The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  Or woman, he reminded himself. Topper turned to stare at Rough Beast, wondering what he’d been thinking and which part of him had been thinking it. Her head poked up now, insect-eyed and blank-faced in the gas mask.

  An electric turret whined as she brought one of the Bofors to bear on him.

  “Screw you,” Topper shouted, and began dragging the cargo chains out. It was hijacking time. He didn’t have what it took to die again right now.

  After monkey-boy propositioned me a few times, I knew we were getting somewhere. Excellent. I could work with that.

  The discussion of children, however, was a tad premature. I almost said something, but then he pressed some big goddamn red button and all manner of excitement began.

  No, the other kind of excitement.

  That all changed once he’d killed everyone within a ten-mile radius of the tank. Or so it seemed, anyway, given the swath of destruction all around us. After that, he turned back to me, with a terrible, deeply insane look about him.

  I mean, he’d been insane all along. I knew that. You might have even said it was part of his charm. But I’d just watched him kill everyone I worked for, lived with, fucked and fought. Then I’d watched him kill everyone at the mill I was supposedly defending. Then he turned and looked at me.

  “Now or never, baby,” I said to myself, cranking one of his cannon turrets to point at him. That ought to put the fear into him.

  All he did was proposition me a third time, then turn away and start fooling with a tangle of chains.

  I threw my riot gun at him. Insane I can handle. Inconsistency: that makes me crazy.

  “Marie-Grace Just Grace,” he babbled on, as he started spreading the chains out on the gravel in front of us. He ignored the riot gun completely, after glancing at it. I clambered down out of the tank and retrieved it, but it was too big to hold if I was going to help him get the pallets aboard.

  Sure, I helped him. He could barely move the damn things. I was in far too deep to back out now. Might as well get our business done in here and get the hell out. Then we could talk about children, or whatever the fuck he wanted.

  Men. Can’t live with ’em, can’t stake ’em out for the vultures. Though some of them might be improved. Including this crazy old bastard.

  He was my last ticket.

  Topper yanked the cold steel out of the charnel house of the mill one-quarter-ton ingot at a time. The winches could handle the load, no problem – they were made for much heavier work than this, naval-grade hardware salvaged off a captured Kriegsmarine surface raider which had been broken in a gray-market yard hidden up the Rappahannock.

  The girl helped. She was small, and weak, and not half-rebuilt out of spare parts and Soviet medicine, but she was tough and smart. Topper wondered how he knew her. Good-looking, too, and not just in an any-woman-in-a-war-zone way.

  Somehow having his hands on all this hard-case metal was bringing him back into himself. Memories spiraled in kaleidoscope paths to land in partially assembled chiaroscuros somewhere deep in our Topper’s head. Like how a real person might think, it occurred to him, coherent images and more than a little bit of focused recall stitching together into timelines.

  He wanted to turn away from some of them – deeply unpleasant, unpleasantly deep, or just infused with a stunning sadness for the boy and man someone with his name and face might once of have been.

  It was her, he realized. Not the metal. Not the dead. Not the distant thump of artillery and first drone of engines gone raiding in the cold, smoky sky. Not the screaming cats and bleeding eye sockets of memory. Not the white coats and wire-rimmed spectacles which had dominated so much of the intervening years.

  Her.

  Topper stepped closer, subtle as a pork roast in a synagogue, and sniffed.

  “What the hell are you doing, you cre—” she shouted, then stopped when she got a good look at his face.

  “M . . . Grace,” Topper said, and looked her full in the eyes. He could fall into that pooled, dark amber forever, he realized.

  Something was waiting to be born here beneath the shadow of Rough Beast, behind the walls of Bethlehem. He could feel it stirring inside him.

  A soul. Hope. Affection.

  Love?

  He closed his eyes and breathed her in. She struck him all the way down into the lizard brain, scent and smell wired by million years of evolution and a hundred thousand generations of hairless apes dropping from the trees to say, this one. This is the one.

