by M. C. Norris
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Darkness covered the balloon squadron as it rolled over a mattress of clouds. Cecile gasped at the brilliance of the rising moon. She could hear her delight equaled in the distant squeals of children’s voices coming from one of the other balloons, floating beneath the same glittering zenith of a billion stars that twinkled down upon them from the dark gulfs of space. God, it was beautiful. She never wanted this night to end.
One of the soldiers shouted excitedly from the bowsprit. The permanganate test results had come back negative for cyanide. He held the rosy beakers aloft, pouring the unreacted reagent back and forth, for all to see. This level of the stratosphere was clean. With a cry of jubilation, people began to strip off their masks. Faces of all shapes and colors emerged smiling from beneath those plastic shells. White teeth and eyes glimmered in the moonlight.
Cobb strode over to Cecile. Licking his thumb and forefinger, his smoothed the silver handlebars of his mustache. “I guess you didn’t hear the good news?” he said. “You can peel off that mask, if you want to. The air’s clear up here.”
Cecile shook her head nervously. “I’m alright. Thank you.”
“Suit yourself,” he replied, tilting back his head and inhaling a mighty lungful of the pure midnight air, beaming in the moonlight, “but I tell you, it tastes awful good! Just the way I remembered it.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Besides, I don’t think half these boys would mind too much to have a look at that pretty face of yours. I almost feel bad for them,” he said, with a wink, “for being the only one here who’s seen it.”
This was her face. That’s what they didn’t understand. She’d left her humanity somewhere back in the wastelands, and this face of rubber and plastic wasn’t ever coming off again. She understood all too well why Cobb was so eager to keep her in his flock of chosen ones. He was looking to reboot humankind with a brand new start in some promised land, and for that, he needed a breeding population. She hadn’t been chosen on the basis of merit, on her unwitnessed acts of valor and altruism toward her former kind. No, he’d summoned her for no other reason than her femininity, and she guessed that she understood his reasoning. She saw and perhaps appreciated what it was that this dreamer now hoped to accomplish, after watching his last dream be burned to the ground. It sounded good to her, a new start, almost fancifully pure, but one thing she’d learned over the course of her life was that nothing was pure, and nothing was permanent. There were always ulterior motives behind the façade of human progress, and in the end, all dreams burned.
“I’ve been thinking about your offer,” Cecile said, “to join your little commune.”
“Well, it don’t sound half so good when you say like that,” Cobb replied, smiling broadly as he placed his hand on her shoulder.
Cecile shrugged the hand off, which she knew was rude, but she didn’t feel like being touched by anyone. She watched his smile fade, as the skin of his friendly face tightened into a more serious expression. There was no hurt in his eyes, no malice towards her, just a very genuine interest in her thoughts. She immediately felt a little ashamed for having snubbed him. “I’m a hazard to you and your community,” she said.
Cobb cocked his head, peering skeptically at her from beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. “Now how’s that, I wonder?”
She didn’t know how exactly to explain herself, and she suddenly regretted saying anything at all about her curse. No one would believe her. No one would ever understand. Down to his dying breath, even Malcolm hadn’t ever been able truly to believe. “I’m being targeted,” she eventually replied, “by the Hunters. Please don’t ask me to explain. Just accept that they’re following me, even now, watching my every movement, and they’ll never stop following me until I’m dead.” Cecile watched Cobb’s expression gather from concern to a measure of worry. “I should never have come aboard this flight with you,” she said. “You’re all at risk because of me. Right now, St. Louis is probably under attack just because I set foot inside that base. Everywhere I go, people die. Everyone I’ve ever tried to love since Z-Day has …”
“Ssh-ssh.” Cobb put a finger to his lips, and shook his head gently from side to side. “I just got off the horn with St. Louis, and they’re doing just fine. Just fine.” He put a hand back on her shoulder, and this time, she didn’t shrug it off. “Sometimes the war can get inside a person’s head, once they’ve seen too much, seen too many bad things happen to good people around them. Makes a person start to think they’re cursed, or being punished for something they might’ve done. I understand that, but casualties of war are not prejudiced. Now, I can call back to St. Louis every couple of hours, just so you can see that they’re alright, but if and when there comes an hour when St. Louis falls, believe me, it wasn’t any fault of yours. It was just their time to fall. That’s all.”
