“Never but me when I give you an order, soldier!” the General yelled. Behind those mirrorshades Hanna felt his eyes were smoldering coals, burning her in a little, private Hell the General no doubt imagined for her every time he looked her way.
She bit her lip and made it a point not to say “Yes, Sir.”
Traffic diminished as they followed the road away from campus. Eventually they were outside the city limit, heading back toward the interstate north of where they’d exited. Hanna kept going.
She thought back to Deuce. Who had he been? More importantly, what had the General done to him? There were answers, but Hanna felt that maybe she didn’t really want to know them. Everything was tied together, she knew that much: her Go Away feeling, the dream, the General, Deuce, the reason she hated peaches, that blonde girl… and wherever they were going, now. It was all connected, all part of a greater whole.
“There,” the General said, pointing. Hanna knew it when she saw it. Three brick buildings arranged in a U-shape. She’d never been there before, but there was no mistaking that those buildings were their destination, drawing the Jeep toward them like a huge magnet. Hanna parked the Jeep in front of the last door at the left arm of the U. The door was open, inviting them inside.
“Stay,” the General ordered, as he got out. He went into the apartment, and Hanna stayed. She tried to will herself to put the Jeep in reverse, just drive away and never look back, but something stopped her. Some overpowering urge made her want to stay.
But not stay in the Jeep. She had to see what was going on inside. What had the General done to Deuce? She felt the answers, some of the answers at any rate, would be found inside this apartment.
She went inside.
Bookshelves lined the walls, packed tightly with all kinds of books. The General stood in the middle of a bare living room facing a man who sported a tattoo of an eagle and the words PROPERTY OF USA written across his chest.
“This is Galactic Bill,” the General said. “Remember?”
Remember…
She closed her eyes.
The dragon spat fire at Hanna, the Earth jolted and Hanna fell face first into the dirt. She saw herself, her body half buried in the dirt as flames danced in her chest. Fire ate her inside, fire seared her skin, fire licked her mind.
No!
No, it wasn’t her the fire consumed. It was Galactic Bill, the one who always stood apart, alone, always staring off into the middle distance. He was burning, and every aspect of his being was centered around his own death, to experience the final transmigration as the body burned away. His spirit would rise on the hot air with the smoke of his charred corpse, to join God. They would all join God, become One within Him. Galactic Bill’s lips spread into a beatific smile just moments before the flames burned them away from his face.
Hanna snapped back into herself, pulled her face out of the dirt, and saw Galactic Bill, his body a torch, standing rigid and waiting patiently to die.
“Okay, enough of that!” the General ordered. Hanna opened her eyes and realized the three of them had been sharing the dream of Galactic Bill’s death. Galactic Bill smiled beneath his bushy mustache.
“So it was your idea,” the General said to him. “Become One.” He said it like spit.
Galactic Bill shook his head. “Not this. Not what you’re doing. This isn’t God. This is perverse.”
“God is perverse,” the General countered.
Hanna had no idea what they were talking about, but she agreed with Galactic Bill. Whatever the General was doing felt perverse. It felt wrong on a cosmic scale. And she was right in the middle of it.
“You’re just as beautiful as ever,” Galactic Bill said to her.
Hanna blinked. “Huh?”
“You. Just the way he remembered you.”
“Who remembered me?” Hanna asked.
“You don’t know?”
Hanna shook her head.
Galactic Bill looked at the General. “She really doesn’t know, does she?”
“I know she doesn’t know,” the General replied. “That’s why I’m keeping her with me. Until she knows. Then… we’ll see.”
“Jovah remembered us all,” Galactic Bill told Hanna. None of us would be here now, if not for Jovah.”
“Who’s Jovah?” Hanna asked.
“He’s us,” Galactic Bill said. “He’s God. He created us. He remembered us from before, then he created us.” He pointed at the General. “He’s not really General Archimedes Carter. I’m not really Galactic Bill. You’re not really Hanna. It’s simple, when you think about it.”
It didn’t sound simple to Hanna.
“I’d rather we not get into it,” the General said.
“She has the dream, but she doesn’t know what it means.”
