REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA: ET IN ARCÆDIA EGO

Chapter II:  "Ecce Arcædia"

Written by Abri Isgrig and Diane N. Tran


Necropolis.

City of the Dead.

Never has there been a place so aptly named.

There was an idea of the City once — a glittering, beautiful, shining thing with hopes and dreams — but it was not meant to be.  The Wars had changed that and left its imprint everywhere:  The Plague devoured half the population.  The oceans rose and swallowed much of the world.  Land became a precious commodity.  It was a City of Nightmares, of glass and steel that blossomed towards the perpetual darkness aloft and the noxious pollution abound from the Dead, rotting and festering inches below the earth.  It was a City of Disease — a virulent, spreading infection, a wasteland of sickness, that squatted upon its putrid foundations, twisting its tentacles into the hearts of all those whom survived it.  Corpses were a common sight.  Death and Decay were crammed in and out of every imaginable corner of Life:  Corpses poisoned the air with its moldering stench, littering in the streets and alleyways only to be vagrantly stepped over.  Corpses contaminated the soil, sprouting out from the earth, like crags, and leaving nothing else to grow in its stead.  Corpses polluted the water, scuttling across the undulating tides and bobbing amass across the seas far beyond the murky haze of the horizon.  Corpses were stockpiled the graveyards inside, like landfills; and when they were over capacity, as they often were, Corpses were heaped into decrepit buildings towards reaches of the ceilings and stacked atop one another to create bridges.  Corpses filled even the sewer-ways known as the Catacombs.  No one went down into the Catacombs because that was where the Repo Men reigned.

Twisted and hidden under the City built on top of the Dead was an endless labyrinth of tunnels and crawlways where skulls and bones, the first wave of the population to die, were tucked elaborately between the bricks.  The Repo Men could use the Catacombs any way they chose.  They could suddenly enter the streets, like phantoms, fade in and out of sight, hide betwixt shadows, and then exit the same way with their prize.  They sprawled underneath the capital like a circulatory system and, at its centre, was GeneCo, spearheaded by the world's foremost authority on bio-surgical technology:

Rottissimo Largo.

The King of the Necropolis.

The Saviour of Humanity.

Never has there been a man so aptly named.

This self-made man from a troubled peasantry village escaped abject poverty and tyrannical oppression of his fatherland through sheer will and hard work to become one of the most affluent plastic surgeons, fashion trend-setters, and sought-after bachelors of his generation.  This bleeding heart of a gentleman philanthropist chose to leave his fame and luxury to humbly serve the Free Nations, with international media close at his heels, as a decorated veteran and combat casualty surgeon along the frontlines.  When the New World global administration formed out of the physical and political devastation caused by the Wars, he was rewarded for his selfless efforts to be the first legislative head of the Department of Health and Human Services.

This "miracle company" by the name of GeneCo, this beacon of renewed hope scrawled out in neon lights, endorsed under the flag of the New World Order that bellowed against the sunless skies, was the heartbeat of the City itself — a false heart, like everything else — but pulsing with blood.  Blood, rich and intoxicating and, above all, corrupt:  It was blood all the same.  It was, indeed, fortuitous, perhaps immaterial, that the ascension of this mega-corporation should arise out of the epidemic tragedy when it did.  GeneCo, with its blithe generosity and untapped compassion towards humanity, offered their "premium" stockyard of custom-made, designer-quality synthetic organs of those whom could afford it first:  And those whom could not met with the Repo Men.

The arrival of the Repo Men into the public consciousness was, indeed, just as coincidental, with the sudden legislative approval of Prop 32-14 that authorized legal organ repossession for GeneCo worldwide; and, just as insignificant, that a number of disagreeable politicians and inquisitive media-mongers slipped under the cracks of the first wave of the Dead prior to its approval:  Corpses were a common sight, incidentally.

And whilst there were a handful of Repo Men under contract of GeneCo, there were four in particular whom were the most feared, the most formidable, the most legendary, of them all.  They were the harbingers of Judgment:

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

But on the Night of Judgment, on the Night of the Genetic Opera fell, on the Night the King of Necropolis, the Saviour of Humanity, fell, on the Night the Voice of GeneCo, the Songtress of a Generation, fell, was the Night that one of the Four fell:

Nathan Wallace.

The Third Horseman.

The Rider of the Black Horse.

Famine Personified.

The Night Surgeon.

And within that emptiness, that open wound left to ooze and pus upon the Night of Judgment, another Corpse fell upon the City of the Dead, louder than the three before her, and chose to waste away, fade out, and evaporate into the shadows, for the True Heir of GeneCo, the Poster Child of Progress, had refused everything that was offered to her:

The Saddle of the Black Horse.

The Throne of Necropolis.

The Crown of GeneCo.

The Order of the New World.

All were left unclaimed.

And in the wake of its chaos, another War, unimaginatively crueller and bloodier, sprang from the Corpses whom were left fallen that Night.  The three remaining members of the Largo family — Luigi, Paviche, and Carmela (better known as Amber Sweet) — transformed their sibling rivalry into a mad struggle for absolute power that corrupts absolutely between a Queen and two Bishops.  But another did lie in wait upon the chessboard under the guise of a Knight:

A pair of heavy boots trampled through the mire and muck of one of the underground channels of the Catacombs, as he pulled the wide brim of his hat down to prevent the dripping water to fall on his pointed, predacious mask, allowing the blue glow of his eyepieces to penetrate through the black.  The dilapidated walls of brick and bone echoed with the wheezing sound of his gas mask and the pitter-patter of the storm above, but even the rains could not clean the corruption and sin of the City of the Dead:

He was John Harrison then.

He is Juan Guerrero now.

Behold the First Horseman.

The Rider of the White Horse.

Pestilence Personified.

The Plague Doctor.

Never has there been a Repo Man so aptly named.

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