Chapter 21: Desperate Stand

The Panama Canal was always meant to be Dominion’s stopping point. Once Washington DC fell, he sent a contingent force, led by Blight, to catch the refugees. As planned, millions of people flocked south to try and escape his invasion, both citizens of the US and the Latin countries. They were funneled through the narrowing passage of Central America, the crowds condensing further and further as Dominion’s forces advanced behind them. It was rather like emptying a tube of toothpaste.

Roads and highways were flooded with people moving on foot, carrying their few meager possessions on their backs or having nothing at all. There were no cars on the road, either because they ran out of fuel or because they’d just get wrecked by the people fighting over them. The summer sun bared down on the poor wretches, with food and fresh water worth their weight in gold. Most people had to make do with whatever they could find, from drinking dirty water and animal piss out of mud puddles to eating roadkill and rotten food from garbage bins and compost piles. The roads were lined with the dead and dying, riddled with disease or sapped of strength from their death march. Most simply died from heat stroke or dehydration.

Over the sounds of bare feet and deteriorating sneakers pattering on the ground was the wailing of the destitute. Men, women, and children wept with each step, cursing the crippling heat, the aches and wounds of travel, their dry throats and empty stomachs, the lives they had left behind, the loss of friends and family, and the evil that chased them down. The sick and dying would beg passersby for aide, but no one had the strength to extend a helping hand.

For families, one member would often become sicker than the others, would deteriorate so fast that they’d lose the ability to walk. Their loved ones would get them into the shade, try to do something to ease their suffering and hopefully get them back on their feet. Parents would offer to carry their children, children would offer to carry their parents, but the reality could only be denied for so long. They’d have to be abandoned if the rest of the family had a chance of survival, the only question was would they be left to die or would their family stick around long enough to bury them, if they even bothered to do that. Countless people skipped this stage, realizing their sick and weak loved ones, carried on their backs, had already passed away several miles back, without ever getting to stay goodbye.

The stench of the refugees was spread for miles, from the mountains of shit and piss left behind to the unwashed bodies of the living and the dead. Upon being hit with the sun and kept damp by the humidity, corpses would swell up like hot air balloons. The gases inside would build until they finally popped and vented their cadaverous fumes. Then the flies would feed on the rotting flesh and lay their eggs, and their progeny would fill the air as a black cloud, dense enough to block out the sun. Decomposition was so fast that the bodies seemed to melt like butter in the heat, and when the rains came, the mixture of liquified tissue and human waste would wash off the roads and contaminate the surrounding areas, so that those still traveling would continue to get sick.

Any towns they passed by were stripped bare. Every drop and crumb were seized, no matter what had to be broken or who had to be killed to get them. The governments would try to maintain control, try to protect their resources and preserve order. Urban areas became war zones, with police and soldiers fighting the refugees. The government forces were better armed, but there weren’t enough bullets and clubs to stop the mob.

Once the fighting died down, the towns became refugee camps, places where people would bed down for a night and then resume their trek in the morning, though the idea of getting a bed or even a roof above was laughable. Most just slept in the streets with the rats. Those already weak from disease or injuries would pass on in the night. Others would often be killed while fighting for resources. With no one to remove the bodies, the refugee camps became mass graves, though the term ‘mass grave’ implies some sort of burial. The corpses just piled up, the towns resembling the dumpsters behind slaughterhouses.

Yet this horror still paled to what awaited them. They arrived at Panama, only to find that all the towns and cities had been reconstructed into new concentration camps. The main force coming from the northwest and a smaller force awaiting in the east; it was a pincer formation. The refugees had walked right into a trap, and as soon as they realized the danger, they were snatched up for processing. Countless people tried to take to the sea, to sail to South America or some small island where they could hide out, but the waters were being watched, and even if they managed to get away, the Caribbean was already under siege.

In the months that followed, despite the halt of Dominion’s advance, the exodus continued. Everyone in the eastern half of Panama, on the other side of the canal, flocked towards South America. South America itself was being emptied, almost everyone either boarding ships and planes to escape the hemisphere, or simply running as far south as possible. Of course, there were plenty of people who believed they could hide. They hoped to disappear into the jungles and deserts, to live their lives free, albeit in fear and isolation.

Those that went south into Chile and Argentina, their life expectancy was actually shortened. If they were captured, they’d become slaves and be worked half to death, but they’d be fed and sheltered. Instead, they flocked to a landscape not meant to support such a high population density. Every resource was fought over until it was exhausted. There wasn’t enough food to go around, not enough clean water or medicine. Shantytowns were constructed in the jungles because every inch of sheltered space in the real towns was occupied. The local governments didn’t stand a chance and simply crumbled like sandcastles washed away by the oncoming tide. There was no economy to speak of, all money rendered worthless, forcing people to either barter or simply kill each other for resources.

