Glassing the Orgachine

by David Marusek

  Adam told Ginger to fetch Deut something warm to drink. She went to the kitchen to put the kettle on and stood by the door to listen. Poppy was questioning Deut, who was doing her best to answer him.

  “They took my brother.”

  “Who took him?”

  “Demons.”

  “What Demons? Beezus?”

  “No, lord, not Beezus.”

  “Then who? Rangers?”

  “Ranger Danger, yes.”

  Poppy recoiled at the news and exchanged a glance with Adam.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  “Who else?”

  “One of them who came looking for the angel’s trumpet.”

  “The federal dicks?”

  “Yes, lord, one of them.”

  “And they came in a helicopter and took him?”

  “I tried to stop them. I rebuked them, lord, like we did with Ginger’s demons. I tried to cast them out — but I failed. They were too strong and I couldn’t do it all by myself. I fought as hard as I could. I promise I did.”

  Corny came in just then, along with Proverbs and Hosea. Proverbs confirmed the part about the helicopter. He and Hosea had been searching in town and heard one fly over.

  Poppy asked Deut, “Why did they take him?”

  “They wanted the key to the pit.”

  This gave Poppy pause.

  “I tried to stop him,” Deut went on. “I really did. You have to believe me. But Uzzie wanted to go with them. He said Elder Brother Jesus told him to go. And Uzzie lied to me. He said he would come back, but he didn’t.”

  She broke down in tears again and couldn’t go on. Several of her listeners were also crying, and Poppy seemed to be weighing all that she told him. The key to the pit, after all, was at the bottom of the same cistern where Uzzie had drowned.

  Ginger wanted to hear more, but she counted heads and counted them again. All of the small children were in the house, probably listening from the top of the stairs. All of them except the drowned, kidnapped boy. All of the middle kids and grownups but Mama P were in the common room, entirely focused on Deut.

  No one was watching the gate. It was now or never.

  Ginger brought her grieving friend a mug of hot, sugary tea, then quietly returned to the kitchen and left the house through the back door.

  ON THE WAY to the gate, Ginger stopped in the machine room where she had hidden a bug-out bag. It contained an extra flashlight and headlamp; stale bread and a lump of cheese; a water bottle filled with cold, cistern water; needle-nosed pliers; her own Bible that Poppy had stolen from her; and the snub-nosed .38 Special she’d found. Most important of all, she had brand new spark plugs for the Polaris and a socket wrench.

  Deut owned the nicest, warmest parka of the bunch, but it was damp from use. So Ginger borrowed Sarai’s instead, as well as her snowpants, hat, scarf, mitts, and boots. All a perfect fit and unused since the family’s night flight to the keep. Hang in there, Sarai. Help is on the way.

  The boys kept drums of gasoline in the entrance area. Two plastic jerry jugs with premixed fuel sat beside them, one for the Bearcat and one for the ancient machines. She took both jugs with her. Before stepping through the sally door, she went down her mental checklist a final time. She’d never found her stolen phone, and the Prophecys didn’t believe in snowmachine helmets, but she could do without. So long, suckers.

  Ginger found the family’s two functioning snowmachines in their usual spot at the bottom of the slide. Her first choice was the brand new Bearcat 5000XTGS that the Prophecys had purchased in Anchorage (and pointedly not from her dad who was the Arctic Cat dealer in Wallis). It was a sweet ride that would give her the edge even if she decided to go all the way to Chitina. Which she wasn’t planning to do. Making it to the Bunyans’ would be good enough. She could use their phone to call her parents and the State Troopers. And just let Proverbs come after her and try to mess with Chas. She’d enjoy watching that actually.

  But the key was missing from the Bearcat, as she had expected, so she checked out the old Polaris. Its ignition key had long ago been replaced by a toggle switch. But, as per Poppy’s orders, the last person using it had dutifully removed a spark plug.

  No worries!

