Battle Hill Bolero

by Daniel José Older

  Finding out the family I have no memories of was wiped out: that brought its own strange, creeping sadness. After the first deluge of shock, it’s a sadness that made a home inside me. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s the massacre itself or the fact that I don’t remember them that hurts more. Trevor’s been dead two years and each memory of him is still smudged with his death. I made peace with the ache, but that doesn’t stop it from aching.

  I look at Carlos very suddenly and realize I’ve forgiven him. It wasn’t a conscious choice. I’ve tried many times, given up trying many times. I don’t know why or what happened, but it feels like a tiny ray of light on a dark, dark day. I wonder if he’s forgiven me in this same sudden, inexplicable way, or if he’s still just trying to convince himself to.

  Even in this hurricane of grief and oncoming war, I’m still the sun he revolves around.

  “Hey.” I step closer to him, wrap my arm through his. “C’mon. We can have reading time somewhere where it’s warm.”

  He exhales a tense laugh. “Where? I hate my hotel, and my apartment’s got a throng haint infestation.”

  “My hotel.”

  He cocks his head at me, one eyebrow raised. “You didn’t—”

  “There’s a lot of things I didn’t tell you.”

  “Is it—”

  “It’s nicer than yours. Not to brag, but . . . it is.”

  “How do you—”

  “Just come with me.”

  —

  I first started doing runs with Reza a few weeks after everything went down at the lighthouse. Once the dead were buried and I stopped checking on the twins every five minutes, once my slow, slow heart rate returned to its even-slower normal, once the nightmares cooled off, I called Reza and we met for coffee at that diner she likes. She tried to talk me out of it at first, and everything she said was right: joining forces was messy, irresponsible, and ridiculous. I had no business putting my life in danger with two brand-new lives in my hands.

  And still.

  I wasn’t sleeping. Was barely eating. It wasn’t fallout from warring with the Blattodeons—it had been going on before all that. I was hungry. That’s the only way I could describe it to her, and when I said that, she nodded with a slight smile, her eyes sad.

  I didn’t have a name for what I craved—it wasn’t blood or adrenaline, just . . . movement. Challenge, maybe. After everything that had happened, the only thing that felt really wrong was being still. Anyway, soldiers don’t leave the army just because they become parents. Plenty of cops have kids. (Reza rolled her eyes: “My least favorite cop is a mom.”) I asked Janey’s future father-in-law, Gordo, if he needed some extra cash and was good with kids (an enthusiastic “jes” to both), figuring I’d pay his babysitting fees with whatever little cash I made on the runs.

  And then it turned out that the cash was not so little. Reza’s organization was at a kind of philosophical turning point when I started coming around, transforming from a gunrunning prostitution ring to a kind of cleanup service for the Underworld—cleaning up shitheads, not messes—so there were plenty of raids, gunfights, assaults, and with them, the cash flowed. In three weeks, I’d made more money than I knew what to do with. Like . . . college tuition for both of the twins kinda money. And I’d gotten used to living off whatever meager cash the combined efforts of the Survivors pulled in—all I knew of money was how to horde it and stretch it and make do without it. And for the most part, I kept up the caution, so when this ghost war came menacing, I had more than enough stashed away to check into a nice—okay, a really nice—suite. In a really nice Manhattan hotel.

  “What . . . the . . . fuck,” Carlos whispers as I lead him into the elegant living room. Night has descended fully on the city outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Jersey glistens across the river, casts a dazzling light show in the dark waters of the Hudson.

  “Long story,” I say, peeling off my own coat and then his. “Listen.” I place myself in front him, facing the dark sky, the shining city. He wraps his arms around my waist.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Don’t you even want to hear what I was going to say?”

  “Yes.” I feel his smile against my neck. “After.”

