Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  The clouds will part and the sky cracks open,

  And God himself will reach his fucking arm through…

  —NIN

  BEFORE, IN THE TIME THAT WAS BEFORE, THIS WAS A city of the living and the whole. It was not a city of blank-eyed warriors and broken women and pregnancies mercifully terminated before fresh teratisms can be born. It was not wasted and besieged. There were no watchful ramparts, and Midway and O’Hare International ferried civilian traffic, because there was civilian traffic. Before. There were unguarded highways into the city, before the fall of Manhattan and Boston and D.C. and pretty much everything else bordering the Atlantic, from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego. Before the city became a pounding ring of field, medium, and heavy batteries, 105 mm howitzers, 155 mm, 203 mm, anti-aircraft and rocket artillery. Before the sea turned black and engulfed the East, and before the waters of Lake Michigan froze over with jaundiced ice that’s immune to the heat of burning skies and molten shores.

  Before the probe came home from the Kuiper belt, when it was never supposed to come home at all.

  Before the beginning of the war.

  The beginning of The End, which some will say is the simply the Beginning. Even within the ragged fortress of Chicago, there are zealous priests and necromancers who pray day and night to the Old Things for the fall of all mankind. They have the books. They know the names. They spill blood on secret altars. Agents of the Guard hunt them, but it’s a hunt as futile as stalking the swarms of rats and the dogs and cats gone feral and vicious.

  The once-were names for the days have been discarded.

  This is Thunderday.

  And on this Thunderday, Susannah takes her weekly turn on the eastern wall, with all the others who come on at dawn. She hardly ever sleeps anymore. She can, in fact, only just recall the last time she slept more than one or two hours at once. It’s better that way; the dreams that are no longer merely dreams are kept at bay by wakefulness. But because insomnia weakens, the infirmaries handed out amphetamines and methamphetamine as long as the supplies lasted. Which wasn’t long. Besides, Susannah recalls that the drug-induced hallucinations that visited her after several drugged days without any sleep at all were almost as bad as the nightmares.

  “Stay sharp,” the Captain of the Guard says as she settles into one of the plastic patio chairs tucked inside the concrete pillbox. As if it’s necessary to remind her, but she supposes he has to say something, so she’s never complained. Futility is the rule After, not the exception.

  She smokes stale tobacco and listens to the skinny kid from what used to be Elmwood Park, back when, back before the crimson drifters and the rain that sets fires. Back before. Before that island rose up from the South Pacific, from very near that oceanic pole of inaccessibility—the point on the planet farthest from any landmass. Near to Point Nemo. 47˚ 9´ S 126˚ 43´ W. And maybe you didn’t know jack shit about geography before, but now those coordinates are etched into the mind of the survivors, as indelible as their own names. The zealots and the enemies of man call it R’lyeh. Susannah just calls it Hell.

  “Sue, you see that?” asks the Elwood kid. She wishes he wouldn’t call her Sue, because that’s what her mother called her. But she always lets it go. The kid’s pointing across No Man’s Land towards Indiana. “You see that?”

  She picks up the one pair of binoculars allotted to the pillbox and tries to spot whatever it is the kid thinks he saw. But there’s only the glistening polychromatic canopy of the forest that presses in at the walls and stretches away, seemingly, forever.

  “I don’t see anything,” she replies, and he curses.

  “I know what I saw.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me, and then we’ll both know?”

  But he doesn’t. He sulks, instead. He sits in his patio chair reading an old paperback, neglecting the job that insures him room and rations.

  Susannah knows better, but she lets the binoculars linger on the forest. The stalks of fungus that once were men and women, back before the plague. Before. Not that it’s well and truly over. But most people in the city talk about the plague as if it were something that’s come and gone, and they do their best to ignore the infected who cower in the alleyways and deserted husks of buildings. They stay indoors or in the bunkers on days when the prevailing winds bring clouds of spores north. The stay inside until the decon teams have done their best to scrub away the microscopic contagion. If they find a growth on their own bodies, they keep it a secret as long as they can. They cloak themselves in denial. Which is how Susannah has made it through the last month, since she found the shiny wet spot on her left hip.

