled her second child out of the ooze and is carrying the pair of them, dripping viscous goop, up the street on the far side away from the creeping mass of sludge. That’s all there is. No bystanders, no firetrucks, no cops, no helicopters in the sky.

He feels exhausted and drops Giorgio Moroder on the floor where he creeps into his doggie box and starts to whimper. Is this it? An entire city block to be smothered in a sluggish stream of effluent, a rancid unclassified soup of toxins, biohazards, carcinogens and unimaginable cooties, and nobody out there even pays any attention? Time was an event like this would gain some traction. He remembers his teens when the first spills happened, when there was no end of interest in these phenomena. There were podcasts: conspiracy theorists positing aliens, leftists, shadowy global cliques and necromanglers. Everyone had a take.

But now the sludge-spills, like the beast-swarms, the sink-holes and the supply-chain hiccups, they’ve just been assimilated into the new normal. That’s to say, it’s normal if it’s not happening to you right at this minute. If it’s happening a couple of blocks away from your domicile, just past the latest mass shooting or the cop brutality du jour, then it might as well be a livecast from the planet Pluto - which isn’t even a planet anymore, just as these localized kerfuffles are no longer classed as crises. Dwarf planet. Dwarf catastrophe.

There are maybe two days max before Huralddo’s place is submerged in a rising flood of sludge. Time enough, then, to have a quick nap and then think through the next few moves. Look before you leap, is that a thing? He seems to remember his grandpa saying that, along with ‘Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow’. So he decides to make that folk wisdom his own and settles down on the couch. The thick chemical air is making him sleepy in any case...

When Huralddo is awakened, it’s simultaneously by a glooping bubblecauldron sound and by the rising scent of that which may not be consciously acknowledged, a smell that the mind itself shies away from in denial. The bare raw aroma of it promises a totally unacceptable experience of festering organs dissolving in complex organic compounds, acidic slugtrails corroding flesh, feces fermenting in some unholy brew of lymph and gastric fluids. Vision swims and wavers as Hurraldo opens his eyes. It’s nighttime and there’s no power; the only light comes from the full moon in the window seen through wisps of spiralling fumes and light nimbus cloud.

Clouds cut across the moon and Huralddo’s eyes begin to water from the caustic air. It’s like something’s slicing his eyeballs, like a straight razorblade forged of corrosive aromatics and the sting of decomposing flesh. Drops cascade down his cheeks, and they too have a corrosive tang to them.

He drops to the floor on hands and knees, gasping out low to the ground where the air is clearer and almost breatheable. Crawls over to the window and sticks his head out. The dreadful truth hits him: the sludgeflood has inched, or rather yarded, up the street. By now it has submerged the lower floors of his building. On the fifth floor where he is he can look down on the glisten of the sludge in moonlight, hear its restless slopping against the walls, and more importantly he can whiff the intense rot of all that is organic and inorganic combined, the absolute breakdown of everything material into its odiferous putrefying building blocks. Only now can he understand that death is the key ingredient in the world’s rich broth.

Choking now, he senses that the only way out is up. He scrambles to his feet and bundles himself, coughing and gagging, through the apartment door and into the stairway. Giorgio Moroder sees him leaving, stirs woozily to a stand, and staggers after him. The air is clearer, less profaned. Batteries power the stairwell emergency lamps. Looking down the stairs he can barely see the sludge but can hear the gulping and thick suction as it jams its way through the ground floor entranceway.

Up and out, out and up. Huralddo staggers up the stairs, knocking and buzzing at the doors as he goes. Nobody answers; it seems that everyone in the building has decided to either die or evacuate, and without telling him. The door to the roof is locked, so Huralddo picks up a fire extinguisher from the hallway and batters at the lock. The extinguisher goes off, spritzing white foam into his face and spooging all over the top-floor stairwell, He coughs out the sweet-tasting chemical fire retardant, thinking of whipped cream, and hammers the door again.

There. It gives. He pushes through the door and out onto the roof, where the stars twinkle unironically through the light cloud cover and the night air is fresh enough to breathe a little bit comfortably. Giogio Moroder follows him out and Huralddo picks the dog up and cradles him. He sniffs the fur, the only thing that still smells of normality in his world, and listens.

