by James Curcio
“Get in.”
“Thanks.” The girl in the back moved over, and he hopped in.
Morpheus cranked up the music. The ice princess rolled her eyes and turned it down immediately.
“Turn it back up!” Morpheus whined.
“Do you want me to keep blowing you, or not? Listening the whole way will totally ruin the show for me. I want it to be fresh.”
He sighed, but let it be.
“Asshole,” she muttered under her breath, and then turned around. “What’s your name?”
“Dennis. Where are you headed?”
There was a muffled banging sound from behind them, but no one seemed to react.
“To see the best band ever,” Morpheus said.
The redhead smiled. She gave an awkward laugh and tried to move closer. Dennis, not-so-subtly, leaned in the other direction. He marveled at how much she looked like a pug.
The banging sounded again.
“I think something is wrong with your car,” he said.
“Oh no,” the ice princess said. “That’s the guy who owns this thing. Total suit.”
“Man! You should have seen him!” Morpheus said.
“Terrific.”
Dennis’ head knocked from side to side as they continued down smaller side-roads. They stopped suddenly. He had been drooling on himself, he realized.
“We’re here,” the redhead said. She was laying on his lap, but thankfully bounced out the door before he had the willpower to dislodge her himself.
He rubbed his eyes. “Here?”
“You’ll thank us later.”
“Uh-huh.”
Morpheus tapped the key chain, and the trunk swung open. A man in his mid-fifties struggled against the cocoon of duct tape wrapped around his body. His eyes bulged from screaming into a gag for hours.
“What do we do with him?” Morpheus asked.
“Let him go,” Dennis and the redhead said at the same time. This led to a really awkward moment where she stared at him adoringly with piss colored eyes. Dennis was finding it hard to see how any of this was better than dying in a flood, hours before.
“Kill him,” the ice princess said, derailing his thoughts.
“Kill him?” Dennis looked around. “The fuck are we? The fuck is wrong with you people?”
Morpheus tossed the keys into the trunk and slammed it shut. “There. He won’t be able to get out, now.”
They stared in bewilderment at the trunk and then him in turn.
“Typical,” the ice princess said. She smacked him on the head, hard.
“I guess we’re all walking,” Dennis said.
“Huh?” Morpheus asked.
“You locked the fucking keys in the truck. How do you plan to drive away?”
It finally dawned on him. “Ooooh, right. Sorry. Well, we’re here anyway.”
They started off down a path.
“You stole a car to take me on a date. Why? Because you don’t fucking have one. Who does that?” the ice princess asked.
“Pretty cool, right?” Morpheus said, grinning.
“It shouldn’t be far,” the redhead said.
They made their way through rocky terrain spotted with pine trees. Dennis saw a shadow moving off to one side. “What is that?”
Morpheus squinted. “Oh, probably another fan.”
“Fan?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
“Alright,” Daniel said, still worrying about it.
More shadows in the near-darkness. Then he saw what looked like Christmas lights. As he got closer, he saw that they were Christmas lights, wrapped around the bulging form of an old man dressed in a sheet. It was stained and painted with an incomprehensible script.
“Hello fellow travelers,” the man said as they approached. He had a staff, which was clearly a broomstick with a pine-cone glued to the top, and a bushy white beard.
Dennis walked right past him, careful to avoid eye contact. A former East Coast city dweller, he knew the power of avoidance. Once you locked eyes with the crazy, you were in their world. The man ranted to another group as he fell out of earshot about “Draco dragons” abducting teenagers to steer his “white-powder time chair,” and something about reptiles eating human pineal glands.
As they continued, he saw a series of glowing orbs leading a path through the pine forest. Many hundreds of people were converging at the lights, and following them further in.
“They’re like willow-wisps,” the redhead said. “Guiding us to Babylon.”
The forest thinned, and Dennis saw the stolid faces of the presidents lit artificially from beneath. But that is where familiarity stopped. It was like Burning Man had formed an independent, nomad nation and decided to take over Mount Rushmore.
Eighty yards above the mob, Trevino waited with a spider’s stillness.
“Target acquired,” a mercenary beside him said. He was looking through the scope of his AR-50 sniper rifle.
“Not until my order,” Trevino said. His voice carried via his headset to men positioned all around the perimeter. Babylon’s security apparatus boiled off doubt that the crew he faced here was a dangerous one. Either Babylon hired a crazy man for too much money, or these little psychos were getting organized. The suits were onto something, and they couldn’t tell him what.
He had spent too many nights on too many rented beds, splicing and peeling back the memories of their meeting. Those three were inarguably criminal, fine. A case could be made that he faced a fledgling, domestic terror cell. But sending him out with a gun and an order to assassinate three American civilians had never sat right with him.
“Let me reiterate that if you screw this up, hundreds of unarmed American civilians could die. This has to be surgical,” Trevino said.
He caught himself grinding his teeth. The mob’s formless susurrus gained rhythm, becoming a chant of Bab-a-lon, Bab-a-lon, moments before his targets came into view. Three girls came first, sweeping the area with their eyes before taking positions around their makeshift stage. Another followed quickly with a handful of others. They seemed to be their superiors, gauging by body-language. They were also mostly naked, and well armed.
