by M. C. Norris
“Space bugs.”
Malcolm swiveled on his rump to face her. “Just imagine, a pregnant female dragon leaves a ruined planet behind, travels through space, and lands on another suitable planet to lay her eggs. This planet is Earth. She’s discovered by humans. They worship her as a star god, and her eggs are distributed all around the world by her little helpers. Eventually, she dies. Maybe the humans killed her. Maybe she crash-landed, or caught some earthly disease, but at any rate, her eggs survive. They’re buried all around the world, right in the hearts of ancient civilizations. Pyramids are built on top of them. Images are carved and painted all over the goddamned things depicting a winged scarab beetle. At least, that’s what we always thought. Now, it’s pretty obvious that those images represent the original dragon, their god from the stars. The eggs hatch underground, and the larvae burrow down into the earth, sucking up all the natural gas and minerals that they’ll one day convert into energy for flight. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and these larvae have grown enormous. They’re ready to emerge. They’ve stockpiled enough underground resources to survive what will be mass migration away from this world, which will become too dangerous, and on to the next.”
“You’ve put some thought into this, haven’t you?”
“This lifecycle isn’t unique to dragons. It’s all around us, on a smaller scale. Just look at the insects on earth. Mayflies, cicadas, stoneflies, scarab beetles …” Malcolm counted off on his fingers. “We see this same basic lifecycle, again and again, beginning with a prolonged underground feeding stage, a metamorphosis from larva to adult, a mass emergence followed by a giant orgy, and lastly, a mass migration by the pregnant females. The only missing bit of this equation is the female dragons. Where are they? We haven’t seen any. Every dragon we’ve ever killed has been a male, a drone.”
“You think there’s a queen somewhere?”
“Yes, I do.” Malcolm nodded. “There has to be. Otherwise, what would be the point? It’s possible that the females stay underground longer than the males, or maybe they keep hidden somewhere else. I don’t know.”
“If you believe that when all their mating is done, the dragons are all just going to fly off and leave, then why even risk your life fighting them? Why not just hunker down somewhere, wait it out until it’s all over?”
“Because, what if I’m wrong?” Malcolm turned his masked face in her direction. “What if they’re all here to stay? What I’ve told you isn’t what I believe, per se. It’s what I hope.” Malcolm bumped his fist against his chest. “I have to hope, because I couldn’t go on in a world like this if I didn’t have hope that one day, we’ll watch them all fly off into the stars. Until that day comes we have to keep on fighting.”
“If that day ever comes, and they all fly away, then what do you think will happen to the Hunters?”
“I guess that if the dragons are like a colony of ants, then the Hunters would be their aphids. They depend on one another. If the ant colony abandons the aphids, then the aphids would die.” Malcolm gazed at the floor for a while, before reaching into a pouch on his hip, and withdrawing a folded square of papers. He flowered the packet open on the plywood floor, and flattened the creases out of the maps of western Kansas with grimy strokes of his hands. “We should probably talk about the mission,” he said. “Is there anything more you can tell me about the man whose photograph is stuffed down the front of your pants?”
“You know as much as I do. They call him the Green Man.”
“Why do they call him that? He didn’t look green to me.”
“Well, he ain’t grass green, but he’s a little off-colored, kind of sickly.”
“Why is he such a critical target?”
“The IDC thinks he’s at the center of it all, communicating with all the Hunters, controlling their movements.”
Malcolm shook his head. “I don’t get it. I’ve never seen or even heard of a Hunter carrying around a radio. Not once. The military band is the only existing communication system, and there’s no evidence to suggest that they’re on it.”
“I don’t know.”
Malcolm stared at Cecile. “Do they think he’s some sort of a telepath? Is that why they brought you into the fold, to try to fight fire with fire?”
“I’m not a telepath. I don’t read minds. I speak with the dead.”
