At the club DEAD hostages were being held at gunpoint while the band played on furiously drunk in its own mangling of music drowned out in a gurgling of shrieks, screams, vomit, harsh noise vomit, chain smoking and barbiturates al blended into a catastrophic descent into a degenerate mockery of jazz filtered through massive dark distortions and out of synch delays. The sparse audience angered and cursed and spat as the band went on unperturbed with its mean and vilifying rendition of communication. Whatever was happening around then was none of their business, the fiendish acts of brutality all the more exciting their senseless playing, intoxicated and spawned into oblivion by their own stage presence, ugly and enraging both by choice and necessity. The whole place reeked of stale smoke and panic, asbestos walls scabbing and injecting cancerogenic spores into their lungs, but whoever had lived long enough in that damned city knew well that cancer was the least of their problems. A fat and heavy mephitic chemical cloud of discharge and organic miasma had been hanging ghastly since the Tower appeared and engulfed everything within hundreds or maybe thousands of miles. There was no border anymore, no barrier no resistance. The Tower had conquered and berated everything there ever was, anything that had ever walked the earth or even ever dreamt of doing so. Nothing was salvaged from its sickening expansion: vast and nameless, its resources infinite and obscure, constructed to somehow resemble offices, places of government and administration, of housing for the living, but it just stared and watched, corrupting the whole city, as it sank even deeper, lower, bloated and devoid, empty and blank, unholy, utterly useless and diseased, imponderable like the last act of a deranged god, at war with life itself.

The scent of molestation dragged itself across the burnt out silicone plains. Washed out decrepit concrete blackened by acid leaks and electrical fires. Failures everywhere as if the city had been constructed thousands of years ago and long forgotten by some deluged prior civilization.
Absurd happenings were taking place down east, one of the five cardinal directions: not just an intersection, but a whole new horizon altogether, one that the Tower had imposed. Word had gotten around and packs of migrants crept out of sewers to take part in the demonstrations: to their demise. Anything that came under the Tower’s eye then came to vanish.

Drugged out pimps and cybernetic whores were roaming the streets raving about violent tricks and molestation they’d been carrying about the city. Insatiable conmen, demonic surgeons, nymphomaniac succubus, ill-lemur junkies in worn out dusty business suits, disguised impostors, hipster fetishists and sellers of whatever good could be commodified and exploited. Downtown was just filled with scams, violence, alterations of all sorts to the very fabric of reality, breaking down any separation between lawful and unlawful, moral and immoral, humane and inhumane, godly and ungodly, tangible and intangible, familiar and unfamiliar, true and untrue. Everything weighed equal and at the same time nothing. Nothing made sense anymore, and only the few who had abandoned any resemblance of humanity could survive and strive, or at least subject the weakest to unspeakable acts of gratuitous evilness.

Police stood and watched as the massacres went on, at times cheering, filming for their own obscure pleasures, mostly jacking off to the flesh eaters who swept the floors of guts and marcescent entrails like bottom feeders. “Let the blood count be higher”, they’d say through cryptic connections, assailing the homeless, burning them in pyres under falling bridges and hollowed parking lots. They’d stand there and enjoy the scene, at times shooting one of the hungry beasts like cowardly snipers, betting on who’d be the first to die, turning the whole tragedy even more squalid and repulsive. The clergy spun out prayers while molesting minors in secret dungeons hidden underneath deep tunnels dug through shut-down schools, their walls covered with breathing human cells, drooling eggs, pubic hair, teeth and living tissue which formed intricate living ramifications of tumor-like growths that had been plaguing the city like a morbid epidemic. They called it The Great Menstruation. At times it rained down over the landscape, corroding everything, dripping dirtily like blackened grease, its spiderweb evolutions strangely beautiful and horrid. The techno priests spent dark hours in self inflicted solitary prayer confined among the carcasses of the lower strata of the city’s poorest. At night they’d hold up mass like ransom, sacrificing the purest of their desperate believers, betraying and blinding them with scorching embers attached to daggers they’d stab the youngster faithful with. “Contrievance, repentance”, they said it was. Utter sadism, all knew but no one cared, the city was up for either grabs or total destruction, and this middle kingdom allowed the lowest instincts to flourish.