“Obviously.”
“What are you talking about?” Hanna asked. Maybe Deuce had tried to tell her—keeping me me—but she figured that was about drugs. Or had she merely imagined it? Had she really been in Deuce’s head?
“You’re a memory of the real Hanna,” Galactic Bill told her. “Your boyfriend really loved you. You were the last thing he thought of as he died.”
“I don’t understand,” Hanna replied. “What does that mean?” It sounded like she was a figment of someone’s imagination, like a child’s invisible friend. But she wasn’t invisible!
“It means—” Galactic Bill said, but the General cut him off.
“It means I have orders to carry out,” the General said, his voice low, menacing. “And I will carry them out, perverse or not.”
Galactic Bill sighed, looked at Hanna with sad eyes. The General also looked at her. She feel the hardness in his eyes through the mirrorshades, eyes like rocks embedded in the sockets of his head.
“Watch this,” the General said.
The next thing happened was so quick that Hanna missed the transition between the three of them just standing there to this: the General grabbed Galactic Bill by the shoulders, then the General opened his mouth wide, wider than any normal human being could, and wider still. The General’s mouth opened wide enough to fit Galactic Bill’s entire head in it. And that, insanely, was what the General was trying to do, to shove Galactic Bill’s head into his mouth. Galactic Bill struggled, pushed against the General’s chest.
“Go away!” Galactic Bill yelled at Hanna. “Go!”
Hanna backed away toward the door, but she didn’t turn to run. She stood transfixed by the spectacle before her. The General was inhaling, trying to suck Galactic Bill into his maw, which seemed to have unhinged. The General’s mirrored facade was facing the floor behind him now, his jaw was open that wide. Hanna felt a light breeze in the room, blowing toward the General’s mouth. A moth got caught in it and he sucked it down. The wind picked up, and Hanna felt it suck at her hair. A thin paperback sitting on a shelf got pulled from the shelf and disappeared into his throat. The wind got even stronger, and other books were pulled from the shelves, creating a miniature twister of paper as the pages were ripped free and whirled around the General and Galactic Bill. Hanna held onto the doorjamb, tried to reach out to Galactic Bill, to help him, but whirling paper sliced up her arm with paper cuts. The paper crammed into the General’s mouth around Galactic Bill, who’d managed to brace himself against the General’s chest. The General’s face suffered dozens, hundreds of paper cuts. Finally a hardcover book flew from the shelf and hit Galactic Bill in the face as he was just managing to successfully push himself further away from the General.
His arm slipped into the General’s gaping maw.
The General’s mouth snapped shut with a sickening crack as it snapped Galactic Bill’s arm in two. Galactic Bill jerked his head back and howled in pain.
Hanna didn’t stick around to see what happened next. Within moments she was running halfway across a field that surrounded the apartment buildings, and she just kept running.
“Cool, let’s go,” one of the dressed-all-in-black girls said. There were
two of them standing in the street, looking at a flyer stapled to a streetlight pole.
“You know how to get there?” the other asked. Their lips were black. Their eyes were lined in black, and their fingernails were painted black… but their skin was almost ghostly white.
“Thataway,” the first one said, pointing down the street.
“Cool. So let’s go!” They walked down to the end of the block and got into a VW bug spray-painted with little skulls-and-crossbones. Stickers on the back of the Beetle said things like The Cure, Lords of the New Church, Morrisey, Joy Division. The little VW backfired when it started, then jerked forward and away from the curb, zipping off into the darkness, leaving behind it a blue-white cloud of exhaust.
Hanna stepped out of the shadows to take a look at the flyer. The toxic smell left over by the VW made her cough. She read the flyer:
LOCAL MATRIARCHS OF MALICIOUS MUZIK THE CHIX!
WITH
THE PSICKENING PSOUNDS OF THE PSYCHOTICS!
AT DAVE-O’S SHOP
B THERE!
The words were written over what looked like a photocopy of someone’s face. Hanna looked closely, and realized she recognized the face. It was her. The blonde she saw crossing the street earlier.
It sounded like a party, which meant people, and Hanna really wanted a lot of people around her at that moment.
