9 Tales From Elsewhere 2
Page 7
I am Lt. John Doe, Kansas State Guard, Midwestern Confederated, 39th Mechanized, Epsilon; and I’ve just learned that the Author and the Audience like a good lay. Teetering on the Wound’s moist edge, my left arm windmilling, I raised a finger to my lips.
“I can feel it! La Joie de la Face Grise. The Syllable--the Syllable is coming! Author, Author! Oh, the Gray Face! Hush, now, my God--oh my God. Hush!”
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The moment Epsilon rolled into Wichita, on the corner of 37th and Hydraulic, the Northland Shopping Center became a Ukraine-style killing box.
First track on point, the Trimalchio, Death Blossomed, firing 180, as ambush RPGs, wire-guided HEAT, and La Bohème coil rounds sleeted into Epsilon Column’s left flank. The troop carrier Fortunata, its point defenses overwhelmed, went Oppenheimer in seconds. A brown smoke ring geysered high; eight men screamed on radio channel three as they burned.
My turret cockpit HUD lit up, a moon crescent of hot contacts. “Green, alternate HEAT with Fletch! Red, break the ambush at the ‘L!’ Kill! Kill on the Move!”
My track crew--Sergeant Red, Corporal Green, and Private Blue--were swan-necked triclopeans with color-coded feathers and long thumbs. They cackled, obeyed, and tin-canned abandoned cars as the Petronius snowplowed through the mall parking lot in a diagonal line, pushing before us a cone of 30mm coaxial terror, missile suppression, and point-blank main-gun butchery; and all the while, Sergeant Green, my hornbill gunner, was yelling out baked one, baked two, baked three. Good kill. Good kill. And we rolled through cement walls, plate glass, and mannequined displays, snuffing out every hot spot on the scope until Captain Jiménez in the Nero ordered us to hold position, you Halloween-faced motherfuckers, hold your position--goddamnit! Hold!
The smell of ozone, propellant, and sweat. The hornet-hive buzz of our cooling reactor and the nervous pecking, the Edgar-Allen pecking, of my RGB crew. Like a contemplative Buddha, I buried my Skull Face in my gloved hands. A State Guard sees things he can’t unsee; he does things he cannot undo. My enlistment papers actually said that, in 10-point font, right beneath the dotted line.
I hate this; I hate myself.
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Sometimes, instead of Jerusalem, something slouches into Kansas City on a Monday morning. A man saws at the Charlie Parker Memorial until the 10-foot head nods forward, decapitated. He has enough time to lie down, unzip his pants, and let himself be crushed by the bronze Yardbird of Jazz. Aye. A high-school girl stands in a public fountain, anointing her bare body with Vaseline and accelerant. She rolls an antique Bic with her thumb, immolating herself above the knees, carbonizing, flash-baconing--screaming one long breathless Syllable: “Aye!” A riot-control Chiron goes down, ant-swarmed by good Christians who butcher it with hatchets and broken glass, sodomizing its sexless body through multiple-stab wounds; and they, too, scream that word until their eyes roll back in their heads, screaming until their lungs deflate and their hearts v-tach. “Aye!”
By 0500 hours, every news-feed drone in Kansas City, the City of Fountains, went black. By 0600 hours, a fusion mushroom blossomed to the Northeast, a Priapic fire column--a false sunrise.
Three months ago, we baked Austin to bake the Syllable, and for what? By 1000 hours, August 21, the infection was spreading across the Confederated Midwest.
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Esther Jordan was a good swimmer. The moonlit waters of the rock quarry rippled like agitated mercury from her three-lap passage. Twisting her hair, wringing it out, Esther asked me if I was going to enlist in the State Guard, maybe even earn a Skull Face and an RGB bird crew. Kansas Invictus, Kill on the Move, rah-rah-rah.
I said I wasn’t sure.
Esther looked down, and then she said it: “Being an orphan, it’s not so bad, is it?”
Why? I didn’t understand. I was trash, a John Doe: I’d trade my soul to be someone else.
“My mom lied to the State.” Esther chewed her bottom lip. “She knew about granddad. If I ever get out of here, I’m going home, and I’m going to kill her.”
Staring at the lapping darkness between my ankles, I imagined sinking straight down, touching the deep bottom, and inhaling pure cold black. I tried to hold Esther’s hand, but she pulled away.