Silence. No sirens, no traffic noise, none of the barks and shouts that make up the unheard background of the city’s soundtrack. The moon is blotted out to the east by a black bundle of approaching stormcloud. Now what?

Huralddo is alone in the dark on a rooftop with a swelling mass of toxic goop engulfing his apartment block. In all the world the only thing he has remaining to console him is a dachshund suffering from ongoing anxiety attacks and urinary incontinence. He has no idea what to do next. He needs one of those things - what are they called? A ‘deuce ex macaron’, or somesuch. You know, when something comes to rescue you even though you’ve done nothing at all to save yourself. They always come at this time, this darkest hour before the dawn. Don’t they?

Suddenly a blinding light shines out from on high and Huralddo stands fixed in its glare, forced to look down, eyes whited out. There’s the savage blat-blat of rotors and the bone-wrenching roar of a powerful engine. When he can see again, there’s a figure dangling in front of him, a silhouette in flight helmet and overalls cradling at the end of a cable.

He yells out and the dachshund yaps insistently, but they can’t make themselves heard in the din. The figure on the end of the cable holds out its arms and without thinking Huralddo hands over Giorgio Moroder. The figure clasps the dog tight with one arm, waves the other arm into the sky in a circular gesture, and instantly rises into the air.

NOOO! Huralddo snatches at the disappearing figure, reaching for its legs, but it’s already gone. The searchlight beam tilts up to horizontal, carving out a cone of brightness in the night. The engine roar and the blatting of rotors recede into the sky and in a few moments the noise is lost within the deep silence of the night.

Huralddo kneels down on the black tar of the roofing and weeps like an orphan, which in fact he is. Snot runs from his nose and pools beneath him in a clear puddle, but he can’t see it for the cloud cloaking the moonlight.

Dawn comes with rosy rays bursting out from behind dark heaps of stormcloud stalled with no movement over to the east. The sky is blue-gray and dappled, with gold and pink and salmon coming in to stroke the cloudcover. It occurs to Huralddo that this is the first dawn he’s ever seen. Usually at this time he’s asleep, or watching stuff on his tablet, or just sitting stoned on the couch and thinking about nothing. He’s never been out in the morning air to take it all in.

He’s sitting crosslegged on the black tar roof, a small puddle of clear mucus pooled before him. It wobbles slightly as the whole building shimmies, subject to great hydraulic pressures from sludge pressing from outside and inside at different rates. There’s a small rampart around the edge of the apartment block roof, a knee-high wall, and the sludge is starting to slop over it in scattered globs and dribbles.

Huralddo has passed through many stages in a short time. His throat is raw with screaming, his eyes sore from the tears and the toxic fumes now gathering at roof height. The last emotional state before this present one was shock. The condition he’s in now is acceptance. He feels a new stage pressing in on his skull just as the sludge tide presses in on the concavity of the rooftop.

Understanding. All other thoughts have already been crowded out by grief and resentment, and understanding comes flooding in to occupy the empty space. His mind is drained of blame, all blame of self or other. He no longer even resents Giorgio Moroder for taking his rightful place on the rescue chopper.

There’s a great totality of knowing that the huge oozing mess that is now piling over the rampart edge and creeping his way is of the same stuff that he himself is made of. It doesn’t judge him, has no condemnation for his lifestyle, just wants to unite with him so they can be together always.

From somewhere the voice of some tired prophet can be heard. A gray level voice, aged with experience and way beyond bitterness. Maybe a voice from inside his head. Perhaps the voice of God, or if not the God, then of a stray god, a trickster maybe, or the devil himself. The voice goes on, intoning a gentle mantra like a soft machine:

Sure as shit is shit, finally they will multiply their assholes into the polluted seas

It’s not important who speaks these words. The words themselves don’t matter either. Huralddo accepts and understands what the sludge itself has come to tell him, and he cares no longer for any distractions of thought. He doesn’t even feel the caustic sting when it touches him. The sludge rises up over his crossed knees, up and over his chest, past his neck and finally submerges his serene smile and his happy red-ringed eyes.

Soon everything is smoothing out towards its most primordial state. The vortices and bubbles are stilling, and the sluggish waves of sludge lap softly in the morning air.

=======» [[ SEWERCIDE /// END ]]] «=======

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