by Michael Shea
Almost there … Down the slopes came ATVs and three-wheelers. The locals were wise to Val, but not quite in time. He gave his screens an apologetic smile. Time to take the wraps off, and go big.
* * *
We kept angling our flash-beams this way and that on the rubble that choked the shaft mouth, but it didn’t change things. There were half a dozen little rat holes in the rubble, the biggest two inches across, but dust-free, and showing narrow, smooth tracks through the loose earth below them. How many APPs had been down there? How much gel had he brought up?
“East side of town,” said Smalls, his binocs scanning Sunrise below us. “There’s no one fighting there—everyone’s in the street fighting bugs.”
I said, “He’s going for our dead.”
I didn’t know my thought until I spoke it. It froze us all a moment, as we took it in. If the gel could incorporate our dead, it would grow gigantic. We fired up the three-wheelers, and went straight down the slopes, no time for the road’s lazy curves.
It was like riding a flung stone skipping out across incoming waves—we were in the air more than half the time, hanging on desperately, our teeth gritted to keep them from rattling loose.
Halfway down we could make out that the heap of our dead looked larger. Smalls had commed, and we could see fighters running out into the Industrial Zone. We came down the last slope, and now could see—down where our dead had been—a bulge of darkness rising. The moonlight showed its surface clear, a long field of arms and faces aimed at the sky. All of them thinning and shrinking and melting away into the moon-shine. That big dome’s mass half-filled the lot.
Then it englobed. The sight made the hair on my arms stand up. It was poised like a bubble now, the whole thing drenched in moonlight. And the moonlight showed its meal was not quite done. Within its mass were human fragments, limbs and heads almost transparent, faces thin as smoke.
Like a giant nullifier. What sick brain could think this up, let alone make it?
The huge sphere had some wobbliness to it—not the smooth tension we’d seen in small masses—but it tensed into a slightly tighter sphere, as if in some last effort of digestion … and then, it divided—thinned at the center forming two separate spheres, a shrinking bar joining them like a dumbbell, then tapering and parting.…
We roared onto the flats, gunning between and around the globes, each bigger than a three-story house—and gunned flat-out for the alleys that would bring us—and them—out into the street.
“Lemme off here!” I yelled when we reached it. I had to get Jool, get her out of the church. She couldn’t be trapped inside with this shit pouring in on her.
Everyone was shouting to everyone else but yet everyone hearing somehow. Our people crowded to the side of the street away from the eastern alley mouths where the gel would pour through. Meanwhile … something was happening to the mantids.
Those trying to kill people suddenly slowed down, moved more jerkily, while those not yet engaged paused and seemed vague in their movements.
And everywhere those on the walls were leaping down and moving slow and aimless among us.
“Cut ’em down quick!” someone blared from a megaphone and then I saw her. It was Ming—her face like a gorgon’s ever since Mazy’s death. She stood in a raft with a crumpled prow, hovering at rooftop level. Stood behind the raft’s sole surviving pilot, a guy with blood on his face and Ming’s shotgun snug to the back of his neck. He was keying his console frantically.
We closed in on the Mantids in a shit-storm of swords and twelves, lopped off not just their graspers, but their heads and their wings. Their lopped-off pieces were jouncing everywhere on the pavement and going to gel, and everywhere this gel was being gassed and torched, so that we fought like fire dancers high-stepping in flames as we hacked them in a fever of rage.
It was a festival under the Summer moon, the bugs like some strange crop that had grown from our pavements, and we the harvesters who reaped them with a vengeance.
I had to shake it off, this kill-fever, like a trance. Few bugs still stood and their gel was everywhere, and I remembered that a shitload more gel was coming through those alleys any moment. And as quick as we fired the gel around us, far more than half of it was escaping under buildings and snaking its way back to the giants in the Zone.
I had a thought, but saw Smalls was ahead of me—already had fire teams up on the rooftops flanking the alleys.
