Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Their metal fortress newly formed on the road, there is a brief discussion between Campbell and Slade Vernier, who now takes charge of the operation. Campbell raises no objection; it is the Law of Bronze.

  The Islamists have come from the east, from Maine, Aroostook County, probably. The convoy is deployed in a double-L formation, the truck as the principal line, sheltering the two pickups, parked perpendicularly across the road. The fortress has only one flaw: it leaves the western mountains open, with the long stretch of woods, Nordic dwarf pines and lodgepoles, cedars, firs, and high, wide tree ferns and subtropical acacias, intercut in every sense by crevassed tracks and deep ravines—difficult to navigate for motor vehicles, but much easier for horses or camels.

  Superior technology, Yuri realizes, can become a serious handicap if it isn’t backed up by a strategy adapted to the situation.

  The day is ending; night vision might be our only advantage.

  He doesn’t know Slade Orange Vernier very well. He hopes the man will measure up.

  He hopes he will be able to get them out of this, like Campbell would probably know how to do.

  He hopes he will help them kill a lot of men.

  Yuri happens to notice that “Magic Bus” is still playing on a continuous loop on Chrysler’s cassette player; one of Link de Nova’s small digital devices allows the pickup’s deck to adapt to all existing types of media—so Yuri put the Who song on repeat, like with a CD. All they have to do is wait for the tape to rewind.

  And the riff begins again, imperturbable. Too much, magic bus …

  Beauty does not care about ugliness; they are not even of the same world. They can never even cross paths.

  Acceleration, turbodiesel style: the truck plows forward amid gunfire and explosions of all sorts, as well as the din of steel battered by impact, Securimax windows that absorb a hail of bullets with a dull thud, and the shattering of more fragile window glass, white sunbursts trapped in the green-gold of the binocular sights.

  The situation has changed very fast; time seems dislocated, the unity of space fractured. He is in more than one place at once. He is there, elsewhere, before, after, during. He is under the stars, he is under fire, he is in the night. Too much, magic bus …

  They are arsenals on four legs. He, in addition to the Ruger Mini-14, is carrying a large German-made H&K MP5 rapid-fire pistol with a nine-millimeter cartridge in a Mohawk quiver on his back. It is a weapon of great precision, even though it was originally designed for short-range fire. He also has his nine-millimeter Sig Sauer automatic in a police strap under his arm; the Russian Tokarev is in a fringed, cowboy-style black leather holster attached to his belt. Two old French-made fragmenting grenades are tucked into the ventral pockets of his combat harness; two other, more modern Chinese-made ones, kept on his dorsal side, are “flash mixes” at once deafening, immobilizing, and blinding. The Mossberg 590 slide-action shotgun is lying on the pickup’s backseat ready for use; alongside it is a long Gurkha sword with a curved blade, his wild-card weapon, his final recourse. Too much, magic bus …

  Campbell is armed with his AK-101 assault rifle, a Remington patrol rifle semiautomatic, a Winchester SX3 rifle, his SS Luger, a Marine assault knife, and the .38 Magnum revolver that Yuri took off the corpse of the man in red on Row 299.

  Yuri has already been sucked into the vortex of the night, the night of weapons, the night of multitraumatic injuries. The enemy has several powerful cross-country motorcycles similar to his Kawasaki and a duo of sidecars where the passenger serves as machine gunner. Horses, camels, gasoline-fueled motorcycles. The present is nothing but the mutual destruction of past and future.

  He is there, he is firing, he is here and screaming something indistinct to Chrysler; he is farther away, behind the truck, exchanging tactical advice with Brother Francisco; now he is supporting Brother Friedrich, who is firing at a group of horsemen galloping down the butte. He is near the pickup again, and in concert with Campbell he empties twenty rounds from a fresh cartridge continuously on a group of camel riders and motorcyclists who are attempting a southern charge around sixty meters from them at the bottom of the slope. Too much, magic bus!

  He is farther away, firing nasty double-ought buckshot from the Mossberg at several camel riders shooting at them from the bottom of the butte, to the north. Stars. Fire. The night. Black.

  Too much, magic bus!

