Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  The commandant stepped forward. “We only want the woman and the girl. The rest of you may go.”

  “What you gonna do?” the boy at Hamast’s side shouted. A warning in a foreign tongue hushed him.

  “We don’t have to allow anyone free,” the commandant said, his hands crossed primly at his back. “We could arrest all of you for aiding a fugitive. But we are not doing so. Hand over the woman and appreciate our generosity.”

  Murmurs rippled in the knot of men surrounding the god. An argument began to grow, but Hamast cut them short by standing.

  “I’ll go,” she said quietly. She kept her head down and did not look at Sed.

  The boy howled a curse. He scooped up a stone and hurled it through the air. The commandant shouted. Guns fired. There were screams and movement, and Sed shielded his eyes from the sting of rifle blasts. When he opened them, soldiers scattered through clouds of dust, and three figures lay the ground.

  One was the commandant, his forehead bloody. One was the boy, his torso pierced a dozen times by bullets.

  And one was Hamast. She lay on her side, her blouse filling rapidly with blood. The light of her eyes was dark, and blood trickled from her mouth. Sed let loose a moan and stumbled forward. He fell into the mud and touched the face of his wife. “Hamast,” he said. “My Hamast. Oh. Oh. Hamast!”

  “She is holy,” said a voice like hail on slate. “I accept her sacrifice.”

  The shadow of the god fell on him… but it wasn’t a shadow. It was a curtain of light poured like steel from a furnace, turning the dust of the street to silver. Sed dared not look up.

  Ahaud touched the blood of Hamast’s blouse. The hand burned a coal forge, scorching him with glory, and when the fingertip brushed Hamast’s cheek Sed’s eyes were opened. He did not see the crumpled form of his wife, but a mystery of sacrifice, and the hand of a god made powerful by blood. The urge to bow and kiss the ground was near-irresistible. How could he not serve such a creature? For the first time he understood the old word worship. The blessed hands reached into the swaddling fabric at Hamast’s breast and withdrew the frail form of an infant.

  “She lives, but barely,” the god said. “The gunmen struck the mother but missed the child.”

  Sed averted his eyes. He would not worship. He could not worship. He served Knowledge and Industry. Ahaud touched his hand. “My power is enough. Do you want your daughter healed?”

  For a moment his heart soared. But to say yes was to worship, and he was a man of principle. Steeling himself, he croaked, “Give me my daughter.”

  A pause. “Very well.”

  Ahaud placed the rasping bundle into Sed’s arms, then walked to the blood-splattered slum child. “Jener, why are you sleeping?” He touched the boy’s shoulder. For a moment the god’s glory enveloped them both, turning the body luminous. The boy’s eyes opened. Then the light was snuffed. Ahaud lifted the child into his arms, and they walked away.

  ***

  I am a slum god, a low god, a god of pickpockets and whores. The City turns away from me, and I turn away from her. Here in the refuse and the bloody dust are my people, and I will be their god.

  THE REDMOND TOMB RAIDERS

  by

  GEORGE S. WALKER

  We broke into the Microsoft tomb in the summer of ’38 — a risky heist because the Sunnyvale D-ceptz gang had broken into Jobs’ Apple tomb two years before. The blast that resulted leveled half of Cupertino. But Scranny said the D-ceptz were morons. Plus, the Apple computing cloud had eventually been more dangerous than Microsoft’s. Microsoft had been bottled up before Apple, at the very beginning of the Panic.

  The morning of our heist, just after dawn, I was biking on Washington’s SR 520, hauling the cart with Scranny’s computer gear. Ahead, the horses’ hooves clopped on heat-shimmering pavement, pulling the flatbed trailer with our street-built trebuchet. Raisin sat with the bloodhound on the trailer, her red-sandaled feet dangling over the side.

  “Hey, Miguel,” she called. “Want a drink? Agua?” She held up a bright pink bottle.

  “Sure.” I pedaled closer to the trailer.

  Raisin opened the bottle and poured the contents in a bowl, giving it to the hound. She looked down at me and smirked.

  I swore at her and pedaled ahead of the catapult.

