The rest of the men came running in, Brewer and Bernstein bearing Cowles to the back of the truck. Scarfe stood in the yellow glow of the truck’s headlights, his eyes flat coins behind his spectacles. “Cap, you better come look at this…”
“We’re almost mobile,” Schwering said. He went over to the doorway with his gun at his side, but he wasn’t sure if shooting anything would make anything better.
The people of Houston knelt in the purple dirt around the meager cornfield, praying in a subhuman mumbling growl as the little man mechanically stabbed the corpse of Mayor Corcoran where he lay in a dry irrigation ditch.
And out of the muddy pool spreading round the body, they saw—yes, and heard—the spindly sprouts of fresh corn breaking out of the scabby earth, rustling and thrusting with hideous vigor, their roots engorged and glutted with human blood.
Real Americans can get right with just about anything, Arneson thought, choking on bile and tears.
Dawn found the improvised convoy circled round the ruin of a gas station on the westbound highway.
Norman had found a cow skull and wired it onto the handlebars of his bike. Weird kid, even for California. Talked like a cheap telegram, but could drop a stick of bombs on a single target by the map like scratching your own ass in the dark.
Kirazian, who never stopped talking, wouldn’t say where he found the top hat and tails he wore when he climbed onto his bike.
Harrigan and Bernstein stood beside the jeep. “We’re thinking this is as good a place as any…”
“For what?”
Brewer shouted, “They’re lightin’ out! They’re goddamn deserters!”
“Nuts to you!” Harrigan jeered. “There’s no more Army, and there ain’t much America left to desert from. Wise up, you saps…”
Schwering came over with his hat in his hand. “Pat, you heard about New York, same as the rest of us. You saw what we saw when we flew in…the whole Eastern Seaboard—”
“Does it matter? Would it matter to you, if you had a home to go to?”
Bernstein cut him off before he started shouting. “What we mean is…We went in to fight the war, and we won. We were told we could go home, and now…Captain, we just don’t want to pretend, any more.”
“What’ve you been pretending about, exactly?”
“We ain’t a bomber crew without no bomber!” Harrigan shouted. “We ain’t soldiers without no Army! And now we come home, and it seems like each of us should look to his own…”
“And we can’t be expected to fight that…” Bernstein pointed back down the road at Houston. “Less than a year, and look what they’ve become! We never took an oath to protect them.”
Harrigan nodded at Buzz Arneson. “You could come with us, kid. We’d ride you up to that town…or at least as far as Boston…”
Buzz shook his head, said “Thanks. But there was nothing for me there, before…”
Schwering came close enough the others didn’t have to hear, but Buzz went under the truck and crept close enough. “Seems to me you took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Whoever they are, someone did this to your country. And nobody mustered you out. Nobody said your war was over. You want to go, I’m not stopping you. But whatever happens on the road, you’re just another running dog in a dog-eating contest.”
Harrigan scraped his stubbly chin at the captain in an old Sicilian gesture. “I been nobody long enough before I joined the Army.” He pointed at Eladio sitting on a motorcycle and drinking from a canteen. “And if anybody can join, then anybody can jump.”
“That’s what bothers you, is it? That he’s not a mascot on a chain? He showed us where to find canned food and water and he knows which road the Army took to go up to some fallback point in new Mexico, so that’s where we’re going, and until we are told different, we are still a bomber crew, and if Hitler didn’t do this, we’re gonna make whoever did do it wish he was Hitler. If that’s pretending, we’ve all been pretending since we left the jungle, and we’ll keep on pretending ’til we’ve got nothing better to do but go back. Do you read me, Sergeant Harrigan? Lieutenant Bernstein?”
Harrigan’s eyes stayed locked on the captain’s hand on his holstered pistol. “Guess I do.”
Arneson wanted to ride one of the bikes, but Schwering ordered him over to the Jeep with Harrigan on the machinegun and the Mexican kid riding shotgun. Bernstein drove the truck with Baskin and Cowles, who had started to respond to an infusion of plasma.
