WARNING: THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS GROTESQUE DESCRIPTIONS OF SINGLE DEATHS 
AND MASS CARNAGE ACCOMPANIED BY PERVERTED SEXUAL DEVIANCE.  ALSO VIOLENCE, FOUL 
LANGUAGE AND OTHER ACTS OF POOR CITIZENSHIP.  IT MAY ALSO OFFEND THE CHINESE.  
IF YOU ARE OFFENDED BY THESE THINGS, THE NEW REDBOOK SHOULD BE ON THE STANDS 
THIS WEEK, GO READ THAT INSTEAD.  IF YOU ARE UNDERAGE AT YOUR LOCALITY, YOU 
SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.  PUT THIS DOWN AND GO DO YOUR HOMEWORK AND BE IN 
BED BY NINE.  WAIT UNTIL YOU’RE OLDER.  


WORLD’S END

By Chip Masterson


“I should begin by introducing myself,” the Chinese official said.  “I am Mr. 
Chan, and I have been in charge of Phase Two these past sixteen years.  This is 
Phase One,” he said, tapping a glass wall.  Behind it sat an enormously muscular 
naked Chinese male with a foot-long semi-erect cock eating a bowl of rice at a 
table.  Scientists working around him took his nudity for granted, as well as 
his immensity – he made Bolo Leung look like a nine-year-old.  As he ate, his 
cock bobbed beneath the table, a viscous gob of come swinging from the slit like 
a pendulum and lowering, slowly, like in that old Vincent Price movie.  Pressing 
a button, Chan said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Wu.  We are sorry for the disturbances 
you have experienced.”

Mr. Wu looked through the glass with an expressing that could only be described, 
please forgive me, as inscrutable.  “Mr. Wu,” Chan continued, “After all this 
time, you have never once asked about your parents, have you?”

“No,” Mr. Wu answered matter-of-factly.  He kept eating.

“I would like to introduce you to your father,” Chan said.  A door opened and a 
wizened janitor came in, his face full of love and admiration for the man 
everyone made such a fuss over.  “Kill him,” Chan ordered.  “Slowly.”

The President started back, shocked.  As Mr. Wu stood up, his cock caught the 
underside of the table, which was bolted to the floor.  The steel surface 
buckled up until the legs ripped loose and flipped over, the rice bowl flying 
away.  Expressionless, Mr. Wu picked the shaking man up in a bearhug.  Never 
taking his eyes off the man’s face as he pleaded and begged for recognition and 
mercy, Mr. Wu slowly crushed the man against his stone-carved chest, the old 
bones cracking and legs spasming as blood drooled out of the man’s mouth.  

Mr. Wu popped his pecs one at a time, each flex shattering ribs and shoulders as 
easily as his biceps broke the man’s arms merely by bulging against them.  He 
rolled his shoulders to work the old man up, grinding him into a tube of pulp - 
miraculously, the bones never broke the skin, but shattered and sliced only 
within it.  The man flopped backward, his mouth draining pink froth as Mr. Wu 
ground his pelvis, hips and legs the same way.  When the man was utterly broken 
yet still, somehow, breathing, Mr. Wu reached out and palmed the man’s skull.  
Flexing his fingers, he shattered the bones in his father’s head so skillfully 
that even then, when the old man was lying like a jellyfish on the shore, he 
continued to blow blood-bubbles from his boneless face.  

While his father lay there, unable to jerk or spasm in his death-throes for lack 
of a skeleton, Mr. Wu lay over him and began fucking him like a giant condom.  
His triceps expanded as his paper-thin waist rolled with dense abdominal muscles 
undulated, intensely controlled to not tear the father-tube open.  More goo 
gelled out of the flapping, distorted mouth with its tombstone teeth until Mr. 
Wu’s ass clenched and cum began to fill the body, inflating it like a fuck-doll.  
Only when every limb was round and firm and the head roughly head-shaped did he 
stop and get up.  A scientist cam over and began cleaning the arm-thick prick 
with a towel.   Mr. Wu looked around for his rice bowl.  When he saw it on the 
floor, he looked cross.  His arm shot out and his fist stove in the cleaning-
scientists skull.  His sneer twitched and grew while the other scientists 
scampered to get him a new bowl of rice.