And then it dawned on me: a new danger threatened us all.
I needed a second pair of hands! I looked around, and saw Ricky Dawes.
“Hey Ricky! You gotta come help me! Quick!”
And as we ran past an alley mouth, there came a tsunami of gel, filling it like a piston.
We sprinted down Glacier. “They’ll think of the hydrants soon enough,” I shouted to Ricky as we ran, “but we’ll need more water than that.”
We hooked out of town at the south end and ran toward the water tower, veered just before it, and sprinted up into the City Yard. And all the way there I was thinking of Val Margolian and hating that crafty, cold-hearted son of a bitch with all my soul. The fucker was planning to make us help him burn Sunrise to the ground.
* * *
Val tested his giants on the defenders who rushed back into the Yard to meet them. He recoiled them from the gas-sprays, and in the next instant counter-surged toward them in thick tongues that seized half a dozen people waist high, and dragged them under.
But though quick in action his spheres were balky and wobbly. He should have caught a score of people on that rush—could now only pour his gel in pursuit just fast enough that their retreat marred their counter-fire. Both his globes caught some flame, which he swallowed up in their rolling flow.
There was another wobbly lurch and seizure of an extra who stumbled, but again the gel took new fire. This again he engulfed … yet saw now within the gel’s bulk a flash of angry orange cancer, the blaze encysted, and only half-smothered.
The last mantid … gone. No forces here left to him with which to distract the extras’ defense. He saw too the rooftop fire teams flanking the alleys he must enter, and knew he could not emerge from those gauntlets unscathed.
And saw then, all at once, that entirely new tactics were at his disposal here. This situation could be shaped to an unforgettable end, to the archetypic climax of combat: a bright apocalypse consuming everything.
They wanted to torch him, did they? No. He was the torch! He’d let them ignite him, and then he would take their whole damned town.
His last scene glowed full-blown before his mind’s eye. Stunning! The orange light of flames devouring the moonlight. A huge, flourishing garden of flame in the shape of a town! Steeples and cornices, porches and doorways and window frames blooming and blazing and bannering crimson and gold! All of us felt it, didn’t we? That surge of Bacchanal, of festival in a total firestorm.
What a lovely conspiracy he and Sunrise had going between them. They did not foresee the crimson canvas they were going to help him paint. They would kindle his palette, and he would paint the town with it.
So. Now to send his giants through the alleys. Not too fast, neither too slow …
He morphed the globes into a pair of obese worms, tapered slugs twenty-feet thick and seventy long. He poured them into the alleys, his fingers hyper-dexterous, incessantly correcting and overriding that quiveriness and that lurking sloth in his earth-wounded monsters.
Gas rained on them, and flares came hissing down after. Both giants sprouted a dorsal crest of flames. Faster now, faster! Both torches were lit, and their blaze must be shared, before they lost the mass and the strength to distribute it.
Now came truly transcendental keyboarding, a music he must not mar with thought or hesitation. His artistry at this juncture was trancelike. Or disjuncture rather, for he split both worms lengthwise as he brought them out into the street, and diverged their halves down the sidewalks. And he set these half-worms to smearing their mass along th
e building fronts, smearing great stripes of flaming gel across porches and walls and doorways.
The ignited gel clung to those surfaces, long scabs of fire that bit into its new fuel. Four whole blocks … now six blocks striped with fierce-biting fire.
Then he rolled the mega-worms—smoking, but their fire mostly shed—laterally out across the street to meet new gas-and-torch assaults from the troops ranked to front them.
Still his weapons had mass enough to bear the new blazes the extras crowned them with—to keep steamrolling forward, forcing the defenders to stream laterally down the sidewalks, pour round their ends, and to start spraying and flaming their street-ward flanks.
But from that deployment, the defenders were helpless to stop Val’s giants from painting the other side of those blocks with fire as well.
