by M. C. Norris
While Cecile focused her mind on the man without a nose, the heap of red yarn churned and flowed with a serpentine sensuality. Slim perked up, eyes brightening, studying the movement all around him. He pounced on the trailing end of a red string, pinning it to the floor with his forepaws. He took it up between his teeth, cocked his head, and chewed contentedly on its frazzled tip.
“Let me introduce you to someone,” Nana finally replied, “who might help you find that personal object you’ll need to make a better connection. She’s right behind you now.”
Cecile turned around. She searched along the shelves and crannies for any sign of a lurking spirit. They could take any form, in the Land of Nod. Confident ghosts, like her Nana Hess, could adopt any form that pleased or suited them, but many ghosts lacked that confidence. Broken people, the lonely and tormented who may have taken questionable paths, or through no fault of their own, were born into terrible circumstances, the souls cheated and deprived of a fair chance at life, and were often manifested in Nod by a basic representation of their essence. There was certainly a presence in the room. Cecile could feel it, and it was not a pleasant one.
Cecile drifted along a wall of cowhide shields, past shelves peopled by the carved totems of lithe African women, inset amongst the ranks of books and candles. She could feel the glowering presence of the spirit getting stronger as she neared an ill-lit corner at the back of Nana’s abode. There, on the floor, spread a reeking pool of black liquid.
“Hello, Honey. My name’s Cecile. What’s yours?”
The puddle shimmered dully, but did not reply.
“I could feel this one lurking, the more you started focusing on that man. I believe this one knows him pretty good. In fact, I believe she your man’s own mama.”
Cecile floated down to the floor, and came to rest at the edge of the dark puddle. It glistened, but cast no reflections. The swirling images upon its surface were being generated from within. “You his mama?” Cecile asked, softly. “You want to talk about your son?”
Black and tenuous tendrils of steam rose from the pool as it began to churn, ripple and simmer. A montage of images shimmered over its surface. Strange and disturbing, this woman’s memories reflected the sort of abuse that Cecile might’ve suffered all her life, had she not fallen into the care of her Nana Hess. There was a school bus, overgrown with volunteer cedar trees, a ramshackle house, mostly hidden from view. She saw a fluttering clothesline, a battlefield of broken toys, beer bottles and aluminum cans. A mailbox on the shoulder of a dirt road. The school bus. Fields of wheat stubble racing to the horizon. The school bus kept reappearing with increasing regularity. The rusty mailbox bore the name “Cyrus” in plated letters, nailed vertically to its crooked post. A battered bicycle was propped against an elm tree. The school bus. A peering face, pacing behind the bus’s cracked and tinted windows. Handcuffs. Pliers and a bloody box-cutter. Handcuffs. Burning skin. Something’s not right with him, not right in the head. Handcuffs. A malformed boy, running naked down a moonlit road. Not right in the head. Idiot child. Mind is gone. Idiot child without a nose.
All at once, the show was over.
“I’m sorry, Honey,” Cecile whispered to the puddle, which had thickened into bubbling tar. “I’m so sorry for all you had to go through, you and your boy. You were cheated out of a good life with him. That wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t get away from that monster, could you? There wasn’t nowhere for you to run.”
The puddle had coagulated to a dry and cracked burn on Nana’s floor, where it continued to smolder. This one had said enough, all that it had the strength to say. It had burned itself out for a while.
“How’d she do, C.C.?”
Cecile rose from the colorless stain in the corner, and floated back over to the sentient pile of yarn. Through the sifting folds of crimson thread, she spotted something slithering, therein, something that wasn’t yarn. A mass of threads toppled, spilling over the coil of scaled hide, and it was gone. Cecile intuited that this was one of those sorts of Nana’s secrets that wasn’t going to be worth asking about.
“I think I got a last name,” Cecile replied, “and a pretty good feel for the place where he grew up, but I’m not sure where that place is. There were wheat fields, stubble, anyhow, and a broken-down school bus, parked behind a poor old house. It was pretty bad, what all she showed me. It was real bad.”
“Indeed it was, child.”