  Ginger popped a new plug into place and tightened it with the wrench. The engine was still warm, and it fired up with ease. The machine may have been a dinosaur, but it ran smooth enough. She shut it down and looked it over with a flashlight. The gas gauge was busted, and she took no chances and topped off the tank with a jerry jug.

  Next, Ginger opened the Bearcat hood and began snipping wires with her pliers. She hurled the cut pieces into the darkness as far as she could throw. Then she slipped her headlamp on over her hat and moved the handgun to her parka pocket. Ready.

  Ginger restarted the Polaris and hopped on. A final glance up the switchback trail told her that no one was in pursuit. Later, freaks.

  EVERY MARCH SINCE Ginger was a little girl, the Lawther family spent a week at their remote cabin near Talkeetna. They would load food and gear into the Ford Explorer and haul a double snowmachine trailer to a pull-out south of Denali National Park. Ginger would ride on Daddy’s machine between his legs while baby brother Rory rode with Mom. Sometimes Daddy would let her steer. On her seventh birthday her parents gave her her first, very own snowmachine, an Arctic Cat Z120.

  Thus she was no stranger to snowmachining, and she cleared the Prophecy prison compound in under a minute. It was cold out, but she burned with excitement. When she reached the fork to the ruined cabin on Trapper’s Slough, she hung right toward the Bunyans’ and town. The trail was winding in places, and willow and alder brush arched over it, so she resisted the urge to open the throttle. There was no hurry. She was free. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, she was free at last! A survivor, an escapee, a winner. Just wait till she got home. They’d never believe her story. A prisoner in a cold stone cell? In Alaska? Possessed by demons? They’d call her crazy, but she’d have the last laugh. She’d drink from the cup of justice when she saw the old goat and his three stooges sitting behind bars. And Sue too, for that matter. And the children will be educated and Sarai counseled and Deut liberated. There’s a lot of world out there, Deut. More than you can imagine.

  The machine’s single headlight bobbed along, throwing the trail into jittery high relief, all white and black, snow and shadow, and she accelerated in the straight sections where there wasn’t a lot of overhang.

  Take my phone away, will you? Take my Bible? What kind of a preacher steals a person’s Bible? It was crazy. His Bible holster was a joke. It’s a Bible, lord, not a weapon.

  She sped up a little more, leaning into the curves, getting a feel for the ancient machine’s steering and suspension.

  Proverbs was the worst, worse even than the old goat, and she refused to allow herself to feel one shred of sympathy for his tender feelings. So you got a dry eye, poor baby. And you get migraines. Lots of people get migraines. Man up why don’t you. Lock me up for my own good? Uh, I don’t think so. Like I could ever love you, creep. Like I could ever, ever love you.

  She wasn’t so bold with the devil. She couldn’t blow him off so easily. Because . . . because he was the devil. She’d always known through her faith that demons and devils existed, but they had been more theoretical than real, and she had never for a moment expected to meet one close up. But she had. She not only met the devil, she called him out. Maybe that wasn’t such a smart thing to do, but she was glad she’d done it and rather proud of herself. Just wait till she told her dad. She had tangled with Satan and lived to tell the tale.

  Except that the tale was still in play. For she had not only met the devil but seen his handiwork. She had seen those agents come down from the mine. There was something wrong with them. She agreed with Deut in this regard, demons in choppers. For the last week since her so-called exorcism, she had tried to get one of the boys to tell her what had happened in the mine that day. Why we
re the agents even there? Why were they acting so strange? No one would give her a straight answer. She prayed she didn’t run into them on the trail.

  But even Satan in person and bizarre agents weren’t the worst of it. What Ginger really feared, as she opened the throttle a little more, was what if the freaks were right and this actually was the End Times? What if civilization had fallen while she was locked up and Wallis lay in ruins? Why else would her dad forget about her? She was a week overdue and they hadn’t even checked on her. Or maybe they’d come and found the empty house. But surely someone would have pointed them to the mine. Surely her dad would have called the Troopers by now. Something was wrong. She prayed for her family.