Some people actually moved back north due to the situation. They secluded themselves in the wilderness, hiding not just from Dominion above, but the desperate masses below.

At the start of September, Dominion resumed his expansion. His forces moved through the eastern half of Panama and down into Colombia, only to find the country all but abandoned. It was utterly still, the silence broken only by the cries of the birds and the clicks of the insects. The vultures and hounds were dispatched in all directions to search for survivors, but they came up emptyhanded. So, with nothing else to do, he gave the order for the new concentration camps to be built and for resources to be collected. In a single day, the nation of Colombia fell without a single shot fired or life taken.

The next day, they took over Venezuela and Ecuador, finding only a handful of families in hiding. On one hand, the lack of people made expansion quick and easy. His forces didn’t have to slow down for capture and shipment. On the other hand, when he finally reached the motherload, that’d be a lot of people he’d have to distribute all at once. Plus, when building concentration camps, he liked having the future inhabitants close by to determine how large to make the buildings and facilities.

Guyana, Suriname, and Guiana (no longer French Guiana as it was before the war, having been claimed by the local population in the chaos years) fell just as easily. In Brazil, he started finding adequate numbers of survivors, though they had to be combed out of the wilderness like lice. Why not go farther south? Either they thought they could hide from him, or they understood that simply running wouldn’t save them.

One by one, the South American nations fell under the mighty footfalls of the spawn. For Dominion, it was just as he had expected, and no less boring. He had hoped that someone would put up a fight, try some guerilla tactics or something, but most of his trouble came from the tedium of flushing the rats out of the jungles. He was also annoyed by the number of dead bodies he found due to the mass exodus. Every life lost was a soul wasted.

Once he passed the halfway point between the northern and southern halves of the continent, he came across the refugees, running out of room in Argentina and Chile and having to search for greener pastures. Towards the southernmost point, he and his forces found millions of people diseased and starving, living in squalor with many resorting to cannibalism. They huddled next to the coast, fighting over living space and writhing on top of each other like maggots swimming in viscera. The stench of their waste and their sickly bodies was nauseating. They were too weak to put up any kind of fight. It was rather disappointing.

He had at least hoped to be able to resume his experiments like he had in the US, but everyone was already so downtrodden that the results probably wouldn’t be very interesting. Oh well, hopefully he’d get better results across the sea.

South America had fallen, not with a bang, but a whimper, and the rest of the world had come to experience whole new levels of fear. The entire western hemisphere had fallen under Dominion’s control, but everyone knew that he wouldn’t stay content with that. In Paris, France, the UN was gathering to hold a meeting on the issue, Paris being the new host city after New York was taken. This new UN was composed not of diplomats, but the world leaders themselves, as they couldn’t allow a single second to be wasted due to miscommunication or emissarial incompetence, also because all of the ambassadors from the original UN were trapped in New York. Only President Collins, the President of Canada, and the President of Greenland were exempt, originally because they were so close to Dominion’s empire and couldn’t leave their homes for even a day, but now that North America had been taken, their seats would forever be empty. The Pope sent one of his Archbishops in his stead.

Although, to state that there was a meeting taking place due to this most recent development would be inaccurate. Once New York was taken and the UN recreated, all the world leaders remained in constant contact with each other, with world leaders flying back and forth to Paris up to three times a week. When the US was taken over, the heads of state no longer bothered returning home.

Every day was a meeting, starting at dawn and going long into the night. The discussions just repeated over and over, almost exactly word for word in many cases. Nations would ask each other if any clues to Dominion’s defeat had been thought up, if any information on his true identity, the source of his powers and his monsters, the origin of that planet-destroying octopus had been uncovered, and the most recent movements of his forces.

Books on mythology would be brought out and recited, in the hopes that some ancient story might prove relevant. Maybe one country would claim to have a new weapon that would work on the spawn, some super-powered bullet or bioengineered germ. There was already a long list of failed miracle cures, from praying to every god in human history to dropping chemical weapons of every possible compound onto Dominion’s territory, in the hopes of discovering some kind of allergen. Someone even suggested setting off a hundred or so nukes at the bottom of the ocean to try and destroy Dominion’s empire with the resulting tidal waves. Everyone was running out of ideas, not that they had very many when this whole mess started.

Then they’d complain about how their own nations were suffering due to America’s destruction, such as losses in trade. Unlike before the war against the undead, very few countries received any kind of foreign aid from the US, but many nations still relied on the US in other ways. Already, mankind was suffering from perhaps the greatest economic recession in history due to the fear of Dominion. With the end of the world breathing down everyone’s necks, it would be understandable if customers didn’t feel like shopping and investing in companies, or if employees were struggling to find a reason to bother going into work. America’s absence in the global market was simply another nail in the coffin. Just ensuring food was being distributed and made available was a daunting task for every country.