  Before he could open his eyes again, she kissed him.

  Somewhere inside the shattered Japanese puzzle box of his head, he was made whole.

  “Let’s get the last of this stuff on board,” Topper said, rough but gentle as he drew her into his arms. “Then we’re gonna say screw it to the Sisterhood and the New Friends and the Federals and the Wehrmacht and go be alone together. There’s freemen in the Alleghenies would pay good money for our cargo, and hire us to raid for them.”

  His mind was dancing with visions of a quiet cabin, an open sky and skin exposed for no purpose more sinister than a long slow trail of the tongue.

  God, it was like being a kid again.

  For the first time in his life, Topper had woken up.

  * * *

  Yeah. So. Okay, I kissed him. Like I said, I’d kind of run out of options at that point.

  But it was more than that. Much more.

  When Topper turned and looked at me, really looked at me; when he got my name right; when the man that lived somewhere underneath all the layers of insanity our world had thrust at him suddenly bled through and took charge . . . I kissed him.

  And when he pulled me into his arms and I caught the scent of him – the real, true scent, beyond the oil and blood and gasoline and the rank sweat of fear and battle – it hit me right below the belt.

  Yeah, there. I meant what I said. How do you think things become clichés, anyway?

  “Right,” I said. “Last load and we’re out of here.”

  And we rumbled off into the sunset. Sunrise. Whatever: I’m telling the story here, okay? The light changed and took us with it into a different world.

  Don Quixote

  Carrie Vaughn

  The distant thunder and subtle earthquake of a bombardment shouldn’t have bothered me. I’d stayed in Madrid through the siege, three years starting in ’thirty-six, and a man didn’t forget a thing like that. My gut didn’t turn over at the noise, but at its implications. The war was supposed to be all but over now. So why the bombing?

  Joe and I had left the main army to drive a truck along the river, looking for a vantage where we could watch the defenders’ last stand. Most of the other reporters had already fled the country. I imagined I’d follow soon enough. As soon as I got that one great story. There had to be some kind of nobility in the face of defeat. Some kind of lesson for the future.

  We stopped at a ridge and looked out over the river valley, trying to guess Franco’s army’s next move. Without getting too close, of course. I shaded my eyes. Another rumble of thunder rolled over us, and columns of smoke rose up from around the next hill.

  Joe squinted into the sky. “Where’re those bombs coming from? I don’t see any planes—”

  “It’s not planes.”

  “Then what is it, artillery?”

  It didn’t feel like artillery; the ground wasn’t thumping with every report. “Want to find out?”

  “You drive, I’ll get my camera.”

  We left the overlook and drove until we found a turn off leading toward all that smoke.

  I gripped the steering wheel; the truck lurched over potholes, the shocks squealing. Joe held the dash with one hand and his camera with the other, waiting for his shot. Not that there was anything to see – the landscape was barren of trees and vegetation. Not a spot of green. The battle had passed by here already, some time ago.

  When we circled the next hill and came into an open stretch, the world changed. The battle here had been recen
t. Battle – more like a rout. Evidence suggested a massive aerial bombardment: tanks broken into pieces, treads shattered and turrets ripped from chassis; craters dotting the field like paint spatters; platoons reduced to scattered body parts. Vegetation still smoldered, and smoke rose up from wrecked ground. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said this was someplace on the Western Front, twenty years ago. It’s what happened when you took a thousand pounds of explosives and used them to scrape the land clean.

  We had expected to find the crumpled remains of a defeated army. The fascists had pushed the Republican defenders back to the edges of their territory. The war was just about over, with Franco the victor. Everyone said so. Without outside aid, the Republicans didn’t have a chance. But any potential allies had just turned their backs by making peace with Hitler. So-called peace, however long it lasted.

  Somehow, I couldn’t turn away from the disaster.

  “Something’s not right,” I said finally.

  “You just now noticed?”

  “No – look at those rifles, the markings. These guys are Nationalists. Franco’s army.”

