Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Yuri sees an enormous shadow looming over him; he barely has time to hit the ground. To prepare himself for the worst.

  It is a horse, a mustang; it is apparently coming from the west and it almost trampled him. The small man riding it is holding a rifle much like Yuri’s own and he is firing it with one hand, haphazardly, aiming at the truck and screaming in a guttural language. Yuri wonders if the rider even saw him.

  The men bearing down on the Silverado are stopped by the joint fire of Vernier and Campbell, who has come to support him. Those that try the same maneuver from the side of the Ford are taken down by Brother Francisco, prudently stationed at the angle of the pickup and the heavy military truck.

  The French sharpshooter continues imperturbably killing men, whatever their distance or position; then, in a movement of astonishing fluidity, he turns and engages the small Islamic rider, who instinctively spurs his horse to safety in the underbrush. Not a chance, thinks Yuri; besides, the Frenchman’s gun is empty. He reloads at lightning speed, but it is to concentrate on the men swarming around the Silverado. Vernier is nearly submerged, and the other flank needs reinforcement. Campbell, his AK-101 firmly in hand, dashes back over to the Ford pickup. Both of them have spent their time in this way, running from one side to the other of the metal fortress, supporting the others when they are at the point of being overwhelmed. “The Firefighters of the Third Reich,” remembers Yuri, thinking of an old article about the Waffen-SS units at the Russian front he read once in the military library Campbell inherited from his father.

  This is war. Beauty is wedded to the Beast.

  Yuri observes the scene; around sixty meters in front of him, the mounted man is riding up out of the underbrush in a cloud of dust, reloading his rifle. He is wearing an Arab kaffiyeh printed with a black-and-white design that hides the lower half of his face; his eyes are filled with the irrepressible desire to kill.

  The horse is a Canadian prairie mustang, white and tawny. Young. A beautiful little runner.

  The rider sees Yuri and the body over which he is crouching. He does not hesitate for a fraction of a second. He bears down on them, shouting a sort of bark, kicking his horse hard, the rifle held firmly in one hand in front of him. He’ll fire when he gets close enough, thinks Yuri.

  Very calmly, he takes the Tokarev from his cowboy holster, switches it to his left hand, and listens to the first bullet drop into the chamber with a dry click. Then, still without any nervousness at all, he pulls the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer from his shoulder holster—no need to cock it; he has used it so recently that it is still hot. In the space of two or three breaths he empties the two guns simultaneously into the horse and its rider, who has only time to fire one bullet in a reflexive motion; it arcs harmlessly into the trees.

  A mountain of flesh collapses into the dust, rolling over on itself in a chaos of limbs and cloth. In the starlight it is like a strange meteorite crashing to earth.

  Neither the horse nor the man moves. Yuri knows he got both of them cleanly. Ural-made 7.62-caliber bullets, the kind that won the Battle of Berlin. Given the ten bullets remaining in the magazine of the nine-millimeter German-Swiss gun, the rider doesn’t have a chance in hell. The night is black.

  He approaches the two entangled creatures, man and horse united like a centaur in death. A bit higher up, on the road, the firing continues, but the spaces between volleys are lengthening; the cracks of gunfire seem to be retreating in the direction of Maine. The night is black and the stars are shining.

  He is very close to them, the man and the horse, the mass of intermingled flesh; his binoculars confirm the kill. The sky is ultraviolet; the mountain vegetation gleams like moon metal. The flesh is the color of electrical interference, the blood is a low vibration just above infrared. The night is black, the stars are shining. Men are killing one another.

  He gets even closer to the two. Yes. He killed both of them cleanly.

  The horse.

  And the boy.

  * * *

  Anyone who has seen a battlefield after the battle knows the meaning of the word desolation.

  Everyone is now aware of Yuri’s discovery. The boy soldier was about the same age as Link de Nova—twelve, thirteen at most.