The string of LED lights flickered, and then waned into blackness. Cecile just sat quietly, her torso rocking to the chugging motion of the train over the rails. After a moment, the lights bloomed back to life. Malcolm was standing, working the generator crank.
“But the man in the photograph, he’s alive, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then how are you supposed to be able to—”
“Exactly.”
Malcolm’s shoulders slumped. “The place where we’re going, you do realize, is dangerous as hell. We’re risking our lives to get you to Zurich, but if you don’t think that you’re going to be able to—”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to be able to do anything. This is just different from anything I’ve ever done before.”
“Well, if you’re hoping that a ghost is going to come floating over and tell you where to find this guy, then I hope it happens between here and Hays.”
Cecile shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. I’ll have to find him. It’s complicated. The spirits of the dead are over there on the other side, not here. They have no connection to this world. They can’t see us. Their connection is to me, and they can only show me things that they remember.”
Malcolm stood over her, wavering on unsteady legs to the motion of the train. “You said that he was standing right beside you.”
“Who?”
“Jacob. My son. You said that he was standing right beside you, back on the boat.”
“In a sense. Yes, he’s always beside me, but he’s beside me over in Nod. Not here.”
“What’s Nod?”
“That’s what my grandmother always called the other side. It’s a biblical reference. In the Book of Genesis, the Land of Nod was a place for the lost ones, the wandering spirits.”
“So, he’s not with us, right now.”
Cecile shook her head. “Not the way you think, no.”
Malcolm’s chin fell. He stared at his feet. “What’s it like over there, in Nod?”
“Different. Very different from this world. If you imagine all the moments in your life as grains of sand, all lined up in a long row, from your beginning to your end, then Nod is like the spaces between those moments. Over there, we still got our moments, our memories, but they ain’t lined up in a neat row anymore. It’s like, all those moments are in a big bucket of water, all stirred up with a stick. There’s no linearity, no passage of time. It’s a fluid place, where things appear as they want to appear, or how you perceive them. Almost like a dream, really. I always wondered if Nod wasn’t just some place inside of the mind of God, who dreamt us all into existence.”
“Is it a nice place?”
“I guess you could say it’s nice, but it ain’t like they teach you in church. It ain’t a land of milk and honey, and it ain’t a mansion with a million rooms. I mean, there’s rooms, kind of. More like places. Everyone has their own special place, but, it ain’t the eternal bliss like they’d have you believe. Same as anywhere else, there’s good and there’s bad, there’s beauty and there’s danger. You still got to watch out for yourself. Got to be aware of your surroundings, because Nod has its moods.” Cecile looked up at Malcolm. “I suppose that might sound strange, but some places have moods, and sometimes, those moods can run afoul.”
“You’re not making me feel much better, Cecile.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to make you feel any which way, Honey. Just telling you the way it is. You ever been to the seaside? The seaside may be the most beautiful place on earth, until a hurricane comes whooping up, or until a shark comes up and grabs you. Then, it takes on a different mood. You see what
I’m saying? Nod is a beautiful place, but no matter where you are in all of creation, some things just never change.”
“Is Jacob—happy?”
“He’s safe.”
“But not happy.” Malcolm lowered himself to his seat, and leaned back against the concave wall of their rolling prison cell. He picked at the side of his boot. “Next time you see him, will you tell him something from me?”
“Of course I will. What’d you like me to tell for you, Honey?”
“That I’m sorry,” Malcolm said, clearing his throat. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could have a second chance to do it all over again. If I could go back, I’d be there. I’d never have left. I missed out on his childhood. I missed everything. I didn’t even call him on his birthday. I screwed up. I screwed up so fucking bad, and I can’t ever take that back. Tell him I’m so sorry. Tell him I loved his picture, and the gum. I never sent him anything. I’m so sorry, Jacob. I was a horrible dad, and you never gave up on me. You never quit trying to reach out to me, trying to be my friend, and I was such a fucking ass. I want so bad to be your friend now and I can’t. It’s too late, and I can’t ever go back. I fucked up. I fucked up so bad.”