  He is there now, near the Silverado, reloading his Mini-14 and backing up the young French sharpshooter, who, like a machine with a faint smile, is methodically firing his SR25M telescopic rifle—a weapon used by the Navy Seals under the code name MK11, if Yuri remembers correctly. The man and his gun seem to form a single, perfect killing machine. Winchester .308 hunter’s bullets. Twenty-cartridge magazines. A titanium bipode. Precision down to the millimeter. A Leupold optics system. Sixty percent of the parts are interchangeable with an M16. It is the typical weapon of the American sharpshooter. The French sniper seems to have become utterly American.

  With each shot, he hits the bull’s-eye. With each shot, his face remains inscrutable. With each shot, he is only doing his job. The endless sky. The end of the world. The night is a black day.

  Too much, magic bus!

  The Ruger rifle is loaded with Remington .223 cartridges; not very high-caliber ammunition, especially for a light weapon like that. Yuri knows he can’t hope to compete with the French sniper. His tactic is simple—fire as many cartridges, as quickly as possible, at the smallest possible area, from the shortest possible distance. The night is black and the stars are shining.

  I want my magic bus—too much, magic bus!

  These three horsemen, for example: slightly isolated, in the very center of the plateau around a hundred and fifty meters away, two of them shouldering old French-made semiautomatic MAS-49 rifles, and the other an even older Enfield dating from the Second World War. The twenty .223 bullets explode in their direction, two or three per second, his finger whitening as it presses almost constantly on the trigger. The men scatter; he thinks he might have hit one of them, who stays flattened on his horse. The Mini-14 rifle is a greatly improved copy of the old Garand M14 used by the American army in the 1950s, but it is still a semiautomatic weapon, and he has to press the trigger for every shot. The Mossberg is less precise but more powerful; it fires at a wide range and uses well-tempered .12-caliber ammunition. At twenty-four meters it creams the two sub-officers coming as backup from the rocky ridge where the attack began in a single, well-judged, transversal shot; the spray of shot drops them side by side.

  Now I’ve got my magic bus—too much, magic bus!

  The Boche machine pistol can wait until later, a wild card to be played in an emergency.

  As if on command, an emergency presents itself immediately.

  Too much, magic bus …

  They don’t have time to detect the maneuver.

  The maneuver from the summit of the butte they came from.

  The butte from where the others came from, too. Where the stars shine more brightly and a very fine sliver of moon casts its gentle light on sky and earth.

  Night has fallen completely now. Campbell and Yuri have state-of-the-art binocular systems, portable and hardly thicker than diving goggles; Slade Vernier has a pair of powerful traditional binoculars that he regularly brings to his eyes, and of course there are the special cases of the Italians and the French sniper, with their integrated combat glasses.

  The night will be their closest ally. It will be their only ally. It will be the luminous shadow of the Law of Bronze.

  Everything happens very fast; abruptly, they are fired at from the back, from the west. They are fired at from the woods.

  They are fired at from somewhere no one should be. The weak point of the fortress. Slade Vernier is hit in the leg; Yuri can see his silent grimace, the reflexive movement of his thigh, the blood that flows in thick streams. He notes that it barely slows the man from western Canada, who fires back without the slightest hesita
tion. Suddenly, Yuri remembers that he is carrying the emergency Medikit—but that will have to wait. He brandishes his H&K and opens fire like a madman. Suddenly, he is a cerebral extension of the killing machine.

  A dozen men, descending on them. Horses. Camels. Automatic AK-47, G3, and M16 rifles, Uzi and MAC-10 rapid-fire pistols—a true attack force. And on its heels, horsemen—and black shadows running on the earth, becoming a sea of ink. …

  Dogs.

  Attack dogs.

  Killer dogs.

  At the same instant, in a perfect tactical conjunction, the firing begins again on the eastern side. Despite his wound, Slade Vernier is giving orders, assigning roles: Lecerf and the men from the truck against the guys east of the road; the others, including himself, against the horsemen and attack dogs. Projectiles explode in every direction. Yuri is concentrating on a group of two or three horsemen, firing a long volley of nine-millimeter bullets at them, when he feels a violent burning in his left leg. Firebrand-ember-spike-barbed wire, white hot, stabbing his flesh. He loses his balance and falls to the ground. Diagnosis: open wound. Large caliber. A lot of blood, gushing freely. Fast fast fast, the Medikit in the pickup, fast fast fast a clotting agent, fast fast fast an analgesic shot, fast fast fast an adrenaline shot, fast fast fast back into the battle, fast fast fast very fast kill more men.

