by M. C. Norris
“Only one way to solve that mystery.” Wesley nudged Malcolm in the ribs with his elbow. “Go talk to her, you big pussy.”
“Ah, Christ.” Malcolm sighed, wishing he could rub his face in his hands. After hanging his head in thought for a few moments, he glanced back up at the figure on the upper deck. “If I’m not back in ten minutes …”
“Yeah-yeah, I’ll send up an extraction team.”
Malcolm gave a thumbs-up, and then sauntered across the stern deck toward a ladder that seemed to stretch all the way to the sky. She stood in the clouds, glaring down at him like some dark angel. Everyone had angels, these days. He guessed that she was the sort of angel that he deserved.
So many angels. So many billions snuffed out, all at once. The air sometimes seemed thick with the traffic of passing ghosts. After a year of mourning, they all had that in common, the survivors, or at least they could all bond under that common presumption, anyway. The ubiquitous atmosphere of mourning helped dull the edge of individual grief. For better or for worse, they were all in it together, having witnessed Death’s boney hand reaching down to swipe ninety-five percent of the human players right off life’s game board.
Malcolm’s deepest secret was that he didn’t grieve. Not really. Not the way all the others seemed to grieve. He didn’t feel as though he had a right to it. Grieving was a luxury only affordable to those who’d invested in loving relationships, and Malcolm had never risked that investment. The truth was that he’d lost Brenda and Jacob without really knowing them, a couple of years apart. Brenda, he’d lost first through divorce, and Jacob the other way. The failed relationships were his fault. He owned that. He’d worked fucking hard to lose their love and their respect, all by way of his nasty temperament and willful disconnection. Why willful? He didn’t know. Well, yeah, he did, because it was fucking easier.
Surviving Z-Day was both his reward as well as his penance for being such a mean son-of-a-bitch, for being allowed to survive all of those engagements in Afghanistan, where so many of his SAS brothers had not. This extra time had been allotted by the cosmos to a damned fool who was evidently unentitled to pass through the pearly gates until he was able to admit just how badly he’d fucked up. The other survivors all seemed to have the spirits of their loved ones swirling all around them, protecting them, encouraging them onward through the ruin of their lives toward some hope for an eventual reunion. Not him. No one was waiting for him on the other side. All that awaited him was judgment. Malcolm looked up into the masked face of his asset. All that he had to live for was her.
Malcolm hesitated at the base of the ladder. Beneath his hazmat fatigues, he felt a peculiar sensation creeping over the flesh of his arms. Was it her again, playing some more of that voodoo on him? The tingling swept over his appendages, and prickled his spine to the base of his neck. Beneath his helmet, he felt his hair trying to stand on end. Malcolm rubbed his forearms, eyes widening behind the tinted visor. It wasn’t her. It was something else. Something far worse. He turned toward the port rail, reaching for the ham radio on his helmet. Fumbling the little toggle, he switched over to a ghost frequency of pure static. He searched the skies, the rolling dunes of limestone and ash, as he adjusted his radio volume until static was hissing in his ear.
“See something, Boss?”
He ignored Wesley’s voice. He closed his eyes, listening. The white noise was not constant. There was a discernible pulse. It was rapid in frequency, like the beating heart of some small and terrified animal cowering in its den. Malcolm’s heart began to drum against the walls of his chest.
“What’s the matter?”
It was an animal, alright, but Malcolm knew that this creature wasn’t frightened, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be small. He backed three steps from the rail, before spinning on a boot heel and making a run for the ladder.
“Battle stations!” he screamed at Wesley, slapping his radio back over to the common frequency, winding the crank of the static generator until he could see the glow of the vacuum tube in the corner of his eye. He seized the bottom rung of the ladder as he keyed up his radio for emergency dispatch. “Battle stations! All hands to battle stations! Sound the alarm! Sound the fucking alarm!”
Malcolm ascended the ladder, hand over hand, as Wesley swiveled the .50 caliber forty-five degrees to port side. Atop the double-decker cabin, he could hear the boots of soldiers scrambling into defensive positions behind the GAU-17/A miniguns, the MK-19 grenade launchers. The Sawyer’s steam-powered whistles emitted a long and piercing howl that reverberated for miles into the wastelands.