  Only a matter of time now, but so is everything else.

  It’s all winding down.

  The world has known the war is lost for years, since the nukes that failed to scratch the pillars of that vast island that shrugged off the sea. Since the fireballs and fallout failed to do anything but piss off the titans that stride across the world, bringing havoc at their leisure.

  Susannah wishes that the ceaseless movement of the forest were only an illusion created by distance and the heat haze. But she knows it’s no mirage. She knows all those men, women, and children who’ve been assimilated, absorbed, transformed, what the fuck ever, are still alive and still conscious and still in agony. As she will be soon enough.

  She knows too much of what the CDC and WHO and etcetera learned before the airwaves and satellites went silent.

  The Survivors’ Prayer: Lord, let me be ignorant.

  But she’s an atheist. Susannah has no prayer.

  “They’re not gods,” she said on the Worstday she met the boy when he wouldn’t shut up about the monsters. “They’re just shit from other places. That’s all they are.”

  Maybe it’s easier to accept The End if it’s being brought by a malevolent pantheon than by indifferent aliens. She wouldn’t know.

  “I don’t see anything,” she says again, right as the sirens go off. She still jumps at the sirens, as if they meant something more than the opening of the southern gates to send the latest batch of fungal terminals out to join those who have gone before them. She always jumps as if it were ebony wings bearing down on the city.

  “Jesus, Sue. Get a grip,” the boy tells her, not even looking up from his paperback.

  She tells him to go fuck himself, flicks the butt of her cigarette away, then trains the binoculars on the asphalt scab of I-394, Forest Road. There are only a couple dozen today. Susannah watches as they stagger away towards writhing stalks and the shadows below the enormous iridescent caps. She watches for five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. It’s easy to lose track of time on the wall.

  She knows that forest all too well. Susannah arrived with one of the last groups of refugees, and the convoy came much, much too near to the fruiting bodies. She was sixteen then. Her mother had died back in Ohio. Her father had not even made it out of Boston. That was five years ago. Five years and spare change. Back when stupid motherfuckers and military strategists still talked about offensives, pushing back, winning.

  They called the invaders gods, and they talked about winning.

  It’s one of the sickest jokes Susannah knows.

  The moon rises like a boil, bloated, livid. No one bothers asking anymore how the moon can rise when the sun never seems to set.

  “Did you hear that?” the Elmwood kid asks, dropping his paperback, his eyes all at once wild, but looking at her instead of looking out over the wastes.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she says, which is true.

  He’s silent a moment, then says, “They’ve left us alone for almost a week. You know this can’t go on, Sue. You know they must be planning something big.”

  “Go back to your book,” she replies.

  “I heard wings,” he all but whispers.

  “Go back to your book.”

  “I swear to god, Sue, I’m putting in a request for a new partner. I’m not joking with you.”

  “You do that. But ri
ght now, you shut up and go back to your book.”

  “I swear I’m going to.”

  “Fine with me.”

  She wants to tell him not to bother. She wants to confess her infection. Her hip itches constantly, and she knows that in another week or two she’ll be one of the alley lurkers, and by next month she’ll be staggering out the gate, unable to resist the siren song, dragging what’s left of her body towards the forest. Maybe the kid will watch her go. Maybe he’ll even recognize her.

  Probably he won’t.

  She’s never recognized any of those who’ve left to take their places as part of that vast colonial organism.