Cecile put her arm around his back, as he dumped forward into his arms with his head between his knees. There was nothing worse in this world than regret. Nothing even came close. “You want to know how Jacob sees you? He sees you as a superhero, fighting all them bad guys.”
Malcolm shook his head slowly back and forth. “I’m no fucking hero. I don’t want to be that anymore. I just want to be over there, with him. That’s where I’m supposed to be.”
“Where you’re supposed to be is right where you are, Honey. Don’t you know that? This world is all out of balance. That’s why you’re here, in this dark time and place, to be an instrument of change to restore some balance to this world. You’re here to protect me. I need you, Honey. You got to keep being that superhero for a just little while longer until I can find the Green Man, and when I do, you got to kill that motherfucker. Then, we can go. Then, we can go.”
##
Cecile awoke to utter blackness. The howl of a steam whistle jolted her from a deeply troubled sleep, where faceless heads were being hammered into heaps of red yarn. For a few terrifying seconds, she had no idea where she was. She felt the warmth of Malcolm’s body, still curled on the plywood beside her, and it all came back to her in a rush. The recollection of her whereabouts didn’t bring her much comfort. In fact, it only made her feel worse, balling a great squirming wad of anxiety in her gut that went roiling up through her chest, igniting strobes of fear behind her eyes. This was a suicidal mission, and if the Hunters captured them, terrible deaths awaited them.
No survivor of Z-Day could ever forget the first hour of the attacks, when the lights all went out, when traffic rolled to a stop and airliners came pinwheeling down from the sky. The living world seemed to allow for a moment of silence that was observed by and for that doomed menagerie of creatures unlucky enough to have shared the planet with humankind. All things stopped. All eyes that could see looked to the skies. The end came with every roaring decibel, with every blinding flash of unearthly energy, as fiery jettisons spewed from swollen thunderheads, when dark broods of destroyers descended through the clouds. Their stench was a new one to the fallen masters of the earth, who fell choking and writhing in their filth. Humankind burned alive in searing fumes as they circled, like a great cauldron of buzzards, tipping their wings in a dark promenade as they soaked New Orleans in torrents of biocide.
Cecile cowered beneath a mountain of wreckage, spared by some trick of swirling winds that had protected her Nana’s house from the deadly fumes until they’d dissipated. Still, those strange winds blew, as walls of fire swept through the Ninth Ward, reducing all but the home of Nana Hess to ash. She’d heard the thunder of the destroyers, the screams of the dying, and the dull roar of the inferno. However, not until three days had passed was Cecile able to push her way through the jungle of debris, and at last look upon the new normal.
It was enough destruction, or so she’d thought. Enough of a penance for mankind’s collective sins. His buildings were reduced to rubble, his birthright stripped from him, as some misused toy is snatched from the hands of a naughty toddler. All was lost. All built lay in ruin. Copulating monsters defiled his technological wonders, crumbling his superstructures as the drones clashed and tumbled in epic battles that shook mankind’s world to its foundation. It was more than enough, or so she’d thought, to teach mankind a harsh lesson in humility, but the harshest lessons were still to come.
Cries for help brought her caravan of refugees to a halt. It was their waving arms, their apparent desperation over the form of a fallen child that lured the best and bravest amongst their rabble off the road, and down into the canal. Here was the first of the many traps, where dozens emerged to fall upon the confused with their terrible instruments, both found and fashioned. They dealt the first, with his outstretched hand, a blow so vicious that he fell to the riprap nearly halved, yet cruelly aware of the blood spurting from his yawning core. With a cupped hand, he tried to scoop his fluids back to him, until they brained the half-man against the rocks with a rusted sledge.