He reached the roof of the double-deck where he met with the racket of bolts being jacked back against their springs. A second blast from the wailing whistle produced a white geyser of steam that gyrated in the air. Soldiers craned their necks over readied weapons, searching the ruined world around them for the dark forms that could drop through the clouds like a squadron of otherworldly attack ships, or erupt from the ground in great shrouds of falling soil. With all weapons locked and loaded, a pervading stillness emanated from the endless escarpments of dust that rolled beneath the curtains of electromagnetic haze. The only sound was the sluice of the paddlewheel, the chug and hiss of steam pistons.
“What do you think, Sir?” a soldier at a minigun asked. “False alarm?”
“No,” Malcolm replied.
“Six o’clock! Six o’clock!” A thunderous cacophony of belt-fed .50 caliber rounds, a shower of dancing brass upon the decking succeeded Wesley’s shouts. Astern, the river swelled. Heaving sheets of brown water folded over what appeared to be a mountain range rising up from the depths. Waves surged at the foot of the each hillock as serrated crags breeched the surface with eruptions of pillared foam. Pink jags of lightning arced between the peaks, bonding the emerging forms in something like a harness of energy.
The hammering .50 caliber chopped the water into foam. White spumes danced all around the pod of dragons as they plowed upriver through a hail of bullets. The six barrels of the first minigun began to spin, spraying hundreds of rounds per second with the scream of a chainsaw. Every weapon on the ship directed its fury onto their forms, but there was no slowing them down. The dragons were upon them.
Malcolm wrenched his head around, searching for the asset. Unable to spot her, he raced shouting across the open deck. Eventually, he found her, crouched miserably behind a sheet of steel plating, clasping the sides of her helmet as if she were trying to cover her ears.
“Come on,” Malcom growled, grabbing her by the upper arm and hauling her to her feet. Despite the threat of imminent death, he stole a quick moment of satisfaction over her display of vulnerability. It was vindicating to see the witch at a major disadvantage, frightened, outside her realm of control. This was Malcolm’s world, and in his world, she seemed far less imposing. “We need to get you down to the main deck.”
The pod of monsters split down the middle as they bore down on the paddleboat. On either side of the vessel, cavorting mountains thundered past, wetting the decks and the soldiers in their spray. Every gun on both decks unleashed violence against the scabrous walls. Day waned to dusk. In the sudden swath of shadow, the eerie song of bullet ricochets whistled and keened through the chaos.
Without armor-piercing incendiary rounds, the weapons aboard the Sawyer were all but useless. Although they were occasionally piercing the dragons’ carapaces, the dissections that Malcolm had attended in Germany revealed a dense layer of blubber just beneath those armored segments that was nearly a meter thick. Encased in protective layers of chitin and fat, gas-filled bladders permitted bullets to pass through harmlessly, as the blubber filled the holes just as quickly as the bullets could punch them, not unlike that pressurized goo that could save a punctured tire. Still deeper, nestled within those gaseous compartments, was an armored bunker within a bunker, where the vital organs and fluid reserves were stored.
Cyanogenic glucosides, sulfuric and phosphoric helium isotopes, they were all neatl
y compartmentalized around a massive bioelectric generator at the dragon’s core. They were like a cross between an electric eel and a meth lab, loaded with stores of inert chemicals that were instantaneously weaponized as they were purged through an electrolysis arc. The more these creatures were studied, the more they seemed to be the perfect answer to the human threat. Their design was unsettling, as though they’d been bioengineered especially to destroy us, dark gifts from the laboratory of some galactic lord of entropy, privy to our every weakness and technological limitation. Crackling with their strange energy, they inadvertently shorted our circuits, confusing organized flows of electrons with massive bursts of chaos particles that glommed to ions, fried capacitors, and stalled every circuit that wasn’t protected within a vacuum tube, forcing technology back to ham radio, steam power, and the vacuumed circuits of the Industrial Age.
