Rick stared at the golden weathervane atop their headquarters. “I guess you’re right,” he admitted.
“I am. If you’re bored you should read up on this building. You know, the Boston Massacre happened right over there.” George pointed to a circle of cobblestones beneath the eastern side of the building.
“Yeah, I know. Pretty amazing,” Rick said impassively; he was staring down Washington Street at a figure limping toward them.
George heard the metallic clink of machine guns ready to fire from nests and pillboxes all around.
“Stop it! Stop it! Stand down!” Rick flailed his hands, hurdled the sandbags, and ran toward the figure.
George shouldered his rifle, spied through the scope, and grinned. Then, he leaned his weapon against the sandbags, crawled over them, and walked toward the two men.
“My asylum buddy made it back!” yelled Rick, smiling broadly, as he helped Laurence toward the headquarters.
“I’ll . . . I’ll take credit for knocking out City Taker,” panted the attorney. “God, man, I’ve been through hell and back. Holy shit. The grays were chasing me so I led them to City Taker and they got caught up in its gears. I managed to duck into a manhole and hide for a while. Two of them ended up down there with me in the sewers and it was a real struggle finishing them off. Not as bad as Sanity One . . . but man, I thought I was dead so many times. Somehow, I managed to survive. You see, it all started when I ended up in this grocery store . . .” Then, in a sharp declension, Laurence’s eyes were wet, and his jaw set hard. “Why me? Why’d my wife and son have to die, man? Why?” Now his mouth was open, and he was crying openly. “I don’t even want to live without them. Why do things have to be so fucking twisted in this world, huh? Why, Rick?” He shoved his friend away. “What, does God get his kicks from killing off Trisha and Kevin and making me survive all kinds of shit that should have killed me? Huh?” The attorney’s head was woozy, his vision doubling and tripling from exhaustion.
“Calm down, Laurence,” Rick coaxed, hands raised and open. “Things are gonna be okay. Let’s just get back to the base and you can relax and have a good meal and get cleaned up.”
“Just what the fuck will that do?” he demanded, stepping away defiantly, a pistol in his hands. “Will that bring back my son? Will it bring back my wife? When are you going to realize that this world’s unfit to live in, man? I’m fucking serious. My grievance is with the rule book of life—of all existence. Even down to the bacterial level, man, it’s the law of ‘kill to live.’ Sometimes we humans can limit it to killing the poor fucking animals we live off of, but so often we can’t. Where’s the equity in that? Why did God have to make a world where you have to kill to survive? Why does nature have to be so destructive and adversarial? This world is hell, Rick, and I’m beginning to believe, more and more each fucking day, that God is some sadistic, cruel psychopath who gets his jollies from our misfortunes.” He shook his gun wildly as he spoke. “Your FCP organization is so concerned about the laws banning white procreation. But even before those laws your people didn’t want to have kids anymore, you know? Ever wonder if it’s because your people decided on some subconscious level they didn’t want to bring anymore life into this hell world? Huh? You know what I think? I think God made this world just tolerable enough to prevent mass suicide, because if we all mutinied and killed ourselves then His fucking fun would be over. Well, I’m not gonna take His shit anymore!”
“Put the gun down, Laurence,” George ordered. “Things will be all right, just put the gun down.”
For a moment it looked as if he would comply, but then his face grimaced in tears and he looked directly at Rick. “Without my family, life isn’t worth living.” His eye lids shut, and his lips trembled. As Rick stepped in to snatch the gun, Laurence screamed, “Fuck life . . . fuck my life!” He positioned the barrel over his heart and pulled the trigger with his thumb.
The bullet screamed off his body armor, and he looked dejectedly at his chest. As he moved the barrel toward his naked temple, Rick wrenched the pistol from his hands. The attorney groaned, and passed out amid the rubble.