  —

  The orgasm felt like it had been building in me for months, my whole body a stretched slingshot. It teased the edges of my awareness as Carlos held me open beneath him and jackhammered away. It let itself be known gradually, a cloud on the horizon, faded slightly as he maneuvered into a different position, returned full force as he fell into a new rhythm, faster and fiercer this time. Then it was right there, hovering over both of us, waiting, and then white light covered the world and my neck craned. A howl escaped me that I didn’t know I had inside. Somewhere far away, Carlos’s whole body spasmed too, and his thrusts got frantic and so did mine, and then stillness took over as he grunted and collapsed, and now stillness is everything, and lying here, with my head draped upside down over the edge of the bed and the city an upside-down masterpiece of darkness and light and the sky its own kind of city, a few straggling stars amidst a few splotchy clouds—now, I know peace.

  No thoughts no fears no words: just peace.

  His cool body lies entwined with my cool body and between us there’s only warmth, somehow, just like we somehow made full life from half-life, and I smile because we defy all the rules of nature, Carlos and I, and every other rule too, and here we are, well fucked and smiling anyway.

  I must’ve drifted off, because a noise startles me awake, and my hand flies to the dagger on the bedside table. A hundred escape routes, entrance points, projectile trajectories splay themselves out across the walls, windows, and doorways, and then Carlos walks out of the bathroom, sees my stricken face, and says, “What?”

  Wartime tattoos paranoid maps across the insides of our eyelids, and in a second they’re splattered outward over the world. I shake my head, willing my heart rate to slow, my breath to ease. How quickly it can all come crashing down. How fragile this peace. I’ve been running as long as I’ve had memory. Running and fighting. The entirety of this new life is struggle, punctuated by a few blessed moments of joy. Carlos climbs into the bed. They could have followed us. They could be watching even now. They could bust through the door, and all our skills, all our combined will, all we’ve been through wouldn’t matter a damn against greater numbers.

  He reaches out; his fingers hover just above my naked shoulder, waiting for permission. Smart. He can see how tightly wound I am; the wrong touch might cost him that hand. Instead of just nodding, I nuzzle into him, allow his length and muscle to encase me. I don’t have to explain—he already knows. That in itself makes all this worth the wait.

  My heart slows to keep time with his. And then I mount him, take him fully inside me, and lean forward, letting my braids cascade around his face.

  —

  “The thing?” Carlos asks when we stop panting and the stillness settles and the world returns to some kind of normal.

  “You mean what I was going to tell you before you decided to manhandle me?”

  “And then you decided to womanhandle me—that thing, yeah.”

  I look up and he’s stroking himself, staring down at my supine and spread body with a holy hunger in his eyes. “Easy, big fella. We got shit to do.”

  He scrunches up his face, grunts. “I know, I know.”

  “Put your pants on. Ain’t nobody gonna be concentrating on shit with that big ol’ thing just hanging out and about.” He raises an eyebrow, nods glumly, goes in search of pants. “Get started,” I say, somersaulting out the bed. “I’ll catch up.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I emerge from the shower, pulling my long braids into a ponytail, and find Carlos hunched over the book Mama Esther left him, muttering to himself. He’s just in pajama pants and a tank top that leaves little to the imagination, and I imagine straddling
him from behind, letting this towel slip away as he turns to face me . . . Back in the bathroom, I take a few deep breaths in the mirror, then wrap my hair. He’s left a gray T-shirt in here, and that’ll do nicely. I pull it on, then hunt down a pair of baggy sweatpants and plop into the easy chair beside the desk he’s working at.

  He looks up, blows me a kiss, and everything just feels so simple. The brutal world creeps back in—I know that book he has open will lead him into heinous shit, and beyond that, the Council looms, always. Still, in a small way, we’re suddenly what it always has felt like we should’ve been.

  “That thing,” I say.

  He makes a show of sliding the book away, his focus on me full. “Yes.”

  “Forgiveness.” I let my stare stay on him for a solid few seconds, unwavering, so he knows. Then I nod.

  He does too. “I had been holding on too. To blaming you, I mean. And . . . yeah. It’s gone. I don’t know how or why, but it is.”

  “It might come back,” I suggest.

  “I know. For either of us.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then we’ll deal with it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  A moment passes. And then I pull the recliner closer to the desk. “Whatchya workin’ on?”

