Dave Stone - Golgotha Run

A Black Flame Publication

Cover illustration by Jamie Jones.

Copyright Games Workshop 2005.

ISBN: 1844162370

Publishers note: This is a work of fiction, detailing an alternative and decidedly imaginary future. All the characters, actions and events portrayed in this book are not real, and are not based on real events or actions.

Version: 1.0

My fellow Americans,

I am speaking to you today from the Oval Office, to bring you hope andcheer in these troubling times. The succession of catastrophes that haveassailed our once-great nation continue to threaten us, but we areresolute.

The negative fertility zone that is the desolation of the mid-westdivides east from west, but life is returning. The plucky pioneers ofthe new Church of Joseph are reclaiming Salt Lake City from thepoisonous deserts just as their forefathers once did, and our prayersare with them. And New Orleans may be under eight feet of water, butthey don't call it New Venice for nothing.

Here at the heart of government, we continue to work closely with theMegaCorps who made this country the economic miracle it is today, tobring prosperity and opportunity to all who will join us. All thoseunfortunate or unwilling citizens who exercise their democratic right tolive how they will, no matter how far away from the comfort and securityof the corporate cities, may once more rest easy in their shacks knowingthat the new swathes of Sanctioned Operatives work tirelessly to protectthem from the biker gangs and NoGo hoodlums.

The succession of apparently inexplicable or occult manifestations andevents we have recently witnessed have unnerved many of us, it is true.Even our own Government scientists are unable to account for much ofwhat is happening. Our church leaders tell us they are holding at baythe unknown entities which have infested the datanets in the guise ofviruses.

A concerned citizen asked me the other day whether I thought we wereentering the Last Times, when Our Lord God will return to us and visitHis Rapture upon us, or whether we were just being tested as He oncetested his own son. My friends, I cannot answer that. But I am resolutethat with God's help, we shall work, as ever, to create a gloriousfuture in this most beautiful land.

Thank you, and God Bless America.

President Estevez

A Benedicta I knew, who filled the very world with the Ideal, whose eyesburned with the desire for majesty, beauty, glory and all that has us believein the immortal.

But this miracle of a girl was just too beautiful to live; she died,therefore, but a few days after I met herand it was I alone who buriedher, on a day when Spring swung her censer even in the cemeteries themselves.It was I alone who buried her, potted in a coffin of a wood fragrant andimperishable as any chest of India.

And as my eyes were glued to the graveyard of my treasure, I saw quitesuddenly a diminutive individual bearing a quite singular resemblance to thedeceased, who, stamping on the fresh-dug ground with hysterical and somewhatbizarre violence, cried: Im the Benedicta! The real deal! And to punish youfor your blindness, and your self-delusion, you shall love me as I am!

No! I cried in fury. No! No! No! And in the rage of my refusal, I stampedupon the earth so violently that my leg sank to the knee into the fresh-duggrave. And like a wolf caught in a trap, there I remainattached, perhapsfor all time, to the grave in which my Ideal still rots.

All the same, though; I suppose a quick one wouldnt be entirely out of thequestion.

Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears, your tongues full of sores,

Before breaking your putrid bones,

Before opening your cholera-infested belly and taking out as use for fertiliser your too-fatted liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys,

Before tearing out your ugly sexual organ, incontinent and slimy,

Before extinguishing your appetite for beauty, ecstasy, sugar, philosophy, mathematical and poetic metaphysical pepper and cucumbers,

Before disinfecting you with vitriol, cleansing you and shellacking you with passion,

Before all that,

We shall take a big antiseptic bath,

And we warn you,

We are murderers.

Artie Newbegin was looking in the bathroom mirror, watching (at last count,the last time he had counted) four thousand, two hundred and thirty-ninefragments of face looking back at him.

Of course, that figure had long lost any kind of meaning by now; he hadsmacked a fist into the mirror any number of times since then (breaking threefingers the last time, which had actually been quite painful for a fewseconds).

The mildew was out of control between the cracks again, Artie noted,congealing over any number of the smaller shards. The overall effect was alittle like looking at the surface of a jewel-strewn swamp.

There was no real point in looking in the mirror in any case, nothing to do orworth doing with anything he might find in there, should the shattered visageever suddenly cohere into something whole and complete.

That face, reassembled, would be a perfect thirty (the mature prime, theoptimal point before the human metabolic flipover into catabolism) with notrace of toxin-contamination even to the point of a mild hangover.

The teeth pristine and cavity- and tartar-free, courtesy of the Bug, whichknew the function of ostensibly inorganic compounds in the body, and knew, byand large, the differences between benign and malign bacteria. The beard wouldbe a fixed, grown-out and somewhat straggly length, the Bug never having quitegotten its nonexistent head around the entirely human-level concept ofshaving.

The hair on the head, interestingly enough, would be thick and lustrous andsupremely manageable. Everyone had fantastic hair these days, which might ormight not say something about whoever it was who had designed the Bug in thefirst place, before it had escaped. Almost certainly it had been a he, witha bad case of male-pattern baldness, for starters.

The bathroom was in an apartment, and the apartment was in a block, in whathad once been downtown Des Moines, through which the wind whistled. Nothingmuch had changed, really, despite the pressure of the years insideContainment. Run-down, certainly, but still ticking over. Cars in the streetsand the buses ran their routes a time out of three and most of them packedwith those who still worked at some daily occupation or other.

The postures of normalcy must be maintained, Artie thoughtrather in thesame way that he himself would go to bed at night, when the Dome overheadpolarised to black, and lie there sleepless.

And then, in the morning, going into the bathroom, even though there wasnothing to do there, and going through the motions, before going out to make akilling.

The Welcome Wagon was sleek and black and looked like death on wheels. In theLast Days, in the days before the Rapture Bug, a vehicle of this natureusedfor the same general purpose, for example, by some governmental agencywouldhave been covert rather than overt, customised to look like a battered oldbakers van or something to blend into the scenery. Now, the sight of theseutterly distinctive black trucks shuttling merrily through the Des Moinesstreets warmed the immortal hearts of people in their thousands. It was a bitlike catching sight of a fire appliance would have been, in the days beforethe Bug hit. The Welcome Wagons were a constant reminder that someone,somewhere, cared.