"Are you a religious man, Major Hundayi?" Keogh asked.
He bristled at the impertinence of the question. He had never discussed his faith with men beside whom he had faced death on the battlefield, and this American, this civilian, deigned to talk religion to him? "What I believe is no affair of yours," he said, as civilly as he could.
"Saddam was a fool to allow the UN to fill it in," Keogh said. "Kuwait was a pearl, but this…" He turned and approached Major Hundayi so swiftly his hand went to his holster, but Keogh was already inside the sweep of his arm before he got it unclasped. "Do you know about Delphi, Major? In ancient Greece, an oracle sat in a cave over a deep fissure that they believed reached down to the center of the earth, where Gaea, the living earth itself, whispered prophecies. They called the oracle's cave and the temple of Apollo there the Omphalos, or navel of the world. This place is infinitely more precious. This is the living womb of the earth."
Major Hundayi sneered and stepped back. "Your cousins in the United Nations did not agree with you. You Westerners are never of one mind about anything."
Dr. Keogh smiled at him. "But we will be," he said. "Soon."
He walked out to the edge of the cliff, and by the settling of his posture, Major Hundayi could tell that he was lost in memory. To heave the American over the edge now would be such a simple thing…
"It has been so long since I was here last. So much has changed since it was ours…"
"We have always stood guard here, Dr. Keogh. This has always been our land."
"Major," Dr. Keogh said, "the last time I was here, your ancestors had not yet crawled up out of the oceans." Major Hundayi jumped, because the Doctor still stood with his back to him, but the voice came from behind him. He whirled, and this time he did draw his pistol, but he could not raise it any higher than his own beltline. The man before him was Dr. Keogh, and so were the three men beside him. One was red-headed and plump, another an Arab or Turk, and the third was a white woman, with hair wrapped in a scarf. But they all looked at him with his eyes, his mind behind them, as if they believed so fervently in his vision that they had been burned away, and only he looked out of their heads. One or another spoke, but the bedrock of his voice lay beneath their words.
"When I was here last, this land was a great forest, and the ruin below us was the mouth of all Creation, and the last best hope of a race as far advanced beyond your kind as you are above the single-celled amoebae that escaped from this place and struggled to evolve into you. They failed, but their grand experiment goes on, down there. Beneath all that stone, lies the Garden of Eden."
Major Hundayi felt as if he were going to faint. His voice cracked as he asked, "And what—what will you do?"
"We are going to walk into Eden, and we are going to eat the flesh of the gods."
Hundayi bowed his head and covered his face with his hands to pray for surely this was a devil, and if there were devils then surely there must be God. "There is no god but Allah—"
"Oh, the universe is rife with gods, but not one of them cares for your miserable race. Do you know the true name of the Crawling Chaos, or the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, or the Unbegotten Source? They sleep, and hear you not. I am the only god who will hear your prayers, Major."
Hundayi sank to the ground before the Americans. Jagged black rock bit into his rubbery knees. He did not want to, but he feared if he didn't bow down, he'd stumble off the cliff-face, or be pushed. And the Major had come so far, fought so hard, just to stay alive in this shitty army, this shitty world. He was almost relieved to know that, now, nothing else mattered. What he had to do was sickening to him, but he had done it all his life, and needed no further prodding to do it now. "I pray to you, most excellent Sir," he hissed, "I beseech you spare my life, and let me serve you. But tell me, please: what are you?"
"The first," Dr. Keogh said, "and the last," and showed him.
~1~
There was dark.
There were dreams so real she thought she'd died and been reborn. A cat in the lap of someone with eternally stroking, scratching hands. A protean sliver of almost-living matter on a cradle of languid tides, her boneless body little more than a higher iteration of the blood-warm water around her. Adrift on the dying gamma ray emissions of a supernova, a blackened speck of mind that not even the death of a sun could extinguish.
The dreams exploded in black fireworks like she'd been socked in both eyes, and it was less like waking up than being reborn into a stone womb, to a mother who cannot feel her, and will never birth her out.
There were burning worms of phosphene unlight in her eyes that might be the test pattern blind people see all their lives, or maybe just chemical vapors and radioactive isotopes eating them out of her head. Her mind darting a thousand directions at once and returning with no answers. Her body coming back with the same dumb responses, no, you cannot move, no, there's nothing to see. Legs? Haven't heard from them in ages.
She screamed so loud that the ragged sound trailed off only when she had flattened her lungs, so loud she sent pebbles and dust tumbling in the dark. Not because of fear, which was growing like ice crystals in her brain with the realization of where she was. Not in hope of being found, because anyone looking for her would hardly have her rescue in mind. She screamed because she had no other way of telling herself she was alive. She was crushed between two slabs of steel-reinforced concrete deep in a collapsed warren of tunnels beneath a junkyard in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and nobody knew she was there.
Her throat was parched and nearly stopped up with dust, and her sinuses were packed with a conglomerate of sand and snot that felt like crushed glass. She could feel fluid flowing past her on the slab, but she restrained herself from drinking. She burned all over, her skin raw and blistered from her scalp to her belly. The odds on her laying in anything like water in this godforsaken hole were next to nil.
