“I wanna be with my family again,” huffed Laurence. “I miss them so much.”
“Den it’s time foe you to leave dis hell worl,” Cardinal explained as he reached the bottom. “It’s time foe us to leave dis hell worl. But when we leave it, les leave it like men. Okay?” His hand was on the door knob, and the sounds of war were loud on the other side.
“Yeah.” Laurence licked his dry lips and readied his gun.
As Cardinal pulled open the door a blast of sound poured into the stairwell, and three men staggered in and fell onto the bottom steps—two on top of the third. Laurence’s eyes narrowed as he saw the night-black bishts of two Muslims as they stumbled to their feet from a twitching American soldier. The hilt of a curved dagger projected from where his jaw met his throat, and blood was already guttering down the steps. Laurence and Cardinal opened up immediately, the Muslims’ aramid fiber undersuits only stopping a fraction of the high-caliber bullets at close range, their guns dropping from clutching fingers.
The next few moments proceeded with a dream’s rapidity. The black soldiers stepped over the bodies and into the expansive first floor. Where had been a bank, a security desk, and a mortgage company now were charred, indistinguishable walls and swirling papers as ice winds blew in from blown out windows. Amid the area, pockets of American soldiers were attempting to stave off a snarling proliferation of enemies. Broad-shouldered men in deceptively fortified ebon cloth continued to issue in from each of the three entrances. When the back ranks couldn’t muster a clean shot for fear of hitting their brethren they fired instead at the ceiling in adrenalized zealotry and pumped their whetted scimitars. As Laurence and Cardinal unleashed full automatic in spread foot stances they were dimly aware of a gyration in everything around them—City Taker was approaching.
Before long some of the invaders had noticed the two black men decimating their ranks, and trained their fire on them. Laurence plunged behind a bank counter, but Cardinal was slower to react. He seemed to be struggling with something in his eye, and hobbled toward his friend.
“Come on, man! Fiddle with your eye later!” screamed Laurence, before he saw the deep red stream gushing from a blasted cheek. More slugs impacted Cardinal as he fell down by Laurence’s side. Aside from the rounds that had penetrated his body armor, an unlucky bullet had entered his cheek and lodged deep in his jaw.
“Go . . . ah cover you.” He gurgled, struggling with something in his pocket. “Dis means lots to me . . . some early writings of Marcus Garvey. Take it.” He shoved an ancient pamphlet into Laurence’s hands. “Rememba our people . . . if you end up stayin in dis hell worl, remba ‘em,” he pleaded, rolled from behind the desk, targeted the enemy, and squeezed the trigger of his gun. At that moment, a handful of American soldiers who had been on the roof with Laurence emerged from the stairwell and into the chaos. The Islamic fire concentrated on the newcomers, and Laurence sprinted, head low, into the back areas of the mortgage company where he knew existed a back door.
Seconds later he emerged from a dead end alley onto the street. Gunfire bit the cement at his feet as he sprinted to the opposite sidewalk. A U.S. tank issued like a ghost-galleon from clouds of smoke and parked itself firmly in the intersection of the street chosen by City Taker. Laurence scurried backward but couldn’t take his eyes off the spectacle of the main gun elevating, gales of small arms fire raking its sides. In a blink the gun discharged its shell, and Laurence watched as the speeding blather of orange light disappeared into the siege mech’s midsection. But the two-hundred millimeter shell may as well have been a bee bee.
The sonic scream of jets was heard, and a wing of U.S. F-75’s flew low in a tandem bombing run. Just as the rolling fire bombs began to impact, Laurence wedged himself between the broken automatic doors of a grocery store and scrambled inside. The sounds of destruction were terrific—the bullets, the jet engines, the Hadean explosions—and still, still rolling—the ground-rattling treads of City Taker. Outside the grocery store glass, the street was a churning vat of smoke. Every so often the attorney spied a pumping scimitar or the hot flame of an automatic weapon. Laurence pulled himself to his feet by the bar of a shopping cart, and looked around. The store was dead.
