Interzone #265 - July-August 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  In the largest migration in human history, all Caribbean islands and the coasts of all nations bordering on the Gulf were cleared of human habitation. Food and potable water were stockpiled around the globe. Most nations declared martial law a few days before the projected impact. The human race hunkered down to weather the storm.

  On July 10, 2042, 10:34:11 GMT, CA19 struck our planet. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and torrential rains battered the Earth. Clouds hid the sun for months. Winter came that July, and lasted for a year. Snow fell in Rio and Singapore.

  But after a year, the clouds began to part. Temperatures slowly rose. The human race drew a collective sigh of relief: the scientists had been right. Within two years of CA19’s impact, humanity was on its way to recovery.

  Then Skoreg the Great heaved His mountainous bulk out of the sea near Galveston.

  ***

  In February of 2055, I joined up with McKenzie’s Irregulars when they marched south from Raleigh, North Carolina. At that time I was a middle-aged man at loose ends. I had just resigned my employment of the last decade, as an investigator with the Duke-GeneSolutions NuLife project. I gave notice by smashing my lab with a steel meter stick. Alcohol may have been involved. I had my notebooks in a pile on the floor and was trying to set them on fire when my colleagues found me. I told them they were monsters of perversion, their whole project was a blot on the conscience of the human race, and NuLife could go to hell. They cursed me, cuffed me around, carried me to the surface, and threw me out onto the red clay of a North Carolina farm field. “Go get yourself eaten by the Gods, if you’re too good to fight them,” one man sneered. Steel doors slammed shut behind me.

  The idea had appeal. My heart was filled with a poisonous slush of guilt, remorse, despair, moral indignation and self-righteousness. I would have willingly walked into a Meteor God’s mouth, had one been present to oblige. Instead, I begged a ride from a farmer on a horse-drawn hay wain, and wound up in Raleigh. My immediate plan was to drink myself to death. I felt it was a realistic plan. People always manage to have liquor around, even in the middle of an extinction event.

  In Raleigh, I found work compounding gunpowder for ‘Happy’ Smiley, one of the local warlords. My training is in cell biology, but I could puzzle out enough inorganic chemistry and stoichiometry to improve the performance of Happy’s black powder muskets. In return, Happy and his boys kept me in whiskey. I was making satisfactory progress towards my goal of death by cirrhosis when I was interrupted by General McKenzie’s arrival.

  McKenzie and his Irregulars, a few thousand strong, were on their way to the Gulf Coast to fight Million-Legged Liloouu, who was working hell around Mobile and the little towns in the bottomland of the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers. McKenzie formed up his men in front of the bronze statue of George Washington on the grounds of the old State Capital building. He wore an olive drab field coat with the elbows coming out, and a battered trooper’s hat that the frigid wind threatened to blow off his head any minute. He had a mop of wavy white hair, a white beard and droopy white mustachios. He looked like a gene-splice of Colonel Custer, Robert E. Lee, and Santa Claus.

  McKenzie held forth in a fine baritone that carried a hundred yards. “Gather round,” he cried, “all you proud Tar Heels! Your country needs every able-bodied man to fight.”

  A crowd gathered. McKenzie’s sales pitch rang the bells for patriotism, heroism, and vengeance for our slaughtered countrymen. At the same time, he stoked up greed for the millions of acres of land that Liloouu had swept clean of human life. Land free for the taking. A thousand acres for every man.

  I didn’t give a damn for patriotism or dreams of baronetcy. But I liked McKenzie because he was obviously mad. He was planning to lead his little army straight into the jaws of a Meteor God.

  One of Happy’s boys standing in the crowd must have thought the same. “Just what are you planning to do about Her Pinkness?” he yelled. He meant Liloouu.

  McKenzie nodded to one of his soldiers. The man stepped forward. He carried a rifle. A FAMAS, though I didn’t recognize it by name at the time. I am not a military man.

  The heckler spat on the pavement. “Fancy rifle,” he said. “Too bad you ain’t got a clip for it.” Stockpiles of ammunition had been used up within a few years after CA19, and there was no longer an arms industry to make more. Or industry of any kind. Not in North America, that is.