“I wish I could believe that,” Cecile whispered, “but you don’t know what I know.”
“Well, what I do know is that I’m not upset you’re flying with us. In fact, I’m proud of it. I’ve been out west, where you just come from, and I know how rough that country is. Truth be told, I never expected I’d see you alive again, but here you are.” Cobb smiled reassuringly. “You seem to have a knack for survival, and you know what? So do I. When you’ve got a couple of fighters like us in the same balloon, who seem to squirm their way out of every trap that’s ever set for them, well that ain’t one hot air balloon that I’d care to fuck with.”
Cecile managed a smile. There did indeed seem to be some unqualifiable element of truth to his good-natured banter. Cobb had a clever way of putting her at ease.
“Now, listen here. I might be an old fool, but I’ve survived two wars without a scratch, and I have to believe that means something. I like to think that it means that I have some sort of an unfulfilled purpose in this world, and the way the world is looking right now, it would seem obvious that purpose would be related to reconstruction. I have hope, Cecile. That’s probably what makes me a fool, if nothing else, but I do have hope. At a time like this, hope is we got while we go on fighting, finding new and better ways to outsmart our enemies. By God, I will never stop believing in people, believing in myself, believing in you, believing in the goodness that’s inherent in every single human being. It’s an awful big responsibility to be a human. Did you know that?”
Cecile shook her head, staring back through her visor into his brightening eyes.
“The responsibility is one that we all too often neglect for personal gain. It’s times like this that put that neglected responsibility right up in our faces, where we can’t help but see it through all our greed. Are we not the wards of this planet, as well as its defenders?”
“I guess so.”
Cobb nodded the brim of his hat. “Of course we are. We were given the gift of intelligence for a reason, and how is that we’ve come to shirk that responsibility, to abuse that gift that was bestowed to us by Mother Nature? We were put here to love and protect her, but instead, we went and turned on her in an outright attack. All of this that’s happening down there, beneath them clouds? That’s a cry from Mother Nature for help. We’d knocked things out of balance, and she’d given up on us, decided to level the playing field. She’ll bounce back from this, long after we’re gone, but my hope is that maybe a few of us can learn from our mistakes, and maybe Mother Earth will let us be a part of that second chance. In order to do that, we’ve first got to have faith in humanity. We are good. We are worth saving. Hold tight to that faith. Believe in our human race. After that, there’s nothing in our way that’s impossible.” Cobb squeezed her shoulder. “I’m not afraid of you, because just like me, I know you’re the sort of person who’d fight to the death for someone, or for something you believe in.” Cobb leaned back, and winked. “So, I just got to make sure that you start believing in all the same things as me.”
Cecile reached up to her throat. She found the plastic hasp of her chinstrap. She popped the clip, removed her helmet, and peeled the plastic
mask from her face. The untainted night air that filled her lungs tasted of rich soil, water and the green foliage of summer trees. She flashed Cobb a moonlit smile.
“So, what do you say?” Cobb said, with an ornery grin. “You want to stay on with us to Fort Sinai, or should I pitch you over the side?”
“I’ll stay.”
The murmur of conversation along the starboard bow escalated into excited chatter, which then became shouts, cries of alarm. Cobb’s smile vanished. He spun in the direction of the disturbance amongst his flock. Beyond the distant squadron of balloons a silhouette eclipsed the moon, and all the stars of the eastern horizon.
Emitting a titanic rumble, it ascended, with clouds spilling in pale rivers down through the channels that fluted its dark peaks. It appeared as though this floating island beyond their bow was a hellish mountain range calved straight off from the netherworld, but stranger still, this landscape appeared to be alive. Red pulses of energy originated from somewhere at its core, flashing off through rhythmic valences that circumnavigated its immensity. It was not until the uppermost vastness of its jagged carapace had breached the clouds that Cecile’s mind could even begin to grasp what sight was thrust upon her eyes.