  His wound just barely staunched, Yuri resumes his post and fires at two camel riders from another group that has just joined the survivors from the first squadron, and he pitilessly eliminates their two Dobermans at almost the same time. He sees Chrysler tackled to the ground by a couple of ferocious rottweilers. He launches himself in that direction, dragging his injured leg, as fast as he can go, and lodges two bullets from his Sig Sauer in each canine spinal column; Slade Vernier has just cut away the hind legs of a pit bull with a single stroke of the needle-sharp blade of his bowie knife before cutting the animal’s throat. Lecerf joins them; his face perfectly impassive, he fires four times and kills a horseman with each shot, then with four more bullets he takes off the heads of the pit bulls running behind them. Mathematical precision. Telescopic precision. The mathematics of a killer’s brain. He is already turning away again to continue firing long-range at the men from Maine.

  Yuri reloads his H&K and resumes firing continuously at what remains of the assault group; he doesn’t know how many he has hit, but when he becomes fully aware again his cartridge is clicking on empty, and none of the enemy men are there. Campbell, now armed with his semiautomatic Winchester SX3, blasts away at the pack of combat dogs that are only following their instincts, trying to kill them all.

  The endless sky, the fiery stars, and the night, so black.

  Parallel track: a group of combatants—horses, camels, motorcycles—heads straight for the Silverado at the exact moment when Slade Vernier is obliged to reload his AR-15 after having slapped together a makeshift bandage and emergency tourniquet for his wound. For the first time Yuri notes the motley, diachronic mixture of the enemy’s weapons: hunting or military rifles from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of all makes, and also even older models, First or Second World War, and even bows and crossbows!

  A Chinese grenade in each hand, he runs as well as he can over to the Silverado pickup and throws the “flash mixes” into the middle of the small troop of assailants. With a series of flashes and shock waves befuddling brains, Vernier has time to reload his weapon. Standing and stifling a groan, he showers the group—still immobilized by neurosensory trauma—with a long volley that cleanly kills several men; the rest scatter instantly in total chaos. The stars in blazes of light, the night in dense blackness. The black Fire of the secret day, the fire of the day of killers.

  Pre-delay: Yuri empties another cartridge from his H&K into a horseman who is aiming a double-feathered competition arrow in his direction, and then another into the driver of a heavy Suzuki who is threatening him with a sawed-off compression cannon rifle. The bullets continue on their bloody way into the body of a camel that bears down on him just before he palms his Sig Sauer pistol and finishes off its rider. The beast falls bleating at his feet, and he puts four or five bullets into the head of the man who is vainly shaking an antique Thompson rifle with a drum loader.

  Fire is coming from everywhere, and men are firing in all directions. Now Yuri is here again with the Mini-14, and then back there with the Mossberg, and farther away with the H&K, and then it starts all over again.

  The stars, the fire, the night.

  Mounted men, camel riders, bikers, guns, bows and arrows. Animal shrieks, roaring motors, explosions of gunfire. He is living an End Time western.

  Gas from smoke grenades rises slowly into the night air; through the filter of amplified optics it dances in ghostly shapes of bluish fog. Orange flashes detonate against the silvery smoke as if on the surface of a broken mirror. Campbell, a predator of the Territory, an odd smile on his face, shoulders his AK-101. A long, crackling, bright yellow flame erupts in the ultraviolet night. Not far from there, Brother Francisco is decimating the attackers’ southern flank. Yuri sees men fall in bunches from their mounts, animal and mechanical, or spin halfway around, their hands pressed to one part or another of their bodies.

  The night is with them. The stars will be on their side. The fire is protecting them.

  The six of them are a single organism now, half human and half arsenal, firing endlessly; the thundering roar is deafening.

  He is there with the Ruger Mini-14, here with the Mossberg, farther away with the H&K. He is there under the stars, in the fire, with the night. He is there, against motorcycles, against horses, against camels. Against men.