  “One of the books Mama Esther gave me. Thing is . . . I’ve read it before. Well, some of it. It’s . . .” A moment of hesitation; he lets it pass. “It’s one of the ones Trevor was researching. She dug it up for me when I was trying to figure out what he was up to.”

  “That’s especially weird,” I say, reaching around him to pull open a desk drawer, “because she did the same thing for me.” I pull out the hefty tome I’d found waiting inside my apartment the day we got back from Jersey.

  “Oh shit,” Carlos says, leafing through the pages. “I remember this one too! And she left in all the Post-it note page markers he had placed.” He opens to an elaborate rendering of a man on horseback surrounded by corpses beneath a giant skull. “This was the framework for Sarco’s plan to obliterate the boundary between the living world and the dead one. A grounded ghost.” He points to the skull. “Mama Esther on the first try.” Just a slight flinch as he says her name. “Pasternak at Grand Army on the second. The ngks are hidden in the border motif, see.” He points to where a tiny, scrunched-up face peers out from behind twirling, golden leaves. Nearby, another lurks. “And this guy, the halfie.”

  “There we are.”

  “Mmhm. All part of the diabolical equation. You remember what it felt like when you were up there and the gate was opening?”

  “Barely,” I say. Sarco had possessed me and taken a kind of spiritual hacksaw to the inner workings of my soul, so it’s all a little blurry. Most of my energy was directed toward not letting him hurt the babies. “Was it awful?”

  Carlos shakes his head. “Not at all. That’s what was terrifying. Felt amazing. I was already unnerved because that madman was actually making a fair amount of sense, besides the whole thing about reaping mass death on the universe—bridging the gap between the living and the dead has always seemed like a pretty decent idea to me.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I was playing along. I knew Sarco had to be taken out. When he had me up there and things started heating up, the ngks had their hooks in Mama Esther and the gateway began opening, well . . . all this gibberish Sarco had been babbling about fulfilling my destiny and how there was more to life than being the Council’s cleanup boy suddenly felt so much truer with all that power surging through me. The Divine Gatekeeper, he called it. I felt it. It was . . . like nothing else.”

  “You walked away, though.”

  Carlos nods. “Sarco had already killed Dro and Moishe, and I knew he was caught up in how we all got like this. There was no way I’d entrust the balance of life and death to such a madman, massive influx of world-changing power or not.”

  “I respect that.”

  “But why would Mama Esther give us the books?”

  “You think she’s pointing us back to Sarco somehow? He’s fully dead, right?” That whole part is pretty hazy in my memory too—I remember tossing the little squirming ngk to Carlos, seeing Carlos raise it up to meet Sarco’s blade, and then watching with relief and horror as the ngk split clean in half. Things got blurred right as the other ngks converged on Sarco and began swarmfeasting on his soul.

  Carlos shudders a nod. “One of the foulest things I’ve ever seen but yeah, there’s no coming back from that. Trust me.”

  “Let me see the other book?”

  It’s considerably smaller, a leather-bound volume with yellowed pages, which, when he opens it, turn out to be filled with floor plans.

  “It’s Council headquarters,” I say, tracing my finger along an ink line demarcating the outer wall on First Avenue. “But these aren’t architect plans.”

  Carlos shakes his head. “It’s a ghost map. See, some of the spiritual defenses they set up are marked. And this.” He flips to a bookmarked page. It’s the basement. A darkly shaded circle marks one of the corridors. The word ENTRADA is written beside it.

  I gape at it. “At Sunset? Think she meant for us to use it as a way in?”

  “Or a way out,” Carlos says. “It’s gotta be heavily guarded, though—both sides. And there’s no way we could get an army through there without getting slaughtered one by one.”

  “So . . . what do we do?”

  He smiles up at me. “I have no damn idea.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Krys

  They dipped out a half hour ago, left this place a chilly, gray splatter of steel and concrete and the living and dead. And then darkness ate the sky, the streetlamps blinked on, and the temperature dropped; car headlights and the dull glow of bodega signs and the flicker of lighters and cell-phone screens illuminating faces, reflecting off windows, along the river and still: all those billions of megawatts surging through millions of bulbs, tiny and huge, and they only barely hold back the night.