Powerless, humanity could only watch as they spewed their filth over our reality, burning our greatest cities, ruining our waters, defoliating our vegetation, and laying wanton waste to every goddamned living thing on which a human being could be sustained. The dragons required none of it. As adults, they didn’t even have mouthparts. Their feeding stage was already finished by the time they emerged from the ground. What humanity was witnessing was the final stage of an insect lifecycle. They didn’t eat. They didn’t drink. Their bodies required no need for rest. All that mattered to them was mating, and human civilization presented nothing more than a collection of annoying obstacles on the floor of their courtship dance.
Malcolm’s boots pounded down two flights of stairs. Dragging the asset behind him, he dove behind what appeared to have once been a bar, nucleating what was once a lavishly tacky ballroom. Gilded columns with plastic foliage rose from a carpet of paisley patterns. It was easy enough to imagine the twirling gaiety of joined partners, the laughter, clinking glassware, the calliope of an organ on the starlit eve of this ballroom’s last dance.
Beyond the reinforced windows, a black wall of chitin plates stretched and contracted, providing hellish glimpses into that boiler room burning deep within, unreachable, untouched by the torrent of flying lead. The carnage of prattling weapons was deafening, but the dragons surged past the ported windows, one shifting segment at a time. Wherever a bullet pierced the armor, an outgrowth of orange blubber flowered. A cavernous sound, like the grumbling of an upset god, shook the little steamboat to its ribbing.
“They’re about to take flight,” Malcolm said, as if his predictions were the least bit reassuring to the IDC’s quavering princess, at his feet. “When you hear that rumbling, see all those flashes of energy, means they’re powering up, creating an internal current to convert their stores of liquid helium into a gas.”
The basal thrumming grew in intensity, until the woman on the floor curled into a ball and screamed. Pinned between two inflating dragons, it was uncertain whether the steamboat would be shaken apart, or crushed like a balsawood toy between their stupendous mass. It hurt like hell, vibrating the eardrums, the guts, even the marrow of every bone. Malcolm fell to the floor beside the asset, incapacitated by the pounding sonic force. As they writhed together in shared agonies on the paisley carpet, he heard the roaring tonnage of falling water, the howl of expanding gas, as those titans raised, ballooning from the river, and lifting up into the sky. The deafening rumble of the bioelectric generators waned, but the danger had certainly not passed. Not yet. The worst was yet to come.
“Stay covered!” Malcolm shrieked, protecting the asset’s curled form with his own. “Make sure your mask is sealed! No skin exposed!”
Night yielded to day, and day to the raging inferno of a kiln, as blasts of bioelectric waste set the Missouri River afire. Gilded paint bubbled and sloughed off of sagging plastic columns; paisley patterns upon the carpet went black, as searing fumes of acid and hydrocyanic gas enveloped the paddleboat in an ineffable cloud of death. Dark shadows passed over, as the pod of dragons floated by, discharging their bowels of hazardous waste upon them, as if to state in no uncertain terms their low appraisal of human worth.
“Breathe shallow,” Malcolm said, rapping his knuckles against the side of her helmet. Her breathing was deep and erratic. He could feel her body trembling, against his. “What was your name again?”
“What?” she replied, looking crazily up at him, as if his inquiry was perhaps the most ludicrous question she’d ever been asked.
“Your name,” he repeated, “what is it?”
“Cecile.”
“Where are you from, Cecile?”
She looked around, frowning, as if somewhat disoriented. “New Orleans.”
“Good.” Malcolm rose to his feet, testing the seal of his mask in the dissipating fumes. “You know how to use a fire extinguisher?” The woman rolled onto her side, propping herself up with one arm. She cocked her head and stared, still breathing heavily. Every question that he asked of her seemed to be more confusing than the last. Malcolm could feel the first embers of his temperament begin to flare, smoldering in his chest, and behind his brow. There wasn’t time for a lengthy discourse. He bent at the waist, mask to mask with the asset. “Fire extinguisher. Pull the pin? Squeeze the handle? Point it at fucking fire?”
After a moment, she nodded.