Dave-O’s Shop… There was an address at the bottom of the flyer, and a little map drawn in the upper left corner. She took the flyer down, folded it up and pocketed it, and started walking.
Thataway.
The General leaned back and emitted a belch he figured they could hear all the way back at the Pentagon—or would hear if they didn’t have their heads stuck halfway up their asses. The Pentagon… What a joke. He showed up one day, all military salute and medals, rigid and square-shouldered, wearing his mirrorshades, clicking his heels and goose-stepping right past security. He was a General. He walked it and talked it. No one questioned him. He was one of dozens just like him. No one paid him any attention beyond respectful deference.
Of course, he’d been inside all along. Deep, deep inside, way down below the lowest levels of the Pentagon, locked away inside a sensory depravation tank that was itself sealed up behind a wall of cinder blocks and plaster, forgotten. Jovah, that is. He was Jovah.
Galactic Bill, who was now part of the General, a PROPERTY OF tattoo across the General’s chest… yeah, Galactic Bill had figured it almost right, but not quite. And he, the General before absorbing Deuce and Galactic Bill, he also had it almost right. Now he understood things a little better.
There were only two left, now, aside from himself. Both were stronger than the General, but were less aware of the truth about themselves. That gave the General an edge. Hanna was going to be trouble because she still thought of herself as an individual. The other… well, he’d find her the same way he found Deuce and Galactic Bill and all the others before them, and deal with her the same way, too.
All the dying memories of Alice Company made flesh. Sometimes he could scarcely believe it, yet he was it. He shook his head at the thought of it, that this was reality. It was his best shot with Hanna, though. If her reality had been shaken up enough, and he could move quickly enough, she might not be able to figure out what was happening in time to assert herself and the General might come out of all this as the dominant personality instead of the alternative. What was the alternative? There was no alternative, really. It was nonexistence. Not even just death, but obliteration, annihilation of the self, of the very being, absorbed like water into a sponge to become merely another aspect of the sponge.
So it would have to be Hanna last. The other one next.
But first the General needed to rest, to recover from assimilating Galactic Bill. Each time wore him out, and here he’d done it twice in one day. No way he could continue. Too bad for Hanna she freaked out and ran off. Had she figured it out, she could have easily absorbed the General, as weak as he was at that moment.
He belched again, a long, loud, wet one. A mist of warm blood sprayed the carpet. The General closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall of Galactic Bill’s apartment, and within moments was fast asleep.
Hanna walked down the side streets, trying to stay in the shadows, trying to ignore what was happening inside her head. She could sense him. The General was asleep, dreaming the dream, or nightmare, and there was a bridge between them, or a tunnel, and Hanna could see through it.
There was something different about the dream the way the General dreamed it. The blonde girl was in it, her blue eyes like the blue at the base of a flame. Amid the destruction of Alice Company, the General dreamed that the blonde girl was laughing, smiling at him, holding him in her arms like a baby, gently kissing him on the forehead, telling him everything was all right… and the war dream receded to the background, barely there. It was peaceful and safe.
There were others around, but they were shadows, shades, they didn’t shine like the blonde girl. When she was there, the others all but ceased to exist. Nothing mattered but being with the blonde girl. She was everything.
Hanna shivered in the breeze at an intersection. It was dark, and had cooled down considerably. Pine trees whistled almost inaudibly in the wind. A half-moon peeked down at Hanna through the leaves and branches of live oaks, magnolias, poplars. It was a very lonely feeling. She kept walking.
Every two or three intersections she saw another flyer. Concentrating on where she was going helped keep the General out of her head. He wanted to absorb her, she knew. She didn’t quite understand what that implied, though. It couldn’t be good, even though something inside her wanted it to happen. She rejected that little piece of herself.
Hanna heard a familiar noise, far away but getting closer. The noise filled her black terror.
Chugchugchugchugchug.
“It’s a helicopter,” she said aloud. “That’s all it is. Nothing to be afraid of.”
Chugchugchugchugchug.