  They have found six other bodies of children or young teenagers around the convoy, crushed under the masses of their sidecars, their mustangs, their camels, their motorbikes, their corpses full of holes of every caliber. They are dressed in various military uniforms and long Afghan-style brown tunics, Pashtun turbans and Arab kaffiyehs. They are pale beneath the watery light of the glacial moon. They seem even younger in death, as if their lost childhoods were revived at the moment of their deceases.

  No one in the group really noticed their presence in the heat of combat.

  Except the French sniper.

  He gives them a technically perfect summary of the operation, concluding with a final stroke:

  “The SR25M has an effective range of a little over eight hundred meters; it’s a semiautomatic but still very precise up to that distance. At first I thought they had hired jockeys! When I realized the truth, I have to say it only strengthened my motivation. I wasn’t going to let them become experienced adults.”

  It is truly the Law of the Territory. The Law of Bronze. The one that will crush everything in its path to save this library. Everything. Including a bunch of children.

  “I should also tell you that I probably sniped the fucker that was commanding them. There, to the east, around six hundred meters away; he’ll be easy to find. He was riding a white stallion. His bodyguards were both kids I had just picked off; he had binoculars and he was speaking into a walkie-talkie. He was wearing a sort of khaki turban and a Nazi uniform.”

  “A Nazi uniform?” Campbell repeats, intrigued.

  “Yes, a gray-and-green German uniform from the Second World War, with swastikas and SS insignia. I am French. I would have recognized it without night vision.”

  Yuri realizes that “Magic Bus” has been playing on repeat for almost an hour. During the entire battle, while men, horses, dogs, camels, and children were killing one another, the tape had imperturbably continued to play. Too much, magic bus!

  The economy of the Territory has its own rules, more implacable than those of nature, since the Territory has outlived not only nature but its destruction. This economy is already in full activity. While Yuri puts together a complete plasmapack for Brother Friedrich’s chest, he can see the two poles of this singular organization click into place, geographically, ethically, naturally. Under the black sky, the dusting of stars, the curving silver sliver of the moon, the starlight reveals a whole secret world; the dark light of the night sky is the light best suited to portray this world, this economy, this way of life.

  Slade Vernier, first: Yuri gave him the first emergency medical care; like Yuri, he had been lucky—the high-caliber bullet, fired at close range, had exited his body after piercing an outer section of the femur. Rather than risking gangrene or surgery in the middle of the night in a mountain desert, Yuri had administered a transcutaneous-osmosis triple bandage and then placed a powerful Textromed exomembrane over the wound to keep the partially broken bone in place.

  Vernier’s enormous Desert Eagle, loaded with .50-caliber bullets, gleams in the diamond light of the moon. He limps heavily as he walks; the wound is severe, but he marches with absolute, mechanical regularity. It is the Law of Bronze—he may limp, but he will walk.

  The economy of the Territory has its own, very strict rules, and one of them is “Never waste anything.” Salvage everything. Chrysler is busily doing just that, loading a rolling stretcher with all the weapons and ammunition he can find. He searches each soldier carefully, without any pointless brutality. For him, they are only merchandise. Or, rather, they are the market.

  Slade Vernier, beginning his progress toward the other side of the plateau, is not following the same section of the Bronze law book. He is not salvaging; he is taking. He does not exe
rcise any pointless brutality, either.

  The first body is quickly turned over. Vernier searches pockets and holsters but does not find what he is looking for. The Desert Eagle recoils in his hand as the man’s head explodes. The night is black.

  On to the second body. The man is only wounded; he stirs and seems to be asking for help. But the problem is that he can’t help Slade Vernier. He takes a 12.7-millimeter bullet right in the face. The night is black, and yet full of stars.

  The third body seems more interesting. Vernier takes from it a large-caliber revolver, .357 Magnum–type, and the corresponding belt full of bullets, without difficulty. If infinity were quantitative, the sky would be constantly illuminated by all the suns in this infinite universe. But the night is black, and the stars are shining.

  This time it is with the newly acquired revolver that he fires a bullet into the man’s head, dead or not. What he was looking for was a weapon with which to finish his work without wasting his own bullets. The entire Law of the Territory is encapsulated here. The Law of the Territory is the Law of the Night.