“The missing queen,” Cecile whispered.
It was true. The thing before her could be none other than the living matriarch of the Khepra colony. Every witness to her majesty stood awestruck in her shadow, stunned into horrified silence, as the stupendous mass rose until it blocked one-quarter of the starlight in the sky. If the Khepra spirit was the God of the Dead, then this was unquestionably the queen that ruled the living world.
Soft globes of crimson light trailed her into the heavens, bouncing along her underbelly with adoring familiarity. It was not until Cecile realized that these glowing pinpoints were in fact Khepra drones, was she able to use the scale of their known size as a measure of comprehending the queen’s enormity. She was the size of a city. The spines of her carapace were skyscrapers, and their flutings were a converging network of highways. The drones, each, were nothing more than small houses just outside her limits.
They ascended through the clouds, flickering demurely in her presence. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of drones, were being drawn to her sexual energy as swarm of fluttering moths might gravitate to a gargantuan bulb. Cecile spun toward the metallic squeal of a gun swiveling on its mount. She lunged for the gunman, wrenching him away from the weapon with two fistfuls of his hazmat suit. Cecile said nothing, only shook her head sternly from side to side.
General Cobb was already one step ahead of her. Keying up to the military band with a borrowed headset, he dispatched an order across the balloon squadron. “Don’t a one of you dare shoot. Not a single goddamned round. You just watch it and let it go. Y’all hear me? Just let it go.”
Cecile felt her eyes shimmering with admiration for her fallen friend. Malcolm was right. He’d been absolutely right. The unbelievable sight before her was the mating phase of the Khepra lifecycle. Drones circled the glowing abdomen of their common bride, mesmerized by that perfect electric signature that had been so crudely imitated by manmade inventions. Wholly enraptured by her magnetism, her suitors followed her ever higher into the earth’s atmosphere, each jostling for a good position in what was sure to be an interstellar orgy that would last through the depths of space. As suddenly as it had emerged, the Khepra colony was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
Cecile crossed the crystalline stream barefoot, wearing nothing but the white sundress sewn from a sheet by one of her new best friends. To mark a new beginning, the time had come to commemorate an end. Before her towered the mightiest oak in the forest. She could hear the strokes of saws, the cadence of busy hammers in the background. They’d all agreed, no blade was ever to touch the trunk of this one. She stood in the shadow of the Tree of Forgotten Faces, gazing up and down the column of soulless eyes, staring back at her. She squinted at the collection, searching for a bare spot where she could hang hers.
Circling the tree, she found an unclaimed space on its mossy backside. This was good. It wasn’t front and center, staring forever down at what would eventually be a fort, like all the rest. Hers was a quiet spot, where her mask could gaze off into the serenity of the surrounding forest. It seemed fitting that those artificial eyes could enjoy their retirement observing the activity of birds and forest creatures, things that mask had never seen before.
She lifted her mask by the top of the visor, placed the tip of a nail into the center of its forehead, and she mounted it to their monument with three strikes of her hammer. Done. Cecile stepped back, placed her hands on her hips, and cocked her head. Although all of the masks that were tacked to that great oak tree belonged to living donors, they represented something more. When Cecile gazed into their visors, she saw ghosts, but in a different way than the one to which she was accustomed. These were the ghosts of a brutal past that had consumed the lives of so many. When she looked at her mask, she saw Malcolm. Cecile knelt on the carpet of verdant moss, folded her legs beneath her, and just stared at all of the faces.
She hadn’t been back to Nod. Not since that morning on the banks of the Saline River. She missed Malcolm, her Nana, and old Slim, of course, but the better part of her remained in fear that although the Khepra colony had moved on, probably to destroy another world, light years away, the Land of Nod might still remain out of balance. To that end, there seemed precious little that she could do. It would only take time. The Khepra spirit was still lurking over there, somewhere in Nod’s darkest shades, but without the colony on Earth’s living world, her ghostly attention would surely be directed elsewhere.