  The empty industrial back alleys of Williamsburg, rat-infested rock piles by the river, frozen puddles and frost-covered trash bags waiting on the curb like fat old men who’ve given up. Every now and then: a bar. Inside, strangers seek warmth from the weather in half-reckless intimacies and missed connections. And drink. A gaggle of hipsters huddle close to each other, smoke and steam rising from cigarettes and lips, shadows thrown long and wavy into the deserted street.

  They don’t see me.

  No one sees me.

  South along the river. Manhattan begs my attention; I keep eyes ahead. Projects loom, Hasidics bustle back and forth; in the distance, a synagogue. Beyond that another glass tower cuts the cityscape.

  Bayliss didn’t have time to react when I blew him away. He was just there, and then I unleashed and he flew backward. Now he’s gone. We must’ve stood there for a full thirty seconds without saying a word. He’d said my name, his voice choked from the knowledge one of us would soon be dead and one would walk away having killed. I’d been scanning the street. I’d been focused. Don’t know how he’d slipped under my radar, snuck close enough to get the drop on me, but it’s Bayliss—he was always inscrutable, impossible even.

  He was the only academy instructor you could really call a master, a tactician, an artist even, and war was his art. The rest were bored, broken, corrupt old lizards that had landed there either as luxury or punishment, and either way: useless. It’s no wonder the ’catcher fighting regimen is mediocre at best. They keep an elite corps stashed away for moments like the one we all know is coming, but . . . the rest: nah. Any acuity they have, any shred of discipline or brilliance, is—was now—because of Bayliss.

  So in a way I suppose I just dealt a major blow against the Council.

  Still.

  He was my teacher. My friend, maybe.

  Do I regret it? />
  The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway stretches like a corroded metal snake through the heart of the borough. Here it slides belowground, then arches up between brick towers and loops around over the water and shoots off toward Staten Island. If you follow it around that bend and past Red Hook, you can see the dusty warehouse where the Council makes their home. I could show up. I could kill. Be destroyed in a blaze of glory.

  It’s tempting.

  I would be talked about for ages, my memory a banner beneath which the revolution would swell.

  But we already have our martyr.

  My face tightens. I cut sharply south and blaze through the streets; the gourmet pizza spots and wine bars and hood Chinese spots and nail salons become a blur. The hipsters and homeboys and homeless blend into each other as I whir past.

  They don’t see me.

  No one sees me.

  Bitch, I’m a house.

  That’s how I’ll enshrine Mama Esther in my heart: laughing. Laughing at me and herself and all the sadness and survival we shared.

  I myself blur into a shining spectral whoosh as I cascade through the Bed-Stuy streets.

  Also: I will remember her as a warrior. I’ve imagined her last ferocious moments a million different ways now; it rips through me every time. The onslaught is relentless, the ’catchers terrified, legion. The air must’ve been alive with death as the first sparks caught; the night must’ve tasted like terror.

  I can see her last yell. She’s laughing, the way I see it. Taking in blow after blow of charging ’catchers, hollering through her pain and approaching end. She must’ve known how vulnerable she was, felt it coming a mile away. Of course the Council would target the one amongst us who could never hide. Still, there’s an undeniable ballsiness to the move—she was easily the most powerful nonaligned spirit around, the most loved. The architect of that hit combined cold calculation with a fiery fury.

  I pause on Atlantic. Let the bustling night traffic blast through me. Even now, a couple years into being ethereal and barely there, watching those headlights lurch toward me sends a shock dancing out from my core. I still wait for the screeching brakes, the shrill horn, the cursing driver. Instead the car doesn’t even slow, just blasts through with a prickly iciness, and I close my eyes, stabilize, and take in each flashing millisecond of rushing steel and cushion and flesh and bone. And then it’s past and another comes and then another, and then Mama Esther laughs as she goes up in flames and somewhere some commander smiles in the ash-strewn night.