  “Wait – aren’t they supposed to be winning?”

  “Yeah.”

  Joe got excited. “Then it’s true – the loyalists came up with some secret weapon. They’re going to turn it around after all.”

  I thought it really was too late – you had to have territory before you could defend it, and the loyalists didn’t have much of that at all at this point. But if they did have a secret weapon – why wait until now to use it? “Something doesn’t add up.”

  Crows circled. The air was starting to stink. There wasn’t even anybody left to retrieve bodies, as if Franco’s army hadn’t yet figured out it had suffered such a defeat.

  “Hank, let’s get out of here—”

  “Wait a minute.” I grabbed binoculars from my bag on the seat next to me and peered out.

  The road we were on hugged the hill and looped away from the plain where the battle had taken place. On the far side, beyond the destruction, another road stretched away: fresh, cut into the hard earth, an unpaved destructive swathe trammeling vegetation to pulp. It was as wide as two tanks driving abreast.

  Of course we had to follow it.

  We took the truck as far as we could across the battlefield, which wasn’t far at all. Weaving around debris, we avoided most obstacles but got stalled in a deep-cut rut. Ten minutes of spinning our tires in mud didn’t get us anywhere. After an argument, we decided to continue on, to follow the story.

  What I figured: the weapon was mobile – the rectangular sections of treads had dug into the ground, leaving an obvious path to follow. It was big, heavy. And it had to be pretty fast, because even through the binoculars, I couldn’t find a sign of it ahead.

  “It must be a tank,” Joe said.

  “Too big,” I answered. “Too wide.” I’d been a cub reporter in the Great War and had seen up close what tanks could do, which was quite a lot, but not this much. Unless, as Joe said, some genius had made improvements. “I don’t know of any tank that carries enough shells to level a battalion like that.”

  “A couple of tanks maybe? A whole squad of them?”

  But there was only one path leading out, one pair of treads traveling onwards, a helpful dotted line guiding the way.

  The sun started toward the west. We had canteens of water, some bread and sardines stuffed in our packs, but no blankets, nothing for camping out. Not even a flashlight. I thought about suggesting we turn around, then decided to wait until Joe suggested it first.

  “You hear that?” Joe said, in our second hour of slogging.

  I stopped, and heard it: the metallic grinding of gears, the bass chortle of a diesel engine. If I’d been back in the states, close to a town, I’d have assumed I was near a construction site, jackhammers and cranes working at full capacity.

  We had just a little further to scramble, over another tread-rutted rise, before we saw what it was.

  A small camp had been set up: a fire, over which a pot hung from a tripod, containing boiling water. A canvas lean-to was propped on a set of rickety branches that must have been picked up from the side of the road. A bearded Spaniard in worn army fatigues sat by the fire, stirring whatever was in the pot. In the shadows outside the reach of the fire, another Spaniard worked at what looked like an armored-encased engine block mounted on a scaffold. The engine glowed, spat sparks and spewed a shroud of smoke into the air. Atop the engine block was a steel chassis; below it were the treads that had cut the road from the battlefield.

  It was a tank, but not really. Rather, some Frankenstein’s monster of tank parts. The war machine had been cobbled together and greatly expanded, drawing on the initial tank design for inspiration then taking it to an extreme. Wide treads on a hinged base performed the same motion as an ankle joint, bending as it climbed over obstacles, keeping the chassis level. The cannon stood in for arms, firing six-inch shells if I had my guess. A squadron’s worth of bombing in a single go. Armored, mobile, crushing everything in its path. As if ten thousand years of warfare had led to this.

  The glowing engine seemed like nothing so much as a beating heart, pounding in anger, atop a muscled body and stout legs. The red, yellow and purple stripes of the Republican flag were painted on its side.

  Joe and I just stared, until the first Spaniard drew a pistol from a pouch on his belt and shouted at us in Spanish.

  Joe put his arms up and yelled back, “Somos Americanos! Americanos!”

