The Battle of Baltimore

[The following came to me in a fever dream, a dream which lasted an entire week, which, uh, explains why this is up so late.  Anyway, I fell asleep shortly after the Lions game against the Browns, and a week later I awoke, drenched in sweat, having felt like I aged 100 years.  Sure, I tweeted during that time and also communicated with a few of you via e-mail and even killed a man in a bar fight using only my mind but I am a versatile creature and these activities only required .0001% of my brain.  The majority of my brain however, was dialed into what was referred to me by my dream guide, a homely looking old Italian man who called himself Dirty Virge, as The Truth.  The visions shown to me were both exhilarating and terrifying, filled with blood, sweat, semen, dead bodies and even the sight of a naked Nick Fairley riding a horse through the streets of Baltimore, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Anyway, when I awoke, I furiously tried to gather those stray visions into something coherent, and the result is this . . .]

Prologue:

Just before dusk in mid-August, General Jim Schwartz attended a meeting requested by the Mayor, Dave Bing.  The General thought the meeting was just a formality, the latest in a long line of celebratory fetes congratulating him for his heroic defense of the Michigan homeland from those vile Ohioan fiends, but when he arrived the General found the Mayor sitting behind his desk, head in hands underneath a single flickering lightbulb.  It was clear the old fool had been weeping and immediately the General steeled himself for the call of duty.

The Mayor released a ragged sigh when he saw the General enter his cramped, shadowy office and he motioned for the man who had saved his ass more than once to sit down across from him.  “Jim,” he told him, wiping away a stray tear, “we got a motherfuckin’ problem.”  The General just nodded his head.  When didn’t they have a problem?  “You hear about these motherfuckers from Baltimore, all callin’ themselves Murder City?  What, just ‘cause they get a fancy show on the HBO, they think they know thing one ‘bout Murder?” 

The General sighed.  So this was how it was going to be.  Baltimore was where he was from.  It was in his blood.  It was where he had learned to play human chess, where he learned to understand the value of a life.  But Detroit was his home now.  It had taken him in, had promoted him to the highest ranks, and had trusted him with her defense.  And besides, Baltimore may have taught him about the value of a life but Detroit taught The General all about the value of taking a life.  Yes, Baltimore was a hard land, but he knew his old friends were mere babies, clad and coddled in sheep’s wool compared to the steel men of Detroit.

“Jim, I know you tired.  I know you got men in and outta every whorehouse in the city, but goddammit, man, if we don’t stand up for ourselves, what the fuck we got left?”  The Mayor rose from his seat and pounded his desk.  It was then that The General noticed The Mayor wasn’t wearing any pants.

“I mean, goddammit Jimmy, all we got is our reputation.  And ain’t no soft-ass motherfucker from Baltimore gonna take that shit away from us.  Fuck Baltimore, Jimmy.  Fuck ‘em.”

The General tried not to look directly at the Mayor, especially since the man’s underwear was as ragged as the rest of him, and the General could already see the Mayor’s python trying to wriggle its way free.  “Uh, Mr. Mayor, you are aware you aren’t wearing any pants, right?”

The Mayor slammed a fist.  “You goddamn right I’m aware I ain’t got no motherfuckin’ drawers on!  And you know why I ain’t got no drawers, Jimmy?”

The General just shook his head.

“I ain’t got no motherfuckin’ drawers ‘cause I had to sell ‘em just to buy ammo to hunt down those motherfuckin’ coyotes been gettin’ into folks’ garbage on the edge of town!” the Mayor screamed.  “Now you tell me if we can afford to sit here and take the insults of those cocksuckers from Baltimore, Jimmy.  You tell me!”

The General couldn’t, and with that he knew what he had to do.  He gave the Mayor a curt nod and left the maniac to his own despair.  After leaving his office he placed a single phone call.  “Corporal Gun?  It’s the General.  Gather the boys.  Tell ‘em ‘We ride.’”

The Battle for Baltimore

The men staggered into Maryland, hung over and dripping with cheap sex.  Violence was in the air but then again, with this gang, violence was always in the air.  The men were in no condition for the serious fight which lay ahead – the General may not have belonged to Baltimore anymore but he harbored no illusions either, he knew Baltimore would bring the fight – and the General cursed himself for allowing the men to pillage the Ohio countryside on their march to Baltimore.  Sure it had been satisfying seeing the rust covered villages of Ohio burn under a hell sun and yeah, the men had made a fortune selling Ohio slaves to greedy Pennsylvanian pimps, but the men had had too much fun.  Hell, Private Fairley even ate a baby outside of Youngstown and then slapped the brat’s crying mother when she protested.  Sure, the “woman” looked more like a mutilated hill troll but baby eating was pushing things just a little too far.  The General knew he’d have to have a talk with Private Fairley.  He just hoped the degenerate understood English.