All roads led nowhere, highways coiling, circling the city with no beginning nor end in sight, playing with your head, leaving the skeletal remains of the few who had ventured to run away only to find their demise lost in the torrid concrete mazes of the transportation nightmare the city had convoluted itself into.

Irreparable damage everywhere. Books, graffiti, ads and billboards gradually putrefying, the signifiers in their pages turning into something unreadable, as if language itself had decayed. Numbers and letters morphed into something indecipherable, the written record of an apocalyptic cult, buried deep under the sands of time yet still evolving, resurfacing and disappearing again in further alterations, incomprehensible, its secret its weapon. But the people had no longer any use for language. What is there to communicate, when your world is dying, its fate sealed, unforgiving, robbed of any hope, of any chance of continuation? The cold awareness that the time you belong to that of the last generation, that after you is no more, that the life in you has ceased to flow, stagnant, putrescent, invalid.

At the DEAD club the clangor of what the band didn’t even bother to call music filled the impenetrable air with vicious rancor and regret. Like a drug it permeated the cramped room, creeping into the patrons’ systems, all one and shattered, deaf to each other’s pain and experience. Half human half machine, their minds and bodies the failed result of decades of genocidal live experiment on the bastardization of mankind. Nano-excreta and gurgling metal-pus oozing lazily from open wounds, AI maggots feeding, laying dormant eggs of contempt.

As the night wore on, the music grew louder, and the crowd grew more frenzied. Among them, indistinguishable from both humans and the cockroach-furniture some had contorted into, were spies of the Tower, traitors of their own kind. Their number and motives impossible to say, the monolith had lured them to it, promising god knows what in the broken language that laid in ruins all around them. Only they could speak it, the tongue of rapture, read the fucked up symbols, interpret the Tower’s will, to serve it, sentinel of despair, an unquestionable higher power.
The Tower chose you, spoke to you, of things unknown, and once it spoke that concluded “you”. One by one the people had succumbed. Not even the most deadly and addictive chemically engineered narcotics could shut its voice down. But the noise, the rumbling in discord, the ghastly shrieks of metal and of cheap distorted instrumentation, the crackling of mauled strings, the toils of faulty electronics and the cacophony of it all, into a symphony of trash and sin, a lurid chant. That… that would keep the voice away. For a brief time, the Tower had no power over them. Its infestation halted, the DEAD club wrapped around a piercing oasis of brawling sounds. The insanity of it all, the violence, the abuse of drugs and flesh, the illicit tradings and unspeakable perversities, amidst this storm of it all the voice was silent and the people banqueted on the last vestiges of humanity they had left. And they knew that the Tower was itself the only thing that now kept the city from collapsing, sucking out from the earth’s itself the very last sparkles of energy that nature had to offer. The faintest thing, now lost, that last drop of life had to be eradicated. The Tower had managed to do just that: consume the whole planet, devour it from the inside and peak and reign over the sky, black and celestial, perverse, feeding itself until nothing remained of the once blue dot, raping its inner core, where no man had the right to venture. The darkest star you cannot unseen
The core had stopped, its revolutions ceased. Earth now slept the sleep of death. Nothing would ever change, but the Tower would keep growing, taller, further away, penetrating the soil and piercing through the planet like a dagger, wiping out the two poles and leaving the dead planet sinking deeper into the darkness, into the boundless abyss of nothing.
How long could the band keep going? And why would they? To what avail? No one had the answer. After them, the deluge. After them, the end. And they kept playing, eating, shitting, laughing amidst unimaginable pain, the riot thriving, useless, hurtful and serene. Sadly human. Terminal. The last alive.