by Unknown
I know it is out there.
That’s what faith is all about.
Ask any television evangelist.
Not that there are many evangelists around these days. As far as I know they’ve all died and gone to heaven. I expect when the first big fire-blast hit the state, they clapped their hands together and peed their pants for joy. Cinder-fried into ashy cre-mains, one blessed-out, pissed-out rapture to go.
As for me, I’m burned dry.
My throat is parched like a two hundred mile crawl through a desert of pan-fried deep-salted squid. I see that glimmer up ahead. I see it reflect in the burning sunlight — tantalizing, transient, the wink of melting diamond.
I smell it.
I followed that glint of unbroken glass. It wasn’t much as vectors went, but in this Gehanna-painted desert, it’s a lot better than nothing at all.
The world has parched itself.
The world has smoked down like an ant under a burning glass.
How did it happen?
You could blame the nukes, but only in the round-about way that you would have blamed a zealous fireman for kicking down your burning door. The world was ready for desiccation long before the flying atoms ever got to it.
We did it to ourselves.
We emptied the sky. We poured it out like the last drop of cheap wine. That deodorized confidence that kept the earth safe, the Colgate shield that surrounded us, the ozone that distanced the earth from the sun’s blind rape had swallowed itself down into nothing, leaving us naked to the burning eye of fate.
Bottles and cans and spray cylinders. We wrapped it all into neat double shrunk packages, everything but the world itself. Now it’s all gone. Drained.
I understand this because of what I am.
A vampire.
I know what you read. I know what you saw in the movies. I know how you think we are so damned vulnerable. Sunlight will kill us. Garlic will kill us. Silver will kill us. Bible camp will kill us.
Forget that foolish prattle.
There is no race of vampires.
As far as I know, I am unique.
Alone.
I kept to the shadows for centuries — but now the shadows are burned away and I must walk. The steady beat of my footsteps is the only heartbeat I have.
It is slow going. I walk on sand glazed by heat. I feel each particle fused together like the icing on a funeral cake. The sun pours down on me like a white-hot acid bath. It doesn’t kill me but it is damned uncomfortable.
I wish for a bottle of SPF sunscreen three hundred times strong but all I have is my cloak, a tatter quilt sewed from a dozen black “Keep On Trucking” t-shirts.
How’s this for a slogan? I Survived the Apocalypse and All I Got was a Dozen Crummy T-shirts!
My jacket is leather, homemade, flayed from a biker’s burned back. I wear high black riding boots, or they wear me. The damned boots rot to my skin. If I try to peel them off, I’ll peel myself down to the bone.
I like my hat.
It’s a large black sombrero, stolen from the wreckage of a tacky souvenir shop. The hat makes me think of Eli Wallach, in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
“Hey Blondie,” I croak — a mouthful of razor and scorpion song.
At least I don’t sweat. I don’t need that kind of teasing, that kind of torment.
But I can’t ignore the thirst.
Never mind. I’m focused on the glinting glass.
I am a walking shadow. I need no shade. I am a shambling darkled pocket of nothing, slanting through a wasteland.
Everything is dead.
Even the cacti are roasted dry.
I draw closer. Close enough to really see the burning glass. The light dances and tantalizes like the sharded mirage of a ripe-titted hooch dancer, shaking her naked juices at my sun-parched eye holes.
God, I am thirsty.
I want to lick my lips, but I resist the urge. A flick of my tongue will peel the dried-out membranes raw.
I plow ahead, immersed in the burning quicklime of want and my thirst for a glinting bottle.
What will it be?
A Pepsi?
A Perrier?
And then I see the actual bottle.
I pick it up. It’s empty, of course. The black label compliments my pitchy cloak. It’s square, like a miniature, transparent coffin.
I recognize the label.
Brother Jack Daniels, the patron saint of sun-parched sinners.
I glance skyward briefly.
“Are you up there, Jack Daniels?”
There is nothing but sunburnt sky. I haven’t seen a cloud in a long forever. I slip the bottle into the pocket of my leather jacket.