  Signora Scranelli was riding Mata Hari, her Appaloosa mare. Scranny’s thin white hair was tied in a ponytail, a sharp contrast to Gunner’s black dreadlocks as he rode the horse harnessed beside hers. Fading scorpion tattoos clawed for space with age spots on her arms. She rode Mata Hari in torn jeans, hummed an old Nirvana tune.

  “You really gonna need all this?” I asked, giving a nod to the cart I pulled behind the bike.

  She stared down at me through her sunglasses. “I’m not walking in there blind, kid. It’s a tomb, not a 7-11.”

  “That’s what the trebuchet’s for.”

  “The trebuchet’s the bottle opener. We don’t know what’s in the bottle yet.”

  “Might be poison.”

  “Was before. I say it’s stale piss by now.”

  “And you can find out.”

  She shrugged. “So I say.”

  We’d passed the sign for the central Microsoft exit ramp a while back, and the lane was starting to curve off. A mile behind the containment vessel for the tomb, I could see a dry lakebed. Seattle hadn’t seen rain for six months.

  The tomb covered less than thirty acres, a tiny fraction of the old Microsoft empire. Mobs had torched the rest decades ago, along with the Intel factories down in Oregon.

  The flatbed started rolling faster down the ramp, the trebuchet swaying dangerously.

  “Gordito! Ape-man!” Scranny shouted. “Slow it down!”

  They were on foot and grabbed the brake chains at the back of the trailer. Gunner’s horse whinnied. He pressed a black hand against the horse’s neck. “Whoa, General!”

  Yoshio added his weight to the right chain, too, and the trailer slowed, veering toward the shoulder where Death-breath weeds fought from cracks in the hot concrete.

  Scranny and Gunner guided their horses, tails swishing, down the ramp and through the intersection, pulling the trailer around abandoned electric cars with smashed windows. Gutted shells of buildings lined wide streets. Ahead rose the curving gray walls of the tomb. At eyelevel all along it, bright orange über-warning symbols stood out.

  We stopped in a parking lot facing the tomb, where a weak breeze ruffled trash. It took all seven of us to get the creaking trebuchet down off the flatbed.

  “It looked sturdier in the camp,” said Ape-man. He scratched his yellow beard, gazing from our steel beam overhead to the massive tomb beyond the parking lot.

  “You bitchin’ like Yoshio now?” said Raisin.

  “Miguel,” said Scranny, “unhook your bike trailer and start collecting parking blocks.” She surveyed the concrete bumpers arrayed on the lot. “Can you believe someone left all this ammo for us?”

  Each block weighed a couple hundred pounds. Our gang name was the 520 Riders, not the 520 Weightlifters. Ape-man and Yoshio helped me with the first one, while Gunner and Gordito helped Scranny align the trebuchet. Raisin sat with Sad-eyes, the bloodhound, in the shade of a gutted building, playing with her indigo braids. Her main skill was in the towns along SR 520, as geezer-bait. No use here.

  “I need fifteen blocks for the counterweight,” said Scranny. “Load that here, then go get more.”

  We groaned.

  After the eighth block, Yoshio complained, “We’re just worker ants, hauling rocks for the queen.”

  “Damn right,” said Scranny.

  Our t-shirts were sweat-stained. We had seven more blocks to go, not counting the blocks for launching at the wall.

  “This better work,” muttered Yoshio.

  I’d joined the gang only six months ago, after Scranny first proposed the heist. Everything we’d done since then had been preparation for today. Even if we didn’t get rich, our street cred wo
uld be awesome.

  Assuming we could break in.

  Getting the blocks to the trebuchet was only part of the work. Winching the loaded counterweight to the top took all of us, even Raisin.

  After raising it, we took a break in the shade by the bloodhound. Between us and the stinking horses, we were going through water too fast. Soon there’d be none left to wash down our tortillas and seagull jerky. But once the heist succeeded, our gang would be eating like the legendary lords of Wall Street.

  A coyote yipped in the distance. Beside me, Gunner was cleaning his pistol, reinserting each cartridge in the clip.