More, he’d needed to talk to the pilot he worshipped as the big brother he never had, even though only three years separated them. About where they were going, and about when he could set aside the duty he’d been given by the Army Air Corps and the FBI, to execute his commanding officer if he ever showed any sign of wavering in his duty to his country.
They went west out of Houston, over a black ashen plain pocked with weird stands of plumbing fixtures and melted gates, thickets of black-red cacti that clawed at the red-black sky. Skeletons of burnt cars blocked the storm ditches along the highway. Further away from the old city, they grew fewer, but more and more of them were Jeeps and troop trucks, the flotsam and jetsam of a four-alarm bug-out. Hour after hour, they rolled through the same nothing that, if not for the ominous soft-boiled sun overhead, Arneson would’ve decided they were going in circles.
On the washed-out clay highway roads, the Jeep roared too loud for Harrigan to be heard, but Buzz gave himself no peace.
What if he had missed America, somehow? That line from the hicks about blood opening and closing the Eye. Maybe it was a door wide enough they all fell through it, into another America.
Eladio showed them how the masters of the Houston compound bled him to feed the crops, which had bloomed up wherever the dead rotted above or in the ground after everything changed. For a while, they had feasted and gotten fat without guilt after such tribulations, but then they found they could digest nothing else, and the earth would give forth nothing else. Indeed, in patches they passed on the road, the land looked like raw, bloodied flesh of some inconceivably vast beast, upon which they scuttled and scraped like dust mites and fleas, unnoticed except when they aggravated the land enough that it was motivated to scratch…And other places, the ground seemed to squirm and throb like maggots wriggling under the sunken skin of a ripe dead cat.
So it went until the sun lay low in the sky and Harrigan’s bitching about setting up camp got louder than Arneson could gun the motor.
Norman drew up on the next rise of the road and stopped, waving his hat. Buzz brought the Jeep up beside the bikes and before the truck.
Beyond the next rise and all the way to the setting sun, the world was a jungle.
After two hundred miles of nothingness, it at first seemed like a welcome sight, and maybe even promised water, but water didn’t make the grass grow around here, anymore. Schwering conferred with Bernstein and Ruiz. Finally, the captain stood up on the hood of the Jeep. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d say we caught up with the evacuation from Houston. San Antonio might be in there, too…”
The trees bent their fleshy heads to the dust, top-heavy with gray, mutant fruit that reeked like shit and smegma and cried like boiling babies. Red-black grass like piano-wire rasped in the evening breeze, its soil choked with bones. Towers of pulsing white fungi sparkled with unearthly colors that seemed to relay unguessable messages over the blood-red jungle. Only the road, inviolate, untroubled tarmac, slashed across the world and promised something else over the horizon.
They watched, but nobody raised a hand or a voice to call to the man who rode out of the jungle and crossed the road before them, perhaps a hundred yards away.
He rode a thing that looked like a horse, or like something made out of a horse, but it ran all wrong, like a spider with half its legs burnt off. He screamed something as he stood in the saddle, but nobody would call them words. Something in his mouth besides his tongue hung dangled like a mosquito’s proboscis,
and he held up a rifle.
That was more than enough for Harrigan. Standing in the bed of the Jeep, he fired the fifty-caliber machinegun over Arneson’s shoulder, so he didn’t hear whatever the men yelled at each other.
The rider was ripped off his mount, which scrambled off over the hills. And then they all fell silent, looking around. Harrigan swatted him on the arm, told him to turn off the engine.
And then even he could hear it, and feel it going up through the sturdy chassis of the Jeep and up his spine.
Thunder.
The jungle rose up in shrieking, hooting, howling swarms that condensed into a cloud and swallowed up the sunset. The cold, dirty shadow of that cloud fell upon the men of 30338-B, and all drew up the collars of their leather jackets and clawed at their scalps.
“We can’t stay here,” Schwering said, only when no man could argue. “We’ll fly right through. It’s just flak.” They mounted up and roared down the highway into that shadow, into the sudden Texas night.