Carefully.
I don’t want to break it.
There is something else out here.
I can smell it.
It takes me two long thirsty days to find where it is hiding.
I count my footsteps, one to a second.
Habit or hobby?
Even the dead need something to do.
Here it is, or the face of it, anyway. A slab of concrete poured across a limestone cliff.
A gun slit.
I smell the life, hidden and cowering within.
“Hey,” I call.
My voice surprises me.
“Hey in there.”
Nothing.
Whoever is hiding is damned sensible.
They aren’t peeking.
Maybe he’ll go away, they are thinking. Maybe he’s crazy, talking to the rocks. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m hiding in here.
“I know you’re in there.”
I slide my hands over the rock, searching for any sign of a real opening.
“I can smell you.”
It feels so good to touch something after acres and acres of nothing but sun and heat and lonely thirst. My fingers revel in the sudden rough gift of texture.
I find nothing.
The camouflage is perfect.
“I’ve got something for you.”
I slide the bottle from my pocket.
Careful, now. It won’t do to break the damn thing.
I tap the bottle against the rock. It sounds so loud. I hadn’t heard anything for so very long but the wind and my endless lonely footsteps.
“Do you hear that?”
I clink it again, softly, letting the brittle ringing emptiness sound out.
“It’s glass.”
Clink.
“It’s a bottle. Full to the brim. Anything you’d like to drink. Whatever you’re thirsty for, that’s what it’s got.”
Clink.
“Can’t you hear it? Can’t you taste it? That cool kiss of glass on your lips. Aren’t you just aching for it?”
Clink.
“Don’t you want to drink it? Taste it swilling down, like a laugh in reverse. Don’t you want to swallow it right down to the bottom? That’s always where the best taste hides, deep in the dregs.”
Clink.
“That’s what you remember, isn’t it? The ease of refrigerators and the sound of ice cubes rattling in a glass. Good things, nothing but good things.”
Clink.
“It hasn’t all been broken. Not all the windows, and all the glasses, and not all the bottles. All those fine clear things you could see through. Not all of them were lost in that first great shock wave. Not all of them lost in that time of flailing around, throwing buckets of mass extinction at each other, trying to figure out how to kill the sun, not all of those holy transparent dreams were broken.”
Clink.
I keep talking.
It might have been an hour.
It might have been a day.
Clink.
I keep talking, praying in the wilderness, until the rock swings open. The man inside the rock pokes his head out slow, like a sleepy turtle.
“Come forth, Lazarus,” I husk out dryly.
He wasn’t much to look at. Nothing more than a handful of bones and carcinogenized flesh. A
desiccant tumor balanced on a fork of twigged legs.
I’m not totally inhuman. I give him time enough for a single croak.
It sounds like he might be saying What, or Where, or maybe Why. Then I bring the bottle down hard against the back of his skull. Bottle against skull. Bits of broken glass imbed in a shattered egg.
Then I use the edge of the broken bottle to open his throat. His flesh is putty soft, and no muscle tone to speak of.
The blood is paler than it ought to be.
But the blood is good.
I drink it down. I drain him dry. I suck each mouthful of salty goodness. I take it all in until my teeth sizzle around nothing but wet air.
I suck until even that dries up.
I let what is left of the man fall. The bones, no longer supported by the cushion of blood, make a rattling shatter as they hit open rock.
“Good,” I rasp, enjoying the stolen fluid in my veins.
I close my mouth tight as a tomb. I don’t want to lose anything to the wind, the evaporation from heat. I peer into the shadows of the bunker mouth.
It looks good and cool in there.
I could lie down and sleep the centuries away. Maybe the next wave of species that crawl across this parched-out madness might give me a little more sustenance.
I sniff.
Inhale.
Nothing.
I stare at the carcass. How long did he hide? What did he live off? A cache of hidden supplies? A scrapbook of faded paste memories? His family?
It doesn’t matter.
He is empty and I am full.
