Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "Guess we better practice so I can prepare not to be boring. Get to know your ins and outs."

  She doesn't respond right away and Wilson wonders if she's actually considering dropping trou and fucking in the flowers, but then she says, "I'm reading heat. Fluctuating. Like it's a fire up ahead."

  Wilson switches on his helmet array. A wall of fire over two miles deep, maybe an hour away, extending to infinity. "The suits might handle it, we move through fast."

  "They might," GRob says. "They might not."

  Though her faceplate he reads a grievous uncertainty, an emotion he refuses to let himself feel. He knows to his soul there's hope, a path, a trick to all this, a secret adit, a magic door. "I'm not shutting down," he says. "And it's no use going back. Like Baxman said, 'Devil's loose in the world.'"

  "You believe that?"

  "You don't?"

  "I saw it, but … I don't know."

  "What else you gonna believe?" he asks. "That we can walk back out, debrief, hit the PX? That we're tripping? That we made this shit up? Those are the options."

  Her face hardens and she won't meet his eyes.

  "You wanna hang out?" he asks. "You wanna take a rest, sit for a while? Maybe lie down? Just chill? I'll do it. I'll stay with you, that's what you want. But I'm not shutting down."

  Time inches along, five seconds, ten, twenty, becoming a memorial slowness, a graven interlude measuring her decision. She looks up at him. "I'm not shutting down."

  Wilson sees from her expression that they're a unit now, they've become a function of one another's trust in a way he and Baxter did not. They're locked tighter, like a puzzle of plastic and metal and blood with two solid parts. They've made an agreement deeper than a week together after the war, one either he can't articulate or doesn't want to.

  "Fight the fire with fire," he says.

  "Summers back in Arizona, I walked my dog in worse heat'n that."

  "Gotta burn the flames, GRob."

  "Muscle up to that motherfucker … make it hurt!"

  "We trained hotter places! We breathed smoke and shit ash trays!"

  "We racked out in the fiery fucking furnace!"

  "Are you glad about it?"

  "Damn straight I'm glad! I got some tunes I wanna play for whatever bitches live in there!"

  "High caliber tunes?"

  "Golden gospel hits, man!"

  "Can you walk through the fire?"

  "Can a little girl make a grown man cry?"

  "Can we walk through the fire?"

  "Aw, man! We are so motivated! We're gonna be waltzing through it!"

  · · · · ·

  1926 hours

  · · · · ·

  They hear the roar of the fire before they see its glow, and once they're close enough to see the wall itself, no end to it, reaching to the roof of the cave, a raging, reddish orange fence between them and the unknown, a fence that divides the entire world or all that remains of it … once they're that close, the roar sounds like a thousand engines slightly mistimed, and once they're really close, less than fifty feet, the sound is of a single mighty engine, and the cooling units in their suits kick in. GRob's faceplate reflects the flickering light, the ghost of her face visible behind it. As they stand before the wall of fire, considering the question it's asked of them, Wilson goes wide on his display screen, taking an angle low to the ground and from the side, looking upward at their figures. It appears they're in partial eclipse, the front of their suits ablaze, the backs dark, their shadows joined and cast long over the yellow flowers, two tiny people dwarfed by a terrifying magic. He shifts the focus, keeping low and viewing them from the perspective of someone closer to the fire. Their figures seem larger and have acquired a heroic brightness. It's a toss-up, he thinks, which angle is the truest. GRob says, "I can't believe this shit," and he's about to say something neutral, a mild encouragement, when it hits him, the thing that's been missing, the hidden door, the trick to all this. It's so stunningly simple, he doubts it for a moment. It's an answer that seems to rattle like a slug in a tin cup. But it's so perfect, he can't sustain doubt. "Yeah, you do," he says. "You believe it."

  She stares at him, bewildered.

  "Where are we?" he asks.

  "Fuck you mean?"

  "Hell. We're in hell."

  "I guess … yeah."

  "The Islamic hell."