  A tree branch or something whacked the windshield in front of Ginger’s face, startling her and causing her to swerve, and as she leaned in to regain control, a second something struck her in the chest. It was heavy and alive, and it nearly knocked her off her seat. It clung to her parka though she batted at it with one hand while braking with the other until she and the snowmachine took flight and crashed and rolled and . . .

  SNOW MELTING ON her cheek brought her back. And the pain did too. Oh, her eye hurt! But not half as much as her right shoulder and arm. Broken bad and bleeding. She was bleeding inside and out. Her legs she couldn’t feel at all, neither one. Nor move them. Cold, she was very cold, beyond shivering. How long had she been out? Long enough for a blanket of snow to cover her. Where exactly was she and what had happened to her? Oh, this was bad. This was serious.

  There wasn’t much of a moon out, but Ginger could see enough with one eye to tell that she was lying on her back on a rock outcropping partway down a steep bluff. It all started coming back to her, her escape, the snowmachine ride, being struck. She knew where she was, close to the Bunyan place. She sure could use a phone about now, and a tall drink of water. She’d give anything for a glass of water and someone to help her sit up to drink it. Her bug-out bag with the water bottle was gone, or maybe she was lying on it. She scooped a little snow into her mouth with her good hand. She couldn’t even feel her face anymore.

  She might still have the gun. If she could reach it and fire it into the air, maybe someone would hear it. Maybe the Bunyans, from a couple of miles away. Or maybe the Prophecys were already on the trail looking for her. No, not likely; she’d messed up their only other working snowmachine.

  The gun was in her right parka pocket, but her right arm was shattered. She tried reaching over with her left hand but couldn’t quite manage it. The whole right side of her parka was sticky wet with blood. Jesus. Daddy.

  At least her shoulder didn’t hurt anymore. It had gone numb. Small mercies.

  She heard a sound, like the rustle of a skirt, behind her head. Deut? No, that was crazy. But someone was there; she was sure of it.

  “Hello?” she said. “Who’s there?”

  No answer except for more rustling. A fox? A wolf? Her heart raced and she groped again for the gun. “Hello?”

  Ginger arched her neck back as far as she could to try to see. She saw ravens, lots of ravens, ruffling their shiny black feathers, waiting.

  The Angel's HAARP

  AH1 1.0

  WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, the van with government plates rolled through sleepy Glennallen and turned north on the Richardson. A few miles more and it turned east toward Canada at Gakona Junction. Deep forest pressed on both sides of the highway. The van passed no other vehicle going in either direction. There were no pullouts, but the shoulders were plowed, and the van left the blacktop and came to a halt.

  No lights anywhere, except for a distant grid of aircraft beacons. The two men in the van didn’t need light in order to see. Neither did they need to speak. They sat in the van awhile watching the sky. One offered the other a pint (0.47 l) bottle of HEET, a gasoline additive. He opened his own bottle with his thumb and popped the plastic cap into his mouth like a breath mint before swigging down the isopropyl alcohol contents. They tossed their empties on the passenger-side floor.

  Masterson burped (as a joke).

  They got out of the van and sniffed the air awhile. Bertolli fetched a coil of climbing rope from the rear. They crossed the highway and entered the snowy woods of black spruce. The trees were short and spindly and cocked at odd angles in the melting permafrost. A drunken forest.

  They came to a utility easement, a clearing about thirty feet (9 m) wide, that ran due east-west and was part of the rural power grid. The hiking was easier here, even for strivers, and they followed the string of utility poles another hundred yards (91 m) before they paused to sniff the air again.

  Bertolli tied one end of the rope around his own waist and gave the rest of it to Masterson. They both studied this arrangement for a moment and came to the same conclusion. Bertolli untied the rope and retied it around his neck. Masterson gave the rope a tug, nearly pulling Bertolli off his feet. Now they were both satisfied.

  Bertolli entered the forest while Masterson remained in the easement break and played out the line. The rope shushed its way through the snow, and soon Bertolli was swallowed up by trees.