I look at the bottle regretfully. I didn’t need to break it. He was weak enough to take without the waste. But somehow there needed to be sacrifice.
Something had to be lost.
I turn from the bunker.
I sniff at the open air.
Nothing.
It doesn’t matter. I am full for now. I can keep walking. I’ll find something out there, sooner or later. There has to be someone left for me to drink.
But what if there isn’t?
It doesn’t matter.
I walk — a solitary speck of darkness enduring within a long and parched eternity of light. The bones behind me wash clean in the dust of burning forever.
Far off, long into that lonely gulp of horizon, I see a distant glinting.
I’m coming.
I know it is out there.
* * * * *
Steve Vernon is a Halifax, Nova Scotia writer and storyteller with nearly thirty years experience in the yarn-spinning business. He wrote “The Faith of Burning Glass” while in the heat of ship-in-a-bottle building entrapment. It took rescue teams nearly three hours of environmental lubricant, glass-welding techniques and applied snappy patter to talk Steve out from inside of that bottle. A much-altered version of this story appeared in an ultra-limited thirteen copy edition of his recent dark fiction collection Do-Overs and Detours (Dark Region Press). Steve has recently released his very first YA novel, Sinking Deeper (Nimbus Publishing), the saga of a young boy, a dying town, a sea monster and a caber toss.
NEW WORLD ORDER
Soulglobe
By John Shirley
“Even death has its fashions,” said Tet, chuckling softly as he led Frank and Mella Zand through passage seventy-seven of the catacomb world. Frank thought the remark was pretty flip and insensitive, given that Mella was dying. But pushing his dark-eyed Iraqi wife smoothly along the stone passageway in her float-chair, he kept his peace. He’d promised Mella he’d accept Soulglobe, every last bit of it, including the morbid sense of humor sometimes displayed by its docents.
“Soulglobe is fashionable,” the docent went on, in his silky voice, “but it will transcend mere fashion, that I promise you!” The docent was a tall, stooped, gray-eyed man, papery pale, with a tumble of curly flaxen hair about his shoulders; he wore a long white robe trimmed in gold and silver filigree; his feet were sheathed in spray-on gold shoes sharply outlining his toes. “This asteroid will survive for millions of years. Those laid to rest here will be safely entombed for all that long time. Memorialized in a work of art.”
“I’ve got to wonder about that term, ‘laid to rest’,” Frank grumbled. “What with the drift coffins. The Ballet of the Dead…”
Mella glanced over her shoulder at him, her gaunt, reproachful face making his heart ache. Her raven hair had gone thin and white. At thirty-five, she was ten years younger than him — but she looked far older. “Frank…? Please?”
He sighed. “I’m not complaining, Mel. I just…” He couldn’t say it. I just don’t want to think about your dead body floating through this place like a speck in a snowglobe.
They were reaching the end of the passage; the docent, striding ahead, was framed against the semicircular opening into the Great Cavern. As they walked up to him, Frank noticed that the docent’s fingernails had been replaced with long, sharp flattened crystals so that his hands sparkled when he gestured.
Why don’t his fingernails grow and push the crystals out? Frank wondered. Had the guy gone to all the trouble to get genetically re-engineered for a fingernail effect?
“And here it is,” Tet said, with a glittering flutter of his hand.
Frank pushed Mella closer — not too close — to the balcony’s edge. They looked out over the great spherical chamber. A cold, fluctuating wind stung his cheeks. The Soulglobe was an asteroid, a nearly perfect sphere a little over a kilometer and a half in diameter. It was a gigantic, transparent bubble of crystal, with encrustations of scab-like rock making a rough mesh around the outside of the bubble; each rocky section was pocked with balconies like theirs. Shafts of light, curiously muted with a faint blueness, angled into the misty, spherical interior and bounced around inside, reflecting from glistening inner surfaces, shifting as the globe slowly rotated. It was difficult to see the stars from within the asteroid but floating close to one of the diamond-shaped transparent sections, an observer could see the distant sun. The sun was Sol; from time to time, in the right conditions, it was said that the planetoid Pluto and the nearby gas giant Neptune were visible as gemlike orbs against velvet black.
