You cannot imagine the panicked scramble. McKenzie and his officers were yelling orders, the marshmallow gunners were unpacking their weapons, the column tried to sort itself out and spread over the fields surrounding the road in a defensive formation.
Liloouu came over that rise in the road like the dawn breaking. An immense pink mass, growing larger, and larger, occulting the sky. Despite everything I knew about the Meteor Gods, I couldn’t believe there was anything so big in all the world.
Her flesh was pink and transparent, trembling like jelly. Vast dark shapes swam within Her. The smell of her filled the air with a nauseous sweetness, like the scent of certain lilies. Liloouu was made in segments, like a millipede, supported above the ground on uncounted squirming legs and feelers. Her body was impossible to look at. It changed constantly, expanding and contracting, churning, bulging, in a way that caused nausea to watch. I saw soldiers on their knees vomiting. I saw soldiers running away. I saw soldiers screaming in terror. I saw soldiers praying to Her.
We might as well have set up a defensive position against a tidal wave. Liloouu’s body swept across it. Her legs curled around each soldier, and bore him up into Her substance. FAMAS bullets vanished into Her vast body, leaving no mark.
“Marshmallow guns!” McKenzie yelled over and over. He stood up in his stirrups and shook his fist at Liloouu. “I want my marshmallow guns! Fire, goddamn you!” His horse tossed its head, panicked, ready to bolt.
A general who was not thrall to his own fears would have stayed out of harm’s way, to direct fire, even to command retreat if necessary and save what forces he could. McKenzie remained at the front as Liloouu approached. She made a sound like the crashing of waters as she moved. McKenzie’s horse reared. McKenzie drew his service revolver and fired again and again into Liloouu’s substance. I have never seen such courage, romance, and stupidity captured in a single moment.
A mass of squirming pink tentacles like a titanic anemone came down upon McKenzie and his horse, lifted them up, and swallowed them into Liloouu’s vastness.
Johnson was directing fire by the marshmallow gunners. All around me I heard the whir of rockets and smelled the stink of the propellant. I watched the rockets splash into Her. Within Her transparent flesh, the warheads corkscrewed, leaving trails of bubbles. Tumors bloomed within Liloouu, silent explosions within her glassy pink transparency.
I held my breath. Were Girard’s soft bullets working?
Liloouu halted. I have said She was made like a millipede, in segments. The segment closest to us shivered. Vast fissures opened in its substance. As I watched, my hopes rising, Liloouu’s flesh melted. It liquefied, poured itself onto the earth, releasing the half-digested bodies of the soldiers She had consumed moments before.
But there was miles of Liloouu behind. “Keep firing!” Johnson yelled. “Don’t stop!”
The next segment exploded in a cataract of pink slime. A million gallons of Liloouu spilled onto the road. The men broke into a cheer.
Then the whir of rockets lessened. From many, to a few, to none.
“Don’t stop!” Johnson shouted. “Reload! Maintain fire!” But there was nothing to fire. The caissons were empty. The French had air-dropped us about a thousand rockets. We used them all in less than five minutes.
Liloouu advanced again. Of Her hundreds of segments, Camille Girard’s rockets had succeeded in destroying exactly two.
Like a pink tidal wave, Liloouu’s vastness splashed and slobbered towards us. Johnson shouted for Company B to retreat. We fled back along the road. Johnson came last, still yelling orders, trying to save the remnants of his Company.
I remember a haze of cloying sweetness that descended upon me. My ears rang with the screams of men being engulfed and the cataract roar of Liloouu’s approach. I dared a glance back. I looked for Johnson.
I saw him yards behind me. I saw him just as Liloouu engulfed him.
I stopped. Someone yelled at me to keep running. I ignored him. I had never had a darker moment.
Then, with horrid splashing, slopping noises, Liloouu lifted Herself up. Johnson lay on the road.
He pulled himself to his knees. Dirt and slime covered him. Liloouu kept moving, past him.