And they ran, women clutching their squalling infants, dropping duffels and suitcases to the pavement. They ran from that place of slaughter, each breath drawn sharper and colder than the last, as the screams of the least of them resounded through the awful twilight, slashed down and hacked into silence. Cecile was amongst the fastest. She tore barefoot across the wasteland, toward no place better than any other was. For six months, she ran, ducking through a nightmare world where flags of human skin wimpled in the deadly breeze, where artful vivisections came to decorate crossroads where the Hunters left clear messages that they were the new masters in the monster’s shadow.
Cecile sat up in the blackness. There was a terrible taste in her mouth, and there was no escape from her masked breath. The only small pleasure that her situation could afford her was a drink of compressed water, and she wanted one. She crawled past Malcolm, sweeping the plywood with her hands, until she’d made her way to the back end of the cylinder, where she felt the square solidity of the ration crate. The lid squealed on its hinges as she lifted it. She turned, to see if she’d disturbed her sleeping cellmate, and she was surprised to find that she could see him. Dim light flickered through the portholes, on either side of the rumbling train. It took her a moment to realize the peculiarity of the fact that the lights were not flashing by, suggested that the light sources, whatever they were, were keeping pace with the train.
She used the crate to push herself up to her feet, jouncing over every railroad tie on her unsteady legs. The crank generator was dangling somewhere nearby, but she didn’t care to flail around in the darkness trying to locate it. She edged toward the nearest porthole. As she approached, she became aware of a noise outside the railcar. It halted her in her tracks. She could hear a wavering drone, moderately high in pitch, not unlike a bunch of revving chainsaws, coming from either side of the train. It was the sound of engines.
Her eyes widened inside her mask. How many there were, she couldn’t discern, but they were all around them. Only one caste of people in the world still held the power of electricity.
“Malcolm!” she shrieked, grabbing the overhead string of lights for support.
Cecile staggered to the north porthole, and peered out through the bleary panel of Plexiglas. A stone’s throw beyond the rail, spumes of dust billowed from the spinning tires of a dirt bike, speeding over the darkened wasteland parallel to the locomotive. Its rider was blackened to a silhouette behind the glowing headlamp, but by the bulb’s sallow glow, she could see a wild crown of blowing hair, and a glimmering grin that flashed like polished metal over the headlight. The lithe figure swiveled his head to glare at her as he reached down to his hip, and from some unseen sheath, he slowly withdrew a gleaming blade that was longer than his forearm. This, he ra
ised beneath his chin. Slowly, deliberately, he pantomimed a slicing gesture across his throat, and then he pointed the tip of the curved blade at her face.
A line of glowing bullet holes ripped crazily across the south side of the railcar, deafening her with the metallic staccato of flying lead. She screamed, toppling to the plywood, as dark riders unleashed a maelstrom into both sides of the rolling cylinder. Malcolm rolled atop her, while ricochets whizzed around the car’s interior, flitting sparks at every point of redirection. All around them in the night, dirt bike motors howled and gibbered like a pack of wolves hysterical with a lust for blood. They alone rode the lightning, and they were the owners of the night.
The lone bike to the north swept in so near the train that it sounded as though he were inside the car with them. The engine roared, as the terrible squeal of a metal blade scraped the length of the railcar, back to front. The machete clanged twice against the steel hull, before the sound of his bike peeled suddenly off and away to the north.
Above, the roar of the machine gun nest was succeeded by the tinny music of spent brass. One bike slammed into the railcar, and something was dragged beneath the wheels. Cecile covered the sides of her helmet as the railcar bucked over a mass that twisted, popped and slapped wetly against the undercarriage. Their gunners thundered away, until the drone of the bike engines fell back and disappeared into the night. After a moment, the relative quiet of the steam engine’s chugging cadence was the only sound to be heard, other than the wind whistling through new patterns of holes that riddled the railcar’s hull.
“Are you alright?” Malcolm shouted, grabbing her by the sides of her mask, pulling their foreheads together. Through their visors, she could just catch the shine of the humanity in his eyes. “I said, are you alright? Are you hit anywhere?”