That’s when he phased out. Slowly, he felt his fingers wrap around the bar to push the cart. It had been a long day at the office—the class action case from that toxic thermogenic aid was consuming all his time. So tonight, after work, he had stopped at Brady’s Market to pick up steaks to cook for his family. He had some other things to get, too, of course. Pomegranate juice for Trisha. Kevin’s favorite cereal. He pushed the cart lethargically past the empty cash registers and down the cereal aisle. Behind him, clutching hands finger-painted blood down the grocery store storefront, and another U.S. soldier slumped to cement. The electric scimitar driven through the soldier’s clavicle continued to make the body dance long after life had left it—while the killer watched. Had Laurence been in a perceptive state, he would have heard the front automatic doors grind open.
The attorney selected a box of cereal and placed it slowly in the cart.
“I’ll get the pom juice after I grab the steaks,” he mumbled to himself, a sedated grin on his face. He pushed the cart with a bit more speed, now; he wanted to finish preparing dinner in time for the three of them to watch their favorite TV show while eating. Ahead, he saw gray, lifeless neon spelling “Fresh Meat,” and navigated his cart in that direction. The push bar on the cart was now rattling so tangibly that Laurence frowned. Somewhere, deep in his mind, he was brooking this charade. More precisely, he was welcoming it—developing it—abetting it.
“I’m not crazy.” He smiled. “The world’s crazy. The world’s evil.” Then, he blinked. His nose elevated and quivered. “What’s that smell?” He covered his nose with his hands. “I’ve gotta tell Trisha not to come to this store anymore—it might be unhealthy to eat the food from here.” Laurence left his cart and advanced toward the meat section—he was almost out of the cereal aisle and into the back of the store.
No trick of make-believe could shield him from the horror that unfolded before him. The floor was strewn with bloody hunks of marbled beef, and the whole area was alive with sounds of smacking-lip mastications and guttural rumblings. Hundreds, no thousands of grays squatted in feuding dining parties bolting down shreds of rancid meat. The swinging double doors to the butcher station, circular windows smeared pink, had been propped open, and the meat lockers pillaged. The glass on the display cases had been shattered, and where once had been choice cuts of fish presented on ice were now pools of stagnant water floating a neglected fin or spine.
As Laurence turned to run, his foot slipped in a patch of sticky blood and he hit the ground. Almost simultaneously, the heavy stroke of a scimitar clove air where his neck had been. The stroke was delivered with such gusto that it threw its dealer off balance, and into a tangle of grays. In seconds, yellow finger nails clawed into the victim’s Islamic beard, gouging his eyes, and gnashing teeth excised hearty hunks from his arms, belly, and legs. They fed with piranha speed, and Laurence watched in paralyzed horror until the femur bones were exposed. Soon, it registered, there would be only a skeleton left. Prognathous jaws sunk into the attorney’s calf, and he instinctively kicked the face of an attacker. Then he was on his feet, pumping full cardio for the entrance. Before he darted through the front doors, he turned back to see if he were being followed. Deep in the unlit meat locker vaults, from the store rooms, to the separate lunch meat aisle, the hunger for fresh prey had spread. The whole, reeking lot of them were bearing down upon him—a herd of teeth and claws.
Ibrahim bin Selim had piloted City Taker for the past twenty years. He won the respected station when his predecessor, Ozan Kamer, had his throat slit at the instrument panel. A Serbian commando had managed to find an open hatch on the mechanized beast during the siege of Kosovo. The Serb had stolen in and killed seventeen men before the internal garrison overpowered him. That was the last, and only, tim
e the vaunted siege mech had been imperiled. Since then, City Taker had always been the first recipient of new technology in the sultan’s line of siege oddities, giant cannons, and nuclear weapons: nearly impregnable armor devised by a mercenary Austrian scientist, roving batteries of high caliber plasma cannons assembled in Baghdad, and targeting computers refined in the industrial centers of east Asia.
The pilot smiled at his monitor, and stroked his gray beard. There, in sharp clarity on the screen, a black resistance soldier was sprinting past the smoking chassis of the tank freshly popped by one of City Taker’s guns. At the soldier’s back shambled a wedge of ghouls. Ghouls. That’s what Sultan, Allah bless his soul, had called them—straight from Arab legend. Ibrahim squinted at the screen—there were more of them than he had ever seen so far. Far more. Far, far more. They were still racing from the grocery store, and a substantial number issued from alley ways and other buildings, apparently attracted by their ululating brethren.