Frank shook his head in wonder. “You claim this thing is natural? That crust out there — the mesh pattern looks almost—”
“It does look almost artificial, at times, yes, though one can see the natural patterns of rock if one looks closely,” the docent said, in his pompous diction. “We have plans to build artificial copies of this one, when we’ve reached capacity. Of course, the Soulglobe could be an artifact — it was found floating in the asteroid belt, then moved out to this safer location, and there is speculation that the asteroid belt was part of a planet that was destroyed, and that the sphere was a structure on the lost planet, artificial or natural. Personally I think it’s a sort of giant geode.”
“It reminds me of a Ramadan decoration I had when I was a kid,” Mella said, her voice weak. “It was supposed to be a moon. I used to stare into it, imagine what it would be like to be inside it.” Her voice was scarcely audible, trailing off when she said, “I feel like I’m inside it here…”
Sounds echoed across the vast interior space of the Soulglobe: a deep hum, rising and falling, the occasional rachitic metal clangor, the sigh of wind and a poignant sound that might be weeping.
The sounds made Frank think of that first battlefield pre-dawn on the terra-formed plains of Mars. He was Sarge for a relief platoon, defending Colony Three; wounded soldiers were calling from the dull red sands of the battlefield; crackly voices in transmissions carried thinly across the plains. The gusting of manufactured air — the artificial atmosphere of Mars — sighed as it lifted wraithlike curtains of red dust. Frank kept his platoon hunkered behind the barriers, waiting for morning, as per orders; the InstanStone the Orbital Army engineers had laid down for them was still soft in places. They’d deployed in a hurry, ready to advance with their night-seeing goggles — but it was the old ‘hurry up and wait’. The sandstorm
, and the procrastination of Command Center, kept them in their igloo-like shelter, peering out the stony slits. Their brothers, Rangers in the OA, were dying out there and they couldn’t get to them.
For thousands of years, men on battlefields had groaned and died, their dying taking all night long, their cries unanswered; a soldier’s life draining slowly away, as the hours of darkness passed. Ought to be a better way to make war by now. Three medical robots and a remote scoop had been sent to bring in the wounded, but the enemy had refused a medical truce, had slammed the rescue gear with seeker missiles, despite the fact that they’d have rescued wounded Orthos too. Frank and his men watched the fires of the rescue gear burning, the flamelight guttering along the crater rim; they’d listened to the screams, the begging. That night Frank had learned to hate the Russian Orthodox Army: psychological robots from the theocratic cult Russia had become.
A night of sighing wind, as if the darkness were weeping…
Something glossy-white swept by the balcony of Soulglobe passage seventy-seven, making Frank step back from the balcony, back into this melancholy moment with Mella and the gray-eyed, flaxen-haired stranger who called himself Tet.
“What was that?” Frank asked.
“One of our Guests,” said Tet with a slight smile. “I just got a glimpse, but I believe it was a woman’s body, sheathed in the new Mark Three coatings. Fixed in the cruciform position.” He bowed slightly to Mella. “The posture was as per that lady’s final request, of course.”
Another of the dead swept by — this one carried in a glass coffin. The farther one went, away from the rotating shell of the asteroid and into the center of the globe, the weaker gravity became. Even here, in the enhanced gravitation of the shell, gravity was less than a quarter of Earth normal.
Tet reached into a pocket of his robe, pulled out a round, shiny golden object, and peered at it. When Frank looked at it quizzically, Tet smiled. “Oh this?” Even his smile seemed silky. “It’s a ‘pocket watch’. Nineteenth century vintage. Three hundred years old. A family heirloom. And it tells me that the Ballet of the Dead is about to begin … Ah! The first strains of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor! It’s shortened a bit, adapted for ballet.”
“Oh!” Mella said, as classical music skirled through the immense globular space with surprising fidelity.