  The rope stopped advancing for a moment, and a moment later jerked violently as a giant man reared up over the treetops. A five-story-tall Bertolli. The air crackled with the sound of a hundred trees snapping. Then, just as abruptly, the giant shrank and vanished.

  After a couple of minutes, the rope resumed playing out. But Giant Bertolli, the Crusher of Trees, reappeared and loomed over the landscape. He turned around and started back toward Masterson, flickering big and small several times more before disappearing for good.

  Masterson loitered in the easement, giving the rope a couple of tugs every once in a while. After half an hour with no answering tug, he began to haul it in. There was a dead weight on the other end, but it slipped through the trees easy enough. It bumped a few but didn’t get hung up.

  AH2 1.0

  WHEN JACE GOT home from the volcano, he was too agitated to think straight. He could not believe he had taken Deut home like that. He was such a coward to make her face the wrath of her family alone. But what could he do about it except make things worse? How would her brothers react to a park ranger bringing their sister home all freaked out and babbling about Uzzie jumping into a volcano? For that matter, what had happened to Uzzie? Jace couldn’t explain it to himself. First, the little kid is tossing boulders around like Nerf balls, and then he climbs into a poisonous volcano vent? And what did the alien’s golden BB have to do with it?

  No sooner had Jace removed his outerwear than he started putting it back on. He had to help her somehow. But how? What could he do that wouldn’t make a bad situation worse? He needed a plan before he could do anything.

  So he kicked up the Preway drip rate and built a fire in the wood stove. He opened a can of Dinty Moore stew for dinner but couldn’t eat much of it. The gooey concoction sat on his stomach. He had to do something, but what? Internet service was still up, but what keywords could you google for a situation like this? Altered humans? Zombies? The men and boy were clearly altered but not exactly zombies. Uzzie showed enough compassion to save his sister and him before taking his plunge into the magma. And Masterson was characteristically sarcastic. This wasn’t typical zombie behavior, at least according to the Walking Dead.

  Was the alien behind all this? It clearly wanted Uzzie to take its tiny artifact to the authorities, but maybe it didn’t know the men were altered. How could it know, unless it was the one who altered them. Maybe they had frightened it while pursuing the glass tulip and it zapped them with something that made them crazy. And crazy strong. So why did they kidnap the boy when all he wanted to do was bring them the artifact? Except they didn’t kidnap him; Uzzie was all in. He’d willingly climbed into the chopper, and it sure looked like no one had had to force him into the volcano either. None of it made any sense.

  Unless . . . the alien and/or its tulips were great at sucking the energy out of things — gasoline, batteries, human bodies. So why n
ot tap into the energy of an entire volcano? If Uzzie could deliver the BB to Mount Wrangell’s magma chamber, which according to Wikipedia was located about six miles (10 km) below the surface, it would solve all of its energy problems. Turdboy would no longer have to suck innocent bystanders dry.

  So they must all be working for the alien. It had assimilated them, including Uzzie, and recruited them to its cause. That had to be it. (But what happened to that other agent, Nabor? Had he died in the original confrontation?) The baby-talking little non-terrestrial must be in charge of the whole affair.

  Jace put on his parka again and went out to the shed to assemble a tulip sampling kit on the workbench. A hacksaw with a diamond carbide blade, a glass cutter, a mini-cutting torch, a sledgehammer, a jar of battery acid, and other tools of destruction that might help him chip off a piece. Threw it all into a duffle bag. And since he’d have to carry all of it up the side of a mountain, he strapped the bag to a pack frame.

  He tied the kit to his snowmobile and started the engine. While it idled he went in to don the rest of his expedition gear and fill a thermos with hot coffee.

  Wouldn’t you know it, no sooner did he enter the house than his phone rang. Naturally, there was no caller ID or number.

  “Hello?”

  Angel lord thank.

  “Stop right there. I’m not a lord, and you’re no angel. There’s no such thing as angels. They don’t exist. You’re not an angel, okay?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Hello? You still there?”

  This one here.

  “Don’t you have a name? I’ll call you by your name. My name is Jace, not lord. What’s your name?”

  Name Missing One.