  McKenzie’s soldier slapped the rifle to his shoulder and fired off a burst at the heckler’s feet. The heckler jumped back, swearing.

  “We got a deal going with the French,” McKenzie said. “You heard about the French?”

  Everyone had heard about the French.

  The murmur of the crowd took on a more positive tone. Another man yelled, “You can’t stop Liloouu with machine guns. Are the French going to H-bomb Her for you?”

  “They got something better than H-bombs for us,” McKenzie said.

  I thought that was unlikely, and McKenzie was coy about the details. But to desperate men, hope trumps reason. Who knew when Liloouu might turn north, or another Vour Faad might pour out of Albemarle Sound? There were stories of six-foot brown maggots in a crawling mat miles wide and yards deep, that had appeared out of Lake Michigan and headed south. They consumed everything in their path.

  A couple score of men signed on with McKenzie’s Irregulars. I signed on, too. Whatever toys the French were giving McKenzie, I doubted that anything short of a nuke could stop a Meteor God. But I preferred to die fighting Liloouu than kill myself by inches with Happy’s corn liquor.

  I still wanted to die. I expected mad old General McKenzie to help with that. But I had resolved to die for something. I would expatiate my guilt and despair, instead of buckling under them. My darkness had began to lift, just a little, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

  McKenzie attached me to B Company (Unusual Weapons), Captain Terrell Johnson commanding.

  ***

  Come a-running down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O

  Come a-running down the stairs, pretty Peggy-O

  Come a-running down the stairs,

  Combing back your yellow hair,

  You’re the prettiest little maid I’ve ever seen-i-o.

  After two months of hard slogging southward through the cold and wet of early spring, we arrived exhausted and half-starved in the suburbs of Atlanta. It was mid-April, with patchy snow still on the ground. The hard winters following CA19 had killed off the kudzu that used to choke the South. Between the cracked concrete slabs of I-85, fields of wild crocus and daffodils bloomed.

  McKenzie billeted us in private homes north of the city, in a gated community of pipsqueak mansions called Thistledown Sidhe. Unit strength was ridiculous. Captain Johnson’s B Company was little larger than a platoon. We all fit into a single house, if somewhat snugly.

  The house’s owner, a man named O’Neill, tried to stick up for his rights. “The government can’t just take people’s homes to put up soldiers,” he said, shoving his chin in Johnson’s face. “It’s unconstitutional.” He reminded me of a snaggletooth old dog, defending his yard against a pack of muddy strays.

  “‘Unconstitutional’,” Johnson said, rolling the syllables around in his mouth. “Two-dollar word. Beautiful word. A pleasure to speak.”

  Before CA19, Mr O’Neill might have called the ACLU. But the ACLU was an obsolete concept. So was ‘call’, except in the sense of yelling. A lot of words have retreated a century or two in meaning. ‘The government’ doesn’t mean what it used to, either. At least four different governments claim parts of the old United States, squatters fighting over an abandoned house even as the bulldozers are rumbling towards it.

  Johnson said, “Mr O’Neill, you may consider General McKenzie to be your own personal government at this time. He has ordered me to billet my company in this house. I’m one to follow orders.”

  One of his soldiers clicked off the safety on his FAMAS and noisily chambered a round.

  I hoped O’Neill wo
uld yield to the logic of FAMAS. There were lots worse than us roaming around the Carolinas and northern Georgia. The Palmetto Kingz or New DNA or Screw would have burned all the houses in Thistledown Sidhe for fun. Raped men and women both, then killed them. Maybe eaten them. Having McKenzie’s Irregulars sleeping in your beds, muddying your rugs and romancing your daughter was tolerable by comparison.

  Wait a minute. What was that about a daughter?

  “Daddy, don’t.”

  A young woman came down the stairs. Yellow hair, freckles from somewhere south of Derry and north of Cork, green eyes that had the whole world sized up in a glance. Like the song says, as fair as any lady in the air-i-o.

  “You can’t fight them, Daddy,” she said, staring at Johnson. “They’re too big.” I think she meant ‘too many’, but she couldn’t tear her eyes off Captain Johnson. Johnson was over six foot, all muscle and bone. He bulked out even larger on account of armor he wore under his uniform. More about that armor later.