“You were watching, Nana?”
“I was watching you, and that was enough.”
“Did you see anything else in my mind’s eye? Anything I saw, but didn’t see?”
“There was some writing on the side of that school bus,” Nana replied.
“What did it say?”
“USD-269.”
Chapter Four
Malcom raised his vials up to the amber glow of the sodium light to check the color of the six cartridges of potassium permanganate. He gave each one a little shake, turning it between his fingertips. The first two were no longer bright red, but they hadn’t yet gone green. They were somewhere in the middle, brownish, around sixty-percent oxidized. The other four cartridges were still blood red. These, he snapped back into the compartments on either side of his mask. The two brownies would have to go.
He removed a flask from the hip of his web belt, and popped the stopper. Using his thumbnail, he unlocked the cap of each cartridge with a half-turn, and then dumped the contents into the galley sink. He turned on the faucet, rinsed out the gritty residue, shook the vials dry, and then filled each cartridge up to the white mark with an acidic solution from his flask. Setting the cartridges carefully to the side of the sink, he retrieved his canister of potassium permanganate from a weathered holster at the small of his back. He unscrewed the lid, and then removed the little, plastic spoon that was hiding inside. Tapping out the crust, he then dipped out a level scoop of the purplish-bronze needles, and tipped it into the first cartridge. As the KMno4 crystals settled, the solution inside the little glass cylinder flashed to a brilliant crimson. He capped the vial back off, locked it down with a turn of his thumbnail, shook it gently, and then snapped it back into the side of his mask. He repeated the same process with the remaining cartridge, and then snapped it into place. Once all six cartridges were reloaded, he snapped down the locking manifolds of plastic tubing.
Lately, he’d watched a lot of troops taking chances, letting all six of their cartridges burn down to ten percent before changing them out. That was stupid. The call for deployment could come at any time. There was no good reason to take unnecessary risks here in port, where KMnO4 was available in ample supply. Soon enough, there would be plenty of risk, and it wasn’t going to come with an option.
He sat down on the edge of his cot and stared at the mask in his hands. The mask stared back. This was a soulless countenance of rubber and plastic. It seemed to possess a sentience all its own, perhaps imbued with the terror of its enemies whose last sight was this stark face, as they stared into its soulless black eyes and pretended to know what thoughts haunted its mind. They couldn’t know the half of it.
As Malcolm held this headpiece to his exoskeleton layer, he was reminded of those pet hermit crabs that he’d kept as a child. Indomitable, in life, the little knots of chitin and claw marched fearlessly across their miniature battlefields, hefting that purple shield in the face of any perceived threat. What was most memorable about those creatures was that whenever the crabs sensed that they were dying, they always crawled out of their shells. Why did they always do that? Malcolm hated that. It was as though those little soldiers felt compelled, in their final moments, to admit the truth, to reveal that all along that they’d been nothing but a cowardly stinking worm hiding their whole lives inside a shell.
Malcolm was ready for the call. More than ready. Over the last few days, he’d found himself praying for it, rocking on the edge of his cot, pressing his face into his hands. Anything but this. He’d come to loathe the feel of his own grease on his fi
ngers, the whispering sound of his unmasked breathing, the smell of his own human musk. He was sickened by the sight of his thin, hairy forearms, the map of veins beneath his wan skin, the hollow eyes in the mirror that peered out of that worried visage tilled into his brow. He hated that face filled with weakness. He looked down at the mask in his hands, and he longed to be back inside of it.
A lot of people thought that the world out there was a lost cause, a living Hell, an enduring testament to humanity’s last and greatest failure. Maybe it was. Maybe it was our just punishment, our penance, but if that was Hell out there, then what exactly was this? Malcolm looked around the welded steel walls of the four-by-eight bunker, in which he’d paced for two weeks, feeling himself slowly dying under the sickly glow of a sodium light, just waiting for someone to give him permission to go out and do the things that the man in the mask was trained to do.