“What was the point of that?” the president said, feeling sick despite 
everything he’d already seen. 

“Emotion, sentiment, and feeling have all been genetically engineered out of Mr. 
Wu.  He does not care what others feel, or who they are – and he will be 
completely immune both to Jason’s intimidating menace and to his sexually 
arousing dominance.  He won’t fear Jason, he won’t desire to submit to him - he 
won’t even be attracted to him.  Mr. Wu is the ultimate narcissist, aroused only 
by his own body, his own strength.  He is several times stronger than the most 
powerful athletes who have ever lived.  He is the perfect weapon,” Chan said, 
his eyes large.

“I hate to break this to you,” the president replied, “but Jason will split Mr. 
Wu like a wishbone with two fingers.”

“Ah, if we relied on Phase One, yes!  He is only our prototype.  Phase Two is 
where the meat is,” Chan said with a hungry expression.

“Phase two?” the President asked.

“What if I told you we had one million Misters Wus, all identical clones, all 
emotionless, obedient warriors who do not fear their own deaths!  Who do not 
fear pain!  Just as humanity would one day have stifled the world through over-
population – before recent events, that is – so will we bring the dream of a 
Million Marching Chinese to fruition, and smother this man who thinks he is a 
planet to rival Earth!”  

Chan spoke with the fiery conviction of a religious fanatic, leaving the 
president no time to realize the Million Marching Chinese idea had actually been 
Chinese propaganda, and not something made up by Mr. Wilkins to terrify the 
fourth grade.  The idea stunned him with possibility – could a million men 
actually bring Jason down?  “How strong are these Misters Wu exactly?”

“The man you witnessed killed just now had a rare chromosomal anomaly – he was a 
triple X, with no Y chromosome at all.  In his youth he was rebellious and only 
broken by the Cultural Revolution.  We culled his genes, manipulated them, and 
created Mr. Wu.  Then we cloned Mr. Wu one million times, using facilities in 
North Korea to grow and nurture the offspring so that they are, at sixteen years 
of age, many times stronger than even the Mr. Wu you see.”

“So that’s why North Korea has been off-limits for so long?” the President 
marveled.

“There are no nukes,” Chan chuckled.  “There are barely any North Koreans in 
fact.  The famine some years back was caused by the need to feed these voracious 
titanic children, and the rest has all been a smokescreen.  I see you’re 
surprised.  I’m afraid your CIA is, what you call, buffoons.”  He smiled 
broadly.

“That’s not news,” the president grumbled.  “Still, Jason’s power is 
incomprehensible, it’s physical mutation on a quantum level.  And Aaron – his 
son, the other Gargantua – he is rapidly catching up and hasn’t entered puberty 
yet.”

“Ah,” Chan said, “I thought all this had the air of a family quarrel.  Well, let 
me show you our Wus in action.”  He walked over to some monitors and typed in 
commands.  As he worked, he said, “Any Mr. Wu can overcome a tank, though not as 
impressively as Jason did this afternoon.  He can hold it in place and flip it 
over, then peel back the plating to gut it like a fish.  Here we go,” he said as 
a stream came up that showed a train station in some desolate region of North 
Korea.  “We gave a ten-car bullet train one hour’s head start, then sent four 
Misters Wu to chase it down.  They caught up to it in forty-five minutes--”

“Good god!” the president gasped.  

“Yes!” Chan laughed.  “The commercial train has a top speed of 150 miles per 
hour.  These men reached a ground speed of 349 miles per hour to catch the 
train.  Watch!”

Enhanced satellite footage showed the men surrounding the train, two on each 
side, one in front and one in back.  Immediately the train lost speed and kept 
loosing it until they dragged it to a halt in under ten minutes.  The train 
shook violently as its wheels caught and spun and caught and spun, but they just 
kept holding in place for minute after minute.  They began ejaculating 
spontaneously as they overpowered the frantic machine, shooting rockets of cum 
that clogged the wheels and webbed the carriage to the ground with thick, sticky 
ropes.  Then they began to tug it backwards.  