But whatever worries the General may have had about his men’s willingness to fight was obliterated when Baltimore sent a weird emissary doing a bizarre dance to the ranks to parley.  The man spoke in strange tongues and the men had no choice but to take it as an insult.  They grabbed the emissary and tarred and feathered him and sent him back to the city riding an ass backwards, gibbering about dirty birds.  The last thing the emissary said before he was lost to distance was “My General, the noble John Harbaugh, will hear of this madness!”

At that, General Schwartz’s ears pricked up and his blood began to surge through his body.  His pulse quickened and his dick grew hard, as it often did before the killing began.  Harbaugh.  Heh.  The General spit on the ground.  He knew the man.  Oh yes.  After all, Jim Harbaugh, the brother of this John Harbaugh, was the General’s mortal enemy.  No one could ever forget the two of them clashing in single combat before the gates of hell while their men cheered them on.  If it wasn’t for the intervention of The Great Willie Young, The General and the fiend Harbaugh, a turncoat who spurned his Michigan roots for the cheap sodomy and lurid hedonism of San Francisco, might have killed one another.  But now, just the name was enough to get the General’s juices flowing.  Harbaugh.  The General wanted blood.

And so he appealed to the men, men who were already alive with their own bloodlust following the emissary’s fateful visit.  The General explained to them that Baltimore was out to take something away from them.  It was out to take their pride.  It was out to take their women and fuck their mothers.  At this, Lord Suh broke from the ranks and made a single mad charge on the walls of Baltimore.  He was riddled with arrows but yet he kept charging until finally he was lost behind the walls.  Even the General was shocked and for a moment the men fell silent before Snake Stafford, the team’s Field Marshall, sauntered from his tent.  The Snake was always cool, always calm, and although he enjoyed the fruits of his labor perhaps even more than the others, he was also more refined, and by that I mean he preferred to fuck his women one at a time, in the comfort of his own tent rather than out in the open, rolling around in the blood of the fallen and the guts of slain horses like some of the men preferred.  Of course, this always meant that there was a line a mile long outside of Snake’s tent, which is how he earned the nickname, as the line often snaked its way through the entire camp.  Still, the Field Marshall was a young man of boundless energy and he commanded the respect of the entire army.  And so when he appeared, the men all grew silent and listened.  “Well boys,” he said “I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to leave one of our own behind those walls.  Let’s say we go and give Lord Suh a helping hand.”  And with that, the men all roared and charged en masse.

The fighting was indeed fierce that day.  At first the effects of the men’s hangover was a problem, as Baltimore sent a wave of crackheads at them, each one buzzing like a disease ridden mosquito, offering to suck the dick of any Lion who would give them a thin silver piece.  And a few of the men, still drunk on sex, succumbed.  Private Logan, a little man, had his penis bitten right off by such a fiendish Baltimore crackhead, and the site of him screaming as blood poured from his groin was enough to make the men buckle down.  The fields ran red with the blood of Baltimore crackheads that day, and as punishment for such a vile offensive, Field Marshall Snake Stafford called upon his friend, a demigod from another realm simply known as St. Calvin to ride down from the heavens aboard a sixteen foot tall horse, and assail the city walls with him.  The two of them, along with their young apprentice, Private Titus, singlehandedly breached the Baltimore defenses and opened the way for the rest of the army to sack the city.  What followed was sheer mayhem.

The Baltimore General, Harbaugh, hid like a coward in the bowels of the city once he heard that General Schwartz was coming for him, and he sent wave after wave of his best men – degenerates and freaks all – to try to chop down General Schwartz and his army.  But one by one, the Baltimore defenders were mutilated.  Their own Field Marshall, an inept coward by the name of Flacco, pissed himself and tried to hide but was caught  and beheaded by Private Fairley, who in his frenzy of bloodlust, stripped himself of all clothing and then stole a police horse and rode through the city, naked, howling and butchering every man, woman and child he saw.  A toddler tried to run from him but its stubby legs couldn’t move fast enough and Private Fairley speared the tyke and held him up like a rabbit on a spit, gibbering and frothing at the mouth about having found that night’s dinner.  The site terrified and unnerved the people of Baltimore, who immediately sued for peace. 

But the General knew that he had to send a message.  Sure, he didn’t enjoy destroying his own hometown, but he had a duty to perform and it was time to end this Harbaugh nonsense once and for all.  And so the General ordered his men to raze the city, and surrounded by a few of his most brutal and merciless troops, he entered the city.  A part of him wanted to weep, as the smell of burning flesh and the sound of terrified wailing met him when he passed the city gates, but he rejected that part of him as the soft bleating of a child.  He then hardened his heart and ordered his men to kill every last living thing that crossed their path.  And so they did.