Malcolm rose from the cot and strode back over to his locker. He wanted to smash his knuckles into the metal and leave a dent behind, something for the next prisoner of this hole to ponder. More and more often, he found himself suppressing some senseless urge to lash out at an inanimate object. It was an urge that was becoming more insistent with every passing hour inside this bunker.
He sucked a deep breath through his nostrils, and exhaled through his teeth. He reopened his eyes, and instead of punching a senseless dent into the locker door, he gently opened it. Removing his satchel of vacuum tubes, he held each one up to the light, scrutinizing the state of their filaments. They were all good, of course. They were just as good as they’d been the last fifty times he’d checked them. He took down his cyanide poisoning antidote kit, and popped the plastic hasps. He checked for leaks in the bottles of sodium nitrite, sodium thiosulfate, and looked for any cracks in the glass ampules of amyl nitrite. Needles and hypodermics were all in place. His hand-crank ham radio mounted into his Kevlar helmet was at full charge, with a fresh vacuum tube snapped into place. The M-16 rifle was meticulously cleaned and oiled. The thirty-round magazines in his bandolier strap were all loaded. Five were black, containing standard antipersonnel rounds, and one was red, which contained incendiary rounds. His water filtration kit was readied. Emergency duffel was stocked with compressed cans of rations and water, first aid, and a couple packs of smokes. Most of the Americans chewed tobacco. Malcolm didn’t have the stomach for that. Wasn’t much of a smoker either, but in dire situations, tobacco was a good form of currency.
He pulled his mask up over his face. God, it felt so right. He closed his eyes and inhaled a big lungful of the sour, sulfuric air through the filter cartridges to perform a quick seal check. Maybe he just missed the taste of it. Holding the blade of his knife up to either side of his jaw like a thin mirror, he studied the flow of bubbles through the series of KMnO4 cartridges on either side of his black plastic snout. Beautiful.
Checking every piece of his gear was the first step of his morning routine. It wasn’t just an obsessive compulsion. That’s what he told himself, anyway. Things went missing. It was a world of thieves up there, where no one could be fully trusted. It was also paranoid world, and a shrinking one. Every day, human territory seemed to shrink a little smaller than the day before, while the range of the dragons kept expanding.
From the moon to the ocean depths, through the trenches of every war since time’s beginning, the cruelly adaptable human animal had always been ready to gear up for deployment. Every challenge we’d ever faced had presented unique constraints to test the endurance of the human body, the cunningness of the human mind. We’d passed every test. Malcolm stared into the blade, drawing long bubbling breaths through the permanganate filters, relishing the taste of chemicals in his mouth. The challenge up above was no different. Humanity would overcome it. We would kill our enemies. We’d clean up the giant mess and rebuild our world, just like always. Life would go on. Malcolm had to believe that. He had to believe in some promise for validation, some justification for all of the shit he’d done. If the day ever came when he’d have to put his mask away in a box, the world’s redemption would mean his own irrelevance. If and when that day arrived, he’d probably have to stick a gun in his mouth.
There came a sharp pounding on his bunker portal. Malcom sheathed his knife. He pulled his helmet over his head, and ascended the ladder. He slapped the latch aside, gave the airlock valve a few counter-clockwise spins, and yawned to pop his ears, as the chamber depressurized with a hiss of escaping air around the seal. Once the pressures had equalized, Malcolm rapped back against the portal three times. With a squeal of hinges, the steel cover was lifted from the outside, and thrown back against the deck of the barge with a massive thud. Masked faces peered down at him like a couple of weird bugs.
Malcolm scowled up at them. It was bright out there. So bright that it hurt. He raised his hand to wipe the sleep from his eyes, only to clonk his knuckles against the tinted visor of his mask, like this was his first day at Boot Camp. Churning bubbles in the soldiers’ K-cartridges indicated their amusement. Malcolm flipped them off. He dragged himself up through the portal, and stepped out onto the gently rocking deck. A friendly hand slapped the center of his back.