  “Glock 77RC laser-sighted harmonica pistol,” he said. “Fully automatic gearing, fires forty rounds in two seconds, twenty rounds on one side of the clip, auto-reverses to fire the other twenty.”

  “You told me, man, a thousand times,” I said. “And your laser sight don’t work.”

  “It’s just a fancy .22,” said Scranny. “Now this is a pistol.” She picked up her gun belt from the pile of gear by the bloodhounds. Drawing her Colt .45 from the ornate leather holster, she sighted at Gunner’s head.

  Gunner laughed. “That’s Old West. You only get six shots, and your pistol weighs more than a bulk box of my ammo.”

  “I hit you with a .45 slug, you stop,” she said.

  “What about a killer robot from the tomb?” said Yoshio.

  “The Panic wasn’t about killer robots,” said Scranny. “It was about computers taking over. And there were people who were chipped, people with silicon implants who saw things that weren’t there and did things because they thought they were smarter than other people.”

  “Like you?” I said.

  The rest of the gang laughed.

  Scranny scowled. “I’m not chipped.”

  “You’ve got a computer.”

  “It’s a Commodore 64. No Intel inside, no ARM. Infecting it with a virus would be like trying to give AIDS to a chicken. A dinosaur chicken.” She holstered her pistol. “Time to fire the first block.”

  The trebuchet had been custom built to hurl parking blocks, with release clamps to fit the holes each one had. The thick steel cables were salvaged from an antique construction crane.

  After we aligned the block in the guide trough, Scranny handed the trigger cable to Ape-man. The rest of us stepped clear.

  “Make it so,” ordered Scranny.

  He yanked.

  The counterweight fell, pivoting the huge steel arm. The cable rocketed the projectile through the guide trough, up and over the top of the trebuchet.

  As the counterweight dropped to the pavement, it flung the block through the air toward the tomb.

  It slammed into the wall. Ape-man cheered.

  “Don’t kid yourself that it was your aim,” said Scranny.

  “Did it do anything to the wall?”

  It seemed to have only taken out a small chunk.

  “It’s too high,” I said. “Over sixty feet up the wall. The block’s gotta release later in the swing.”

  “That means moving the trebuchet,” said Scranny.

  “No, I watched it work.” I climbed into the bottom of the trebuchet. “Move this cable cinch from here to here.”

  She gave me a long skeptical look. “If this doesn’t work, you’re moving it back.”

  Ape-man helped me make the change, then we all winched the counterweight up again.

  “Call it, hotshot,” said Scranny.

  “Twenty feet off the ground,” I said.

  They stepped back, and I pulled the cable.

  The great arm pivoted, swinging the block toward the wall.

  It hit twenty feet above the ground.

  Scranny’s jaw dropped.

  “What’s stored in that Oregon head of yours?” said Gunner. “How’d you do that?”

  I looked down at the ground uncomfortably.

  Yoshio punched me on the shoulder. “Same way he wins at pool.”

  It still took the rest of the day. Forty two launches. We were sore and exhausted. The sun had gone down, the sky getting dark. But there was a hole in the concrete wall.

  We studied it with Scranny’s binoculars.

  “I could get through there,” said Raisin.

  “You could slink through a rat hole,” said Gordito. He took the binoculars from her, studied the hole, then shook his head. “It needs to be bigger.”

  “That means tomorrow,” said Scranny. “We don’t hit the same spot every time. It could take another five, ten launches.”

  Ape-man took the binoculars. “I can squeeze through that. Just leaves Gordito.”

  “I’m going, too,” he insisted.

  “Then who watches the horses?” said Ape-man. “I’ve waited damn long enough. Let’s see what’s in there.”

  “Killer robots?” I said.

  Ape-man passed me the binoculars.

  They revealed shattered concrete, bent rebar and a hole into darkness. Nothing coming out. I scanned back and forth across the containment wall, from the orange über-warning symbols up to where the wall curved back to cover the tomb. Nothing. Tilting my head back, I found the moon with its tiny reflective ads for products that no longer existed: Apple, Coors, Viagra.

  “Miguel’s lookin’ for robots on the moon,” scoffed Raisin.

  I handed the binoculars back to Scranny.