  For a frozen moment I thought that wouldn’t matter and we’d both get shot. I prepared to run. But the Spaniard lowered his pistol and laughed. “I don’t believe it!” he said in accented English. “We thought you all left!”

  He invited us to sit by the fire. The mechanic climbed off the machine and joined us. The man at the fire was Pedro; the mechanic, Enrique. Pedro was a nondescript soldier in worn fatigues, hat pressed over shaggy hair. Enrique was otherworldly: his eyes were invisible behind tinted goggles, his head was bare – his hair appeared to have been singed off by the heart of the engine where he worked.

  After exchanging names, we told our stories. But Joe and I couldn’t stop looking at the modified tank. Pedro saw this and smiled. “What do you think?”

  “It’s—” I started, then shook my head. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “We call it the Don Quixote.”

  “Because you’re tilting at windmills?”

  Pedro laughed and said to Enrique, “I told you people would understand!”

  Enrique didn’t say a word. He sat on the ground, arms around his knees. The firelight reflected off his goggles, so he could have been looking anywhere.

  “But what is it?” Joe asked.

  “It’s a personal tank,” Pedro said. “Enrique built it, but it was my idea. It’s better than a tank – faster, more agile, simpler to operate. It only needs one man instead of a whole crew. You’ve seen what one person is able to do with a machine like this?”

  “That battalion back there – you destroyed it?” I said. “It’s amazing.”

  “Yes, it is,” Pedro said.

  “If you’d had this a year ago you might have made a difference,” Joe said.

  Pedro’s smile fell, and he and his partner both looked at us, cold and searching. “Never too late,” Pedro said, shoving another stick into the fire. “It took us years to build this one. But now that it’s finished, we can build more, many more. An army of them. The Great War didn’t end war – but this might. No one would dare stand against an army of Don Quixotes.”

  This gave me the image of a hundred wizened old men sitting astride broken horses, making a stand against Franco. I almost laughed. But then I glanced at the shadow of the war machine. This conversation should have taken place in a bar, over a third pitcher of beer. Then, I would have been able to laugh. But here, in the dark and cold, an hour’s walk from a scene of slaughter, the firelight turning the faces into shadowed skulls, I t
hought I was looking at a new kind of warfare, and was terrified.

  The Spaniards let Joe and I stay at their camp. They didn’t have extra blankets, but the fire was warm and they shared the thin stew they’d cooked. Enrique slept in the machine, by the engine, which although it was shut down now, never stopped its subtle clicking, cooling noises. Like the beat of a heart.

  “This is going to make a hell of a story,” Joe said, whispering at me in the dark. “I can’t wait to get pictures in the morning.”

  A hell of a story, yeah. “This isn’t going to turn the war around for them, you know,” I said.

  “Of course not, with just the two of them. Even if they do have that monster. And I think they’re a little crazy to boot. But that’s not the point, is it? This thing – folks back home’ll go gonzo for it. It’d be like King Kong. If we could get them to bring it to the states we could sell tickets.”

  There was an idea – if the two men would ever agree to it. More likely they’d prefer to stay and smash as much of Franco as they could before going down in flames. They wouldn’t have a chance to build their army of personal tanks.

  “What do you think, Hank? Can we talk them into giving up the fight and bringing that thing to New York? Get it to climb the Empire State Building?”

  The fire was embers. Enrique’s machine clicked like crickets, and Pedro seemed to be asleep. I shook my head. “I’m thinking about what the Germans would do with that thing. Scratch that – with a hundred of them.” Pedro and Enrique couldn’t build an army of them, but an industrialized war machine like Germany?

  “What?”

  “That armor might be able to stomp out a few battalions, but it can’t win the war. They’ve got no allies, no outside support, while Franco’s got Germany and Italy supplying him. As soon as the fascists cross the river, they’ve got Spain – and if they capture those two, they’ve got that thing, too. Then the Germans get a hold of it—”

  “And what are the Germans going to do with it?”