“We should go.” The distant silo lights of the East Kansas Juvenile Housing Farm pulsed and beckoned. “Kayla’s covering for me. I’ll cry if she gets busted.”
But we didn’t move; we just sat there on the dock, our bare shoulders touching, gently egg-beating the water with our feet.
“We should go.” But we still didn’t move. The full-moon sky was cloudless except for three contrail spears stabbing south. The croak of the night frogs ebbed in and out.
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“The Quiet is unquiet,” mewed Blue.
“The Quiet is unquiet,” said Green.
Laying nested in the wreckage of the Northland Bookstore, crushing the Children’s Literature section beneath its quadruple treads, the Petronius idled; ball-and-socket secondary armament auto-tracking, searching, sniffing--restless blunt antennae looking for something new to kill.
A buzz cam with a porpoise-class psyche glided over the wasteland of DU-pulverized cement and crushed-car bonfires, sending us hazy, smoky feed pictures of abandoned tripod-mounted coilers, shoulder-fired HEAT launchers, black Derby hats, and slaughterhouse blood splashes--but no bodies. No enemy dead. Nothing.
“Where are my eyes, goddammit?” On the command channel, Jiménez’s voice was helium high and flutey. “How did we walk into this? Two tracks down and sixteen red hearts in the black! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot--what the fuck!”
And that’s when we heard it: A bleep, a fuzz-tone crackle on channel three, and that single unmistakable Syllable: “Aye.”
“Sweet God,” said Blue.
“You hear that?” Green’s three black eyes--obsidian dots floating in sunflower yellow--looked nervously around our turret interior. “I heard that.”
And then we heard it again, only louder: “Aye.”
“It’s here.” Green crossed himself twice with a three-fingered hand. “It slouches.”
As Kansas City died, Epsilon scrambled, mobilizing, full NBC gear--but for what? GPS, Iridium, ether--all links and feeds flat-lined en route. Short, medium, long--all radio waves silent, becalmed, as we punched down Interstate 35 in the dark, skimming through a night-vision green dream of wheat field, sun flower, oil well, and solar panel. A Sargasso Sea of Quiet
Our last orders from StateCom: link up with the Theta, our sister column, in El Dorado--but we never found them; we never found anyone.
“Aye!”
“Keep it together! Keep it together! Goddammit, Epsilon!” By the third day of the Quiet, Jiménez had lost his veteran cool. “All assets, turtle in and withdraw to MacDougal. Track Five, fall in and cover us!”
In the empty alleys, classrooms, and baby cribs of Emporia, we found endless Rorschach blots of dried blood; animals--both flask-forged and organic--murdered and bisected like Gadsden Flag snakes; but only one human body--one in a town of 25,000. He was a gray-bearded statue with a rigor mortis smile and crow-pecked eyes, who had died kneeling on the front steps of the United Methodist Church, stripped to the waist, hands crushing each other like two deadlocked snakes.
Emporia, El Dorado, Augusta, Whichita--the crime scene repeated: a ghost town of blood spots, butchered animals, and the same shirtless dead man, on his knees, praying.
“Track Five, do you copy? Fall in. Fall in now. Move! John--.” My commander's voice cracked with emotion. “We need you.”
Same DNA, same face--same unknown cause of death. Our Geigers never clicked; our NBC gear never bleeped, but we napalmed the Bearded Man anyway each time we found him. It had become a freakish ritual--a peevish Suttee--as we drove south through the Midwestern Quiet, looking for someone to give us orders. When we found the Bearded Man in Augusta, kneeling in an abandoned Temple of the Golden Buddha, Private Donelly briefly fellated his Grandfather’s vintage Glock before pulli
ng its double trigger. He was our third suicide.
“Tango on our nine,” cawed Green. “Do I bake him?”
Ping, ping, ping--like a Jasper Johns painting, our port auto-Fifty triple-ringed the target with three luminous circles.
Ten meters away, the Bearded Man was alive and well in Wichita, standing by the World Travel bookcase--still shirtless, still smiling, but with an anti-personnel Fletch dart impaling his right thigh. He had a potbelly, a Stevedore’s muscular chest, and forearms like carved olive.
“Elle-Tee, do I take the shot?”
Invisible fingers C-gripped my throat, tightening; the palms of my hands felt hot and red.
“Lieutenant? Sir!” Red and Blue looked at each other, then at me, pecking their equipment consoles with the compulsion of neurotic parrots.