When Laurence awoke it was dark. Through an old window he could see the gleaming edge of a crescent moon against black night. Slowly, he regained enough feeling to note the agitation of an intravenous in his arm. He was at Sanity One. Bellowing, he tore out the needle and scrambled to get out of bed. Where was his straight jacket? He must work efficiently before they applied it. He’d strangle them all with his bare hands—let them come. He seized the first man on the scene. Even in the dim light, Laurence could see the stethoscope around his neck and his bio-measurement devices protruding from pockets. Surely it was one of Mangallah’s assistants.
There were men yelling all around as he felt his fingers pried away from the doctor’s throat. Then he was hurled onto the bed, and his arms restrained. More lights flicked on, and he could see the doctor moving closer, a squirting syringe in his hand. His skin was tan, his features Levantine, and the attorney’s nightmare spiraled deeper—the grays and Muslims must have confederated.
“Get away from me, you fucking Islamic bastard!” he screamed, writhing like a man twice his strength.
“Laurence, it’s me, Rick. It’s Rick!”
Suddenly, his old friend was staring into his face overhead. How old a friend was he? He had known him since September, the real genesis of this hell. But it seemed like they had known each other for years.
“Rick, free yourself, man! Run while you can and get the word out that the grays have allied with the Muslims. Tell everyone! Run!” He winced and growled as the needle dispensed a sedative into his bloodstream. “You think you’ve won by killing me with that poison.” He eyed the doctor standing by Rick maniacally. “But all you’ve done is buy me a ticket out of this hell world. You and your Muslim kin can have this existence—it’s all yours. Good fucking luck with it.” His face calmed, but wrenched again when he saw Rick still in the room. “I thought I told you to run, man. Run while they’re focused on me. They want me for what I did to Mangallah.”
“Laurence, you’re not at Sanity One,” the doctor said. “You’re here in Boston with us at HQ. You’re a hero—you single-handedly brought down City Taker. Don’t worry, you’re with friends, remember?”
The attorney glared skeptically at the doctor.
Rick stepped forward and put his hand on the physician’s shoulder. “Don’t worry; he’s a good guy. Laurence, this is doctor David Saada—he’s a U.S. Army doc.”
“And if you must know, I’m Lebanese Christian.” David smiled.
The militancy in Laurence’s eyes eroded, and his breathing normalized.
“Why’d you stop me, Rick? Why’d you stop me from killing myself? I want to die, man. Just let me fuckin’ die . . . I miss them so much.”
Rick sat on the edge of the bed and gripped the attorney’s hand. “Laurence, you’re going to see Trisha and Kevin someday in the afterlife—and you’ll be together again for eternity. But until then I know they’d want you to live out the rest of your life to its fullest—which you’re clearly doing now. You’re helping your fellow Americans, man. You’re a revolutionary patriot. This is our chance to make history. I’m sure Trisha and Kevin are looking down from heaven at you with so much pride.”
Laurence nodded in a rush of understanding, and stared at Rick and David through watery eyes. By the time the first tear had reached his jaw, he was asleep again.
At three AM, the Old State House was silent. Rick had drifted asleep just an hour before, after receiving news that Uktar’s forces had been vanquished between the Aztec and U.S. armies. U.S. soldiers were now mopping up remaining pockets of enemy resistance; all portended to be settled by morning. Outside, from Water, to Court, to State, to Washington Street, the night was tranquil. Guards were awake and diligent, and the incoming reports seemed to impart only good news. But over all governed a crescent moon so sharp that its edges seemed poised to stab the night and disgorge s
ome astral life essence before relinquishing its fief to the sun.
Rick awoke for no particular reason. There was a cotton dryness in his mouth, his throat was tight, and his hands were knotted into fists. He had been dreaming of fighting a hardened throng of enemies, and was still in that liminal state between consciousness and nightmare. He could still hear the cries of his friends dying in battle. He shook his head and blinked—George went flying by, strapping on his helmet and roaring: “Wake up! Wake up—they’re here! The Muslims—they’re here!” He stood atop the central staircase, shouting over the hack of his gunfire.
“What? How?” Rick muttered as he stumbled out of bed. The chandeliers were aglow, now, as he seized his gun and scrambled for the staircase. George and about ten other men, including the generals, were firing into the central stairwell. Rick walked forward, peered over the handrail, and felt a comet of plasma burn his hair. Then he was rolling for the corner, and out of his foes’ line of sight.