I staggered towards him. I was so terrified my knees almost refused to support me, but I had to get to Johnson. He was the only thing I believed in any longer. I threw an arm around him to help him stand. We were only yards from Liloouu. Her body rushed past us like a wall. Dirt and stones kicked up by Her myriad legs pelted us. I tried to say something stupid to Johnson, like ‘Are you all right?’, but my voice was swallowed up in the roar of Her.
Half-falling, supporting each other, we stumbled off the road, away from Liloouu. At any moment I expected Her immensity to rear up and crush down upon us, but She didn’t pursue us. She had eaten Johnson, but vomited him back up. It has to be the armor, I thought. The folk wisdom was right. Girard’s lab was right.
Half a mile off the road, on the other side of a farm field abandoned to weeds, we found a creek beneath an arcade of cottonwoods and willows. I laid Johnson down on the grassy bank. He was alive, coherent, breathing and talking, but his skin was singed by Liloouu’s juices. I washed his wounds off with creek water as best I could. I tried to pull his armor off. He grabbed my hand away.
“Doesn’t come off,” he said.
“Liloouu’s juices probably got beneath it, sir,” I said. “I know how you feel about your armor, but I’ve got to clean Her matter off you. It’s burning your skin.”
Johnson shook his head. “No. The armor really doesn’t come off. At all. It’s been like that ever since I first put it on, years ago.”
I pried up an edge of the armor and tried to peer beneath. The material was smoothly fused to Johnson’s skin.
“Liloouu didn’t want any part of you and that armor, sir,” I said. “We ought to send you to go one-on-one with Her.”
Johnson smiled wanly.
***
After he had bathed in the creek, Johnson lay on the sun-dappled bank and gazed up into the sky. He said, “Frenchie, why are you still here?”
“I’m not a deserter, sir,” I said. “And you’re my commander.”
He nodded. “I appreciate that. But if you’re not a soldier, you can’t be a deserter. I don’t think you and I are soldiers any more. My unit’s gone. My command’s gone. I don’t think I have a commission any longer. McKenzie was never too sure about which ‘United States’ authorized his command, and that command wasn’t much more than a letter of marque to begin with. I’m a man of loyalty, but I don’t think there’s anything left to be loyal to.
“You can stop calling me ‘sir’, Frenchie. For me, this war is over. I’m going to try to make it back to Peggy. I don’t know if anywhere is safe, but there are little hollers deep in the Appalachians that the Meteor Gods may overlook for a while. I grew up in one. My plan is to find somewhere to hide, and wait. Until someone comes up with a better idea to fight the Meteor Gods.”
“Why are you looking at me?” I said.
“’Cause you had a better idea. Once. Oh, never mind. Want to come with us?”
I’d go with Johnson anywhere. But did he really want an army buddy along on his honeymoon?
“Three’s a crowd,” I suggested.
“But four’s a fireteam,” Johnson said.
“Where are you getting four?”
Johnson laughed. “Where do people usually come from?”
“Where…? Oh. Um, congratulations.”
“But let’s clear something up, first,” Johnson said. “We’re talking about your traveling with a black man, a white woman, and a mixed-race kid. How are you with miscegenation? Any problems there?”
It took me a moment to remember what that word meant. It had an atavistic, nineteenth century flavor. It made me think of Simon Legree and Eliza on the ice floes.
“Good lord, no,” I said, blushing deeply. Stammering, I tried to tell him I was good with it. I tried
to explain that his and Peggy’s relationship, even what little I was privileged to glimpse from the outside, struck me as beautiful and touching—
He cut me off. “Fine, whatever. Here’s why I’m bringing it up. That conversation we had. About mixing human and Meteor God DNA. You had a whole lot of drama going on there, Frenchie. You’ve got a lot of emotional stuff riding on fear of the wrong genes getting busy.”
I was thunderstruck. “That’s different…”
“Is it?” Johnson said. “I dunno, Frenchie. It’s all just a matter of degree. You get so crazy about mixing the flesh of humans and Meteor Gods. How do you feel about mixing a horse and a donkey? Are mules crimes against Nature?