The world leaders now lived in their hotel rooms in Paris. Any time not spent in meetings was used trying to run their countries from over the phone, as well as interrogating their nations’ scientists, researchers, and military commanders over any new developments they could bring to the table. They’d be lucky to even get a few hours of sleep.

The fall of South America pushed many world leaders over the edge. Almost everyone had already been self-medicating with antacids to deal with stress, scarfing them down like candy. Most were on heavy prescription drugs to prevent heart attacks, strokes, and ulcers. When the news came, several world leaders were hospitalized and Poland’s Prime Minister killed herself. Like the US and Canada, the seats occupied by the leaders of the South American nations were now vacant.

Now, today, the exhausted men and women in charge of the nations of the world once more gathered in the council chamber to discuss this newest turn of events. They all looked disheveled, no longer caring about appearances or etiquette. Few were wearing clean clothes and many had been drinking since they heard about South America. The room stank of sweat and stress, no matter how many times it was cleaned.

The chairman of the EU stood at the podium at the back of the room, about to initiate the newest of a long line of pointless meetings. He’d bang a gavel, open up the floor to anyone with something to say, and act as moderator. It was a job he was painfully used to, yet today, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, he just didn’t have the strength in him as he honestly couldn’t see any point. What hope was there? What chance did they have of surviving Dominion’s wrath?

He looked out over the sea of gaunt faces, all equally devoid of hope. It’s an ironic fact that great threats can bring even the bitterest enemies together, forcing them to cooperate in order to survive. Dominion was no different. These men and women had spent so much time together in this stuffy room, that it was like they were blind to politics. They addressed each other by first names, they gave each other a hard time and argued like children, and even let slip personal secrets as if they were drunk. It was a strange little fraternity that had formed. Fear of Dominion had torn down all borders and differences and showed how pointless political etiquette was.

The sudden rocking of the building shook him from his lamenting, and before anyone could react, a hole was blown through the ceiling and something landed in the center of the room, kicking up a cloud of dust. Security rushed in to investigate with everyone coughing on the dust, but before anyone could even get out of their seats, the cloud vanished, with every particle of smoke and drywall forced down to the ground in submission.

A nude man sat in a crater in the floor, his body curled into a ball, and with his limbs loudly cracking, he got to his feet and stretched. No one who saw him could believe their eyes, first faced with the weirdness of the sight before them, and then horrified by the true meaning of what they were looking at. They had been visited by Priest, the cult leader of ‘the Dominated’ from Portland. He now ran the concentration camp, but he was no longer human. Like Blight and Dominion’s harem, he had been infused with wraiths and turned into a homunculus.

When he came out of that mall, he was wearing a dead baby as a mask, with eye and mouth holes cut into the hollowed torso and the head and limbs hanging limply. In his baptism, that mask had affected his transformation. The mask had now become his actual face, the baby itself fused with him like a parasitic twin. The tissue was alive, but it didn’t have a soul. The baby moved its eyes and limbs without any actual thought, simply twitching like a beheaded snake. Across Priest’s lanky body, random baby limbs grew out of his flesh like branches on a tree. Even his fingers had all been replaced with the arms of infants.

Upon decrypting his appearance, several men and women vomited on the floor, crossed themselves, and even broke into tears from revulsion and terror. Had he come to kill them? Were they going to meet their end at the hands of this grotesque monster?

He held out his arms and flashed a deranged smile. “Friends, fortune is on your side. I have come to save you from despair. Your nightmare is over.” Nobody could believe what he was saying. This was a joke, right? Was Dominion offering some kind of deal? Was this messenger going to announce that he’d expand his empire no further? “You’ve made yourselves ill with worry and uncertainty, so in an act of unfathomable mercy and kindness, Lord Dominion, the one true God, has sent me to clarify the situation so that your questions as to the future may be put to rest and you may sleep soundly, comforted by the presence of an orderly schedule.

At noon on January 1st, to begin the new era of human civilization, my Master will arrive here to accept your complete and unconditional surrender. Your presence here is mandatory. At which point, every single man, woman, and child on Earth must present themselves for collection. You should know by now that any attempt at resistance is utterly futile, and those who try to defy us will meet a terrible fate. Those who quietly hand themselves over will be spared torture and death.

That gives your four months to get your affairs in order. Fulfill any lifelong dreams or desires, make peace with your enemies and spend time with your loved ones. Or go wild and set the world of fire if you so wish. Let it be a celebration of life, of the step you will all take together into the glorious service of Lord Dominion. Overindulge yourselves on the nectar of freedom, so you will not be burdened by such desires when you take your proper places in our holy temples.

That is all I have come here to say. I bid you all farewell.”

Then he rose off the floor and shot into the sky, leaving everyone bewildered and exhausted.