They worked as one, pulling and heaving the enormous, thundering train backwards 
as its screeching wheels sprayed the air with sparks.  They gained speed and 
first smoke tendriled out of the engine, then flames.  The track began warping 
under the pressure and snaking away from the disaster as a series of dull 
explosions signaled the trains dying gasps.  They’d burnt out the engine simply 
by using their muscles.  

“They then lifted and carried the train to an undamaged section of track and 
pulled it back to the station – backwards – in fifty-five minutes,” Chan said 
proudly.  “Not only out-running the train, overpowering the train, but driving 
it faster than its own engine ever could.  We believe that a single Mr. Wu could 
have accomplished this task with a little more time.  We believe no engine has 
been devised that is a match for Mr. Wu.  This was an exercise in teamwork.”

The president felt dizzy with the prospect of victory.  “Can they get stronger?” 
he asked.

“Oh yes, every day,” Chan told him.  “In fact, all they do when they aren’t 
eating, shitting or sleeping is train.  Here’s a clip of how those same four Wus 
spent the hour waiting to go catch that train.”  He typed and another screen 
flashed to life.

One man was doing pushups – with a Soviet tank on his back, overflowing with 
men.  Another did pull-ups from a partially-constructed office tower, gripping 
an I-Beam between his legs: it too had men balancing on top of it and hanging 
below, and suspended beneath him and off either end were three large trucks.  A 
third did squats holding a soldier-packed transport plane over his head, men 
sitting on the wings and fuselage.  The last man stood on top of a building and 
doing curls, using the ladders of two fire trucks loaded with men.  The time 
lapse record showed they performed these feats of strength for nearly the entire 
hour, without pause or interruption.  Soldiers provided water and protein shakes 
for them while they exercised.  They stretched for a few minutes when they were 
done and then took off so fast the cameras couldn’t follow them.  

“Intriguingly,” Chan said, “the men do not like lifting dead weight.  They 
require living beings.  We tried elephants but the animals became too agitated 
around men so much stronger than they – becoming frenzied with fear, or a need 
to dominate the men.  We had an incident where a Mr. Wu was doing chest flies 
with a team of three elephants on each arm, and after ten minutes the beasts 
were driven to exhaustion being dragged backward by his arms, then straining as 
hard as could as he gently resisted them, only to humiliate them again.  Two 
bulls turned and charged him, and Mr. Wu didn’t like having his workout 
interrupted.  He grasped their trunks under his arms, flipped them onto their 
back and alternating between one and the other, pounded their chests in before 
they could scramble to escape.  Then he refused to clean up the mess because he 
wasn’t finished with his workout.  Common soldiers are so much more obedient.”  
He typed in another command and said, “You might find this interesting.”

The stream backed up and played at a slower speed.  The president could see the 
controlled manner of the lifting better, and that periodically, their cocks 
would erupt with cum.  Particularly the soldier doing the pull-ups – his long 
thick cock rested on the steel beam and every time he pulled up, his cock would 
ooze man-grease so that on the way back down, the cock never chafed against the 
metal.  Soldiers would collect this effluent as well, and clean the Wus 
generally of sweat and dirt – it appeared the Wus never bathed nor did anything 
else for themselves but were constantly serviced by service personnel.  Like 
some kind of hive.  

“Aren’t you worried?” the president asked.  “Won’t all that … sex ... make them 
nuts?”

Chan laughed and said, “As I said, it is only themselves that they love – their 
orgasms are triggered only by pride in their machismo, in shattering their own 
previous records and feeling their strength defeat some obstacle.”

“But what if that semen were used--”

Chan cut him off with another jolly laugh.  “They are completely sterile!  We 
engineered them that way with multiple redundancies.  Tubes do not connect.  No 
sperm are produced and in fact, the testes, the prostate, the bladder and the 
kidneys all secrete spermicidal hormones.  Our super-soldiers shoot only 
blanks.”

“Yes, we all saw ‘Jurassic Park’ and know how foolproof that is,” the president 
groused.  “Why let them have sexuality at all?”