Malcolm stretched the kinks out of his spine, groaning with a mixture of pain and pleasure through his mask. He stood there, blinking in the morning sunlight that gleamed upon the steel bow of the St. Louis Arch until the sleep had roamed to the corners of his eyes. Not much had changed. On all sides, he was still greeted by the ruins of the same city from which the Corps of Discovery had departed, two centuries ago, under the command of Captain Lewis and William Clark. The Americans had once called this place “The Gateway to the West.”
“What’s the good news?” he asked.
“Today’s your big day, Sir.” The nearest soldier pointed westward. “You’re headed upriver with a rifle squad on the Tom Sawyer. Kansas City is going to bring power back up at 15:00-hours, put out some dragon bait.”
“With what?”
“Klystron generator.”
“Where the fuck did they get that?”
“Fort Leavenworth. Brought it down by rail.”
“They’ve got a train?”
“Yes, Sir. The only fully-restored steam locomotive in the whole goddamned state of Kansas, built back in 1919. Sat on display in a city park for over sixty years. Now, it’s going to be the dragons’ worst fucking nightmare!”
Malcolm gazed westward. Dragons didn’t have nightmares. They didn’t even sleep. They just stood motionless for hours like flies on a wall, but they were never offline. Always on, ready to launch. Humans liked to give animals emotions where emotions had no sane or reasonable place. Those things had none. They operated purely on instinct, compelled only by their most basic urges to feed, fuck, and fight. That was it. Their so-called attacks on human civilization were never personal. They were sexual. The drones were males, and they were sexually attracted to power supplies, which presumably mimicked the signatures of receptive females, kind of like lightning bugs.
Malcolm knew a lot about Dragons. Dragons were electrical creatures. They were gassy creatures. They were ridiculously long-lived, subterranean creatures that slowly diffused lifetime supplies of helium and nitrogen that they acquired by suckling pockets of natural gas over a larval period of about five-thousand years, but nothing about their attacks was ever personal. The clouds of hydrocyanic gas that they produced were nothing more than a digestive byproduct, expelled as they burned-off their reserves of cyanogenic glucoside. The protonating jettisons of plasma acid were natural byproducts as well. That was simply the waste when you electrified a reserve of liquid helium and phosphorus, their fuel for flight. They were just big gassy beetle-bugs. No emotions. Never a malicious intent. Even as they laid waste to our cities, defoliated our forests, reduced magnificent landscapes to rolling wastelands of ash, they were just behaving in the way that Mother Nature intended. In the end, it was all mathematical. Natural selection was a numbers game, and it was a game that they were c
learly winning, but they didn’t know that they were winning anything, or that humanity was losing everything. They didn’t despise us, and they certainly had no reason to fear us. They hardly even noticed human beings standing there weeping, as their orgies obliterated our world. All you could do was kill them.
“What’s my mission?”
The soldier shrugged. “It’s not militia, I’ll tell you that much. It’s a Coalition directive. We’ve got an agent here who’ll be briefing you within the hour. Hope you put on some clean underwear.” The soldier gave him a friendly nudge.
A Coalition directive. Anything coming down from the IDC promised to be unusual. As Malcom gazed westward, through the shimmering gulfs of electromagnetic haze, he could on some level relate to the anxieties and uncertainties that must have weighed on the minds of Lewis and Clark. What trials would he endure out there? What dangers awaited? What face would death wear, if and when it came to him? Would death be wearing a mask?
“I’ll escort you down to HQ, whenever you’re ready to rock and roll, Sir.”
“I’m ready.”
###
“Cecile, I’d like to introduce you to Captain Malcom Gann of the British Special Air Service,” the agent said. “He’s one of the lucky ones brought across the pond six months ago by steam liner to teach America a few things about pest control.”
Malcolm offered the woman a nod, but she did not return the gesture, or acknowledge him in any discernable way. He was pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful woman waiting in the underground bunker. That was unexpected. Women were a rare enough resource, let alone a good looking one, but the walls that she had up appeared to be thicker than those of the IDC bunker. Maybe it was his mask, making her feel a little uncomfortable. Malcolm unfastened the chin strap of his helmet, and he lifted the covering from his head and face. He glanced up, expecting a change in her countenance, but the woman was unaffected. Figured.