Something cold and buttery melted in my stomach. With a single word, a single gesture, I could pink-mist this Bearded Man from existence. He looked straight into our gun cameras, nodding, as if answering a question, and then unzipped the fly of his coyote-brown trousers, raising a single finger to his cracked lips--“Hush.”
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Tequila Blanco and promotional surgery do not mix. The day after I earned my officer’s skull, still doped on pain meds, I got traditionally shit-faced, staggering out of The Albion, almost toppling the tin suit of armor by the cigarette dispenser, with Red, Green, and Blue and Blue propping me up, as if I was Silenus, drunk, falling off my sacred donkey.
The Bohème jongleur in the parking lot was shirtless and sunburned, and one, two, three . . . no, seven--seven balls the kid kept in the evening air, juggling, pirouetting, catching them behind the back, punctuating each move with the words Tout est Un. All is One. Like a vagabond Luchador, he wore a ragged gray balaclava.
I don’t know why, but instead of money, I dropped my wood-handled Pakistan No. 7 into the kid’s waiting derby, right before firehosing a parked Harley with a cone of agave puke. Steam clouds of bile rose high into my throat, and my three-eyed birds covered me with their bright wings, chirping, saying it was okay, sir--I was a Lieutenant now, a leader of flask-forged things and skull-faced men: I had a right to vomit.
The next morning, just after reveille, the Bohème showed up at the main gate with my pocketknife between his teeth and juggling seven infant heads as if they were bloody cabbages. Tout est Un. All is One. Aye. The Semtex under his hat exploded the moment the MPs tasered him.
By 1000 hours, June 20, the Bohème Movement, a laughable fringe cult, had finally revealed its place in God’s narrative, as five tracks and two Sagittarian Chirons, the combat assets of Epsilon, crunched through the Austin Financial District; where I, too, like an honest State Guard, Killed on the Move, weeping and dry-heaving into my helmet while the Petronius pink-misted Bohemians by the dozen--men and women and children who screamed “Aye.”
Answer me, God: Why are you doing this? We’re good people. Please, God, please--make this stop.
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On my sub-screen, four blue dots--the retreating assets of Epsilon Column--had stopped dead on the corner of Hydraulic. Damon and Pythias, Epsilon’s mil-spec Chirons cantered in place, armored horse head sensors swiveling, turning--nervous. Epsilon was exposed, a fish-barrel target.
“Melinda left me.” Jiménez fuzzed into existence on our holographic main. His Skull Face should have been the color of glazed terracotta; but floating in the turret cockpit HUD, his captain’s Death’s Head was washed out, colorless--like a faded bubblegum comic. “Did you know that? My sweet maple, she served me papers. Right after Austin.”
Behind Jiménez, in the Nero’s spacious turret, Gunnery-Sergeant Nguyen finished undressing someone with a stout gut, a big dick, and gray pubes. Our port auto-Fifty binged in despair as it lost target lock. The Bearded Man off our nine was no longer on scope.
“There was no Jody, no other dude--it wasn’t like that. I was on the front porch, with my pack, and Mindy wouldn’t even touch me, wouldn't even open the door. She said I came home with a Grey Face. That’s fucked isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, I know: ‘If the Guard wanted me to have a wife, they would have issued her,’ right? But it's still fucked. I just don’t understand it, John. Do you?”
With two deft stabs upward, my commander shish-kebabbed his left eye, then his right, with a trench spike, the same weapon he used to ear-tunnel an Austin grandmother, a La Boeheme insurgent loaded to her dry dugs with iron nails and C-4.
Blood dribbled down my captain’s plastic cheeks; optic nerve and muscle dangled like torn wire. Lucius Jiménez trembled, gritted his teeth, and struggled not to open his mouth; and his lips parted, he thunked the spike knife into his naked throat, right up to its double-eyeball hilt.
The connection broke; our HUD went dark, filling our turret with the snow globe hiss of white static. No one in the Petronius said anything.
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Tantric Yoga. Wing Chun. Renaissance Juggling. We are La Bohème. You understood now; you get it, or else you would not be reading this. From your head’s Nirvanic Crown to the Red Chakra glowing at your tailbone, you feel a serpent of energy coiling down your spine, pinballing, lighting you up from the inside. Vishuddhi. Anahata. Muladhara. It is in your spiral code because you are not the Author of your fate. Give up your technology; abandon your logical positivism and all other poison apples of ego. We understand you because we understand the Joy of the Grey Face.