Like your chances of getting rescued.
She forced herself to lie still, forced her breathing to level off, and let her gyroscopic mind whirl itself to an exhausted standstill.
She could move her left hand before her face, but the right was pinned flat against her back in a devastating compound shoulder fracture. Still in shock, I must be, that should hurt like hell. She could feel something that might be either a tarantula or her right hand twitching uselessly against her left shoulder blade. Below there, she could feel nothing at all.
That she had survived the previous week, only to end up here, buried alive in the mad prison she almost escaped with a cure for her cancer, made a perverse kind of sense that she might have laughed at, if it were somebody else's life she was reading about in the odd news from Reuters, over breakfast. When her captors had opted for suicide over capture by federal agents, she'd bolted, and gotten free. She could still see that fleeting glimpse of moonless sky, alive with stars and roving searchlights, and that wondrous other light from on high, what the Radiant Dawn patient Stephen had called the moon ladder, that had touched her just before the earth opened up and swallowed her. She could still see that soldier, the one who'd come back for her, could still feel the fumes of that exhilaration when she'd thought the world had seemingly decided it had tired of fucking with Stella Orozco and wanted to make things right. Now the soldier was probably buried alongside her, and no light would ever touch her living skin again. This was not the end she would have foreseen for herself, stupid girl, and that was what hurt most of all.
Why are you alive right now?
She was a survivor. She had taken one misstep into her new life, and lay in the grave, unable to die. That fits, God. I'm alive because there's nobody else, who knows I'm here, nobody else to laugh at my joke. If I laugh, if I admit it—Good one, God, you really had me going there for a minute—then I'll be allowed to die.
How did you survive?
Her fucking brain, again, whirling away on imponderables while her body slipped away. Lie still and conserve your energy, your air supply. When you f
eel stronger, start tapping on metal, if you can reach any. They have trained rescue dogs, they have scent detectors, they have ground-penetrating sonar, for Christ's sake.
Not for you.
Save your strength, and stay positive. You will be rescued.
Have you ever been rescued?
Who the fuck are you? She asked herself, but she knew. It was the voice she'd always heard when life or death hinged on choices. It was the voice that had guided her through orphanhood and foster homes and a solitary life of hard-fought serenity. The voice that had abruptly cut off when she discovered she had terminal cancer of the liver. Her Guardian Angel, come back too late to do more than poke and prod her in her failure.
Nobody is coming for you. You have to get out of this yourself.
Tell me another, Guardian Angel.
You are made anew. You are as strong as your will to survive. You have been given a gift.
Her hand scuttled across the papier-mâché nightmare of her face, stretched taut over the bones except where knots of deep tissue trauma formed new features. Her fingers faltered in the alluvial ruts carved into her cheeks by tears. Incredible, that halfway to death, already mummified and entombed, her body had decided to splurge and let her have a good cry. Her breath fluttered and a whole rack of steak knives pressed against her lungs. That'd be her broken ribs, unless she was impaled on a bunch of iron rebar, too. "Thank you, God, for this precious gift," she whispered. "When I get out of here, I've got a present for you, too."
That's the spirit.
Fuck you too, Guardian Angel. I want to die.
Then die. All is a matter of will. You want to live, so you will live.
"With what?" she screamed aloud, coughing up a tempest that only got worse as her blood-flecked breath stirred up the dust coating her tomb. "I have no legs! I have one arm, and I'd have to chew my goddamned legs off to get free—" she paused for breath, coughed up sand "—but the pressure…from the concrete…is the only thing keeping me from bleeding to death."
If it is too much for you, you may die. But if you want to live—
"What, goddamit? What?"
You must dig.
She had no retort, for it was true. She would not, could not die down here. Her new body would not allow it. Death for her would not be the sad little thing that came to claim other hapless accident victims, usually before they regained consciousness. Like Prometheus on the rock, or a vampire, she would linger forever down here. Powerless to save her, her new, improved body could only infinitely prolong her suffering, unless her old mind got her out. Even as the brittle bundle of sticks that apparently was her hand pawed the matted hair from her brow and set to probing the shattered stone floor of her tomb, she knew she would get out. If she emerged a smashed and peeled skull, propelling its miserable self only by the flapping of her jaw and the flailing of her severed spine, she would escape this.
Her fingers scrabbled over the unbroken slab she lay upon, creeping ever outwards almost to full extension before finding a crack. The sensation was unspeakably strange; she felt none of the textures or temperatures of that which her hand touched. It was like trying to work a telephone with a glove on a broomstick. Had the nerves in her fingers been cut, or had her whole nervous system given up the ghost and signed off? Shock, she told herself. At least you can still move it. Die trying.
She forced her hand to claw at the edges of the nearest small rock underneath her slab, to wedge her numb fingers into the fissure and pry the rock loose. It might have taken hours, but at last she held a shard of concrete in her fist, as more dirt and rocks clattered into the hole she'd made. Her hand seized up and the rock tumbled out of her grasp, and she realized with a start that she could still feel pain, for her hand felt as if it had caught fire. Maybe it was burning, and she was blind. But there was no warmth from the flames that ate her nerves. She shrieked and tried to blow on her hand, but only sand and spit came out.
