The brutal metamorphosis of Milo the American was about to be birthed to the world’s end. Waiting to bear soul witness was Police Sergeant Aussie Ozil. He was standing at the edge of a puddle of New Zealand mud from where his nemesis was about to rise from the savaged Earth.

Ozil could feel a panic attack building. Quickly he scanned the surroundings. Between himself and a concrete wall loomed a near impenetrable blanket of vibrant gorse. Half a kilometre in every other direction were the roofs of residential properties. The remaining space in between was spotted with more gorse and manuka scrub which rocked to the growing blasts of gale force winds as mountainous black clouds raged across the winter sky. In the distance he saw the corrugated roof of a two-story home being blown away like tissue paper. Plumes of metallic kites were forming exactly as he had been told they would. It was an affirmation to himself of a terrifying coming reality which couldn’t be avoided. Immediately his left-hand starts to shake uncontrollably. Profuse cold sweat drips from his brow. Power lines vibrating in the wind howled to him like imagined banshees screaming prophecy of terrible decisions that had to be made and time was running out.

From a pocket he draws two plastic bags containing a diminutive pipe and a small rock of crystal meth, it was the last of his A-grade stash. He sits down in the mud and jams his oscillating hand between his left knee and chest. The muscles from his shoulder down to his fingertips are tensed with all the strength he can muster. With the shaking reduced to a minimum, he puts the pipe into the grip of his left hand. Using his right he carefully places the crystal into the small bowl. Lips are pressed to the pipe as he hunches over to protect the lighter’s flame that flickers into life. Breath begins to draw. The plasma momentarily caresses the crystal, briefly melting its surface when a ferocious squall hits him hard and square in the back. His shaking hand is freed and the methamphetamine is flung asunder to the mud.

Raw panic floods the near-broken man. His desperate eyes search for the slightest indentation on the surface. He can’t see it anywhere. Quickly he’s on his knees at the shallow shoreline of the large growing puddle. Finding nothing he lowers even further until the front of his uniform is completely soiled. He moves methodically, searching a square meter at a time as an endless cacophony of words like God, murder, sin, the remnants of once complex thoughts that had long since shattered into countless bits of conditioned fear, guilt, and loneliness, pounded his brain. They crashed, banged, and bounced inside his skull until he became the overflowing cauldron of malignant emotion that was now melting down. This was the consequential development after months of planning the murder of Milo. It had tormented him, getting worse over time because he couldn’t reconcile it in any way how God could possibly approve. At least in the way that Ozil had believed that God had led his hand all the other times when he had killed for King and country, as a warrior of God and state. And now his self-delusional makeshift lies at the final hour, had reached the limits of his mental suppression. The manifestation of his shaking hand was now spreading to the rest of his physical self. The anxiety attack was overwhelming, crushing. He was certain that there was nothing mortal that could save him now. So humbled and raw to the bone, he splays his humility before God, shuts his eyes and prayed for a miracle.

Right at that moment, high in the sky, the trailing edge of a blue-black cloud turns burnt orange, foretelling the arrival of the sun’s monstrous burning identity that floods the puddle with glorious light. Ozil opens his eyes to the igniting glint of a tiny methburg floating in an ocean of watery brown. It sparkles to Ozil as a gift from his father in the sky. A mandate from heaven to quench his insatiable need for righteousness. Carefully he lays on his stomach in front of the speck of imagined holy crystal. The ball of his right wrist is placed at the bottom of the puddle. With his first finger and thumb, he carefully pinches the meth from the mud. Then it’s straight to his lips to remove the filth. Staying on his belly to ensure he would not fall as before, the pipe is placed back into the clutch of his left hand. He tenses his forearm and pins it hard against a rock. The shaking is tamed for his second attempt of emancipation from the heavy burden. With incredible care, he places the crystal into the bowel and lights it up. The lungs draw the smoke. He holds it deep inside his chest until his inner core starts to burn. Immediately his hand stops shaking. The shell of a broken man is smoothly exhaled as the middle of the puddle suddenly slumps. Ozil stands and grabs the mouthpiece of his radio. With meth-laced elegance, he hears coded words flow from his mouth to the world of police with the panache of a dazzling movie star. He now fears nothing.

Once again he surveys the area for privacy. There are three large mounds of soil in the immediate vicinity. The first had been placed to divert a storm water drain which the second mound had dammed, creating the wide deep muddy sump. The third mound was about ten metres away. Ozil had checked it out before on arrival, but that was then. He starts moving towards it when the puddle suddenly starts draining from the same spot it had previously slumped. Thousand of litres of mud and water poured into a hole in the ground to mysterious unseen depths. As the level of the puddle starts dropping to more than a metre lower, Milo’s hunched over head and shoulders start to appear. The mud was cladding his head with such thickness that he still couldn’t tell if he had made it to the surface yet or not. Fluid particles of homogenized soil flowed down his matted hair and face in a slow-moving sublime brown glaze. Ozil could see that the man was physically exhausted and close to drowning, but he wasn’t showing any signs of giving up. Even as the overpowering suction was trapping Milo’s arms and legs, his neck and head continued to uncurl like the frond of a fern reaching up and out for the precious gift of life. He tilts his head back, raising his mouth to the maximum possible height, and opens it to the atmosphere, drawing a colossal deep breath. Ozil’s tweaked imagination saw Milo looking like a shit brown ceramic beast rising from Hell, so he thought it only civil he should say hello.

