H2G2 Storytime III: From Prussia with Love. Part LXIV
Created | Updated Jan 12, 2008
He had to get out.
He'd been a fool. And worse. Sparring with with Robinson had done more than shatter Andrei Sreka's arm in two places; it had finally brought him to his senses and given him renewed purpose.
In a moment of surprising clarity, given his extensive head injuries, Sreka understood with the precision of a diamond anvil that the Cult was finished. He sensed it clearly. It pulsed through his veins, brought vigour to his limbs and drove him unsteadily forward, streaking blood down one wall.
He could admire on one level Daltmooreby and Robinson. Their hatred for one and other burned so strongly it would bring it down everything around them. This appealed to the destructive side of Sreka: the side that did not hate the world but would gladly slice it open just to see the innards spill out.
A terrible will rose up in him now. Sreka's default psychopathy was being superseded by a far more primitive and urgent need: survival. All could be expended by it's blade.
They believed they fed off the grace of some benevolent and mythical god, who supplied the fire in the mountain, swelled their orchards, . Well some of them: the more practically minded knew about geothermal energy and how to harvest it. But it was a fiction. For generations, the Cultists had managed not to see it, but the adventure in the south was doomed; a project kept alive out seemingly of sheer spite. Their star was falling from it's heaven ironically just as they planned to add another to the firmament. They thought they would inherit the Earth by living beneath it. The warm and comfortable lie had let the Cult become complacent. They should never have let someone as ruthlessly unstable as Sreka come within a hundred miles of this place. Too bad for them.
Annabel had used him, Daltmooreby had been right. She thought she could use him. But beneath the rocket, Sreka beheld a new truth. He was the worm in the heart of their rotten core: feeding on the collapse and all the time digging further down to freedom; to escape. The fifth angel was sounding and from out of the bottomless pit would emerge The King Locust reborn.1
He turned a corner and read through watery and swollen eyes the sign that pointed to the Sub-station Di-gamma and the way out. No matter who might get in his way.
1Revelation 9:11