  O’Neill stared at his daughter helplessly for a moment, then his chin and shoulders fell.

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” Johnson said. “My men need rest and food.”

  One of the soldiers said, “Captain, there’s livestock out back of the house.”

  “You don’t say,” Johnson said. “Eating-type livestock?”

  “Couple of horses, couple of cows, some pigs and chickens.”

  “Please don’t eat the horses,” the young woman said. “We’ll be needing them for spring plowing in a month.”

  “Ma’am,” Johnson said, “your horses are safe with us.”

  “Call me Peggy,” she said. She put her hands on her hips and smiled.

  ***

  Sometime after sunset one of McKenzie’s staff corporals rattled up in a buckboard. Most of B Company was still on the front lawn, enjoying the warmth from the firepit where we’d barbecued one of the O’Neills’ pigs. April evenings were still frosty in Georgia. Post-CA19 effects. “Where’s Frenchie?” the corporal yelled. That would be me. “The General needs you for speaky-speaky French talk. Hop on in.”

  “You’re French?” Peggy said. “Parly-voo?” She was sitting with Captain Johnson, who had been telling her war stories. Johnson had seen the French glass Marseilles.

  “Non, Mademoiselle O’Neill,” I said. “Je suis de la ville des, ah, Sioux Falls.”

  I hauled myself into the buckboard. I spent a year at the École Normale Supérieure while doing my post-doc, and a couple of years as a visiting professor later on. My French is spotty, but I can usually make myself understood. It’s why McKenzie let me tag along with the Irregulars, because otherwise I’m just a middle-aged guy without noticeable soldiering skills.

  McKenzie had taken the biggest house in the development for his HQ. I found him in the great room, in front of a roaring fire on the hearth. His officers were scattered about, passing around a jug. McKenzie sucked on a cheroot that stank up the place.

  The Alcatel shortwave on the table in front of him was almost as big as a baby carriage. Its tubes glowed a cheerful orange through the ventilation slots. A private sat to one side, hand-cranking a generator. Batteries would be nice, but there’s no industry here that can produce them any more. Or shortwave radios, for that matter, but France makes those, and they airdropped us this one. 1930s technology. Even France can’t make solid-state any more.

  McKenzie pointed to the earphones with the glowing end of his cheroot. “Hiya, Frenchie,” he said. “They’re waiting for you. They hinted at some hot stuff the last time.”

  I put on the earphones and bent over the mic. “Bonsoir,” I said.

  Every time I got on the shortwave, a fear ran through me that no one would be on the other end, now, or ever again. That France was gone. That for all their Gallic pluck and their unspeakably ruthless methods of national defense, they had finally been overrun, another pocket of humanity extinguished.

  But it was not to be tonight. “’Allo!” came a voice, wavering and static-corrupted.

  The conversation lasted ten minutes. Oddball Franglais, with lots of English loan-words.

  McKenzie kept interrupting and asking me what was being said. “They’re making bullets,” I said. “…making them out of the flesh of Vour Faad…the bullets are very big, and—”

  “I like big!” McKenzie yelled. “Big bullets for big game.” He rubbed his hands together and cackled. The cheroot coal flared.

  “…they have to do…extensive re-engineering…the bullets are… Quoi? ‘Doux’? The bullets are big and soft. Soft.”

  “The bullets are soft?” McKenzie spat a bit of cheroot across the room. “The hell?”

  I shrugged. “They have great expectations for these new bullets. Girard thinks it will take two months to make them.” Camille Girard was the senior weapons scientist at Manufacture d’armes de Saint-Étienne.

  “Two months? Well, crap on that. Crap on that.” He leaned back into his chair and stared up at the ceiling.

  The call was over. The man on the generator stopped turning his crank and wiped his brow with his sleeve.

  “We’ll just have to wait,” McKenzie said at last. “It’s suicide going against Liloouu otherwise. We have to wait on the damn French and their soft bullets. Frenchie, how are you at Russian?”

  “Sir, I don’t have any Russian,” I said.

  “They say Russia still exists, but I’ve never been able to raise them. I’ve wondered if Russia’s got the same deal going with Dog or Perez that we’ve got with France.” Dog Braxton and J.L. Perez were the presidents of two other fragmentary USAs. “You know what they’re up to, don’t you, Frenchie? Why the French give a damn about us?”