  He runs it down for her. The induction of chaos by means of military device, the imposition of distinct form upon primordial matter, the anthropomorphic effect, the villagers believing that the flowers were the gateway to Paradise, and then there it was in its metaphorical form. But in this instance there was a truth congruent to the anthropomorphic effect: the cosmic disruption caused by the materialization of Paradise on the earthly plane brought about the day of judgment, allowed hell to be hauled up from wherever it rested on seventy thousand volts or ropes. Or maybe the villagers lied, maybe they wanted the Americans to think it was Paradise and knew it was hell all along. Maybe that's why what they told the interrogators was classified.

  "So? We been through all this," GRob says.

  "Are we in hell?"

  "Yeah … I mean, I don't know!"

  "You do know!"

  "Okay! I know! Fuck!"

  The way she's staring reminds him of how Baxter would look at him when he said something Baxter thought was dumb. But this isn't dumb, this is their only chance, and he continues laying it out for her.

  "We're in hell," he says. "The Islamic hell. Which means Islam is the way."

  "The way?"

  "The true religion. We're in the middle of a verse from the Qur'an. It's the perfect fucking irony. An American bomb brings about the Islamic day of judgment. And now the path to Paradise lies ahead. How do you escape from hell? People intercede for you. They make a case you deserve getting in."

  "You're trashed!"

  "How can you not believe it? We're here!"

  She has, he thinks, been on the verge of scoffing again, but when he says this, her stubborn expression fades.

  "You see? We're not infidels … not anymore. We're believers. We have to believe 'cause it's happened to us." He points at the wall of flame. "You said it yourself. We gotta go through somewhere bad to get somewhere good. You felt that. Well, here we fucking are! We have to go through hell to reach Paradise. It makes sense that the last people allowed into Paradise would be infidels … converts. That they'd be the lowest of the low. It makes raghead sense."

  "We're not converts," she said. "You hafta take classes and shit, don'tcha? To convert."

  "We been jumped into Islam, we don't need classes." He puts his hands on her shoulders. "What's the name of God?"

  She wants to buy into it, he can tell, but she's hesitant. He asks again, and she says, tentatively, "Allah?" Then she turns away from him. "This is so whack!"

  "It's not! We been going like it wasn't happening. Ignoring the reality of the situation. It was there for us all along … the answer. Only thing we had to do was accept where we were."

  "But …" GRob swings back around. "Even if you're right, man, why would anybody intercede for us?"

  "I told you! It's the ragheads! They gotta have somebody to be sweeping up in heaven. What's better'n a couple of ex-infidels they can rank on. Look! You can't even question it. We survived! Out of seventy-two—out of the whole world, maybe—you'n me survived. There's gotta be a reason for that."

  He keeps at her, explaining the obvious, the simple truth he's excavated from the wreckage of heaven and the fires of hell. He hears himself preaching at her like how Captain Wilts preached him into re-upping, trying to convince her that a walk in the fire is just what they need, a trip to salvation, and recognizing this similarity, seeing that he's conning her, even if it's for her own good, even if the con is sincere, intended to instill faith, because that's what'll get them through, faith, the fundament of all religion … recognizing this, he suspects he may be conning himself, and understands that, also like Captain
Wilts, he's not giving her the whole picture. He's not sure there's room for two infidels in heaven. Maybe only the last person allowed in can be an infidel … at least that's the sense he has from what Baxter told them. If such is the case, he wants it to be GRob. He's evangelical about this, he desires in his soldierly way to save her. She's his sister in the shit, his blooded friend and ally, and possibly she's more than that, so he continues banging words into her head, preaching up a storm, until he sees faith catch in her, a spark of understanding flaring into a flame and incinerating doubt. Watching her face glowing with reflected fire and inner fire, his own doubts evaporate. There is a reason the two of them have gotten this far. They're both going to make it.

  "Do you hear what I'm saying?" he asks, and GRob says, "Loud and clear, man!"

  "Where are we going?"

  "Paradise!"

  "What're we gonna do there?"

  "Walk in gardens of silver and gold!"

  "How we gonna get there?"

  "With superior firepower!"

  It's not the answer he wants and he repeats his question.

  She falters and then says, "By the grace of God!", but she almost makes it seem another question.

  "By the will of Allah!" he says.

  "By the will of Allah!"

  "Allah be praised!"

  He pounds the message into her, motivating like he's never done before, but it's not his usual bullshit. He feels it; the words sing out of him like silver swords shivering from their sheaths until at last she's singing with him, delirious and shiny-eyed, and she lifts her rifle above her head with one hand and shouts, "There is no God but Allah!"