The soldier altered his course and began running for City Taker. Ibrahim chortled a laugh and fixed his crosshairs on the perspiring black face. At the squeeze of a trigger, the soldier and his pursuers could be annihilated. But that wouldn’t be as much fun as hitting them head on and squishing them to pulp beneath colossal treads. The pilot grinned, depressed a foot pedal, and bumped up the mech’s velocity by two measures. He jostled in the seat at the sudden lurch in power, and his hands tightened on the controls.
Below, Laurence’s plan was inchoate. He operated on some vague impulse of efficiency—to eliminate both enemies by pitting them against each other. But by all means the contest was woefully imbalanced. Fang and claw were no match for treble bolstered steel. For a split moment, Laurence flashbacked to playing with his son, Kevin, and his toys. Kevin had a vast array of action figures, some of them robots, some of them monsters. He and Laurence would pit them against each other after work some nights. But those times were gone.
Only at close distance could Laurence fathom the size of City Taker. Its bulky, rectangular body was edificial in scope, and crowned with a glowering, robotic head. Its treads were bullet and fragmentation-proof, and each was wide as six car lanes. By now the Muslims walking alongside their goliath began to fire upon Laurence, but in seconds their focus had turned to the horde at his back. It was as if the whole gray Bostonian population were sprinting for his throat, and no direction offered safe passage. As if diving into home plate, the attorney slid, hands first, beneath the four foot clearance of City Taker’s undercarriage as bullets nicked his arm. Beneath, he tried to get to his feet and run hunch-backed, but kept hitting his head on pipes and protrusions. So he scrambled on all fours, keeping his eyes focused on the daylight visible far ahead from the mech’s hind. The sound of the treads and the roaring locomotion of the engine somewhere above his head were almost deafening.
Upon the collision of metal and gray flesh, the former was victorious. Ibrahim laughed as wave after eager wave of them were jellied beneath his treads. But the preponderance of the ghouls, he observed, were crawling in the clearance space beneath his vehicle on the trail of their quarry. So he threw the siege mech into the sharpest turn he could manage, and ploughed into an antique building with a French-style façade.
The pilot glanced at a levitating digital map and noted that he had just demolished Old City Hall. He hoped the abruptness of the turn had caught the vile creatures off guard and sucked them beneath his treads. But more were still coming—ever more. He ordered the mech into reverse, and waited for the familiar jerk of his head when the machine complied with an emphatic directive. Nothing.
He grabbed the directional stick, pulled it back, then drove his foot into the movement pedal. Nothing but the whimpering, far below, of gears. After three more attempts, all unavailing, the gears in his own mind began to whir. He couldn’t begin to count the number of people he had smeared beneath his mech over the years—usually a singular straggler with broken leg—but sometimes a special treat of a duo or trio. Last year, in St. Petersburg, he rolled over a score of children frozen with horror. But somehow, now, the flimsy constitution of bone and flesh and teeth had become adamantine in the incalculable aggregate of teeming thousands. Somewhere, along one or both of the treads, the sedimentation of organic matter had clogged the tread gears as effectively as a bone, width-wise, in a metallic throat. Ibrahim’s fist smashed the instrument panel.
Fifty soldiers and as many engineers stood facing each other within the nadir of City Taker’s belly. Before them, on the face of a thick hatch on the floor, was a palm recognition pad and an array of buttons. The head engineer stooped down and placed his hand on the pad while inputting a code with his left. Slowly, the hatch began to open like the lid of a beer stein. Its progress was agonizingly slow, as inch after reinforced inch of steel hatch lifted back. There were invocations to Allah and Muhammad aplenty—none of them wished to descend to a crawlspace teeming with demonic creatures of folklore. They’d rather wrestle a djinn. But Ibrahim’s order was insistent: clean the tread gears and dislodge whatever was thwarting movement. To oppose an order meant death. So, in alternating fashion of soldier, engineer, the hundred men jumped into the black whole one by one. As soon as the first soldier’s boots hit the dirt, his gun blazed.