  “We’re not going in until I scan,” she said. “Come on.”

  I followed her to the building where we’d left the horses and the bloodhound, where I loaded the computer gear onto the bike cart before dragging it beneath the tomb opening.

  Scranny plugged the computer into the power inverter connected to old car batteries. The CRT glowed eerily, then the computer booted to display a Ready prompt. Scranny inserted a cassette tape and typed on the keyboard. The drive clicked and whirred, loading her program. She cabled a blue box labeled Tektronix to the computer.

  Minutes later, the CRT displayed “Spectrum64 running.”

  “What’s it do?” I asked.

  “It’s scanning for EM. The Tek box downconverts the electromagnetic spectrum into something slow enough for the Commodore to see. I’m hunting for wireless carrier signals.”

  She’d lapsed into pre-Panic babble-speak. I watched Ape-man instead. He’d tied a bent piece of rebar to a rope, which he swung up toward the opening. On his third try, it stuck and wouldn’t come free. He clipped a carabineer to his belt and looped the rope through it.

  “Catch me if I fall.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” said Gordito. But he stepped closer to the wall. Raisin stepped back.

  Feet spread, Ape-man pulled himself up the wall to the hole.

  “What’cha see?” called Raisin.

  “Dark.”

  Yoshio jogged back for the torches.

  When he returned, Gunner tossed one up to Ape-man, then almost lost the matches in the darkness. We clipped them to the rope and he pulled them up.

  Braced in the opening, Ape-man let go of the other end of the rope and unwrapped the plastic bags from the head of the torch. He wasted a dozen expensive matches before the torch caught fire. Then he looked into the opening, moving the torch around to see.

  Even Scranny was watching now.

  “Uh, there’s a room,” he finally said. “Fancy chairs. Big table. Broken glass. Musta’ been a window here before they walled it off.”

  “Anything moving?” called Gunner.

  “I dunno. The torch flickers, man. You comin’ up?”

  Gunner turned to Scranny.

  “No carrier signals,” she said. “If there’s anything in there, it went silent years ago.”

  “I’ll get the guns,” he said.

  “Here, Sad-eyes!” called Raisin. “She’s comin’ with us, right? Our fearless tracker?”

  “Everybody except Gordito and the horses,” said Scranny.

  “I just sit here?” he complained.

  “If we’re not back by dawn,” she said, “you better tell someone
.”

  Gordito frowned. “Like who?”

  “Your mom,” said Yoshio.

  Raisin giggled.

  “And if killer robots start marching out,” I said, “that’s another bad sign.”

  “Especially if one’s wearing Raisin’s braids,” said Yoshio.

  She picked up a shard of concrete and threw it at him.

  “Ow!”

  Scranny turned off the computer. When Gunner returned, she strapped on her gun belt.

  Gunner had a spare pistol, a cheap thermoplastic model. He handed it to Yoshio. Some of us had a crowbar to carry along with our torch. If there were iron giants, the crowbar would be better than a plastic gun anyway.

  Ape-man tossed down a carabineer, and Gunner climbed the wall. His backpack held his gun and extra ammo, plus the unlit torches.

  At the top, he took off the backpack, fished out his harmonica pistol and a torch, and hung the pack from a piece of rebar jutting from the wall.

  “Goin’ in.”

  He lit his torch from Ape-man’s, peered into the opening, then climbed in feet first. Now all we could see was Ape-man with his torch, peering into the hole.

  Ape-man turned and called, “He wants to know how far he should…”

  “Wait for us!” shouted Scranny.

  Ape-man tossed down a carabineer, and I caught it. My backpack was empty except for a water bottle, so I had an easier climb.

  At the top, I lit a torch and clambered through the hole onto the table, kicking broken glass onto the carpet. The air was much cooler, smelling of plastic and smoke. Gunner was just outside the room, standing in a corridor.

  “What you see?”

  “Nothin’, man.”

  Scranny came next, lighting her torch from mine.

  Through the hole in the wall, I heard Raisin talking to Sad-eyes outside.

  “Lemme get your harness on. That’s a good girl! Hey! No tongue! Okay, haul her up, Ape-man.”