Dragon! her heart screamed. RUN! But she didn’t run. She picked up her pace a bit as she continued walking, but she would not give herself to panic. That would be the end of her, she realized. She could not let herself believe what the General had said. She could not ever, even in her wildest nightmares, have been in the Vietnam war. She would have been a six-year-old Marine! She wasn’t that old. They sent ’em to die young in ’Nam, and sure, some six-year-old kids died, but they weren’t carrying M-16s with Semper Fi tattooed on their arms.
The rapid-fire, growling noise got louder, which meant it was getting closer. It could not be what she was imagining. It could not be a helicopter-dragon with rotary wings!
The roar of the helicopter was so loud it drowned out her thoughts, and she stopped walking. She stood motionless, waiting for it. She was like a deer paralyzed by approaching headlights, unable to move until it’s too late and SMACK Bambi’s roadkill. Hanna looked up, saw the lights of the helicopter right overhead. Her heart vibrated with the beat of the rotary blades, the echoing cacophony off the cement gutters down the sides of the street, the shuddering fear of the Victorian houses as their windows shook in their frames.
Then the noise slowly died as the helicopter continued on its way. Hanna watched it go, and realized she wasn’t breathing. She didn’t need to breathe. I’m not real, she thought.
But the helicopter passing overhead jarred something in her mind, shook something loose, and she remembered…
She closed her eyes.
Letter written from her sweetheart, waiting for her back home, her prom date, fiancée, wife to be. Sex in her letters, naughty bits, adolescent erotica for a lonely soldier of Alice. “I think about you all the time when I’m in bed, after everyone in the house is asleep, and I play with myself. My fingers wet. When you come back I’ll do all those things you wanted me to do before you left, okay? I promise. It’s all I can think about.” Pictures of her naked, and her letters passed around to the others, to Deuce, Galactic Bi
ll, Jovah… Visual aids for masturbation. They didn’t love her, they just wanted to fuck her.
Hanna opened her eyes. A letter to whom? From her? Apparently so. Jovah had forgotten his name, but Hanna was remembered.
They didn’t love her. They loved the blonde girl.
Hanna loved her, too, but she hated herself. No… She hated Jovah, whoever he was. The greater self, Alice Company through the looking-glass, in Wonderland’s war. What was she thinking, writing those letters, sending those pictures? Had she truly thought that only the recipient would see them? Boys will be boys, though. Or had she secretly hoped the others would see them, too, get a cheap thrill at her expense, the cost of some stamps. She’d become the imaginary object of desire for an entire company of Marines. What girl wouldn’t want that?
“I’m not invisible,” Hanna said aloud.
Born of fire, born of acid, born of death. Can’t get much more real than that. Jovah did not exist within her, Hanna decided. She would excise him, somehow. She wanted nothing to do with him, nor with the General. She could still feel him out there, asleep… And there was one other, only one left, but Hanna barely felt a connection to her, barely felt the other was female. Not sex, though. Innocence. Hanna sighed. How nice it would have been to be innocence.
Had the General found all the rest and eaten them for breakfast, or sucked them through a straw like Jell-O? How many had there been in Alice Company? Had they been sprinkled all across the country, and the General was all the King’s horses and all the King’s men putting Jovah back together again?
A thumpthumpthumping sound snapped Hanna out of her musings. Her heart raced. At first she thought it was chopper returning for her, and her initial impulse was to run. But she realized it wasn’t the helicopter. She got closer and heard it again. Thumpthumpthumpthump. Then the raw shriek of an electric guitar joined the noise and she realized the thumping was a drum.
Hanna stood in the parking lot of a warehouse, the front half of which was a furniture store. Around the side, the wall was spray-painted with the word DAVE-O in huge, red letters. The parking lot was lit by dull yellow streetlights and a floodlight over the door to the back part of the warehouse. The place was packed with people and automobiles. The people caught Hanna’s attention. Like the Goth girls earlier, they seemed to all be dressed for effect, mostly in black, some in combat boots, leather jackets, bandannas… Some stood around drinking cans of beer, a few were off to one side smoking pot, a few passed around flasks of liquor, and every other person was smoking a cigarette or looking bored.
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