Stella froze. A sound, not of her own making.
The rock she'd dropped had struck something. The sound was muffled and faint, but so familiar to her that it made all the difference in the world between going through the motions of trying to survive, and actually getting out. The rock had struck sheet metal. The only sheet metal surfaces she'd encountered in the Mission bunker had been the blast doors that sealed off the motor pool/hangar. Last night, she'd gone to those doors first when running from Delores Mrachek, she'd banged on them for help from the federal agents who surrounded the bunker, and they'd shot at her. She knew those doors with her fists. If they were below her, then she was closer to the surface than she'd had any reason to hope.
She clenched her hand into a fist. Her nails gouged the meat of her palms and clicked on bone. A short bark of a scream escaped her lips, but the pain brought her back wholly into herself. There was very little blood, but her hand felt as if she'd torn every tendon and ligament in it.
Dig.
She pried loose more rocks, working herself into a fever that painted the dark with brilliant hallucinations, before she felt the slab beneath her shift. It was only a few millimeters, but she felt it in her legs, saw the wheeling phosphene mandalas tilt on their axes before her, and heard the grit of something harder than her own head as the concrete blocks settled into the tiny tunnel she'd begun to make. The flooring she'd been picking at was nearly pulverized by the weight of the bunker's outer shell collapsing onto it, but she had no idea how thick that floor was, or how many floors lay beneath it. I see where you're going with this, God, she thought. In digging my way to freedom, I only dig myself a deeper grave.
You can die right here.
Fuck you, Guardian Angel.
You're going too slowly, Stella.
What do you want me to do, then? This?
Stella reached up behind her and clawed at the slab pinning her down, Its edges were cleaner, a neat break along a stress line, and she dislodged only crumbs, and broke off her nail and most of the flesh left on her pinky finger. She might've been trying to crush herself rather than try to escape. When her hand grasped the protruding length of rebar, she didn't even realize what it was. She seized upon it and yanked down on it with all the strength she had left in her ravaged arm. She even heard the muscles of her deltoid separating from her humerus, and the snapping of her wrist, before they were drowned out by the growl of the concrete slab unzipping itself into shards and crumbling over her.
Then the darkness came alive again and took her away.
When she awakened, she could move.
Moving was pain.
Her right arm was dead meat at her side, completely popped out of its socket and held on only by the twisted wreck of her shoulder muscles. The elbow was blown out, too. Her left was little better, shaking like a dying dog as she put weight on it.
She rolled over.
Catfish moved more gracefully on the bottom of a rowboat after you smashed their brains in with an oar. She flopped about in the relative stadium of open space beyond the slab, reveling in the backlogged messages of agony now flowing freely to her brain. She was free. Still some twenty feet under concrete and hard-packed desert sand, but free. She should be dead, now. No doubt about it, if the burial hadn't killed her and she hadn't asphyxiated, then she never should have awakened from her faint after she freed herself from the slab. She'd lost a lot of blood, her vision writhed with faces she'd never seen and places she'd never been but all that was almost behind her. She was still alive. She was changed. The cancer couldn't kill her, now. Nothing would ever threaten to take her life again. She could make noise now, the dead would rise to dig her out.
No one's coming to save you, Stella.
This is something you have to do for yourself.
She knew the voice was right, even as the words became shapeless blobs in her mind. She had to move, to get out. She had to put the pain aside and move.
The crawlspace she followed was only a little roomier than the pincers between the slabs, but it inclined downwards, down
a jagged slide of shattered concrete shot through with spears of rebar, and slick with fluid that burned her skin off as she wormed through it. Her arms flailed at the ground like broken fins, every motion a fiery seizure, but she knew they were growing back. It was a good pain, and brought her back to herself. The cancer in her—was her, now. The blooming black and pink tumors she'd seen in Stephen, the man who'd been hit by the train—what, a week ago? Stanching the flow of blood, growing to replace tissue and bone, even lost limbs. It must have burned like this, she thought.
"We can rebuild her," she wheezed. "Stronger, faster—" She tried to hum the Bionic Woman theme song, but had to stop when she coughed up something solid.
She humped over a slab of concrete and slid the last few feet into the sheet metal door. Exhaustion burned her from the inside out. Lactic acid in her muscles must be past lethal levels. She shivered all over, and tried to catch her breath. She lay head-down against the sheet metal of the blast doors. The razor-puckered mouth of a bullet hole cut into her cheek.
Rest.
When she woke this time, she could feel cool air on her cheek. It came from the bullet hole. She could smell the desert, through the ashes and oil and toxic waste and the dead—oh that's me.
There was no pain. She felt tired and sore, and her right arm still flopped, but the head of the humerus had popped into the rotator cuff while she slept.
She pressed her lips to the hole and sucked in fresh air. She gagged and coughed as her lungs inflated as if for the first time. The thought occurred to her. If she was so close to fresh air, why hadn't she been found already? Surely a dog would have sniffed her out. Scared of a little toxic waste, maybe more explosives. If they came looking for anything in here, it'd be with bulldozers.
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