  “Sir, I don’t know anything about strategy…”

  “We’re their guinea pigs, Frenchie, guinea pigs. They’re using us to test their weapons ideas. So we get all the weird crap they can dream up. They wouldn’t give us an H-bomb or anything useful. Oh, no, but we get soft bullets. Big and soft. Marshmallow bullets. Jimminy Christ.” He took another deep pull on the cheroot. “I bet they’re also playing us as a proxy against Dog and Perez, if those two are clients of the Ruskies. I swear, I feel like some African po-ten-tate a hundred years ago, like a pawn in the Cold War. Funny turn of events, ain’t it, Frenchie?”

  “Yes, it is, sir,” I said.

  The cheroot was almost gone. “Next time,” McKenzie said, “next time you get ’em on the shortwave, tell ’em Perez has crossed the Mississippi, and we expect contact. Maybe that’ll make ’em kit us up, if they think Russia’s bitches are gaining ground.” He stubbed out the cheroot on the tabletop. “Maybe they’ll give us a god-damned H-bomb then.”

  ***

  In a carriage you will ride, pretty Peggy-O,

  In a carriage you will ride, pretty Peggy-O,

  In a carriage you will ride,

  With your true love by your side,

  As fair as any lady in the air-i-o.

  Weeks passed. McKenzie’s impatience with the French grew and festered. Anyone who spoke to him risked a tirade. Armée de l’Air was flying recon over the US, six-engine pusher-prop planes. Now and then they’d parachute us a couple of skids of guns or ammo. No H-bomb was forthcoming.

  They say a dog and its master come to resemble each other. When McKenzie was snappish, fights tended to break out between Irregulars and townies. McKenzie confined some of the Irregulars to quarters and rationed the liquor. Things simmered down a bit, but I thought there would be trouble ahead if the Irregulars didn’t march soon.

  One source of friction with the townies was romance. Sometimes a Thistledown woman had eyes for one of the Irregulars, and maybe a Thistledown man didn’t like that. But that’s what happens when you mix men and women together. Even at the end of the world, with Meteor Gods the size of mountains scouring the land clean of life, scooping up human beings like ladybugs eating aphids off a tomato plant, romance happens. Even then. I only am escaped alone to tell thee. Even then romance strangel
y endures.

  One of those women was Peggy O’Neill. The object of her affection was Captain Terrell Johnson.

  I believe those two figured it out immediately. It took me a little longer to realize that when Captain Johnson wasn’t in a briefing with General McKenzie or drilling Company B, you were likely to find him with Peggy. You wouldn’t call them alike. No more than a honeybee and an apple blossom are alike, or mashed potatoes and gravy. But they were things made by nature to go together. Her cheerful patter and his reserve. Her easy smile and his sardonic one. As I watched them sit together by the fire on a cool evening, the way their shoulders tilted together, the way their bodies bent and folded against each other, seemed to have been drawn by an artist in a scheme of proportion and balance. Or like the twisted complementary strands of DNA that mirror each other, base pairing with base.

  Perhaps that’s an odd metaphor for lovers, but I was trained as a cell biologist and my mind tends in that direction. Although, if I had thought more deeply about it, I might have wondered why else that particular metaphor occurred to me.

  That I didn’t think deeply about it, until much later, testifies to the effect those two had on me. As I have said, at that time all my world was dark, and I looked forward only to death. The love of Captain Johnson and Peggy O. was the only positive and joyous thing I had encountered in as long as I could remember. Their love, amid the ruins of the Earth, was the unexpected datum that overturned my theory of despair. It testified to the presence of tenderness and hope in a world which had seemed to promise only terror and death.

  Now I had a new sort of problem, though. I had joined General McKenzie’s mad expedition with the thought that McKenzie would lead me to certain death in the maw of Million-Legged Liloouu. I still thought death was our destination – but I no longer wanted to die. I had developed considerable respect for Captain Johnson. A man of sense and judgment, unexcitable, a cool head in any situation. But even the best-led school of sardines is ill-advised to fight a shark. I doubted whether any of us had a chance of living through contact with Liloouu.