God Of The Dead

by M. C. Norris

  For the first time since she’d watched Malcolm die in that massive inferno, her emotions liquefied, spilling freely from the corners of her eyes. A strangling sensation seized her throat with such intensity that her knees buckled, dropping her down into the mud. She grabbed at the front of her visor, dumping forward at the waist, and plunged into the mud. Squeezing the stuff through her fingers, she released a wail through her percolating cartridges that she thought might never end. This was how to cry inside of a mask.

  It wasn’t long before she heard the squelch of boots in the mud, and felt a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The soldier knelt beside her. Thankfully, without asking any further questions, he assisted her back onto her feet. The exhaustion she’d felt back on the riverbank, earlier in the day, had returned with a vengeance. Her leaden legs could barely move. She leaned against her assistant, clinging to him, while her boots could only drag through the mud.

  With a blast of steam, the train’s cogs began to turn. The arm of the massive crankshaft reached and pulled. The steel connections between every car gave successive clanks as the great machine surged forward, lurching against its own weight until the wheels found purchase on the slickened rails.

  “Engineer doesn’t want to stop too long here,” the soldier said.

  Cecile nodded.

  “I’ll show you to your car, and then I’ve got to get back up into the nest. You injured?”

  Cecile shook her head.

  “You sure? Your quarters are a fully stocked ambulance, down here at the caboose. Filtered air, first aid, rations and water. It’s got it all. You can take your mask off in there. Hell, you can even clean up if you want to. You’re riding in style.”

  Cecile nodded, weakly. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  The soldier walked her to the end of the rolling railcars, a line that terminated in a car with a big red cross painted on the side. Cecile could only stare in disbelief. Never had a symbol felt so meaningful, so loaded with a message of hope. She could imagine how refugees, starving throngs, must have felt in the days when rescuers bearing this symbol had descended into their war ravaged countries to deliver food, supplies, and most of all, hope, to those who had none remaining.

  “Thank you,” she repeated.

  “Portal’s got an airlock,” the soldier explained, as he pulled her up onto the moving car’s stoop. He disengaged the airlock lever, venting filtered air into the night with a satisfying hiss. “I’ll let you step on up here into the first chamber,” he said, swinging the short door ajar, “then once you’re inside, I’ll go ahead and open the valve, and purge all the bad air out of it. Once you hear the flow of gas stop, the chamber’s purged, and you can open the next portal and step on into your luxury suite. Okay?”

  Cecile nodded in understanding, too weakened to reply. The train was picking up speed, rocking her torso gently with the chug and surge of its horizontal gait. The thought of taking off her suffocating mask and the wretched hazmat suit, cleaning up, were so wonderful that those were the only thoughts that kept her from falling dead asleep on her feet. In all her life, she’d never been so tired, and had never felt such blissful relief.

  “Be careful when you step up in here. The ceiling’s kind of low. Watch out for your head.” As the soldier reached up to pat the top of her helmet, his head came toppling right off of his shoulders, rolling off into the night. Transfixed by the sight of rhythmic spurts of blood that fountained from his transected stump of a neck, Cecile gawped at the slickened blade of the machete as it withdrew ever so slowly back into portal. The decapitated soldier lilted sideways, slumping off into the train’s muddy wake with a splat.

  Cecile’s heart pumped the dregs of adrenaline through her body as the killer stepped forth from the shadows. Cocking his head of wild hair, he flashed her his gilded grin. There he stood, unscathed by bullets, spared by the flames that had consumed the pack with which he’d ridden. The assassin allowed a salacious smile to curl the corner of his lip as he stroked the sweeping bade of his favorite instrument against the door’s steel frame. Writhing bolts of electricity leapt from its chipped edge to the metal structure. There was a jumper cable clamped to the base of the blade, just above where its shaft was hilted into the cropped handle of a baseball bat. The yellow cable slithered around his hip to the base of a prattling generator that the maniac had strapped onto his back.