Loki strode into view, a blur of activity, cigarette clutched between his teeth. He was waving his hands, directing the girls in something. Next the band appeared. First came Cody, wearing a bemused, ‘aw, shucks’ smile and a wide-brimmed hat. Dionysus and Jesus followed, chatting amiably and reeking of nervous energy. For a moment, they lingered in loose formation with their security, a pair of triangles near the base of the makeshift stage and control area: two watchers and their superiors standing hard and calm, the three musicians fizzing and bouncing in place.
“Dancers are in position,” one of the girls said over the com.
“Security perimeter set,” another replied. “Can we get this party started?”
Loki cocked his head to the side, crunching out his cigarette quickly under his boot. He spoke into his headset. “Widen the perimeter; something’s not right.”
“I’ve got the shot, sir.”
“No, I said hold,” Trevino said.
Loki was walking behind the Behemoth. In seconds he would be out of view.
“I’m taking it.”
“No!”
Dennis walked in front of the line of fire at the exact moment Loki passed from view. If his fiancee had decided to dump him another day, he might have been at home watching TV. Instead, he was at an outlaw at Mount Rushmore. This moment, this spot. He was also in the sights of a rifle held by a man who really liked shooting people. The Universe was playing one of her many cruel practical jokes.
Bam! His chest exploded, organs and limbs tossed into the air like confetti. The force of it ripped the leg off the red head standing behind him.
“Jesus. Fuck. Go, go, go. Take them!” Trevino yelled.
Thousands of people screamed and stampeded in every conceivable direction. A semi-circle of mercs in body armor emerged from the
pines, their weapons drawn. They proceeded directly towards the band, who had already disappeared from the stage.
“Civilians, stay where you are,” one of them said over a megaphone.
Some froze. Some tore off into the woods. But others, seemingly oblivious to common sense, charged instead. They screamed, cursed and hurled what they could get their hands on.
The deafening sound of the mercs return fire seemed to echo in Trevino’s eardrums as he watched helplessly.
A half-dozen of the rioting audience bore down on a merc. His rifle discharged uselessly into the air as they tore at him with broken bottles, fists and teeth, before concentrated gunfire chewed them to pieces.
Audience members entered the fray with handguns they had stowed in their bunks. Morpheus jumped from behind a rock, firing off a single shot with a pistol before his face exploded in a whiff of bone chunks and vapor.
A second shot cracked from beside Trevino, ripping a chunk into the side of the Behemoth, but missing the engine block.
The sniper beside Trevino let out a groan a split second later.
“Wha–?” He looked, and saw a crossbow bolt sticking from his face.
On his hands and knees, Trevino crawled away.
Dionysus, Jesus, Cody and Ariadne fell back to the Behemoth as planned. They held position, gaping, surrounded by a skirmish line of their security detail. Their faces were studies of contained fury.
Loki and Artemis could be heard screaming orders. Several mercs dropped in their tracks as they advanced, bolts sticking out of their necks.
As though from the ground, Artemis emerged from a shadow, blade drawn. She slid it under a mercs jaw, and then dropped and rolled out of sight.
Smoke grenades began to sail over the heads of the rioters and into the remaining skirmish line of mercs. They were quickly blinded, and the rioters surged forward. Loki snapped a thumbs up at the girls who’d just tossed the grenades.
He dropped one last grenade, almost at his feet, and was immediately obscured by brightly colored smoke. Near the edge, security formed a loose screen, picking off mercs with their crossbows before the smoke rolled over them as well.
The following moments were a nightmare of flailing limbs, muzzle flashes and dying teenagers.
Loki popped up again, putting two in the chest of a nearby merc. Suddenly, every inch of Loki’s body felt icy cold. It wasn’t fear, just a thought – the man twitching at his feet had probably suffered through twelve years of tedious public schooling, the ins and outs of life on the street after a war, possibly a loveless marriage, a host of unrealized hopes and dreams, just so he could bleed out in a field full of plastic cups and dead kids.
He shook his head. Two seconds wasted navel-gazing in the middle of a fire fight. He needed to stop spending so much time with Dionysus.
Loki and Artemis regrouped behind the stage with the remaining security. They nodded in unison. Time to go.
They trotted alongside the already moving Behemoth and jumped aboard. Small arms fire dinged the armor as they sped off.
Dionysus switched places with Loki once they’d cleared the immediate area.
“We’re all here...No wait. Where’s Lilith?” Dionysus looked around frantically, re-counting the people in the vehicle.
“I don’t know. Right now I’m trying to save our asses,” Loki said.
“We need to go back.”
“No way. We can’t save anybody if we’re all dead. Got lucky in all that chaos. Would’ve owned us otherwise. That was a hired assault force.”
“Hired?” Dionysus asked.
“Everything’s getting privatized these days. Y’know–”
“–Dionysus?” Ariadne asked, weakly.
Dionysus looked down. She was lying on her side, blood was pooling all over the floor around her.
“Fuck. Oh fuck. Artemis! Cody? Jesus?”