“How’d they get in here?” screamed Rick over the clamor.
“Through the subway tunnel,” some soldier shouted back.
A paroxysm of anger shook through Rick’s body. They had been such fools! Just yesterday, he and George had inspected the tunnels beneath the building. They had read the history about how the Old State House’s underground used to be used as a wine cellar before being incorporated into the Boston subway system as a station. It was deserted and cold down there, but it hadn’t occurred to them that the enemy might use it as an insidious passage to their nerve center.
A group of Janissaries pushed up the steps in a desperate rush, and were gunned down immediately. Some of the bodies still gripped the slug-splintered banister, and became the fleshy steps for more reinforcements. Suddenly, a silver ellipses arced up from below and spun on the floorboards. Before anyone could seize it and pitch it out a window it detonated, creating a large hole in the floor and maiming several men. Two more grenades followed, and Rick and George retreated into the historical Council Chamber they used as a sick bay. Just as Laurence was struggling out of bed the two grenades went off, and the entire building shook.
“How many are there?” asked Rick between kicks of a plasma rifle from where he crouched at the lip of the door frame.
“Don’t know,” snapped George, his right eye squinting down the length of his gun as he tried to line up a target.
Laurence rolled out of bed and ran to the window. Guardsmen were headed their way from the fortifications, and heavy fire could already be heard downstairs. “I don’t know how many there are,” the attorney yelled. “But our guys are hitting them hard on the first floor it looks like.”
Just then General Sanchez stumbled into the room, an obtuse hunk of shrapnel wedged in his throat. Both hands tried to stem the flow of blood, and his voice was a wheezing gurgle. Before he could advance farther a scimitar clove his back, and he fell face first into the Council Chamber. Rick and George opened fire, while Laurence searched frantically for a weapon.
A half-score of janissaries shoved through the door, lips parted in snarls. They were tall, burly men with green or blue eyes. Were it a millennium earlier, they would have made fine Viking reavers. But their ruddy cheeks and pastel eyes told nothing of their allegiance. Among them, urging them onward, was an ursine, brute of a man with a personalized scimitar of black steel. Even in the shaved second that Rick and George saw his face, they knew it to be the storied man of the Irish genocide—Alp Uktar was finally upon them.
Skirting the yawning holes in the floor left by the grenades, General Rutherford, General Curtis, and a handful of men opened fire at close range on the janissaries from behind as they forced into the Council Chamber. The room was a splattered mess of anachronism, technology, decay, youth, barbarism, and grandeur. Each of the curio cases was smashed, and the ancient relics within had either been knocked to the floor or cloaked in shards on their velvet cushions. A towering janissary buffeted the chandelier with his spiked helm as a bullet rent his spine, and light played wildly along the walls. In this Georgian time-capsule fastidiously preserved by conservationists, scimitars arced and plasma hissed, bullets spun out of rifled barrels, and curses drooled from red lips in Turkish, Arabic, and English.
When the gunfire stopped, only one of the invaders still lived. He looked around himself, eyes wide, but found that all his soldiers were floored. Alone stood Uktar, preserved in a battle suit that had been awarded to him by the Sultan himself. The war armor was black, but had a multicolored sheen to it like opal. The Turk stood ready, eyes narrowed, the silver crescent moon embossed on his breastplate refracting the swaying chandelier light like a midnight sun.
“It’s over,” said George to his adversary, posture bent, hand cupping a fissure in his side from which guts probed. “This was the final agon. I hope you go to hell for all you’ve done—all the innocents you’ve killed.” The Athenian raised a pistol to the exposed forehead.
“Agon?” asked Uktar, a wry grin on his face. “What do we have here, an Aegean slave? Yes, I can tell by your look—you were spawned in some stinking polis. We should have just exterminated you all after the conquest. Better yet, we should have exterminated your ancestors in 1821 after their first revolt.”
Were there a barometer for its measurement, the hate issuing from the eyes of each man would have cranked a pin into a dangerous red zone.