“Good.” Malcolm grabbed the nearest red canister, and ripped it off the plastic column. He swung it in front of her and plunked it heavily on the floor. “Take it and follow me.” He headed for the staircase, leaving the woman on the floor, staring at the fire extinguisher. He snatched a second one off the wall from behind the bar, yanking it from its plastic housing. When he reached the bottom tread of the staircase, he turned to glare at the woman who’d still not risen from the floor. “Get on your feet, Cecile! People are dying up there!”
By the time he’d reached the roof of the upper deck, hot blood was drumming in his ears, chugging up the sides of his neck. This was a state of mind that demanded either action or violence. He stepped over the sizzling corpse of a crewman, whose arms were curled over his chest like the forelegs of a dead insect. His fingers were melted down his sleeves. Both of his legs were entirely protonized, slathered against the deck in bubbling stripes of reddish paste. Rubber combat boots lay haphazardly at the ends of those trails, unaffected by the toxins that had dissolved the feet within them. Malcolm snuffed each pool of fire with a blast of retardant. Paint bubbled and sizzled underfoot. The soles of Malcom’s boots were melting, sticking to the deck, leaving black tracks of dissolved material.
To the northwest, the pod of dragons tacked port around the bend in the river, propelled toward the setting sun by intermittent jettisons of abdominal gas. Their tattered wings glimmered in the sunlight, as they raised and lowered these gossamer membranes to steer them along their course, as a pilot might adjust the wing flaps of a banking aircraft. They weren’t the fastest fliers, but then, they didn’t have to be. There was almost nothing on this planet that threatened them. They were headed for Kansas City. No doubt about that. The dragon bait was working. The klystron generator testing was obviously underway, already attracting the attention of scads of horny drones that could detect an electric signature in the atmosphere just as keenly as sharks could find a drop of blood in the ocean. He hoped that Kansas City was ready.
Malcolm noticed Cecile out of the corner of his eye. Fire extinguisher dangling from the end of one arm, she stepped onto the upper deck with the same bewildered manner of trepidation. He pointed toward the bow, where the railings were fringed with flames. “Fires, goddamn it! Go put them out!” He waited, still pointing, until she began slogging in the direction of the flames. Dead bodies of soldiers were everywhere. What was left of them, anyway. Their protective gear could only withstand so much punishment. The upper deck had taken a direct hit from the most powerful oxidant on earth. Like all acids, the stuff spewed by dragons had preferences in the substances that it dissolved. Rubber, glass, synthetics, they all offered some protection, but the protection wasn’t complete. Organics w
ere most the vulnerable substances. The compound’s favorite food seemed to be flesh.
Malcolm checked the body of each militiaman. Where the bug juice was most liberally applied, boots and helmets had also been dissolved, melded into the liquefied corpses of the men he’d been entrusted to lead. Just like Afghanistan, he would be left to wonder for years to come why he alone had been allowed to walk away. Rage boiled behind his eyes. He’d fucking seen enough. It was a total loss. Up top, not a single life had been spared.
“Wesley?” Malcolm shouted, as he neared the back rail, hoping to God that at least his guide to western Kansas had survived. He gazed down upon the stern, where the lazy paddlewheel still slapped at the steaming water. Near the axle lay the crumpled form of the soldier named Wesley. He was unmasked, extruding his blackened tongue at the sky. Malcom turned from the sight of it, spitting curses through his teeth. He clenched his fists as he stormed back toward the bow. That was the last fucking time. The very last. No soldier on his watch would ever be allowed to delay swapping out K-cartridges. The fucking idiot. He deserved it. That never should have happened, but deep down, Malcolm knew that it was his fault. He was the man in charge. He’d failed to get right in Wesley’s face and order him to change them. He’d failed to evacuate these men from this death trap on the upper deck, instead ordering them to battle stations, when he knew their weapons were useless without incendiary rounds. It was all because of her. He’d ordered them to their battle stations to protect her. These good soldiers would all still be alive if he hadn’t been preoccupied with her safety, with dragging her useless carcass out of harm’s way. Whatever potential the IDC saw in this woman, it had damned well better be extraordinary.