  · · · · ·

  2009 hours

  · · · · ·

  They touch before they enter the fire. Not skin to skin, just resting their helmets together, acknowledging the agreement they have made, a soul contract that will cover either a few minutes, an eternity, or a week in Tecolutla. Then they walk forward into the flames. Wilson watches them on his helmet display, two silhouetted man-shaped robots slipping seamlessly inside the glaring reddish orange wall, and then there's no time to watch, he's moving fast, the cooling unit of his suit already beginning to labor.

  The floor of hell is plated in yellow metal, at least Wilson thinks it's yellow and thinks it's plated. Hard to be sure of color from within the lurid, inconstant glare of the flames, and it might not be plated, it might be a vein of some perfect substance, God in mineral form. It's neither gold nor brass, for those metals would melt from the heat and this metal is unmarred. It's inscribed with the serpentine flourishes and squiggles of Arabic characters, each one longer than a man, and they are written everywhere he looks. The text of the Qur'an, perhaps, or of some other sacred book undelivered to the earth. In the depths of the brightness around him, he sees movement that's not the liquid movement of fire and shapes that aren't the shapes of flame, intimations of heavy, sluggish forms, and he swings his rifle in quick covering arcs. The rifle is a beautiful thing. Should he fall in the fire, overcome by heat, it will continue to function, lying there to be used by whatever weaponless soldier happens by, irrespective of the fact that no soldier will ever pass this way again. He keeps GRob on his left, concentrated more on her target environment than on his. The roaring of the inferno sounds different now, a river sound, a flowing, undulant rush, and the ruddy light comes to seem an expression of that rush, its flickering rhythms sinuous and almost soothing.

  Half a mile in, he knows they're in trouble. The heat. His suit, sheathing him in machinery and plastic, fitting tightly to his skin, extrudes an ointment and injects him with mild numbing agents. He hears GRob gasping over their private channel. His helmet, already dark, darkens further. According to his instrument array, they are surrounded by a myriad of invisible lives and everything else reads infinite. He doesn't switch off the array, but realizes he can't trust it. Allah, he says to himself, and lets the sonority and power of the name bloom inside his head like a firework, a great inscription of cool radiance, a storm of peace that lets him ignore the pain of his blistering skin. They keep going. It's who they are. There's no quit in this bad blond and her sixty-rounds-per-second man, this mad-ass detonatrix and her Colorado killer … The silly lyrics of his thoughts make him gleeful, unwary, seduced by the golden rock 'n' roll legend he'd like to fashion of their walk, and, needing to steady himself, he boosts more IQ. Mega-dangerous levels. He's long since maxed out, but it doesn't matter. He'll live or he'll die by the will of God and by that alone.

  Three-quarters of the way across, by Wilson's estimate, and now they're in serious trouble. Slowed by narcotic injections, their blisters evolved into burns, stumbling, veering to the side. It takes too much energy to talk, so he puts on his tunes, transmits them to GRob, and feels their connection strengthen. Her green telltale on his array blinks on and off. A signal. She feels him, too. He'd walk closer to her, but is afraid he might lurch and knock her down. A slow crawl of thought runs through his head. Images and the names that generate them. Like beads on the necklace of his life. GRob. Baxter. Home. Paradise. Allah. He understands that the nature of God is fire and ice, balm and poison, this and anti-this, all unified in a marvelous design, the design he's treading, and if their act of faith succeeds and they reach Paradise, they will merely have stepped one inch in the eyes of God, because that's how far the distance lies between faith and disbelief. His whole life has been spent traveling that inch, and now, able to grasp the sublimity of God's design, the cleverness of His infinite text, Wilson is overcome with joy, his scorched awareness momentarily illuminated, made into a crystal lens through which he goes eye-to-eye with Allah, with the great golden white figure who fills the void … and then he sees something real. Not just an intimation of form, but something solid, having substance and volume. He switches off his tunes and peers at it. A long flexible limb, that's his first thought. Black, with a mosaic pattern of some pale color. Whipping toward them out of the flames. A tail, he realizes. An immense fucking tail. He starts to bring up his rifle, but his reflexes are dulled, his fingers clumsy, and before he can lock down the target, the tip of the tail coils about GRob's waist and snatches her high. She cries out, "Charlie!" while she's being flipped about high overhead. Then the tail withdraws. As it does, as it whips away from Wilson, lashing GRob to and fro, the force of displacement sucks back the flame, creating a channel, and revealed in the fiery walls of the channel is an iconography of torment. Crucifixions, quarterings, flayings, eviscerations, hangings, people burdened by massive yokes. Demons frolicking among them. Hideous and subhuman, their skins scalded away, their striated muscles and sinews exposed. But Wilson barely notices them, staring toward the end of the channel where resides a lizard the size of a dinosaur. A salamander with a mosaic black-and-pale skin. Its hindquarters and tail emergent, its flat head and supple neck and one powerful foreleg also emergent, the remainder of its body cloaked in flame. Its glazed yellow eye rests balefully upon him. The salamander twitches its tail toward its gaping black-gummed mouth, and, with the delicacy of a dowager nibbling a shrimp impaled on a toothpick, it nips off GRob's head.