  He moves on calmly to the next body. Yuri watches as he serenely lights an enormous Cuban cigar acquired who knows where, which he inhales with an expression of ecstasy before firing a bullet into the neck of the man, who seemed dead already. The Law of the Territory is the Law of the stars that shine in the Night.

  He continues, limping; he continues with rigorous constancy, going on to the next one, a wounded man who tries weakly to extend an arm in a pathetic gesture of self-protection. A bullet to the head and the arm relaxes, falls to the side of the body; Vernier’s hand trembles only at the moment of ejection of the heavy .357 Magnum cartridge. The starlit night sky shows everything. At night it is the stars that serve as a sun, for those who know how to capture their light.

  Every six steps, Vernier patiently takes six new bullets from the belt draped over his shoulder. Every three steps or so, he inhales and exhales a deep puff of his cigar.

  Between the men, wounded or not, he does not fail to take what he wants from the animals, wounded or not. They are sometimes sprawled on the ground with their riders, sometimes a short distance away, sometimes still standing, wavering on their feet, trying to walk in one direction or another.

  A man, a horse, a man, a camel, a man, a man.

  The economy of the Law of Bronze in action, the Law of the Convoy-Library. The night is black and overflowing with luminous stars. Chrysler gathers weapons and ammunition; the deputy sheriff is finishing up with the dead, conserving his bullets. Thirty bodies are scattered over what can in truth be called a battlefield. Yuri cannot tear his gaze away from the two men’s methodical ballet, like an antique funerary right dedicated to the warrior gods who live in the mountains.

  The night sky seems to be waiting for expiatory sacrificial victims, as if a gaping mouth will open at the zenith to swallow them up.

  This is Slade Vernier’s version of the Law of the Territory. He won’t have any heads cut off. No time, no point, inefficient in this situation. But there will be no survivors among the bandits from Maine.

  None. No men, no animals.

  Not even any children. They will remember the Territory Convoy for a long time.

  The Law of Bronze dominates the night of the asbestos mountains. The Law of Bronze protects them, them and their library. It has no pity for anything, or anyone.

  It is an infinitely reassuring feeling, thinks Yuri.

  A feeling that corresponds, he realizes, to the scope of the terror he is capable of inflicting on others.

  28 > RIDERS ON THE STORM

  Forty men. In forty-five minutes. By six of them. Five and a half, really.

  Six to seven victims per person, on average. Around one every seven minutes. From another statistical angle, one enemy killed every seventy-five seconds. And that’s not counting the men taken out of combat that the vanguard took with them when they retreated toward Maine.

  Vernier counted them all carefully as he fired a bullet into the head of each one. His zeal had even extended to asking the French sniper to take him up the butte, to the north, and then near the rocky ridge to the south, and finally six hundred meters straight west, in order to make absolutely sure that his work was finished.

  There would be no survivors. None.

  When he had returned from his patrol, he said: “We found the guy in the Nazi uniform. And the boys Lecerf mentioned.” And then: “And two or three others.”

  Any additional commentary would be superfluous. No one can survive the passage of the Convoy; the remnants of the force that attacked them must be on the other side of Quebec by now, in New Brunswick, or in Maine. You don’t attack a Territory Convoy. And, Yuri adds to himself, there can be no impunity when it comes to a Papal Convoy.

  The Convoy and the Forty Thieves. They are creating a myth, a legend that

  will sweep the entire Northeast. Each of us is a soldier-monk; we are the

  Guardians of the Sacred Library, and every bandit in the region better get that into

  his thick skull, if he hasn’t already. As deeply into his skull as a .50-caliber bullet

  fired by Slade Vernier.

  Around them, the strip excavations of Thetford Mines are vast arenas of chrysotile, giant craters whose walls descend in concentric spirals into the heart of the earth; it is like standing on a piece of the moon that has been teleported to eastern Quebec. The huge mines are nothing now but archaeological remnants of a long-gone world, vanished even before the Metastructure. At that time, forgotten or nearly so, men worked the Earth in order to reach the Sky. Now they no longer work; they have abandoned the Sky and allowed what remains of the Earth to control their destinies.

