Fernando rested for a few hours at Chico’s home, then he returned to his grandmother’s property—or what remained of it, that was.

On his climb up the hill to the home site, muddy rivulets coursed past him sluggishly, like slow-clotting veins. He spied the shed he’d thought to take refuge in swept clear down the slope and dashed to jagged pieces in the ravine far below. A litter of his grandmother’s precious icons and other meager possessions poked here and there through the sagging ooze of mud and plant matter like so much trash caught in an avalanche of shit. He followed this trail of debris as if they were fairytale breadcrumbs leading to whatever monster preyed upon lost witches. Ascending at last to his destination, Fernando stood motionless. Trapped in a spell that was the dark antipode of amazement, he took in the breadth of destruction the fell storm had wreaked.

It was a scene of apocalyptic devastation.

The shack was little more than a bleak, wasted heap of half-sunken rubble. Huge pondlike pools of brown water stood about everywhere. Among them, the remnants of the washed-out garden listed soggily, stewing to a slimy mush in the boiling heat of the sun. The swollen carcasses of chickens and all manner of jungle creatures wheeled sadly through the puddles, damming the purging stem of their streams. The smell of decay hung heavy in the hot, dank air. Stifling and hellish in its reeking oppression.

Worst of all, up on the higher ground where Fernando had figured they’d be safe from the floods, the goats lay strewn dead across the sodden grass of the paddock, crushed to death under the bulk of a massive ceiba tree, which had fallen with infernal precision on the shelter beneath which the animals had been huddled—slaying them one and all in a single fell swoop.

Numb from the sheer magnitude of the carnage, Fernando went about the property mechanically, as if he were in shock. In all likelihood, he was in shock. He wended his way along the drier patches of land. With whatever scattered implements he could find, he cleared blockages to let the fetid standing water drain downhill. He fished out the drowned animals, domestic and wild alike. There were exotic jeweled birds, gigantic yellow-fanged rodents, vibrant lizards and poison-hued frogs. It was if the bowels of the jungle had expelled these inner fauna with gross and wanton abandon.

In wagonloads, he ferried the mounds of bloated corpses to the paddock. He deposited them there in their pathetic rotting midden heaps among the buzzing, fly-specked remains of the dead goats. When he was satisfied he’d cleared them from the yard one way or another, he doused the carcasses with a canister of gasoline he’d found bobbing among them in the mire, and set them aflame.

A thick black smoke rose against the watery red of dusk. The smoke carried with it a fuming stench so abominable Fernando drew back as much from the seething foulness of it as from the heat of the blaze. With burning lungs and baleful eyes he watched the red flames rise. They licked along the blackening, corroded flesh of the dead animals in self-stoking greed, a holocaust to a pagan god too odious to be named. No sweet savor, this.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy