THE RISING TIDE:
A TANGLED WEB
The African sun beat down on Big Bill Jennings. It reminded him of the rays depicted on the flag of Jacksonland, to the south. Standing at the cusp of this turning point in history, he thought of all that had led him to this. From his earliest days saying prayers to The Worm, to creating the Congo Dam Authority and Corporation, to meeting Grandmaster Armitage for the first time, it was a victory that tasted as sweet as sugar. He breathed in a damp, wet gulp of ocean air. Soon the Pyramids of Giza, the Panama Canal, and the Great Wall of China would have nothing on the Congo Dam. It would be a lasting monument that would forever change the earth. But it was not mere fame and sunshine in which Big Bill Jennings wished to bathe. He longed for a new era of world history. He longed for The Worm, the Cosmic Destroyer, the Crowned and Conquering King, to rise up and bring about the Age of Aquarius, when the age of Man would end, when all religions would crumble, when governments would fall, and there would be only chaos, only a darkness moving across the waters. The Death of Creation. The Death of God himself, if he wasn't already. As Big Bill Jennings stood, arms folded behind his back, on the top of the Congo Dam, he smiled. What if, through enough magick and occult rituals, he could become the physical form of The Worm? Armitage had bandied the idea about, that it was possible for one to submerge oneself so deep into the Mysteries of The Worm that it would be possible to become an avatar.
These fools and simpletons in Kappsburg and New York honestly believed they were creating a brighter future for Mittelafrika. The absolute nonsense of that idea made him chuckle. He would wipe out this nascent, disgusting little country. He would destroy it and reforge it in his own image, in The Worm's image (or their
combined image?). The leaders of the Reich were not the brightest torches in the cavern by any stretch of the imagination, but the sheer gullible delight in which George Carver participated in the largest human sacrifice of all time--one in which the majority of its victims would be his fellow blacks--was hilarious in its blind egotistical stupidity. Carver, however nice, never forgot a slight. When the Mittelafrikan government nationalized and seized Pentagon Oil facilities in the Reich in the 1920s after the death of Pentagon's CEO, they essentially wrote their own death sentence. George Carver was one of the largest shareholders in Pentagon, and those seizures genuinely upset him. It was not hard to fan the flames that burned within the Sweet Victory CEO's heart and get him to fall under his spell.
While they had written back and forth several times, Jennings' first meeting with Carver had been a rather enjoyable tour of the flagship Sweet Victory confectionery plant in New York City in 1935, when the Dam was still a dream and Jennings was still an officer in ORRA's AAU. There he laid out to Carver another of his many, many pitches: a plan for an Africa dominated by Sweet Victory and George Carver, the Modern Moses. Jennings played the part of a well-meaning enlightened Southron, a man of progress bent on elevating the status of the negro race and ending backward, unchristian Carolinian brutality forever. Not only would George Carver provide a new homeland for the negro people, the Congo Dam would generate so much wealth, power, and industry, that not a single person willing to work and follow the rules would go hungry. Not a single black child would be forgotten, held back, or discriminated against, as Carver had been before his move to New York so long ago. American Fundamentalism would become the national religion of this new Union of Africa, and Carver would become the Black Custer, even the Black Lincoln. The black people of New Cackalack would flee the institutional racism of Carolinian rule and establish a glorious republic. Their inspiring stories of success would motivate Carolinian blacks in North America, and perhaps even other black Yankees, to emigrate to this new homeland, equal but apart. Africa for the Africans.
But not just any African.
Better Africans, not the Godless heathen pygmyoids of the Interior. The Muslims, the witchdoctors, the stubborn... all of them would fall before the sword of progress. Their very existence disgusted Carver. The blacks of the Interior, the thousands of tribes large and small that rejected the Words of the Prophet and mixed with Arabs and other iniquitous Inferior bloodlines were too far gone for redemption or second-chances. Their ancestors had sold Carver's ancestors. Now, hundreds of years later, justice was coming. At the same time, Carver would end racism in the continent, providing a safe, secure, and peaceful home for blacks united not in tribes, but as one God-fearing Christian nation of Chosen Believers. It was delightful to dissect the minds of rabid racists. Jennings had moved beyond racism, beyond skin color. That's not to say he didn't hate the Negro race, for he very much did. It was was just that Big Bill Jennings hated everyone.
This mad world disgusted him, repulsed him with its gibbering sectarianism. Even the supposedly free-thinking Illuminists imposed boundaries on what was and was not permissible, going after Worm Cultists even as much as the American slime did. The only man who ever made sense before Armitage became the Black Prophet was Meinrad Beutel, the author of
The Anarchist Way. As pathetic as that man still was, he laid the groundwork for Armitage's "do as thou wilt" belief system and morale code. The Christians, be they Fundamentalists, Protestant, or Catholic, disgusted him equally, often failing to conform to the strict codes of their own faiths, believers of convenience. It was not convenient to be an Acolyte of The Worm. It was not convenient to know you would be instantly torn to shreds the moment you were discovered. The Worm was the true path, the true path to power, carnal and infinite, and Jennings was in it for the long haul.