“G’day mate,” he said in his strongest Australian accent that slightly cracked at the end with a hint of lingering fear. Peaking Ozil suspected there was still a remnant of sober Ozil lurking at the edges of his freshly fortified mind, which he would squelch by clenching his jaw so hard that his amalgam fillings started to crack. His upper lip rises to expose his fangs. “Gotta bit of mud in your eye have ya?” he says forcing the words through his teeth. “I’ll have it cleared away for ya in a jiffy.” He casually takes a can of pepper spray from his belt and sprays it into each of Milo’s eyes, washing away the mud until spots of pink begin to appear. "I’ll do your ears as well so you can hear me better." Milo screams out in pain. Ozil shouts a second order into his radio. Far on the other side of the concrete wall, a twenty-tonne front end loader comes to life; revving high as it rams into a large roller door sounding a loud metallic crash. Milo tries to get the spray off his eyelids by furiously rubbing his face into the last of the draining mud until his rising anger overrides the still building pain. He flings his head back. Mud projectiles are flung up and over in a large flying arch with some of it splattering onto Ozil’s face, who wipes it off with a vengeful smirk.

“I’m going to cut off your nuts, stuff them full of ten eighty poison pellets and feed them to your fucking dogs.”

“Now that’s a lot of angry talk for a guy who’s about to have his head kicked over his now worthless criminal enterprise.”

“Nah you don’t wanna try that, all your pretend mates will find out you kick like a little sissy.”

“Oh, it won’t be me who gets the blame, dead man. Of course, you can’t see it right now since your eyes are pretty much fucked, but the single murder suspect is that rusty sheet of old roofing iron blown in by the wind over there, so obviously, it will simply be a literal act of God versus filthy criminal scum, haha.” Ozil starts stepping back several paces holding his thumb up to the roof of the building as he pretends to gauge for a kick over top.

“But Aussie what if there’s another way, I mean, you might not even know it yet but we could be family, after all, there’s a significant chance that I’m the father of your bastard grandchild. Ay, dad.” Milo laughs as Ozil’s boot comes driving down in fall swing. The steel capped toe was aimed just below Milo’s chin. Ozil had the expectation that the spine and sinew would mostly snap on impact, after that and he thought it would take nothing much more than a few hacks with the sheet of iron and the head would be off. At least that was the plan right up until Ozil’s kicking boot was halfway there. That was the instant he saw out of his peripheral vision, Tex as big as Texas. That was the nickname Milo had given his friend Harry for being the biggest guy he had ever seen, and right now he was horizontal like Superman, coming in fast for a flying tackle at Ozil’s left rear. As Tex hits him with his right shoulder, the trajectory of Ozil’s swinging boot rises high above target. Hard contact occurs just above Milo’s right eye. Only two chuckles into his laughter and he’s cut to the skull as his head snaps back, rendering him unconscious. Meanwhile, the momentum of Tex continues on carrying Ozil in a bear hug. The officers bald head is carried on through like a missile’s cone ramming through the gorse as thousands of needles slice into his bald scalp. They come to stop with Ozil laying on a bed of spikes under Tex’s crushing weight. The big man raises his fist, pausing just long enough to see Ozil mouth the word NO. Tex bashes him hard with Hulk-like hits. Ozil’s face rapidly becomes an unconscious bloody pulp. Tex turns to the side and vomits. He takes Ozil’s pistol then stands up to look around. Seeing no one in sight he runs back to the mound of dirt and retrieves a rope. He checks Milo for a pulse, then ties one end of the rope around his limp torso. The other end is looped around a sizeable kanuka tree and the middle Tex ties around himself. He pulls the rope as his massive thighs push against the ground in a sustained herculean effort that results in Milo barely moving. He’s stuck like an entrenched tree stump thinks Tex whose muscles and veins were bulging. Sweat’s dripping profusely. He can hear an approaching hail storm playing rooftops like drums and spitting lightning all around. The sky turns black as Milo’s slowly pulled out to the bottom of his ribs. There’s a splattering of small hail for a few seconds and then it hits hard. Ice as big as marbles in their thousands pound into Tex’s back as he heaves for all he’s worth. For at least another minute Tex pulls until the hail storm ends and Milo’s pulled out of the earth like a newborn baby, coated in brown afterbirth and laying on a sheet of pure white. Tex unties the rope, checks Milo’s breath, then slaps his face.

“Milo, Milo wake up.” He slaps him harder and speaks with anger. “Milo wake up.” Milo does nothing. Tex looks over at Ozil, motionless and buried under inches of hail. Tex gives a big resigned sigh, then lifts Milo onto his shoulders as torrential gusting rain begins to hit. He staggers through the cold slush of hail and mud following a trail North towards the town. Milo’s eyelids open to the pelting rain that chips away at the painful burning of his eyeballs. He saw the world as a pixelated smear of grey and then an instant of a brilliant flash floods the entire sky, burning through the darkest of clouds.

"What was that," he silently mouths, before blacking out again.

Next Chapter: 2