Jesus and Cody flattened themselves against the wall as Artemis tore past and attempted to bind a wound in Ariadne’s upper arm with a T-shirt. She was in shock, barely conscious.
“Gonna be fine. Gonna be fine. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be...” Dionysus looked at Artemis. “How is she?”
“Shut up.” She continued working.
“Talk to me,” Loki said.
“They shot her. Went right through her arm. Looked clean but then it spurted.”
“Deep brachial?” Loki asked.
“No. Pinch the axillary. She’s going.”
“Dionysus...” Ariadne said.
“You’ll be fine. You’ve just lost a lot of blood.” He looked with concern at Artemis. She shook her head.
“Listen,” Ariadne said to him. Her voice was barely a whisper. “Time is a dream. I’ll see you again.” Her eyes rolled back. She was breathing, but barely.
Ariadne opened her eyes. She was lying on stone in the same place she had been that night with Lilith in the hotel. A length of twine lead down one passageway. She followed it around twists and turns.
Ahead, a black doorway was ringed with red and blue flame. She saw a woman before the endless darkness, waiting for her at the threshold. The length of twine lead to a bundle in the hands of this figure. Closer still. It was an ageless vision of herself.
“Come home.”
“So soon?”
“Yesterday is tomorrow. Tomorrow is yesterday.”
They stepped through the door together.
Dionysus was covered in his lover’s blood and she was gone.
He imagined a lifetime without their shared jokes, without ever hearing her voice again. No one would have her smell. It would drain from her clothes, turn stale, and then never again return. He put his hand over her heart and felt a hole open in his own chest.
An eerie silence fell on the vehicle as it sped off into the night. There was no back-and-forth banter. No smiles or laughs. Just silence, and the certain knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again. Whatever came next, the party was over.
Trevino stood in the field where the audience once stood. He was surrounded by bodies, many of them the age his children would have been, if he’d ever had children.
It wasn’t Mai Lai. To Americans, it would be worse. Mai Lai happened to “other people.” The Kent State massacre had a body-count of four students. He looked at the empty, staring eyes of a dead girl. Maybe seventeen, all-American, except the bullet holes. She wasn’t a fucking terrorist. She was a kid out past curfew.
He lit a smoke and looked away. Someone was going to hang.
Lilith entered his field of view, her hands cuffed together. Several mercs escorted her to Trevino. She was a mess of ripped fishnet and blood, but seemed unharmed.
“Take her to interrogation,” he said.
“Sounds fun,” she said.
“It shouldn’t.”
She flashed a winsome smile at him before being carted away. He shook his head and looked up at the faces of presidents, long dead, dreaming darkly.
–
Trevino paced behind the one-way mirror, flicking a Zippo lighter back and forth in his hand. On the other side sat the most appealing creature he had ever set eyes on – forget that she stood for everything in the world that he loathed. She was still wearing the form-fitting leather outfit she wore on stage. Her hair cascaded around bare shoulders.
Why had she offered herself so willingly? She was like a sphinx when they arrested and cuffed her. Trevino, a veteran of countless firefights, one official war and many unofficial ones, caught himself blushing when she smiled at him.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t smoke out here, Marshall. Just in the box,” a cop said.
Trevino stopped pacing. “Does it look like I’m smoking to you?”
“No, I just...”
He flicked it closed a final time. “It helps me think.” He looked back at their prisoner. Lilith was casually inspecting her handcuffs.
He marched into the room.
“I am Deputy U.S. Marshall Trevino.” He tapped out two cigarettes and
pulled out a chair.
“The good cop routine, then?”
“Might be taking you to a firing squad, too. It's just common courtesy,” Trevino said.
“Sure. I’ll have one.” She leaned forward and indicated for him to place the smoke in her mouth.
He lit both cigarettes.
“There's no ‘routine.’ We have you as an enemy combatant – a terrorist. So we can get to the thumbscrews later.” He scrutinized her, and realized it was a lie. He couldn’t hit this woman. He just couldn’t. “They didn't take off the cuffs?”
“Nah,” she said, “I prefer it this way.”
She locked gazes with him. For a moment he could think of nothing but the image of her, still bound, on her hands and knees. Trevino blew out a cloud of smoke and finally sat.
“Your life is forfeit now. Terrorists don’t get the due
process of law.”
“So you implied.”
“Let's get to it.”
“There's too much momentum. You can't control this,” Lilith said.
“I want to know plans, dates, targets.”
Lilith laughed. “Plans? You don’t understand what’s
going on at all, do you?”
“Why don’t you explain it to me.”
Lilith thought for a moment. “I saw this show on the Discovery Channel about ants. It was amazing watching them move together. Attack together. Flee together. They would even drown themselves to let other ants traverse a stream. Now, sure they have a queen, but she’s just their bloated sugar momma. No one is giving orders.”
“I don't understand wh–”
“I'm answering your question, Mr. Trevino.”
“Agent Trevino.”
“Okay, sure.” She leaned back. “You’ll make legends with your bullets, martyrs of a rebellion that didn’t even exist until you started firing.” Especially when that message I recorded gets out, Lilith thought. An army of fools would flock to the Behemoth’s location in hours. She hid the thought behind a smile.