Ibrahim reclined in his pilot’s chair and folded his hands behind his head. So far, his conquests had been splendid. If only the sultan were alive to receive his report. He wondered when the gears of sultanic succession would turn, and Murad, Mehmed III’s son, would officially be named Sultan. It had been nearly an hour since he had dispatched a quarter of his men to free City Taker from its gory moorings. No response. Not by radio, visual hand-held device, or in person. He scanned the video screens beamed from cameras positioned at regular intervals along the colossus’s armor. It was growing dark, and the snow fell heavily. Outside, he saw the ghouls shambling around the base of his vehicle. Many stared at City Taker’s belly, others at its chest. Others, still, had their vision raised high, and seemed to be staring at Ibrahim himself directly in the eye. He blinked, and averted his gaze from the screens.
As the seconds ticked by on his antique watch, he scrutinized a three-dimensional schematic of the city. Earlier that morning, it had been a pleasure destroying Trinity Church. Tomorrow, he’d raze St. Paul’s. It seemed that the siege mech’s treads had been everywhere in the city—even snapping the slate tombstones on Copp’s Hill like rotten teeth. But nothing yet in this campaign had rivaled the demolition of the Massachusetts State House. Its twenty-three karat gold dome had shattered into a million, precious keepsakes for the foot soldiers picking through the rubble. A hunk had been retrieved and brought to him. Upon returning to Istanbul, he’d break it into seven and give a piece to each of his children. He tried to focus on the gilded piece of dome in his hand, but his palms were sweaty, his fingers shaking. From a side angle, he could see a sheet of what appeared to be copper underlying the gold—he pretended to be interested. There was a dull thump at the cockpit door, and the souvenir fell from his hands. Another thump—like a fist impacting and dragging along the metal. His call through the door was answered by a chorus of moans and growls.
When they finally broke through he was at his console, erasing their brothers and sisters standing in the street with clapping shots of plasma. As he was pulled from his chair to the floor for unceremonious cannibalism, his hand reached out toward the floating map of Boston. His jeweled fingers passed through the glowing immateriality in an empty swipe. He craned his neck and stared at the streets and buildings, crafted in lines of blue light—inviolate—until his eyes—precious morsels—were shucked from their sockets.
Chapter 51
Rick slumped against waist-high sandbags facing Washington Street and let his arms hang over the side. The sun had already stolen behind the ridge of buildings around him, and the vague delineation of a creamy sickle moon already milked against the fading blue. The sounds of battle were so distant, now, it seemed. Guerrero had attacked that
morning, carving into the Islamic rear guard with a vengeance. Part of Rick felt deprived that he hadn’t been able to see action in what surely would become one of the greatest battles of American history. And part of him was relieved.
“I almost wish they had made it this far into the financial district. I feel like we missed it.” He pondered ruefully, and spat on the street.
“One less glimpse of hell you’ll see in this life.” The Athenian laughed. “That’s what war is, you know. Just be glad the Aztecs hit when they did, and that they’re meeting with such success. Uktar and his men are finished. And good fucking riddance.”
“Yeah, and good riddance to that big-ass siege mech. We’re so damn lucky it broke down when it did yesterday, and stirred up that hornet nest of grays that cleaned it out.”
“I know.” George nodded. “Our luck was amazing on that one.”
Both men turned around and stared at their barracks in the fading light. The Old State House, built in the early eighteenth century, was architecturally incongruous among the giant rectangular buildings of modernity. Rick had read the plaques posted within—it had been a market, a Masonic lodge—even Boston City Hall. Before the battle, it was a museum. Now, it was headquarters for the U.S. general staff.
“What do you say to you and me suiting up with some gear, legging it south, and helping our guys pincer the Muslims?”
“Tempting.” George smiled. “But I think we serve our forces better here. Besides, there are about thirty-thousand Caucasian nationalist troops serving alongside the regular army units. I think only a fraction of those guys would feel confident taking orders from any kind of centralized federal entity for the near future—including the army. But they trust me—and they trust you. They obey our orders. And for our orders to be well informed and complementary to those issued to the U.S. army, we need to stay here with the generals.”
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