“And it makes no damned sense, because when you look at real mixed-race animals or plants, they’re not worse, they’re better. Frenchie, what’s the best kind of dog? The healthiest, the smartest, the sweetest personality?”
I saw what he was getting at. “A mutt, a mongrel.”
“See? The mutt’s got what they call ‘hybrid vigor’.”
“Look,” I said, “we’re talking about creatures with only a tenth of their genes in common with humans. Christ, even a banana shares half its genes with us. Would you crossbred humans and bananas?”
“If it took a race of bananamen to save my world from the Meteor Gods, I’d fuck the banana myself,” Johnson said.
***
It took six months to make our way back to Thistledown Sidhe. Half-starving most of the time, forced to hide from roaming gangs and skirting settlements to avoid conscription by local warlords, our progress was slow. Hope, and little else, sustained us. Summer and fall passed. It was late in the year, and snow had already fallen once by the time we arrived at the outskirts of Atlanta.
On the road leading to Thistledown, we found our way blocked. A mass of bubbly gray mucus, inches deep, flowed over the broken asphalt, and covered the ground on both sides, extending far back into the pine grove. It was where we had shot the loblolly pine with one of Girard’s soft bullets. All around us pine trees were denuded of bark and needles; some had fallen. The mucus thing was eating the other pines.
As Johnson and I approached, it inched towards us.
I stepped back. “Let’s not walk through that,” I said.
We sidetracked through the woods, skirting widely around it – it was hundreds of yards across – and continued up the road.
The Thistledown Sidhe gates were open, and unguarded. I thought that was a bad sign. Johnson said, “Damn.” He unshouldered his pack and dropped it on the ground. He ran up the drive. He still carried his FAMAS. I yelled for him to wait. He ignored me. I ran after him as fast as I could, but couldn’t keep up.
I saw no one. I heard no human voices. As I passed houses, I noticed that many had their doors ajar. The lawns and the farm fields behind them had grown high and rank and gone to seed, untended.
I passed a pile of white bones. Some were cattle or horses, but I thought others looked human. Despair rose within me again.
Johnson stood in front of the O’Neill house. The door was open, and dark. “Peggy!” Johnson screamed. “Peggy!”
No answer.
Then, through the empty door, a bluish gelatinous mass pushed itself. It was bigger than the door frame. It squeezed itself through the door like toothpaste coming out of a tube. Its head, trunk and limbs re-formed on the other side. It stood up. It was thirty feet tall or more, and humanoid.
Its head, its face…its features reminded me of Johnson.
I was trembling uncontrollably. I forced my voice to work. I yelled, “Johnson, for god’s sake, move away!”
“I think,” Johnson said, “I think this is my child.” He took a few steps towards the giant. He dropped the FAMAS he had been carrying, and raised both empty hands. A gesture of peace, of surrender.
For a moment, the blue giant hesitated. Then it scooped up Johnson in its immense hand, and shoved him at its mouth.
The armor, I thought desperately. It will reject his armor. But I didn’t quite believe that. Because it seemed likely that this blue giant was the product of Johnson’s armor. Vour Faad’s DNA had crept stealthily into Johnson’s system as the armor melted together with his flesh, and inserted itself into his germ cells. Hybrid. Vigor.
Johnson struggled, and kicked with his legs. The giant twisted Johnson around, trying to fit the struggling man into its mouth. The armor was not working.
I ran for Johnson’s FAMAS. I lifted it to my shoulder, and aimed at the giant’s chest. I squeezed the trigger and held it until the clip was empty.
I am not well-trained in weapons. The rifle’s recoil almost sent me tumbling backward. The barrel drifted up, the bullets nearly stitching across Johnson.
The giant didn’t fall, but I had gotten its attention. It dropped Johnson on the ground and came after me instead.
I threw down the FAMAS and ran. As I passed through the Thistledown gate, my breath came hard and painful, and my muscles were burning. Behind me, the giant’s thumping footsteps shook the ground.
A voice, from behind. Johnson’s. “Keep going!”
I chanced a glimpse back. Johnson was running behind the blue giant. He could have escaped, but had chosen not to.