Monday/Wednesday classes at the Third Unitarian Church. This is non-sexual clothing-optional event. All are welcome.
I crumpled the flyer and threw it into the slit trench. Fitted with a dozer blade, the Petronius began covering the mass grave, burying the citizens of Austin under a dry layer of white lime and red soil.
“I don’t understand.” It was all I could think to say.
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Blue squawked, “Elle-Tee, the command track--!”
On monitor two, the Nero’s turret traversed 180 and hosed down Damon and Pythias with a piranha stream of depleted uranium. The Chirons were good guys: they liked sugar cubes and racket ball; and during the Austin Campaign, they earned Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars, protecting the command track from La Boehme land torpedoes: suicide flankers armed with shaped-charge lunge mines; and now, for their loyalty, the flask-forged were pink-misted, reduced to bone shards, red meat, and rubber-shod hooves. The APC Asciltus, second vehicle in the column, was next. Its hull sparked and cracked as if draped with a fissionable belt of Chinese New Year. Then the APC Oppenheimered, and eight red hearts on my scope faded to black.
“Green, HEAT the command track! Bake it--bake it now!”
But as Blue cycled in a tandem round, our HUD came to life again, and Jiménez’s disembodied head reappeared, and it was disembodied because it was severed at the cervical vertebrae, bleeding dew drops of holographic burgundy that dripped but never touched our turret floor. Someone off-screen held the eyeless skull as if for our inspection, and somehow Jiménez’s lips were moving, trying to form words without larynx or lungs. Gulping, opening and closing, the lips struggled in death to quietly form the Syllable that Jiménez denied them in life.
Aye. The lips moved. Aye. They moved again.
Then the Nero’s rear-glacis mortar ejaculated once, twice, three times; and a trio of rocket-assisted Clean Crocket warheads--the weapon that pacified Austin--shot straight up.
“Oh God, Crockets up!” Crowed Red. “Crockets up!”
And now the streets of Wichita were populated by hundreds of identical Bearded Men. Like hidden pop-up launchers, they emerged from the pavement; and as each Man’s booted feet hit the ground, he stuck out his tongue, threw his head back, and Dervish spun in place, as if the sub-kiloton nukes arcing above would be snowflake sweet upon descent. Someone screamed “Aye!” as Corporal Green jack-in-the-boxed Nero’s turret, blowing it high off its chassis.
“Counter measures! Too late! Brace, brace, brace!”
Hush now, I have a secret. Hush, don’t tell a soul. Fortunata, Trimalchio, Ascilt
us, Nero--the black pavement beneath each burning vehicle jellied, wobbled, and turned to pink meat, until finally splitting open--sucking down the smoking steel carcasses of Epsilon, one after the other, into a red-lit underworld of cervical flesh.
“Ring the bell,” said Sergeant Red.
Click-Clack. As one, my RGB crew popped their harnesses and buried me under a feathery pig pile. Corporal Green wing-slapped the emergency pull switch.
“Close the book.”
I screamed and screamed no, stop, no, please--stop, as the interior blast bags deployed, smothering three birds and a man in a balloon womb of air and latex.
“Snuff out the candle.”
Private Blue nestled just above my heart. Through my anti-Spall vest, I felt him coo and purr.
Then the Divine Cement Mixer tumbled our 100-ton combat track like a stone; and as we rolled, the hollow bones of my State birds gave, giving me life, cushioning me, an extra layer of jellied compression between me and the Crocket-hammer shock.
A teenage girl whimpers before her mother’s father, a posy ring of MIRVs bake a city, and a skull-faced orphan screams and screams because this narrative is vicious. God, why are you doing this? Make it stop. God, God, God--Make it stop!
And then He answered. All is Quiet, my son. Hush.
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The Wound was now big enough to swallow an errant cow. Sprouting a ring of clitoral teeth, it opened wide like a movie-poster shark; and as if skipping rope, I jumped from one edge of the sexual chasm to the next. Tout est Un. All is One.
Naked, I stripped the Bohème half-naked and carved a Venn Diagram on his chest, forming a central vesica piscis on his sternum--a blood almond that made my hands tremble and my noseless nose bleed. Then the gray silk covering his mouth billowed like a small sail, and the dead man breathed and spoke to me in my own voice.