Arneson could close his eyes and almost feel like they were back in the bomber, flying over Fortress Europe like a screaming eagle to lay eggs of fire and death upon the monstrous kraut war machine. They’d taken hundreds of hits, but never lost a man in forty-three missions. The Captain seemed to simply know the path through the anti-aircraft barrages and the Luftwaffe swarms. They were charmed men; every one of them believed it when they saw Berlin fall, and every one of them believed it when they, alone, survived the Atlantic crossing.
But it was hard to feel charmed now. They were not high above the hostile country. The jungle rose up around them until the canopy on either side fused to enclose them in a shrieking, chittering miasma. Insects and flying arthropods smashed into the Jeep’s windshield, and the bikers had all donned goggles and wrapped their faces with scarves and undershirts. Moths like great horned owls battered their headlights and soft, awful things they never quite saw crawled out on the road to be crushed by their wheels, as if all they knew was the desire for extinction.
Somewhere inside all this was a city. Somewhere in here, the Alamo still stood. But human eyes would probably never see it again.
They didn’t stop. They charged on through the jungle of San Antonio as fast as the truck could keep up. Above fifty, the suspension started to make a horrible racket and became hard to control, so they stayed in a tight cluster around the Jeep and the truck, with Norman as outrider and Captain Schwering in front of the Jeep and catching most of the bugs, and Kirazian and Brewer tight in behind the truck.
Harrigan wanted to turn around and circle round the jungle, but Ruiz said everything was worse off the roads. “Ant lion,” he said, making a show of his left hand trapping and eating his right, “but big. Trap a man on a bike, just like ant.”
Something crashed through the overgrowth alongside their convoy for the better part of a mile. It had to be the size of a house and moved like a Tiger tank. They sped up until the truck nearly sideswiped Brewer before it fell behind them. Mercifully, it never came out onto the road.
“What do you think he really knows?” Harrigan yelled in Arneson’s ear.
“What d’you mean?” he asked by reflex. He sure as hell didn’t want to know what Harrigan thought anyone else knew.
“He’s so fired up to link up with the Army, but there hasn’t been any kind of law and order out here since whatever it was happened…”
“It was the Eyes,” Eladio Ruiz said. “They opened over the cities, and the broken light spilled out and made everything wrong.”
“Have it your way, Pancho,” Harrigan said, leaning in to cut the Mexican kid off. “I never said a word when we were flying, but you know guys on the flight line talked when we weren’t listening. About him.” The sergeant pointed at the captain’s back.
Arneson ignored him, but he kept talking. “You know he’s a kraut, right? Folks came over after the last war. My pop died licking those fucking Huns, kid.
“But he’s not just any fucking kraut. You know who his uncle is? Give you three guesses and a hint. He wears a tutu and eats whole bakeries, and he commands every blue-eyed Aryan son who’s tried to kill us these last two glorious years.”
“Shut up, Pat,” Arneson said through gritted teeth.
“Come on, kid. He didn’t seem all that shook up to come home to all of this, did he? Any real kind of American would’ve fallen to his knees and begged God’s forgiveness, and he would’ve let us go home to see to our families, is all I’m saying. But not our true-blue son of Wotan, Captain Carl Schwering…except his name ain’t Schwering, it’s—”
“Shut up, you dumb fucking paddy,” Arneson growled. You don’t know what all of this is, and you’d lose what’s left of your mind if you did, he thought.
“Maybe he’s been playing us all for saps all along, and just used us to fly one last mission to plant the Nazi flag on this mess. That place he’s taking us now, you know I heard guys say they were working on some kind of super-bomb there, and now that’s where we’re going. What the hell for? There’s nobody left to bomb. If there’s a German left to fight, I’m starting to think maybe we’re following him.”
Arneson snapped at Ruiz, “Take the wheel.” He stood and twisted in his seat and punched Harrigan in the nose as hard as he could. The roaring Irishman fell off the bench and flopped flat on his back in the road, rolling and tumbling into the dark.
He was pinned in Brewer’s headlight. The motorcycle swerved and the corporal laid the bike down trying to dodge the tumbling sergeant.
The whole convoy screeched to a halt. “What the hell happened?” Schwering jumped off his bike and ran back to where Kirazian stopped beside Brewer.