  Susannah still remembers the TV broadcasts in those first few weeks after the island rose, after the earthquakes and tsunamis that devastated coastlines and erased cities on both sides of the Pacific. Quakes measuring 9.9+, possibly one or two as strong as 12.0, exceeding the parameters of Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg scale. Quakes so strong they broke apart the atomic structure of stone. She remembers watching on CNN and MSNBC, the floods, the fire, the few blurred, grainy bits of footage that were ever filmed of the coast of R’lyeh before there were no longer any ships left to sail the bruised-black seas. Susannah even recalls an interview with two physicists who attributed the inability of video to capture clear footage of the island’s titanic monoliths to the bending of light rays by the angles of poorly understood geometries and “physics beyond the standard model.” Her dad had said it was all a load of crap, that no one had any idea what was happening, and she’s inclined to agree with her dead father.

  New Horizons returned, ignoring its programming and using Pluto for a gravitational slingshot back towards the inner Solar System, hurtling across near vacuum and cold and all those millions of miles back to earth. The probe crashed somewhere in the Sahara, or the Caspian Sea, or Scandinavia. No one was ever certain, as tracking stations seemed to show it coming down in multiple locations.

  But it returned with secrets, and the scientists could grasp at straws forever and never have one iota what those secrets were. New Horizons returned, and R’lyeh rose, and the one sleeping there awoke.

  And The End began.

  Or the Beginning.

  Susannah remembers those grainy clips, played over and over until all the channels all went off the air, and her family joined the steady stream of refugees heading inland. She even recalls the final broadcast, and what emerged from those strange angles into the light of day. Just a distorted hint of its impossible bulk glimpsed between crackling bursts of static. She remembers the screams.

  She asked questions that her parents would never answer, but she had the TV and Twitter and Facebook, while they lasted. All the contradictory reports, the events that were only explicable if one were willing to believe the inexplicable. News of the friends and family who died or simply vanished. So many people vanished so quickly there was no way to keep track. Here one day, gone the next. Here one hour, one minute, then poof.

  The conspiracy nuts, fringe theorists, and pseudoscientists had a field day, their fifteen minutes in the sun. It was their moment to shine, because, obviously, this was all the result of top-fucking-secret black-ops NSA DOD ESA CIA NASA acronym, acronym, acronym ancient astronaut Roswell Area 51 chemtrails secret electromagnetic directed-energy weaponry cold goddamn fusion and strangelets spawned by the Large Hadron Collider and, and, and HAARP program disruptions in the ionosphere and the ghosts of John F. Kennedy, Nikola Tesla, and Madame Blavatsky. They all ran together just exactly like that in Susannah’s mind, like melted steel. Naturally, the religious end-timers got a word in edgewise. This had to be the Rapture, the Second Coming, the opening of the Seven Seals, what the hell else could that thing that crawled forth from the New Land be but the Antichrist?

  There were a few who went so far as to propose that all conceivable claims were true. They embraced.

  Five years farther on, in the ruins of Babylon, she and the Elmwood kid sit in the pillbox. She watches, and he reads. At precisely 13:00 hours a “squadron” of the blood-red driftgliders appears to the south, swooping low above No Man’s. They shimmer wetly, those wings a hundred feet from tip to tip, those insectile heads, the tails that trail out behind them throwing blue-white sparks of electricity. Minutes later, there’s the dull whup-whup-whup of a modified National Guard UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter. It goes as near to the driftgliders as it dares, but never engages, never opens fire.

  She watches it all through the binoculars. The Elmwood kid only looks up for a few seconds.

  At 15:07 something on towering stilt legs strides through the mushroom forest. She reports it, but HQ O’Hare says it isn’t a clear and present danger. Just neofauna. But she notes the walker in the logbook, anyway. Susannah even sketches a decent likeness of the creature. It calls out across the wastes with a cry like all the foghorns ever built. Maybe it’s lonely and looking for a mate. Maybe it’s praying. She isn’t curious enough to ponder the problem for very long.

  “That’s it for me,” the kid says at 16:55, even though they won’t be relieved for another twenty minutes. “There’s meatloaf tonight,” he says and grins, tucking his book into a pocket of his coat.

  “How can you eat that shit?” she asks. It comes heavy on the loaf and light on anything that can be called meat, just enough Spam or Vienna sausage to create the illusion, and all the rest grain and Crisco filler from the rapidly dwindling stores.