  “Zorra,” the killer spoke, in some Latin dialect, licking his golden teeth as he raised the machete beneath his chin. He pantomimed a slow slicing gesture across his sinewy throat. “Eu voe cortar sua cabeca!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The killer’s blade swept through the air. Cecile launched herself backwards off the railcar stoop, and out into space. The ground met her hard and fast, knocking the wind from her lungs. A bolt of white agony shot up the length of her spine, leaving both of her legs momentarily numbed. She rolled in the mud, clutching the bends of her knees, moaning. The killer dropped off of the departing train, grunting under the weight of his terrible new contraption. Cecile regained her unsteady footing. She groped frantically around her waistband where Malcolm’s pistol should’ve been. Gone. The memory of her dropping that weapon to the ground when the machine gunner had halted her blazed through her mind like frames clipped from a horror show.

  Beyond his jagged form, the steam locomotive was chugging steadily away. The killer threw back his head and howled into the tempest, mocking her paralyzing terror. He laughed at her, slapping the curved blade of his upgraded instrument against the rail, and grinning proudly at the snaps of blue static that leapt from its tip. One touch from that fucking thing, and she’d be stunned, racked with immobilizing convulsions.

  When she moved, he moved, matching her sidesteps with a serpentine fluidity. He would not be outfoxed by her weary maneuvers, not in her depleted condition. He advanced upon her with a leisurely gait. The killer appeared sickeningly smug, oozing with confidence. Her luck had finally run out, and he knew it, just as he knew that her only means of escape from this godforsaken land was creeping off into the night without her. There was no getting past him without being struck by that industrial sized cattle prod and she had no weapon to deter him. Cecile had nothing at all, nothing but her body and her will, both of which were all but broken.

  “I chose this assassin especially for you.” An all too familiar voice rattled through her radio earpiece. “He will never be deterred from his singular purpose as a drone in my colony, and that is to cut off your head.”

  Cecile backed away from the personal demon assigned to her, who was teasing her with languid swipes with the machete. To feel herself retreating in the opposite direction of the train produced an agonizing upheaval of despair, but she had no choice but to accept that eager blade, or to turn and flee into the endless desolation, a suicidal run that would only prolong her inevitable death. She should have pulled the trigger when she had the chance.

  “He killed your friend, you know. Impaled him squealing on the end of that blade.”

  “You lie,” Cecile replied, shaking her head back and forth, “he didn’t kill Malcolm. Maybe he tried, but he couldn’t get the job done. Malcolm won!”

  “If that’s so, then explain why your friend is here with me, now.”

  Cecile heard herself emit a growl, rising from somewhere deep in the pit of her throat. Still backing away from the assassin, she could only recall one other time in her life when she’d ever wanted to kill anyone so badly, and at that time, she had. If it weren’t for the influence of her Nana Hess, she might’ve been rotted in prison for rest of her days for what she’d done to those boys. It was the only time in her life that she could ever recall her Nana Hess looking scared, powerless against a situation. More than anything, that’s what had frightened Cecile, seeing her Nana’s look of helplessness. In the end that woman had managed to rise above the law, overpowering the massive odds stacked against her, the enraged families of those three boys who’d wanted so badly to see her hang. Nana He
ss had come through with a bit of her old voodoo magic, which by then, Cecile had come to understand, was rarely any sort real magic at all. The magic of her Nana’s voodoo was almost entirely rooted in the power of suggestion by those who dreaded it.

  “I apologize for my lack of hospitality, earlier,” the robotic voice continued. “I’ll be far more receptive once you’re no longer a trespasser connected to a living heart.”

  The killer screamed, carving a wild slice from the air. Cecile ducked the decapitating strike, lunging by his opposite hip. She winced as she passed him, knowing too well what was coming from behind on the backswing. She felt the slap of the electrified blade striking flatly against her shoulder blade—and nothing happened.