Chan looked surprised.  “Isn’t that the essence of manliness itself?  The 
ability to fill and cover your defeated enemy with your seed, to treat him like 
a whore?  We’re not turning men into soulless beasts here.  Though clones, they 
are still men, and men have their needs.  And any man denied regular orgasms 
goes insane.  Look at your Catholic and puritan churches.  Full of lunatics and 
repressed sex fiends.  To be a man is to, what is that phrase that diplomat used 
one time, to ‘hock cocksnot all over her tits’” – he smiled at the memory – “is 
it not?”

“I think I know who you mean,” the president said grimly.  “And it’s all devoid 
of sperm, it cannot be used to inseminate anyone?”

“What do you think we collect it for, our baths?” Wu laughed.  “We run 
continuous tests.  Not a single sperm detected in all the gallons of daily come 
they produce.”

“What about being shot?” the president asked.

“No bullet of any caliber, at any range, has been able to penetrate their 
muscles.  And their reflexes are such they are almost impossible to hit.  And 
they can flex the shrapnel out and stop their own bleeding my sheer muscle 
control.”

Something still nagged the president.  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll rebel, kill 
you all, take over the labs and clone versions of themselves that are potent, as 
well as female?  Haven’t you considered the possibility of their replacing the 
human race with their superman kind?  If you what you say is true, they may 
defeat Jason, but what then will defeat them?”

“Or more precisely, us?” Chan said, a cold smile lingering on his lips.  
“Because we control them, we control them absolutely, and we will therefore 
control all the world’s resources once they are unleashed.”

Suspecting “we” might not be the same as the current government of China, the 
president asked the more pressing question, “Control them how?”

“We have their brains mapped to a master-computer that communicates to them 
using long wave signals.  We can micromanage their every twitch and flex, or we 
can allow them relative freedom and control their strategic choices.  When the 
North Koreans discovered we were not breeding engineered crops in our facilities 
and tried to take us over, Mr. Wu – then only ten years of age – was, or were, 
able to take out their entire military in a matter of weeks.  We asked them 
their strategies beforehand, then commanded them to use less efficient, even 
dangerous methods.  They obeyed, using their natural dominance to overcome every 
obstacle.”  

Chan paused and asked slyly, “Want to see more?”  The president could only nod 
queasily.

“When they were thirteen, we took one hundred to the Indian ocean for maneuvers 
against one hundred nuclear submarines.  Already they were too much for the subs 
to handle.”  Chan’s eyes grew feverish as he called up footage from helicopters 
showing what looked like fireplug bodybuilders bulldogging enormous submarines 
in mid-ocean.  One boy would swim up to meet a sub and stop it merely by 
swimming against it.  When one would try to reverse, he would simply sink 
fingers into steel and pull, treading water to prevent the sub from moving.  
Orders were given to dive, and ballast tanks filled with seawater.  The boys 
allowed them to drop one hundred, two hundred feet, and then dove after them.  

Cameras placed on the submarine hulls clearly showed the boys, without diving 
gear of any kind, dropping beneath the subs and forcing them back up towards the 
surface.  Torpedo tubes opened to flood for additional ballast but it was no 
use.  Propellers churned the sea like blender-blades but the boys continued 
raising the subs higher and higher until the broke the surface.  

“You’ve seen water polo players tread water with balls over their heads?” Chan 
asked.  “Watch this.”

The thirteen-year-olds, by treading water, raised the subs completely above the 
surface of the ocean and held them overhead for an hour.  The sailors gathered 
on the hulls, terrified, wondering if they should make a run for it in 
inflatables.  But by then the sea was growing increasingly choppy from the power 
generated by two hundred legs holding tons of steel and men over their heads.  
The swells grew steeper and steeper and the boys, ordered not to stop, continued 
riding the steep waves that rose and fell for dozens of feet. 

The president got a sick feeling when he did the math.  “When was this?”

“Christmas day, 2004,” Chan said quietly.  

“They caused the tsunami?” the president gasped.  “A hundred 13-year-olds 
fucking SWIMMING?”

“There could be no witnesses,” Chan said, sly again and scary.  “We ordered the 
boys to bury the subs.”