And still the cowards of Baltimore wept and offered surrender.  The Lion army laughed and forced the cowards to do unspeakable things.  They made Lieutenant Lewis, a man of great notoriety who had once knifed a man in the streets of Miami just for looking at him, march through the streets naked with his penis tucked between his legs.  They then poured boiling water on him and placed him in a catapult.  They then flung him to the tower in which General Harbaugh was hiding and laughed as he made a sickening splat against the walls.  That was but one of the atrocities committed on that dreadful day, but what is a simple atrocity compared to the slight of a city’s pride?  Baltimore dared to bow up to mighty Detroit and now it suffered the consequences. 

As the city burned and its people wept and died, its cowardly General Harbaugh called for a full retreat, hoping to barricade himself and his best men behind impenetrable walls.  But General Schwartz had other ideas, and it was then that he called on his best man, his secret weapon, the legendary one himself, The Great Willie Young, who was currently splitting time between observing the battle and fighting The Battle of Lepanto in a different time and place (don’t question the ability of The Great Willie Young to exist simultaneously in more than one place and time.)  The Great Willie Young excused himself from The Battle of Lepanto for a moment and appeared like a bolt of lightning on the Baltimore horizon.  The people – or what was left of them anyway – dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves before his magnificence.  The only holdout was one lone stubborn old lady, who spat in the direction of the great one and vowed to never give into him.  It turned out that she was the great, great, great granddaughter of a man named Beauregard, who The Great Willie Young had once crushed during his time in the Louisiana Bayou.  The Great Willie Young recognized the scent of her foul blood immediately and charged the retreating Baltimore line.  He destroyed them effortlessly, disemboweling the weak-willed fools, and then strangled them each with their own intestines.  The old lady pissed herself but still she refused to bow to the great one.  She was 95 years old and her grandchildren were watching, but The Great Willie Young booted that old bitch in the stomach and then laughed as she fell to the ground, vomiting.  He then slapped the grandchildren around, caged them with a rabid gopher and then dropped the lot of them into the Baltimore Harbor.  This was no time and no place for mercy, for they carried an evil seed and above all, The Great Willie Young was a force of pure good.

And so the city of Baltimore fell.  The men later found Lord Suh ensconced in a whorehouse, covered in blood, being pleasured by no less than eight different ladies who he immediately made his wives, as was his right according to Leviticus.  He had thousands of wives across the country and he would never see these harlots again but they sucked a mean dick and that was enough for him to grant them his protection.  The men laughed when they found the Lord Suh and spent the rest of the night with him and his whores. 

But the General still was not satisfied.  He broke down the doors of Harbaugh’s stronghold and found the so-called man in there, whimpering, surrounded by a scaly advisor, a hunched man who spoke with a forked tongue which flicked back and forth, betraying his lizard man roots.  The General became furious for he knew right away who this inhuman monster was – it was none other than Sheriff Goodell’s hatchet man, that lizard son of a bitch known only as Pereira.  The Sheriff and Pereira had long had it out for General Schwartz and his men and so it came as no surprise that they would be behind this fiendish villainy.  After all, the Harbaugh men were too simple.  And so the General ordered the men he had with him to chase the Lizard Man Pereira down and bring him to justice but the fiend managed to wriggle free and it is said that a man – or a humanoid of some form – fitting his description could be seen slithering from the Baltimore sewers, accompanied by a sycophant named Brennaman, the Sheriff’s Minister of Propaganda.  These were ill-tidings to be sure, but they belong to another story which will be told in full at a later time.

But for now, the General stood alone before the quivering Harbaugh, who offered to suck the General’s dick but the General just slapped him senseless.  It was then that Private Fairley burst through the doors, naked, astride that terrible horse, a horse which, let me tell you, had seen some fuckin’ things in the short time since it had been abducted by Fairley.  A half-eaten child rested on the end of a spear and General Schwartz made a mental note to get the Private some help when they returned home.  But for now, the General was glad to have his most degenerate soldier with him.  He looked at Private Fairley, who just stared back with wild eyes and then he pointed at the quivering Harbaugh.  Private Fairley smiled a sick, fucked up smile and climbed from his horse.   He stood over Harbaugh and said, simply, “Now we gonna have us some fun.” 

The General nodded, satisfied, and turned away.  He didn’t need to witness this.  To know that it was done was enough.  After, he would return for Harbaugh’s head, which he would place in a burlap sack and mail to his brother, his mortal enemy, as a message that General Schwartz and his Lions weren’t fucking around and that soon, those San Francisco sodomites would get their reckoning.  But for now, Baltimore was conquered, and that was enough.  The General would give the men leave to pillage the city for another day or two and then they’d make the march back home.  He only hoped that when he arrived that Mayor Bing had found some new pants. 

“Wait . . .” the General said, before Fairley could get to it.  Private Fairley turned around with a grunt.  Harbaugh looked up, tears in his eyes and began thanking the General for his mercy, but General Schwartz just smiled.  He turned to Fairley and said, “Make sure you leave me his pants.  I know a man in need of a good pair of slacks.”  And with that, my fever dream and the Battle of Baltimore came to an end.  May God have mercy on all of our souls.