  Cecile ran, emitting a strangled cry of delight as she realized that her rubber hazmat suit had saved her from electrocution. She could hear his foreign cursing, his footsteps slipping in the muck, as the assassin tried to wheel around and take pursuit, but he was not going to catch her, not with the weight of that generator strapped to his back. For nearly a year, she’d outrun killers, and now she realized that those innumerable pursuits weren’t just some bad streak of luck. She’d been targeted, probably from the very beginning, from the first second of Z-Day. The Khepra knew her. It feared her dark gift. That was why she had to die, and why so many innocent people had been cut down in her stead. The alien spirit wanted her out of Nod because it saw her as a threat. That was the only explanation for all of this. A spiritual medium posed some sort of a threat to the ghostly puppeteer.

  As she neared the departing train, she heard the crash of the backpack generator upon the rails. The assassin had abandoned the heavy device that was encumbering him. She peered over her shoulder to see him ripping his blade loose the jumper cable, coming after her with the machete. She was almost to the train, but she could hear his footsteps pounding closer, gaining on her. He was fast. Faster than her, perhaps, but the bastard wasn’t going to catch her. She gritted her teeth and drove her pumping legs once again to their uppermost threshold of speed.

  Cecile cried out as her toe struck a disjointed railroad tie, tripping her, sending her careening toward the rails, but in the last second her hand struck out and seized the edge of the steel platform. The toes of her boots drummed against the rushing ties. She could hear his chuffing breaths, his grunt of exertion as he swung the weapon. Correctly anticipating the downward chop for her Achilles tendon, she swept her legs to one side, and she heard his blade clang against the rail. She swung her legs back in the other direction, and used the momentum of the swing to pull her upper-half onto the platform. As she wriggled forward, she heard another growl preceding a strike, and she rolled to her right, avoiding a vicious hack to her spine. The assassin roared with frustration as she clambered onto the platform and rose to her feet. He was right behind her, but instead of bolting into the railcar and latching the door behind her, she stood over her killer, ready to face him.

  The locomotive clacked rhythmically over the railroad spikes and ties. The steam whistle pealed eerily in the stormy night. Spitting a torrent of Latin expletives, her personal assassin slammed both of his hands down on the platform’s edge, still gripping the machete. Cecile stepped forward, as though she’d sprung the same trap on a hundred other killers, and stomped her boot down onto his blade. Before he could react, she’d slapped one ringlet of her recovered handcuffs around his wrist. As the assassins eyes widened with the alarming prospects of these new circumstances, Cecile snapped the adjoining ringlet around the edge of the platform rail. She reared back her free leg, and with every ounce of strength left in her, she smashed the steel toe of her combat boot right through that grimacing mouthful of golden teeth.

  “I win!” she screamed. “I win, you motherfucker!”

  His machete went clattering. Hilt over blade, the horrid weapon cartwheeled off into the night. With a second kick, the assassin was flung loose of the platform. He dragged squalling by his chained wrist over the pummeling railroad ties. The murderer clutched his ruined mouth with his free hand while blood streamed down his forearm from the cuff clamped around his other. Cecile towered over the helpless creature, rather enjoying the sight of him being beaten to a pulp by inanimate objects. Some sadistic part of her hoped that he would attempt to climb back up, as many times as he cared to do so, providing her with repeated opportunities to kick his ugly face, but she wasn’t granted that satisfaction.

  It was the laces of his boots, perhaps, or the cuff of his pants, that snagged the flattened head of a railroad spike that had not been driven flush with the creosote surface of the tie. Perhaps a century ago, some exhausted laborer hadn’t the strength or the presence of mind to deliver that spike a final strike, leaving its cap peeping queerly above the thousands of others. It was just that little flaw, that lapse in human error, which resulted in the cuffed arm of a dangling assassin to be torn right from its socket. Cecile watched him roll, clutching at the ragged stump, until he came to rest in the middle of the railroad track. She looked down at his twitching hand, the hand especially chosen to end her life, ensnared in her steel trap.

  ###

  Cecile awoke to the sound of a voice over her radio headset. For a dreamy moment, she thought that it was Malcolm, but the helmet and mask were resting on the cot right beside her. She turned her head in the direction of the voice, murmuring some soft reply, and found herself staring into the empty eyes of her own visor, the insect-like visage of a creature that she’d so recently been. It was the face common between she and Malcolm that she still associated with him, but were no eyes behind those lenses. No emotional presence. No ghost inside the machine.