“Bury them?”

The feed showed the boys tossing the subs into the water and letting them go.  
When the subs dove, the boys followed and pushed them straight down toward the 
bottom.  Storms of bubbles floated up as  the subs tried to rise again but even 
after all those exertions, with no rest, water or food, the boys still muscled 
the nuclear submarines down to the bottom of the sea, and then proceeded to cave 
them in with their fists.  The subs flooded as they battered the plating down, 
crushing the men inside, cramming and stamping the subs into the seabed until 
the cloud of mud of obscured everything and the cameras finally failed.  

“That provided the seismic shocks that were registered around the globe.  
Disparities in the time sequence have been blamed on the clocks,” Chan said.  
“The boys swam one hundred miles under water before surfacing, to avoid 
detection.”

“I saw sailors jumping away before the subs dove – did none escape?”

“Each boy received a full crew list, with images, transmitted via computer to 
their control chip.  Fugitives were hunted and killed below the surface.  We 
can’t speculate how, and the boys wouldn’t say.  They simply smiled at each 
other and giggled,” Chan said.  “There was a great deal of blood and semen in 
the water, however.  But no remains.”  The president found that very disturbing 
indeed. 

For the short term, it meant hope.  If 100 thirteen-year-olds could produce such 
wide-scale devastation, literally changing the face of the earth, surely one 
million at 16 could challenge even Jason’s brawn.  Possibly Aaron’s as well, if 
Aaron tried to defend his father.  They could swarm over them like army ants.  
How many could Jason and Aaron kill before they were overpowered?  Buried, even, 
in the carnage which the Wus would pack against them, stuff into their throats, 
and never mourn their fellows.

But what if one of them did mourn?  Or get angry?  See, in his mirror image, his 
own fate?  If even one could evolve that much empathy, overcome the obstacle of 
his own genetics the way he overcomes every other … what else could they change 
on their own? 

Worried, the president asked, “Where exactly are they now, these million Mr. 
Wus?”

 “At home base in Korea.  They can be on top of Jason at a moment’s notice.  
Look at him,” Chan said, turning on another monitor.  “Sleeping right out in the 
open at ground zero.  Fearless, no?  As if he were taunting us.”  Chan fell 
silent a moment as if occupied by unspeakable thoughts, then turned to the 
president brightly and asked, “Do you want to watch on our screens, or from our 
observation deck?  There’s tea and your American whiskey.” 

The fact they’d installed a Skybox for the event, possibly even goaded the 
military into luring Jason here, chilled the president.  But honest to Christ he 
wanted a drink, so up they went.

The president felt relieved to see computers and workstations filling the room 
in front of the large glass wall set into the side of the mountain instead of a 
common lounge, and also relieved Chan hadn’t lied about the bourbon.  A large 
crack slanted through the foot-thick tempered glass but it remained intact.  
Ominously, everyone wore safety goggles and Kevlar body armor.  A nervous 
technician brought these items to the president, bowing curtly.

The signal must have already gone out, because when the president looked back at 
the big window with his whiskey, the sky was turning dark.  At first, he thought 
he was watching the arrow scene from the movie “300.”  Only it wasn’t arrows 
that blotted out the sun: it was one million Misters Wu converging on the plain 
where Jason recuperated.  Either he doubted the seriousness of the assault – he 
would never perceive it as a ‘threat’ – or he was deeply asleep, because he made 
no move to counter them until, like a blanket, they covered him and the fields 
around him.  Linking arms, they doubled over each other to concentrate their 
fist-power and grappling abilities.  Only after the first barrage of blows that 
looked like a swell on the ocean did Jason rise from the ground.

Or rather, attempt to.  The president goggled, booze forgotten, as he watched a 
small bump form in the middle of the Wu-mat, only to get flattened back down.  
Next a single arm rose above the surface, spearing a Mr. Wu like a flopping 
fish, but Jason’s attempt to stand again was thwarted by the concentrated power 
of the Wu army.  Jason flexed his forearm so fast that Mr. Wu’s body exploded in 
half – and then the Wus surged and two dozen arms gripped Jason’s arm and began 
to pull it back down.  