  Each individual moment is frozen in time, an iceberg against the universe. The ultraviolet sky is fixed on forgotten constellations. He sees, he hears, he knows, he listens on several distinct channels, like a multifrequency radio-telescope.

  Campbell, Vernier, the soldier-monks, the French sniper, him, the night, the moonlight, the starfire, the gleaming steel of the heavy vehicles, the dark masses of the battle animals, the living shadows of the motorcycles on the plain.

  Brother Francisco stands in front of the truck; concealed by the heavy bulletproof hulk, he fires long volleys from his Lombard army Sig Sauer SG551 automatic rifle, the Kevlar grip of which is covered with reproductions of angels and the Virgin. It looks like an excellent gun, with a thirty-shot clip and Remington .223-caliber bullets, a compact combat telescope, and camouflage coloring, typical of tactical units, widened at the front optic. Its fire is extremely powerful, something the soldier-monk is taking full advantage of.

  His compatriot Brother Friedrich is a bit farther away. With his assault rifle, a Beretta AR70/90, unified Italian army model, NATO 5.56mm-caliber ammunition, fitted with a long telescope of black Kevlar that gleams in the starlight, he has taken up a post on top of the panel between the cab and the platform. It’s a good spot and affords him a good view; he fires in bursts of three shots each with the precision and calm of a machine.

  Yuri’s brain is like an organic calculator; everything is factored together even before it fully crosses his mind, like an illuminating rocket. The zenith, the North Star, Sirius, Vega, the Pleiades, Orion, Andromeda, Venus, Arcturus: all the Beauty of the stars is laid out for them on this night when the Beast is striking.

  And Beauty sees the invisible, while the Beast can detect only what is obvious.

  The night is black.

  There is danger.

  There. Yes. Now.

  The impact of the blast is so devastating that Brother Friedrich is thrown backward. He falls heavily, like a sack of rags, to the ground, with a soft noise, without even a cry.

  There is already blood on the asphalt; there is blood everywhere on the man’s body, so much blood, colored ultraviolet in the binoculars. The night is red.

  Campbell, who has just loaded his Remington 7615 patrol rifle with a twenty-cartridge magazine, sends a silent but very clear message to Yuri. His thin smile says
everything as he shoulders his gun and opens fire on a group of horsemen and camel riders galloping toward them as a front line, backed up by several bikers and their last sidecar equipage.

  We are the Camp Doctors.

  Save him.

  The final frontal attack erupts as Yuri approaches the man from the Vatican and drags him to shelter on a collapsible stretcher with retractable wheels, into a clump of pines about fifty meters off the road. Brother Friedrich isn’t doing well at all. He is in a state of shock, having gotten two high-caliber bullets in the chest while a third ball dislocated his shoulder. Heavy Soviet 7.62-caliber bullets. The operational capacities of their Medikits are going to be pushed to their limits. It will be a white night.

  First the wounds are thoroughly cleaned with Recyclo cotton wool and sprayed with analgesic and antibiotic ultraspray, disinfected with freeze-dried alcohol and then biodegradable antiseptic strips, and then the man is quickly injected with cardiostabilizers, neural antitraumatic and anticoma agents, microcapsules to prevent hemorrhaging and scar accelerants, programmable neuroleptics, and pseudomorphine. Chrysler prepares oxygen and the cardiopump as well as the first plasmosmart emergency bandage, and at the same time he cannot ignore the twenty or so mounted men bearing down on either side of them.

  He sees Slade Vernier take down a half dozen men with a single lateral blast of his AR-15 before shouldering his huge Israeli Desert Eagle. The young French marksman, flat on his belly under the truck’s platform and sheltered by its enormous uncrushable double tires, carefully takes out the entire rear line, diminishing the enemy forces via constant attrition, periodically picking off one of two members of the attack wave. On the other side, near the Ford pickup, Campbell and the other soldier-monk form a veritable battalion of two with the strength of their fire. The night is there; it is their ally. The stars are still watching over them.

  It is war. And this man from the Vatican will surely die. At any rate, he will die if they can’t finish off their attackers from Maine very soon. …