  “Come in, Cecile Raquet.”

  She reached for the helmet, groaning. The agony in her stiffened muscles couldn’t have been worse if she’d climbed to the summit of Mount Everest. The rain had stopped. A silvery effervescence brightened the interior of the railcar. It was the light of a new dawn. Cecile sat up. She pulled the mask into her lap, and scratched her head, blinking her eyes in the thin morning light as she gazed out the windows. The ruins of low buildings scrolled by, crumbling highways and viaducts.

  “Ms. Cecile Raquet, do you copy?”

  She grumbled a string of unintelligible words as she lifted the helmet begrudgingly back onto her head. She’d fallen asleep so quickly after her sponge bath that it felt as though she’d only just stepped out of her combat gear. The helmet was covered with mud, blood and a greasy layer of ash that promptly soiled her clean hands. She flipped the toggle and keyed over to the common frequency. “I copy,” she croaked, clearing her throat and coughing. Her lungs still burned from exposure to the Khepra gases. She wondered if they would ever heal.

  “Ms. Raquet, this is the engineer speaking. We’re approaching Kansas City, but things are a mess around here, and we’re probably going to have to push straight on through to St. Louis.”

  Cecile rubbed her eyes and rose from her cot. It was only then that she realized she was completely naked. Her uncovered body was quite a sight, bruised all over, sickeningly thin. She grimaced, not caring to look long at herself. Snatching up the drab military blanket that she’d slept on, she wrapped it around herself like a shroud, and stepped over to the row of sealed portholes. What had so recently been a civilization on the verge of a rebound was once again a smoldering range of splintered peaks, rubble escarpments that crumbled down to the riverfront, indefinite in a swirling green haze.

  “They were hit pretty hard over the last forty-eight hours. I’m afraid there’s nothing left to be worth stopping for.”

  Cecile thought of General Cobb, with his handlebar mustache and his thin, silvery hair. She pitied him, if not for his own demise, then for the false hopes he’d invested in those unworthy colonists that he’d allured to the gates of his doomed city, filling them with romantic notions of horses, whiskey, and an American dream he’d been so foolish to entertain during the fall of humankind. She hoped that he, at least, had managed to escape before the
cleansing wave of the Khepra had rolled over them.

  “I’m going to ask that you strap yourself in. Put on your mask and survival gear. Be prepared.”

  “Copy that,” she replied, unable to hide the loathing in her flattened tone.

  Cecile stripped the helmet from her head and threw it onto the cot, glaring at the filthy heap of rubber and plastic with a look of disgust. The idea of climbing back into that reeking hazmat suit felt no different than if they’d suggested she crawl naked into a sewer. She knew that Malcolm would’ve already been suited up, checking his gear, strapping on his mask and helmet. She shook her head, and closed her eyes. This was his world, a world he’d inhabited largely by choice, but it was never hers. It was a world forced upon her, a world she was lucky enough to have escaped for six hours of comatose sleep, but it was back, and it was waiting for her, reminding her that this little train ride might be the last bit of comfort that she would ever experience again. When the train’s engineer had said to be prepared, Cecile knew that what he really meant was to be prepared to die.

  Cecile was ready to die. This mission had drained her last reserves of hope for a future, for love, and for humanity itself. She dropped her blanket to the railcar floor, and looked down with revulsion at her nude human form. This was a form that had been judged unworthy by its creator, and had been sentenced to extermination. It was a form that made her angry, propped so pompously upon those skinny legs that enabled the human head to look down on anything beneath its pointed nose, legs designed to bend at their knobby knees to enable humans to cower before anything more powerful. Humans were nothing but an arrogant tribe of savage apes, and women were no better off for having birthed and raised all the little boys who grew up into men who’d ruined this world, one killing and contract at a time, until there was nothing left for anyone or anything to enjoy.