Jason must have been surprised by their power – tendons tensed and muscles 
bulged but it only gave the Wus more to grasp, and they continued to drag his 
arm back down behind Jason’s back.  Soon it disappeared entirely beneath them 
only muffled outraged roar broke the surface of the Wus as again fists and feet 
began pile-driving into Jason.  Another, louder roar sounded and both arms 
smashed through the surface, the one carrying a dozen arms ripped out of their 
sockets, the other blasting a hole of shattered flesh where a clone used to be.

But the blood-sprayed Wus immediately moved in the fill the holes, tightening 
and thickening the web overlaying Jason and, with linked arms, pressed down as 
if to crush him against the earth.  A bump rose ten feet into the air suddenly 
with a fine halo of blood flying away from it but the outermost Wus remained 
intact and flexed their bodies down, driving Jason back and onto the Wus that 
had moved beneath him to seal him in a Wu-cocoon.  

The Wus moved in concert, twisting and tightening themselves around Jason.  As 
he trampled through their bodies to reach solid earth, they grappled with his 
legs and cock and balls, keeping him slicked with gore and suspended among them.  
They tightened like a single bulging muscle around him, sacrificing themselves 
in the attempt to crush him from every angle and deprive him of anything solid 
enough to spring off of.  The tightening muscle bulged with Jason’s futile 
attempts to free his arms and legs and a for a moment, the president felt the 
tingle of excitement untouched by dread of what would inevitably follow.

Jason began to twist his body.  His fuckrod, pressed against his abs by dozen 
hands, throbbed to break flee and tear through them.  But the more he twisted, 
the more Wus flowed beneath him, buoying his enormous weight farther from the 
ground.  Jason continued to rip, claw and bite chunks away from the cocoon and 
empty his balls with volcanic spurts, creating a constant flow of slippery, 
creamy gore around him.  The Wus began to struggle to maintain their grip on 
Jason and their links to each other – squeezing harder, they started to break 
each others arms and legs.  Jason began to sink through the liquid layer, his 
tonnage forcing the uncompressible liquid back out against his captors.

It was impossible to tell how many Wus were left by sight – only the computer 
tallies of active bio-signals could inform them and everyone was transfixed by 
the spectacle outside the window.  So when the first tremor hit with enough 
force to toss a bank of computers across the room, everyone had to admit in 
retrospect they should have seen it coming.

The second quake-wave rocked the mountain and forced the split window to grate 
along its crack.  The Wu-mass rippled chaotically but didn’t break, forcing down 
even harder than before – and began to sink into the ground like quicksand.  
With two blows, Jason had opened a crack he could slip into, and now his mighty 
arms began forcing the crack open wider, causing the Wus to slip in as well.

“He’ll need to do more than that to cope with my children!” Mr. Chan shouted 
feverishly, holding onto a desk that slid across the floor.  Unfortunately, the 
president knew how much more Jason was prepared to dish out.  At least, he 
thought he knew … but he soon discovered how little he really knew of Jason’s 
capacity for destruction.

Jason’s arms and shoulders forced the mouth in the earth wider and wider to 
swallow his adversaries, and they started to reach for the jutting rocks around 
them, breaking the chain.  With a titanic crack, the earth split for miles and 
Jason dropped into a subterranean cavern system.  Stamping his feet, he kept the 
earth shaking until enough had broken up to start again.  

The Wus began trying to fill the chasm by ripping huge swaths of rock away from 
the walls and down onto Jason, to no effect.  They began chanting in a single 
booming voice something in Chinese that Chan interpreted as COWARDS RUN.  But 
Jason wasn’t escaping.  He had no intention of running away.

He was only seeking the proper depth.

They felt it first in their guts, even before it registered in their heads as a 
loss of balance.  A churning sensation, accompanied by a sound almost too low to 
hear.  Men began to throw up spontaneously and then everything – pencils, 
clipboards, staplers, keys – anything sitting on a surface began to dance like 
water in a hot pan.  Then the furniture itself began to dance and the glass wall 
shattered into a million bouncing shards.  Chan pulled the president into a 
hallway at the last moment and they raced up the stairs to the roof deck.  