I ran until I was stopped by the pool of roiling mucus that covered the landscape. I was beyond fatigue, almost dropping. What now? The giant was a hundred yards behind, and closing.
Johnson screamed, “Keep going!”
The giant turned at the noise, and stopped. It made a burbling, bubbly sound. One immense translucent hand snatched at Johnson as he passed.
Johnson dodged. The hand brushed him, but its fingers closed empty. Johnson hit me running. He grabbed me with one arm and dragged me forward, into the pool of tree-thing.
It was like struggling through glue. The pool of slime got deeper as we walked. Waves rolled in from all sides. It slopped higher and higher up our legs. Within fifty feet, we were waist-high in the stuff. My skin burned where it touched.
Behind us, the blue giant burbled. Its flesh boiled and churned. It hesitantly put one foot down into the pool of tree-thing, then the other. It waddled towards us. My heart sank. We had traded one danger for two.
Johnson struggled on, dragging me with him. “Dammit, Frenchie, don’t quit now,” he growled.
In fact, as we pushed on through the gray mucus, it got a little easier. The mucus around us wasn’t quite as high. Then it was only at our knees, our ankles, then only a film of slime on the road. I looked back.
The tree-thing had found a bigger meal than us. It drew itself up around the giant, as high as the giant’s waist. The giant sat in its middle. Its hands lifted up immense clots of mucus, and shoved them into its mouth. It had found bigger prey, too.
We didn’t stay to find out which monster would win this battle of appetites. Johnson and I fled down the road, until it was night, and we were utterly exhausted and could run no more.
***
We slept in an abandoned house. In the morning, the ground was frosty, the air clear and scentless, the Georgia sky an endless blue.
“Where to?” Johnson asked.
“North,” I said. “Back to Carolina. Maybe NuLife will let me work there again.”
“Changed your mind? About creating a hybrid to fight the Gods?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.”
“Want help with that?”
I grabbed his hand and shook it. “Always,” I said.
As we traveled north over the following days and weeks, Johnson broke down into tears more than once. He wasn’t able to talk about Peggy, but talking about his childhood and his life before the meteor impact seemed to help. This was the only thing he ever said about the blue giant who was his child: “I should have been there. A child needs a father. I should have been there to raise my kid. It might have turned out different.”
That thought would have shocked me before. It didn’t now. I thought Johnson might be right.
You might thi
nk that witnessing Johnson’s monstrous child try to eat its own father would have confirmed my ideas about the unnatural horror of mixing human and Meteor God DNA. Instead, it had the opposite effect.
I had been wrong, and Terrell Johnson had been right. I had been clinging to the old world, the world of humankind, and imagining that it could be saved, restored to the way we’ve always known it. I no longer believe that. The encounter with Liloouu, in all Her ineluctable vastness, majesty and terror, changed something in me. After that, the sight of a thirty-foot toddler, the hybrid of human genes and star spawn, trying to eat its own father, seemed like a perfectly ordinary event for the world we live in now.
I don’t think humans have a chance any more. At least – not the kind of humans we know.
Remember those other extinction events? In the end, all of them failed. Thousands of species vanished, but life was not extinguished from the Earth. If prior extinction events were the result of encounters with ancient Meteor Gods, then what happened to the Gods? They weren’t defeated by a coalition of trilobites or dinosaurs. I’d seen how easily Meteor God DNA spliced itself into ours. I believe that has happened many times before. The Meteor Gods from those previous extinction events didn’t vanish. They became you and me, the maple tree and the bumblebee, just another tributary emptying itself into the vast, turbulent river of DNA that has driven life on Earth since its beginnings. Like Johnson’s child, we are all the Gods’ descendants.
Life on Earth must join itself to the Gods again. We must become the Gods ourselves, so that we may fight them, defeat them, and carry that battle to the stars.
Johnson and I made our way up the ruined highways, back towards my old lab and my old colleagues, to begin my work anew. As I walked, I hummed ‘Peggy-O’ softly to myself. At last, I understood and accepted its final verse.
If ever I return, pretty Peggy-O,
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 5