And—suddenly, it seemed—they were not such giants anymore. At last, their titan strength was broken. They had ceased answering his keystrokes. They tremored now, slumping away from the walls they’d torched, feebly twisted and thrashed, and lay inert, shriveling as the flames died down.
An odd sense of ceremony filled him. Val rested his hands on his lap. Satis est. His piece was played, its coda echoing. Long scars, swift-growing scars of fire lit the shadows of the moon-drenched street, snapping and snarling as they gnawed the night with their yellow fangs.
A gem. A faceted jewel of split-second improvisation. He was getting older, true enough, but had lost not a jot of his gift for riding the moment, for snatching inspiration from the heat of battle. See the blaze roar in its feasting!
* * *
I knew that Sunrise had a pair of small water trucks with two thousand-gallon tanks—for out-of-town homesteads with poor wells that stored the water in tanks of their own. Each truck carried forty feet of three-inch canvas hose for off-loading. The trucks had off-load pumps too in them, that could put out a powerful stream.
In the Yard we were just upslope enough to see, under the smoke pouring up, licks of flame rising up into sight here and there.
We filled the truck’s tank from a secondary tank in the yard fed by the water tower. It was agony, waiting to take on that load. At last I drove out with it, leaving Ricky to fill the second truck.
My vehicle was unwieldy, wallowing dreadfully on the downslope curves of the maintenance road.
Wrestling it down to the south end of town now, swinging onto Glacier …
Great, snarling stripes of fire, both sides of the street. Blocks of fire! Huge cinders of burnt gel littered the pavement.
“Help here!” I shouted. “Man my pump!”
The street had two hydrants. People were already clustered at both of them, and others were hurrying from the Majestic, carrying the hoses kept stored there. The gel had acted as an accelerant, was all but shriveled already, but had gotten the wood fiercely started.
I took up the hose, climbed on top of the tank, and got one guy to drive me up onto the sidewalk and close to the nearest wall. Then got another to start up the pump. We drove the truck down along the sidewalk, drenching flames and sending black smoke and white geysering up at the moon.
There was Ricky now, pulling up into the street’s far end. The squads got their hoses hooked up, and water was snarling and hissing as it bit into fire. Everywhere people formed relays for buckets of water from the houses. Steam and smoke were everywhere, our shouts drowning out the roar of flames.
Until at last came the moment when we saw that all along the street the fire was lessening. Saw it raged only here and there, its smoke climbing in thicker and thicker columns.
And then we knew. We had won. That hissing noise of drenched flames sounded like a sigh, a huge sigh of relief that the whole town was breathing. The assault on Sunrise had been repelled. Sunrise had survived.
It struck me then—and not me alone—that all of our dead friends and loved ones had fought with us and helped us to the very end. They had all entered the monster’s flesh and weakened it. They had turned it to fuel for our flames. All our dear dead had risen again to fight at our sides.
We had conquered at great cost. Some building-fronts’ siding had been half-consumed, the charred, naked studs showing through. Shingle roofs had been more than half consumed, their charred joists like the bones of carnage. But Sunrise was still standing.
I went up to one of the big gel cinders and stood looking at it. I wasn’t the only one doing this, dreamlike, standing in the steamy, puddled street, thinking of all the lost friends entombed in there. Glittery-wet with our firefighting streams, they were studded and spiked with the shapes they’d contained, or engulfed. Half-melted heads with charred eye-globes joined to human skulls, shrunken arms and legs protruding, a foot, sole skyward as if the rest of its owner had dived into oblivion. One profiled face, its eye a moon-aimed onyx, cupped water like its dying tears.
We looked at one another. Down the whole length of Glacier, people stood talking in pairs and trios, or just stood holding each other, the taller heads tenderly laid on the lower—not as if after a battle, but with the air of drowsy lovers ready for rest, sharing quiet thoughts. Our words rose in a murmur, as if the silence of all our dead had muted us as well.