  Wilson finally manages to lock onto the salamander and opens up, but flames wash back to fill the channel. Both the tormented and their tormentors vanish, reabsorbed into the flames, once again becoming a myriad of invisible lives, as if the creation of the channel stretched their grain and made them visible for a few seconds. Wilson has no idea whether or not his bullets have struck their target. Everything is as before. The fire, the golden script beneath his feet, the intimations of movement. All his readings are infinite. He's too shocked, too enfeebled, to scream, but his mind's clear and his mind is screaming. He can still see GRob's blood jetting across the salamander's snout from her severed neck arteries, an image that invokes nausea and gains in memory the luster of a vile sexuality. He wants to spend what's left of his time seeking out the salamander, tracking it across the Word of Allah and exterminating it. He's hot with anger, but his will is
stunned, unequal to the duty, and after standing there a while, long enough to feel discomfort. he goes stumbling forward again, heartsick, trying to blot out the vision of her death, to cope with loss, an impossible chore since he's not certain how much he's lost. The measure of his grief seems too generous and he thinks he must be grieving for himself as well, for what he's about to lose, though that's the easiest route to take, to avoid looking closely at things. His faith has been shaken and restoring it's got to be his priority. Perhaps, he thinks, GRob's faith was to blame. Perhaps she was killed by doubt and not by chance. Perhaps it wasn't only his protection that failed her, perhaps he didn't preach to her enough. There's guilt for Wilson at every turn, but justification serves him best, and he re-armors his faith with the notion that GRob simply couldn't abandon her old preoccupations, couldn't wrap her head around the new.

  He can't remember if he's facing the right way, whether he spun completely around after he fired and is now walking back toward the flowers. This causes him some panic, but the dizziness he's feeling, the pain and confusion, they trump panic, they thin it out until it's an unimportant color in his head. Faith, he says to himself. Keep the faith. He goes another quarter-mile. The slowest quarter-mile yet. His air's become a problem. Too hot. Baking his lungs, drying the surfaces of his eyes. Either the fire's darkening or else a vast darkness is growing visible beyond the flames. Wilson knows if it isn't the latter, he's a dead man. Drugs are keeping the pain damned up, but he can feel it waiting to burst through and roll over him. The cooling unit in his helmet has done its job. His face isn't badly burned. But the other units have been overtaxed and he doesn't want to imagine how he looks under the suit. He's weaving, staggering, almost falling, propping himself up with his rifle, moving like a barfly at closing time. Like he's coming out of the desert dying of thirst, struggling toward the oasis. A shade tree, he thinks. That's what Baxter said. First a riverbank and then a shade tree. Then Paradise. He'll have to find the shade tree. In the dark. He can't get a handle on his thoughts. Allah. That's the only thought that holds and it's scarcely a thought, more of an announcement, as if he's some sort of fucked-up clock and every so often, irregularly, he bongs, "Allah," a sound that gradually fades away into emotions and ideas that never quite announce themselves. Charlie. That name sputters up once in a while, too. Calling him Charlie means she must have thought of him that way … which makes the name more acceptable. But he can't afford to care about the sweetness this implies.