Try as they might, the UN couldn’t keep Dominion’s declaration from reaching the public. Even those who thought they had lost all hope clung to the possibility that Dominion would remain content with the entire western hemisphere, and he’d leave the east alone. But he had openly announced his intent to take over the entire planet. He wasn’t declaring war, he wasn’t offering negotiations, he was just awaiting the complete surrender of every nation on Earth, for the world leaders to simply bend over without even asking him to be gentle. The impotence of every government had been made painfully obvious, like a child being scolded by his parents in front of his friends.

Almost every nation was descending into total anarchy, with their governments having to sequester their assets and resign themselves to their capitals in order to ensure their survival, like a hypothermic body minimizing blood flow to the extremities to keep the vital organs warm. What few resources they had couldn’t be wasted trying to put out the fires of carnage sweeping across their countrysides. Areas outside of their control had to be severed like gangrenous limbs. The great nations of the world were reduced to city-states.

As always, the UN remained in chambers, trying to figure out their next move. They were given four months in which they didn’t have to fear invasion. That, in itself, was a godsend. The bible had stories less miraculous than that. They had one last chance to defeat Dominion, four months to try and find a way to kill him and send his demon army back to Hell.

“What I don’t understand is why he would do this. Why wait until the new year? Why give us so much time?” the Australian Prime Minister lamented.

“A cruel joke, most likely,” the EU Chairman responded. “He’s going to let us wallow in our fear. He’s announced the day of our executions and given us enough time to go mad. Rather than just rip off the bandage quickly and crush us, he’ll let our nations burn themselves to the ground. He wants us to suffer like death row prisoners.”

The room was silent, no one knowing what else to say. “I have a proposal.” The words came from the Russian president. “He said he will invade France and come here for our surrender. A cruel man such as himself, I have a feeling as to where his attack will come from.”

“Normandy,” the EU chairman muttered.

“Such an evil twist of historical irony, I doubt he will pass up the chance. I suggest we gather all of our forces together and wage an all-out war on those shores. The combined fighting power of the eastern hemisphere, with the added power of a nuclear bombardment, should the need arise. If that can’t stop him ... we move on to Plan B. That messenger said it himself: Dominion will be here on January 1st. That means we have a guarantee of a time and locations, so there will be no better chance for a nuclear strike.”

“You want to bomb Paris?!” the French president shouted.

“We’ve already lost a whole hemisphere to Dominion. What’s another city?”

“However, it will require us all to be present,” said the High Chancellor of the UIR. He understood what the Russian president was really suggesting.

“Correct. Dominion will come here to accept our surrender, meaning we have to be the bait that will lure him. There is no running, no hiding. We have to die in the blast with him. So, I suggest you all appoint your successors, on the off-chance that it works. Like the monster said, we have to get our affairs in order.”

For over a minute, the room was dead silent, with everyone mulling over the proposal. In a way, it was an easy decision. Few people still thought there was a magic bullet for stopping Dominion, that some ritual or holy relic would be discovered that would kill him. If they failed to find anything, then on January 1st, they would become enslaved and inevitably die in chains.

The Russian president’s suggestion just spared them the pain of living in a concentration camp, and if it didn’t work, then there really was no point in trying to resist. Mankind was simply destined to be crushed under Dominion’s heel. Doing this would mean actively embracing their death. This wasn’t committing suicide due to pain or depression, this was hardly any kind of escape. This was self-sacrifice that had little chance of working.

The Russian president placed his arm, wrapped in a cast, on the desk in front of him. He then drew a pocketknife and began carving away at the plaster. Everyone watched him. For months, his arm had been in that cast, but he never explained how he got hurt. “Would you all like to know how my wife died?”

The scream of his wife drew the Russian president from his private study. He had never heard his wife make a sound like that. It was a sound he never wanted to hear again. He rushed down the hall to the master bedroom and wrenched open the door. He saw his wife on the floor, left lame from terror, and being looked down upon by a wraith coughed forth from the darkest pit of Hell. Garbed in a black cloak with tentacles for limbs, it floated out of their closet towards his wife. Behind Scourge, darkness spread from the closet like oil across water, blackening the room.

“Mariska! Move!”

The president drew a small pistol from an ankle holster and raised it to fire. Scourge, his face invisible, hissed and launched something from within his hood. It was a black mass the size of a basketball and it struck the president’s hand with enough force to snap his forearm. The mass stuck itself to the wall like a clump of mud, with the president unable to pull his hand free.

“Ivan!” his wife cried out as she scrambled to her feet.

She tried to climb across the bed to reach him, but Scourge grabbed her with his tentacles. They bound her limbs and lifted her into the air, her body now like a puppet on strings. They were deathly cold and layered with an oily film, feeling like they were made from the stitched-together tongues of corpses. Scourge hissed and tore away her clothes, exposing her body, pitifully frail compared to this creature. Their hearts dropped to the sound of the fabric ripping.