The helicopter had already lifted off and hovered feet above the ground, which 
rose to slap at the struts and batter the bird while it waited.  Chan jumped 
inside, pulling the president with him, and while aides hurried up the stairs 
after them, he commanded the pilot to go, abandon them, get away from the 
ground.

When the craft stabilized, what they saw defied their imaginations.  Jason’s 
powerful arms worked the earth below like the blades of a blender.  Enormous 
tracts of earth twisted, broke apart and smashed together, causing the Wu army 
to scramble for footing; their activities busting up the earth now worked 
against them.  They hopped like fleas off a shaking dog.

The region around Beijing is laced with faults from an active volcanic period 
during the Cretaceous era.  The crust convulsed from its own underlying tensions 
as Jason shuffled them around like air hockey pucks.  Huge plates battered 
against him as if the earth were trying to vomit Jason out – only the rock 
simply broke and crumbled around him.  

Jason’s pleasure only increased as the crust plates fragmented and weakened, 
their 12-Richter shocks canceled by arms twice as strong.  The circle of 
devastation grew wider, coruscating the earth for miles around, leveling all 
structures, swallowing high-rises and miles of highway.  Jason took the worst 
quakes the earth could generate and doubled them, tripled them with muscles 
mightier than any natural force since the birth of the planet itself. However 
violently the planet thrust itself against him, Jason grabbed it with his 
terrible iron grip and cracked it like a whip over his head.  The surface became 
a churning, uninhabitable whirlpool of rock a hundred miles in diameter.

Soil and rock jetted into the air, blocking the view and driving the copter 
higher, higher, ever higher to escape the expanding bubble of rocketing debris.  
Chan gasped as reports began flooding his blackberry.  “Quakes are leveling the 
cities of Japan – Richter scale insufficient to measure their strength!  Storm 
surges already swamping tankers at sea with markers of multiple tsunamis 
radiating across the north Pacific.  This can’t be … volcanic activity across 
the entire Hawaii chain – quakes now reported in Manila, as far away as 
Brisbane.”  He looked up and said, “All communication with Singapore and Taiwan 
has been lost.”  Nothing could be seen below them except the dust storm surging 
up from the surface, forcing the helicopter farther south, where they could see 
the last remnants of Beijing being swallowed in enormous sinkholes and crevasses 
that opened and closed like hungry mouths.

“Avalanches in the Himalayas – now reports of measurable quakes at Samarkand, 
St. Petersburg, Calcutta … quakes building in all these areas – the Three Gorges 
Dam is history … reports from – oh, no!” Chan gaped at his PDA.  “The entire 7th 
fleet floundering among ocean crests of two, three hundred feet – aircraft 
carriers breaking up.”

Chan looked up, gazing out to sea – but the horizon already was blocked by a 
kind of fog.  Mushroom clouds began dotting the earth below as nuclear reactors 
and weapon silos collapsed.  The president shouted over the roar of the blades 
and the dull thunder of destruction below, “Are you happy now?!  He’s breaking 
the earth’s crust apart!  What’s gong to happen when sections of ocean begin 
sinking into the mantle?  Mountains will be raised, farmland flooded or vanished 
– who will survive?  How?  You did this, you did, by thinking you could beat 
Jason.  Nothing can beat him!  Nothing can stop him!  Admit it before it’s too 
late for all of us!”

Chan looked up, a crazy grin spreading over his face.  “One thing may.  I have a 
report from Pyongyang – something they believe may be Aaron is headed straight 
for us.”

About time, the president thought.  Though god knows, if Jason’s rattling dishes 
in St Petersburg, adding Aaron to the mix might only escalate things.  Then they 
saw it – or him – a blur punching a hole in the dust cloud and exploding past 
every obstacle.  Now the game was on.

Or back on – the Wus had found their balance.  A screen in the helicopter showed 
the Wus’ signals following the blur down into the churning earth, now battered 
down to less threatening dimensions.  But even able to shove the rocks around, 
the Wus bounced back and forth like pachinko balls, whereas Jason and Aaron 
seemed to swim through the metamorphic rock strata like it was water.  And when 
Aaron found Jason, he caught him by surprised and pile-drove him straight down 
along the wall of a fault.  