“After we kick your ass out of this country it’s on to Europe,” George vowed, face primal. “We’re going to free our people. We’re going to take everything back that you took from us—everything, beginning with Ireland! The houses, the stores, the churches, the cities, the land—the people. We’re going to shut down all but a token few of your madrassas and mosques—they’re the badges of conquest and subjugation. Let them exist in your land, on your side of the Bosporus.”
Uktar chuckled, and looked to the other foes around him. “The Hellene simpleton is in need of a geography lesson. Istanbul is on the west side of the Bosporus. So, you see, both sides are our ‘side’ of that sea.”
“What part of ‘we’re taking it all back’ didn’t you understand? I myself am going to lead a Christian army to reclaim our birth continent—and I’m not stopping until what you call Istanbul, and what I call Constantinople, is in European Christian hands like it started out being.”
The silence was palpable, as Uktar’s face turned furnace-hot.
“That’s right, you bastard,” exulted George, “I’m going to bulldoze those fucking minarets you have around Hagia Sophia. I’m . . .”
“Greek, may Allah pox your flesh!” roared Uktar, bulling forward and colliding with George. The Athenian dropped his pistol and was lifted off the ground by the bigger man. He tried to sink his arm around the thick neck and beneath the chin in a guillotine choke, but was thwarted by the Turk’s helmet. Bullets and plasma washed off Uktar’s back as he and George smashed through glass and wood, clopped onto the balcony, and splintered through a whitewashed railing overlooking the street below.
Rick rushed forward, pistol drawn, and peered over the shattered east balcony. About twenty feet down, George lay on his back. His helmet had protected his head, but several of his bones felt broken; he couldn’t move his legs.
Atop him, Uktar was coming to. The Athenian had largely broken his fall. Blinking, Uktar rolled his head as if to prepare for a morning jog, then casually drew a long knife from the plate guarding his forearm. A bullet whined off the back of his helmet, then another, as Rick squinted down overhead, pistol smoking.
George tried to elevate his hips and buck off his enemy, but couldn’t move them. Another bullet reflected off Uktar’s helmet, snapping his head down with the impact.
“Why . . . why did you have to kill all those people . . . those women and children across Europe?” asked George, the exertion of speech calling up pain from every corner of his body.
“Fear. Those who fear succumb easier,” the Turk said, as if imparting some empirical truth to a child.
> “Your atrocities only make cowards flee or surrender,” corrected George. “But in brave men, it creates a desire to stop you . . . at all costs. I’ve shown my people how to be brave again. Your tyranny will be short lived.”
“Maybe you have,” conceded Uktar. “But it will bring you nothing. There are not enough of you left to make a difference. You—your people—your spineless religion—are in twilight. Now die, damn you!”
He swept the stiletto toward George’s throat. The Athenian caught the blade in his hands and felt it sink to his finger bones. With a grunt, Uktar wrenched it away then plunged it down toward his victim’s chest. Again George forestalled his death, this time by catching the armored wrists. Uktar bared his teeth and leaned forward, head down, to apply leverage. Blood from George’s torn side leached into the circle of cobblestones—the most that had touched them since 1770.
As Uktar curled forward with all his strength, and the tip of his blade pierced George’s chest, Rick saw a patch of skin high on the nape of the Turk’s neck. Just beneath the base of the skull was a senescent rectangle of exposure due to the helmet’s extreme angle.
“Execution style . . .” Rick whispered, squinted, and fired. The bullet punched through the occipital bone of Uktar’s skull and swam all the way to the frontal lobe of his brain. His eyes glazed, and he slumped forward. George pushed off the body then ripped out the knife from his chest and tossed it aside on the cobblestones.
Rick sprinted down the stairs, over bodies, then out the front door and around to the east side of the building.
“George! Are you okay, man?” Rick shouted as he neared. “Can you move?”
“My legs are broken from the fall—so are my pelvis and hips, probably. God damn you have good aim—holy shit I thought I was dead.” His eyes rolled up in his head and he exhaled dramatically.
The Gods of Color Page 53