Malcolm had been right about everything else, and he’d believed that if and when the colony departed, the Hunters, their aphids, would simply die. So far, in the weeks since they’d landed in Fort Sinai, no trouble had come calling. The use of radios, anything electrical, was forbidden in Fort Sinai. Before the balloons even landed, General Cobb had collected every vacuum tube. They were to remain a breed apart. Cecile wondered about the rest of the living world, how things were going in the dragons’ absence, but not so much that she cared to leave her woodland sanctuary to find out. Maybe one day her curiosity would get the better of her, with regard to both worlds, but until that day arrived, the living world was on its own, and Nod would just have to take care of Nod. She figured that when her time came to die, she’d find out the answer to all of her niggling questions.
A twig snapped, right behind her.
Cecile pivoted on her arm, crooking her neck over her shoulder. There were a lot of deer in the area, and so far, they remained quite tame. She searched the underbrush for the telltale swish of an anxious white tail, the flap of a pale ear.
“Hello, Cecile.”
The voice came from a different direction than that from which the twig had been broken. She knew that voice just as well as she’d ever known the voice of anyone. The blood literally fell from her head and chest to someplace deep in her core, leaving her lips tingling, her mind swimming, and her vision blurry. Her breath caught in her throat with every throb of her heart, and she feared that she would faint before she ever turned in his direction. When she did, she looked upon him for the first time, face to distorted face.
“Don’t get up. You’re surrounded,” he said, stepping casually forth from the bramble. “You don’t want anything to happen to them, do you?”
Cecile could not look away from the melted visage of sickly skin, nucleated by the dark and ragged hole where a nose should have been, but she heard the laughter of playing children, the soft murmur of friendly voices, knocking hammers, the sounds of peace and tranquility. She was able to shake her head. No. For the love of God, no.
The Green Man raised the mechanical device to his ruined throat, and pressed it to his vocal cords. “Walk with me, in the woods.”
The pounding cadence of blood in her ears ramped up to a deafening tempo. She was cold, chilled to the marrow of her bones, as t
here was no blood left in her extremities. It surprised her when her body actually obeyed, nodding the head on her shoulders, lifting her unsteadily to her feet. Her hands were trembling so badly that she had to clasp them together at her waist. She took one step toward the monster in the woods, and then looked back in the direction of Fort Sinai. Three children splashed in the stream, collecting bouquets of wildflowers. Beyond, the women chatted around the friendly fire pit, where three weeks of wonderful nights had been spent in the company of her new friends, her beloved new family.
Every breath she drew seemed to squeak inside her throat, as she turned back to the Green Man, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Please,” she whispered, shaking her head, “please, no.”
“Walk with me in the forest, Cecile,” he replied, his words purring softly over the thrum of his mechanical voice box. He extended a hand of abbreviated and missing fingers, webbed with scars around the wrist where long ago, a pair of handcuffs had repeatedly bitten in. The stench that emanated from his sickly body was the sour putrescence of a corpse. “Walk with me, and no harm will come to them.”
She reached out, trembling, and took his horrid hand into her own. She didn’t want to die. For the first time in a year, it was life that she craved, a new life with them, but life had never been fair, had it? Quietly, she sobbed, as she walked hand in hand with the Green Man into the hall of scabrous columns, where the polar winds whispered secrets through the clattering leaves of hardwood trees. Behind every one of those trunks, she now could see, was a Hunter. Through her tears, she saw the rusted edges of their blades, the dark barrels of their guns, but worse than their weapons, their numbers, was the glimmer of victory in every set of malicious eyes. There was no use begging for mercy. They’d travelled long and hard to reach this remote sanctuary where she dreamt she’d at last found happiness, but that dream was over now. Nothing was pure, nothing was permanent, and all dreams burn. Cecile fell to her knees in the forest litter, tears falling from the cusp of her chin.