“The sergeant,” Ruiz said helpfully, “he fall out the jeep.”
The Captain looked at Arneson, whose face gave up everything.
Brewer was scraped up and hit his head on the pavement, but seemed no worse for wear. Harrigan had a broken arm, nose and jaw, but he seemed hale enough to try to strangle Arneson as they carried him to the truck. Tucked in beside Cowles and their water, rations and fuel, the sergeant insisted on holding onto a Thompson.
“We don’t stop again,” Schwering said, and then they heard it.
It sounded like a train coming down the road.
And then it sounded like a dozen trains.
And then a hundred.
Kirazian backed up his bike to aim the headlight down the highway to the east. The dark ate up the light like India ink soaking into yellow paper, but something was coming.
The pavement trembled. The ascending howl broke up into a clattering, gobbling din Brewer said sounded like a thousand Thanksgiving turkeys.
Schwering gunned his Harley and took off with Norman close behind him. Arneson fumbled the starter on the jeep. Ruiz climbed into the back and began poking around the machinegun.
“Do you know how to work that?” Arneson shouted.
“Don’t you know how to work this?” Ruiz pointed at the Jeep.
Baskin honked the truck’s horn, the lumbering three-ton hulk bearing down on them. The starter caught and the Jeep took off just ahead of the grumbling truck.
They were going flat-out at fifty when something passed them. It was taller than a man, the size of a horse, but it ran upright. It pivoted in front of the Jeep and danced through the headlight beams without a stitch of a clue as to what it was. Silvery black and pink flesh, it was flesh, moving so goddamn fast—
Ruiz screamed, “Correcaminos!” and squeezed the trigger. The machine-gun chopped at the darkness, bucking and throwing fire into the canopy behind them, missing whatever thundered down the road in the dark all around them.
Arneson screamed to watch for the truck. Something slammed into the Jeep on the passenger side. They caromed helplessly off it and swerved onto the left shoulder.
Arneson fought the skid, tried to keep the Jeep from stalling, but he still saw more than he bargained for.
They were birds, of a sort.
Buzz Arneson
had been to museums with his mother and seen the skeletons of the thunder lizards, with their alligator jaws and long necks and massive tails, and the things that paced him in the dark had no upper limbs to speak of, but no tails, either, and their jaws were long cruelly curved beaks. More like ostriches, or those desert birds, roadrunners, but big enough he had to spin the wheel left again to avoid smashing into one of the hideous things. Instead of feathers, they had spiny, silvery quills all over their naked, cancerous hides, and no eyes that he could see, unless the glittering muddy black buttons all over them were eyes, and not tumors. The Jeep glanced off the racing thing, which reared up and shrieked at him with two stunted heads growing from its wattled neck.
Ruiz fired into its faces and chopped them both off. The thing went on running several more paces before its legs tangled and it fell, only to be overtaken by three more.
Arneson feinted left and swerved right, slamming one of the hideous birds hard enough it belly-flopped and went under the wheels of the truck. Ahead of them, he saw sparks and streaks of gunfire and the drunkenly ducking, weaving cones of their headlight beams. They were straying ahead, racing the horrible things, leaving them behind. Arneson hit the gas, but several roadrunners skipped backwards in front of them. One leapt onto the hood of the Jeep. Ruiz shot it, but also cut down their windshield.
They were leaving the truck behind. Over his shoulder, he saw the other two bikes trying vainly to block a half dozen of the monsters. Kirazian stood up on the pegs, his top hat still mashed down on his head, and lit a short-fuse on a stick off his cigar, flung it ahead of them and veered right, then slewed left into the path of his own dynamite. Three roadrunners peeled off the truck to pursue him. The dynamite exploded underneath one of them, fouling another so they went down and fell into the black. The third flapped stubby wings to vault up and catch at Kirazian’s tuxedo jacket with claws like a fistful of sickles. He almost went over the handlebars, but Brewer shot the thing off his back with his sidearm, skidding to the shoulder and kicking a roadrunner in the rubs to rebound back into the path of the truck.
Through a Mythos Darkly Page 2