Aaron dove down after him, sustaining Jason’s blows while delivering his own 
equally devastating ones.  Mile after mile they battled each other, deeper and 
deeper into the earth, which buckled and coughed out huge waves of terror that 
traveled straight across the globe to break out beneath the ocean or closer and 
closer to Europe, Africa and North America.  The Wus couldn’t keep up with them, 
and only seismic reports to his PDA informed Chan of the depths the battling duo 
had reached when the pilot, realizing he would run out of fuel with no place to 
land, took off toward the Gobi desert.

“I’m afraid their movement may not be completely voluntary,” Chan shouted over 
the roar of the turbines.  “The earth’s core and the two supermen may be 
attracting each other in equal measure – pulling them down but also shifting the 
core within the mantle.”

“That’s impossible!” the president gasped.

Chan handed him the PDA which displayed, unhelpfully in Chinese, the seismic 
reporting.  A graph appeared that the president showed to Chan.  “What is this 
measuring?” 

“The inner core normally spins faster than the earth itself.  This shows it is 
wobbling – pressing against the liquid outer core and slowing precisely beneath 
Beijing.  The deeper they go,” Chan said, “the more they’ll drag the solid core 
through the belt of liquid metal.  Already their mass and the power of their 
blows against each other are battering the core with forces never before 
conceived possible.”

The president looked out the window – everywhere the earth surged in waves like 
the sea, grinding every human structure – and human, animal and tree – to pulp.  
Reports came in of cities laid waste now all over the globe – New York, Chicago, 
Sydney, Johannesburg, Rio.  The Amazon flowing backwards, the Panama Canal 
collapsing, the cauldron of Yosemite erupting.  But even those horrors paled 
against the thought of the earth’s core being whipsawed around like a toy.  1500 
miles in diameter, and they were affecting it more than it was affecting them!  

“What happens when they reach the mantle?  Can they survive the heat?  The 
pressure?” the president asked.

“The question is, can we?” Chan asked as the pilot desperately looked for a 
place to land.  “There!” he shouted, pointing to a rocky outcrop that seemed to 
be, comparatively, barely moving.

The copter lowered itself onto the rock while the men wondered where in the 
ravaged land they had to go, or who might rescue them, when suddenly the rock 
itself lurched.  A chasm miles long opened beneath them and swallowed the entire 
outcrop like a tongue, and fuelless aircraft with it.  They fell for what seemed 
like hours but in fact was only a few seconds before getting wedge, the jolt 
knocking the copter onto its side.  They skidded against the chasm wall and for 
a moment, in the dark, nothing happened.

Then they felt the vibrations – like a distant stampede coming at them 
impossibly fast.

The chasm walls crunched together around the massive rock like molars trying to 
crack a nut.  The copter flew into the opposite wall and rebounded from another 
shock, skidding off the rock and down into the crevasse itself.  The battering 
rocks flattened the copter around them and the president relieved, in again what 
seemed like hours, his entire adventure with Aaron and his terrible parent.  All 
the opportunities the two men had to kill him and now their muscles were 
crushing him to death from a hundred miles away, from twenty miles beneath the 
earth – their muscles squeezing the copter like toothpaste and crushing his 
legs.  He felt his heart race as his lungs compressed beneath the tons of rocks 
Aaron unthinkingly elbowed out of the way, breaking his ribs and cracking his 
skull, grinding his arms and twisting the meat off his bones.  The president 
knew he was only one of millions, billions possibly, being smashed by the 
muscular exertions of these two inhuman beasts, but that didn’t make the 
darkness any less lonely.  He felt his belly burst out his side and his guts 
spill into the gnashing metal and rock around them and his last thought was to 
wonder if any planet would be left at all when they were done.

And then the president, Mr. Chan and the pilot were dead within the munching 
jaws of earth that split into dozens more as Jason and Aaron’s power bounced off 
the punch-drunk core and punished the earth for thinking it was big enough to 
take them on.


THE END
chipmasterson@yahoo.com