  According to Campbell’s estimations, they were attacked by around sixty men, seventy-two at most, the standard number in a katyba of neo-Islamist franc-tireurs. Apparently their armies are often composed of child soldiers. “The bandits had a numeric advantage over us,” says Chrysler, “but we knew how to stay compact, how to help each other, how to act in a coordinated way. We handed those bastards their own asses.”

  Of course, there is more to be said on the topic. They put forty men out of combat, dead or wounded, seriously or not. And Vernier had taken it upon himself to balance out the equation; he had made everything clearer, more readable, more definable. He had counted to forty and turned all the numbers into a single and terrible zero.

  The neo-Islamists from Maine don’t understand Territory mathematics at all; they know nothing of the Law of Bronze. They didn’t know how to see at night; they hadn’t had the support of starfire, or the allegiance of the ultraviolet sky.

  The arithmetic of death provides you with a sort of map on which the darkest areas indicate the light to be found, light that will blind you remorselessly.

  The Law of Bronze imposes itself with a vengeance; it seems to have an insatiable need for men of their type.

  “I think you’ll be able to congratulate yourself fully when Brother Friedrich is definitively out of danger,” says Brother Francisco.

  Campbell grimaces.

  “We’ll be out of the Bois-Francs soon and in the Estrie. In twenty-four hours at the most, we’ll be in the Territory,” he points out.

  Yuri is silent. The four of them are in the truck, transformed now into a makeshift ambulance. The so-called Francisco Alpini is at the wheel; Campbell is in the passenger seat, with Friedrich Ostermann lying in the cab’s large rear compartment and Yuri hunkered down beside him, keeping an eye on the patient.

  Vernier is driving the Ford pickup at the head of the convoy; the young French sniper bringing up the rear in the Silverado. Speeds up to sixty kilometers an hour are easy now. “The roads will get better as our altitude decreases,” Campbell remarks. “We should get there before night tomorrow, I’m sure of it.”

  Yuri sighs deeply. There is one certainty, and only one: the man called Friedrich Ostermann has only a few hours left. The plasmapack and cardio-pump are do
ing what they can, as is the intrapulmonary microrespirator—as is Yuri himself—but the initial hemorrhages were too severe, the impact of powerful military bullets fired at close range much too heavy for his body. If he is to survive, they need to get the bullets out of him as soon as possible, and Yuri is not really equipped to perform such a procedure, unless he goes back to military surgical techniques from the time of the Thirty Years’ War.

  They killed forty men. And they will lose one.

  This man who will die in the foothills of the Notre Dame Mountains will never have seen America except to die here, saving a library that is not even his. His tomb will face the Saint Lawrence estuary amid desolate mountains where no one ever comes. He left the heart of the Old World, the Eternal City, to die in the northernmost reaches of the Appalachians.

  He came. He conquered. He disappeared.

  A man’s death can be the best opportunity for a group to fuse together forever, to become a single living entity, with all its contradictions.

  In this sense, death can be a creator; all you have to do is look it right in the eyes.

  Dawn is just breaking when they begin to dig. They all work together. Picks, shovels, sweat, silence.

  Brother Friedrich Ostermann died at the border of L’Amiante and Asbestos counties, near the huge glacial Lake Aylmer, in the place called Moose Bay, a few miles from a city called Beaulac-Garthby—deserted, half destroyed, probably the victim of violent confrontations between various armed groups.

  Yuri had told Campbell they needed to stop the convoy; then, in reply to his silent question, he had said to Francisco Alpini: “I think he wants to say something to you. And I think they will be his last words.”

  Then, with the convoy halted in the middle of the road, they had changed places.

  Yuri had watched the ritual of prayer and benediction with fascination. He heard snippets of incomprehensible murmurs and brief whispered dialogues; he saw Brother Francisco gently close his comrade’s eyes and then make the strange gesture also common in the communities of HMV, the sign of the cross.