In his office at the factory, Carver had taken Jennings on a tour of his delightful collection of West African and slave-trade relics. Having been a member of the Union's ORRA Artifacts and Antiquities Unit, Jennings showed genuine knowledge and interest in Carver's personal museum, further cementing their false friendship. In 1936, they began preparing the way for the Congo Dam project. According to his analysis, the Dam would bring about a controlled deliberate flood that would annihilate much of the Basin, and the tribes therein. It wouldn't be total barbarism, of course. Leaflets would be airdropped, warning the villages of the impending tide, but if they couldn't read English or German, it wouldn't be anyone's fault but their own, and Jehovah would sort them out. Survivors would surge north, overwhelming the Europan colonies there. "To Hell with the Europans," Jennings and Carver agreed. And as the water taketh away, it would also giveth, providing a massive climate change and jolt of life to Central Africa, a new breadbasket for humanity. A New Eden, the sands of the Sahara would give way to thriving, lush sub-tropical environments fit for Carver's new empire.
To build this new empire, Carver would have to trust Jennings with his time and money. Jennings was the engineer, Carver was but a businessman. Carver happily agreed. Thus the fate of the Reich was sealed, long before the meeting in Kappsburg formalized the entire affair. Until that fateful meeting, Jennings used slush funds to supply the Congo King, Opulo Odika, with rifles and armaments. It was with from these weapons that Reichsmarschal Wolff Sauer's Heer forces suffered their embarrassing defeat at Ruprecht Creek, cut down and sent into a riotous retreat through friendly tribal lands that ended in rape and looting, turning even more natives against the German government in Kappsburg. With more Sweet Victory cash laundered through multiple accounts, Jennings hired Cokie and international handhunter units to harass and destroy tribal lands and murder in the name of the Reich, while also bully white settlers and pillage from their property as well. Jennings hated everyone. And now everyone hated Kappsburg, blaming the incompetents there for their current dilemmas and tragedies.
The history of the Reich was the history of an unstable, incompetent government, the history of mindless xenophobia and racism, and the history of dirt-poor black and white farmers being turned against each other. With the Dam, many of these people would lose everything. But it would be built back "ten-fold," according to Jennings, placating Carver's concerns. In the glorious future African nation, there would be no poverty or hunger. There would be no racist Germans or Cokies lording over blacks, quietly abusing them while the Union turned a blind eye. They would be exposed for the frauds they were and washed away with the tide. They would be Pharaoh and his chariots, consumed by divine waters.
Jennings lit up a cigar and took a long, satisfied drag and stared out over endless teams of construction workers, laboring away in the warm rays of that African sun. He had these people right where he wanted them. He was playing chess with himself. Every single person he roped into this scheme would lose. Every single faction would come out on the bottom. The Mittelafrikans would be overthrown and slaughtered. Sweet Victory and Carver would lose millions upon millions of dollars and years of time. The natives would lose their homeland, theirs for generations innumerable. The farmers, be they white or black, would lose their ranches and plantations, daring adventures and last-chances swept away. Everyone would lose. Except Jennings, because Big Bill Jennings never loses. And over a sea of bloated, festering corpses, both animal and human, he would take his place as a god over the few that survived. And if The Worm decided he was not an adequate vessel, at least he could pass into the afterlife with an army of slaves, his legions of victims. It was all coming together, filling Jennings with a joy that could not be dampened, a bloodlust so depraved that not even McClellan in Mexico or Viktor in Hungary and China could compare to.
A construction worker, covered in dust, walked past Jennings carrying a canteen. "'Evenin', Professor," the man said in an English accent. "Don't mind me, just takin' a break. Hot as 'ell out here, sir."
Jennings smiled warmly. "Good day, my man. How goes the work?"
The man chuckled, wiping sweat off his brow with a handkerchief and setting his steel helmet on the massive concrete ledge before them, looking down at the water of the Atlantic through what almost seemed like crenelations atop a medieval battlement. "Good, sir! You can always count on us, and meself, to get the job done! I'm right proud of the work we done! Gonna do an awful lot of good for this country and for an awful lot of people, sir."
Jennings slapped him jovially on the shoulder. Another clueless, uneducated moron. At least he was a useful pawn, if a pawn he must be. "You're English! What company brought you in? Or are you, I say, are you a local settler? What's your name?"
The man proudly said, "Lancaster's of London, sir! Crowley, me name is. Maybe one day, sir, I will be a settler. I'll build me a homestead here! Me and some o' the boys have talked about makin' us up a li'l village in the fertile lands after the Congo Sea fills in. Maybe I'll build us a church. Always had an interest in preachin'. I preach sometimes on our breaks. Motivates the boys, it does. Not only do we have the promise of a better life here, but a better life even in death."
"Sounds like you live a good, clean life, Mr. Crowley. Bully, I say, bully for you. Glad to have you here," Jennings said, saccharine-sweet. "I too have a keen interest in building a church here myself. And I am sure what awaits your honest toil in the great beyond are riches and rewards beyond your wildest dreams. Thank you for your labor, good man. I couldn't do this without men like yourself."
Crowley and Jennings shook hands vigorously and both turn to face the front of the dam, looking out to sea. "What's that, sir?" Crowley asked, squinting and pointing at several shapes below seemingly in a physical altercation by a security gate. As the two men watched from on high, they heard a crack ring out over the din of construction equipment. It was a gunshot. Now they heard more.
"What in blazes?" muttered Jennings, acid seeping through his gentlemanly Southron drawl. "What the hell is, I say, what in the sam hell is going on down there?"
Then came more cracks. From all directions. A bullet went whizzing by, smacking into a concrete crenel nearby. Sirens sounded from the various security stations and the sound of belt-fed grinders opening fire from guard towers filled the air.
"ATTENTION! ATTENTION! THE DAM IS UNDER ATTACK. THE DAM IS UNDER ATTACK! ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! DER DAM IST ANGRIFF! DER DAM IST ANGRIFF!"