Then heads began turning toward the boulevard’s midpoint. A faint disk of light had appeared on the pavement, a light more golden than the moon’s, and growing stronger. A shaft of this light was beaming down from above.
A raft up there was beaming it. The street went mute. From the raft a bulky shadow sank toward us on a cable that, released in the spotlight, proved to be a bale of something in shiny shrink-wrap.
The cable was retracted as the raft slid to the west side of the street and tilted its bow slightly downward to show us Val Margolian, seated behind his console. He smiled. One side of his head was bandaged. His voice came at a mellow amplification that reached the whole street.
“Your payout is three hundred million, three hundred thousand, three hundred dollars. We’ve rounded it up a bit, just for the symmetry of the number.
“We now most sincerely salute you all for the heroic defense you’ve waged. We are pleased to tell you that Panoply has brokered your full pardon from the State, though the ratio of capital punishments you’ve actually suffered tallies far below the mandate of your sentence.”
I only realized how amazing it was when it had continued for several heartbeats: our perfect universal silence, every one of us standing there mute, looking up at him.
This silence seemed to tell him something that he had not expected, something that made his pleasant expression become a shade more thoughtful.
“It’s with the deepest respect that I tell you you’ve been the most courageous opponents we have ever faced. Opponents, we were of cruel necessity. We could not change the fate that had befallen you, but together, you and Panoply have fashioned something from that fate that will never be forgotten.
“Not one of your deaths will end the life it took. All those lives’ endings will be woven into a tapestry that will be studied, that will be relived by whole generations to come.”
Margolian had begun this statement gravely, earnestly, but the unbroken silence below him, all our eyes coldly studying him, changed his tone as he spoke till it grew almost strident by the time he finished.
Sheriff Smalls and some helpers had approached the bale and razored off its wrappings, and—still in silence—stood counting packets of bills for some moments. Margolian sat up there watching us all, as if we were a vid that was turning out stranger than he had expected.
At length, Smalls straightened up, and spoke the only answer Sunrise had for him that night:
“The amount seems in order. We’ll make use of this.”
XXVIII
FORTRESS HOLLYWOOD
Later that year, just after our second snowstorm, I was watching Jool nursing Lyla. This was delightful to me—I couldn’t stop grinning—to watch our avid little pap-sucker, her tiny brow knitted with concentration as she worked on Jool’s breast. But
Jool and I were also having a bit of an argument.
“Hey,” I said, “you’ll be nursing her at least another year! You can’t be part of it! You have to sit this one out.”
“Forget that. I’m her model, Curtis. I’m her mother figure! And she’s gonna know that her momma fought back.”
“You’ve already fought through two shoots! She’ll know you fought back. She’ll see it on-screen whenever she wants.”
“I don’t want her seeing either one of those fucking vids!”
“Well, which is it? You want her to know you fought back or not?”
“I want her to know I paid those fuckers back for what they did to us. I don’t want her seeing any Live Action, and anyway there won’t be any vid of what we do to those fuckers, but I want her to know I helped do it to ’em.”
I pretended to chew on that for a while because I wasn’t going to budge her now anyway, and I had till next spring to convince her. But I couldn’t help answering. “What are you saying? There won’t be any vid of what we do to them? They won’t shoot it? We won’t? Kate Harlow’s working on it as we speak.”
“Just because I let you get me pregnant doesn’t mean you can keep me out of the fight.”
“We got you pregnant, hon, come on! I just think—”
“Just go away, Curtis. Leave us alone. You’re disturbing her lunchtime!”
“I’m not disturbing her! Look how she’s scarfing away!”
But seeing Jool’s glower, I grabbed my coat and got scarce.
I gave a whistle and Chance—we hadn’t changed his name—came wagging along.
I stood out there thinking I might take our little snowcat down into town—all the rolling slopes white, the dark trees in fur coats of powder.… Then thought I was being a wuss, and decided to hike down. Crunch and slog through the drifts—be one with the planet.