  “Gotta eat something,” he replies. “There’s worse. Then again, maybe you ain’t never been down that low, Sue. Maybe you never were a scrounger before your paperwork went through and you got the wall.”

  And sure, that’s true, though she doesn’t like the tone in the Elmwood kid’s voice when he reminds her. She waited out quarantine in the camps, then pulled various shit civil service and Army duties before finally rising up the ranks. All she had to keep her sane was ambition. That and her own secrets, which she will never share with the Elmwood kid. Even without the infection, even if she had all the time in the world, she’d never share those secrets. New Horizon had its mysteries, and Susannah has hers, which are even more secret than the probes because no one suspects that she has secrets.

  She doesn’t let the kid leave early.

  Technically, Susannah bunks with the other members of the Guard in the barracks at the converted State Street Subway tunnel. That’s what her ID badge says, and that’s where she takes most of her meals. But she isn’t the only person who seeks other lodgings from time to time. Her rank gives her a freedom of movement not afforded to civilians. The curfews don’t apply, and she has very little trouble at checkpoints.

  The stingy luxuries that keep people at their posts, gazing out across the horrors of No Man’s Land.

  Fringe benefits.

  Susannah has claimed a basement room below what once was the Biograph Theater. Dillinger was shot dead just outside the theater, way, way back before. But some people still remember that. A lot of people squat in the derelict movie palace, and sometimes there are gatherings and meetings of one sort of another that use the stage. The squatters don’t ever seem to mind. It’s something to break up the grinding tedium here at the end of the world. But none of the Biograph’s other inhabitants or occasional interlopers ever fuck with Susannah. She’s painted the Mark of the Guard on her rusty steel door, and that keeps them away in droves.

  There is a second mark, down low. Bottom left-hand corner, near the hinges that creak and strain every time the door is opened and closed.

  A mark no larger than a dime.

  It’s another secret in a the dregs of a world that has all descended into secrets. If military intelligence could ever learn this secret, then the city might stop rotting from the inside out. A drop in the bucket of the tide might be turned. Might. It’s the sign of the Eyes and Mouths and Hands of the Black Pharaoh. He has many names, many titles, but that’s the one Susannah prefers, even if she can’t say why. Perhaps because so many of the others are all but unpronounceable. She
used a Swiss army knife to carve the symbol there herself, almost two years back now, after she first glimpsed the tall, dark man lingering in the doorway of a burned-out house in Sheridan Park. He saw her, as she saw him. He looked into her, and she glimpsed the thinnest rind of the truth of it all. Just the oily scum floating on the surface, but that was more than enough to seduce.

  Now she is among the hundreds in the city who have answered his call, and that seems a far, far greater purpose than numbering among the paper tigers who go through the motions of watching over the ignorant, the unseeing, the souls just counting off the days until deaths or fates much worse than death. Unlike them, her existence has true meaning, even if only a shred.

  There isn’t much to her room below the stage. A few pieces of furniture she dragged in down the stairs: an old office chair, a loveseat upholstered in tatters of mildewed linen, a television set that was already there when she claimed the place, a hotplate, an Army cot, a wobbly table (one leg’s too short) heaped with books and unbound pages and a ceramic coffee cup filled with pens and pencils. One side of the cup has the glowering face of a red bull printed on it and THE CHICAGO BULLS. The horns of the bull form the U in BULLS. The only light comes from the stubs of candles that she hoards, and that she only lights when she needs illumination. Most of her time here is passed in complete darkness.

  As, Susannah knows, is appropriate.

  The ceiling is low enough that she can reach it by standing on the Coleman cooler she scavenged from the ruins of a sporting-goods store. And there on the cement ceiling is the place that she’s creating her celestial map, which is, of course, more than a mere map. When it’s finally finished, at that undisclosed but nonetheless appointed hour, it will also be a hole.