by M. C. Norris
Malcom marched across the deck toward the asset, whose back was turned to him. Flames still lapping at the sky all around her, she stood gawping in wonder at the diminishing forms of the dragons that had just wiped out his entire squad. It was all he could do to suppress the urge to sweep an arm between her legs, hoist her up over his head, and throw her right over the rail. Then, he could get back to killing dragons, doing his fucking job. The asset turned, as he closed in on her. She squared off her shoulders to his, and before he could say a single word, she discharged her fire extinguisher directly into his face.
Chapter Six
The spirit of that fatherless boy was just as real as that motherless child, and the shadow of her former self, once remembered like a stain upon the walls of Storyville, and cast forever within the nooks of Nod. Absolution was just some nonsense dreamt up by the living, whose minds grew distant from their sins by time’s slow passage, while they mulled their wrongs over, turned them this way and that, until they found some suitable angle from which to accept the things they’d done, or forget them entirely. Not so, for the spirits of the dead, forever estranged from time’s perceived linearity, exiting in every moment all at once, from time’s beginning to its blessed end. Like the spirits of the dead who bothered her, Cecile hadn’t time’s healing luxuries to absolve the past, because those ghosts of her own awful past were present, in every sense of the word. All hollering and fighting for a moment of her time, they wanted justice, revenge, apologies, yearning to make things right in that mess they’d sometimes left behind, even if that mess was no fault of their own. Over in Nod, all you had was time to think, and plenty of it.
Cecile’s mama was over there. A flock of blackbirds, just as flighty and scattered in death as that woman had always been in life. A hundred yellow eyes, forever searching for that crumb of something that would make her happy, bring her peace, and make her right in the mind. What her mama never learned was that even a whole pile of crumbs wasn’t made to last. Soon enough, it would all be pecked up, and that flock of blackbirds would be off looking for the next something, always searching, with those hundred yellow eyes.
Storyville was a dim room with sheets over the windows, stained green carpet, littered all over with those sharp things folks stuck into their arms, shiny glass bottles that rolled and clinked cheerily. It was a threadbare couch and a stranger’s lap, where folks would snatch you right up as if you were their own, talk in your face, and carry you out onto a porch with white balusters of flaking paint that kept you penned in safe like the bars on an animal cage. You could lick that sour wood all afternoon while watching cars and people drift by. It was a place of hollering, where folks got hit, and things got smashed against the walls. It was sometimes like a theater, where folks raged in the room’s center as if it was a stage for some unending production, where one interpretive act followed another, through every day and sleepless night, when boisterous bouts like you’d never imagined could sometimes stir whole rooms of strangers all to dancing. What Cecile remembered best about Storyville, and liked best to remember, was that it was the place where she met old Slim.
Black as the bag they’d zipped her mama in when they carried her out the side door, and that slinky old cat had just hopped right up through the balusters and onto the porch right as the ambulance sirens got to wailing. That cat sauntered up purring loud as could be with those lids half-closed over its golden buttons for eyes, and it just loped all around her, rubbing that cold, little nose and those silky cheeks against her own, as if to say, “Don’t you worry, child. You ain’t alone in this world or any other, long as you got me.”
Slim got her smiling again, even giggling, before those howling sirens had ever faded out of earshot. True to its word, the old cat kept her company all morning long, until Cecile peered through the bars of her wooden prison to see her Nana Hess walking up the block, red as a blood rose in her fringed skirt of madras cloth. That was the last day they ever spent in Storyville, Cecile and Slim both.
A lost child needed someone like that, like Nana Hess, and even like old Slim, or else they’d just stay lost forever. Praise God, because Cecile couldn’t stomach such a thought of what might’ve become of her if not for those two souls, those two perfect angels, who came right to her rescue when she needed rescuing the most. Not all lost children were so blessed. Like the fatherless child, Jacob, who’d died lost, and who might’ve remained so for every moment of eternity if he hadn’t thought to show Cecile that crayon drawing he’d made.
“Kum hom Dade.”
Son of a soldier boy, always waiting for daddy to come home, every day of his short life. Still, he waited, over there on the other side of things. Borrowing the imagined words of a slinky black cat with golden button eyes, Cecile had promised that fatherless boy that there was no need to worry, as he wouldn’t ever be alone, not in this world or any other, long as she was by his side. That promise had seemed to please him, and Cecile always kept her promises.
#
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Malcolm screamed, still covered in flame retardant. “Just because you find a key to someone’s house doesn’t give you the right to barge right in, go through their shit, and take whatever happens to suit your fancy. You think you’re special, because you can do whatever the hell it is that you do? You’re just a thief! A fucking thief! Stay out of my head!”
“I was never inside your fool head, nor would I ever want to be,” Cecile replied, tempted to give him a second shot from her extinguisher. “You’d best mind your nasty mouth right in front of Jacob. Long as I live and breathe, he’ll be standing right here by my side.”
“What a load of shit! You’re only saying that to keep me from throwing your ass right over the rail of this goddamned boat!”
Cecile cocked her head. “You don’t believe me, Honey?”
“Of course I don’t fucking believe you. You went through my goddamned file! Doesn’t even take a street magician to pull that trick.”
“What about that crayon drawing? Orange and red. Whatever happened to that? You reckon that made it into your file? Because that’s what he’s holding up to you, right here in his little hand.”
“What drawing? What are you talking about?”
The fool was trying to maintain his level of aggression, but at this point, it was all just a show. Cecile had heard the sudden change in his tone. The fight was over. She’d won. She needed say no more, but then that wouldn’t be her style, because this fight wasn’t about winning. “It ain’t too late to get to know him.” Cecile let it hang in the air. The small fires, all around them, were putting themselves out.
“If he’s really standing there,” Malcolm finally replied, his voice wavering with uncertainty, “then you ask him what I did with that drawing.”
Cecile slowly shook her head.
“Because you can’t answer that one, now can you?”
“No. Your son had no connection to this world, after he passed. Not until I met him, just this morning. Whatever things have happened, between the moment he passed, and now—whatever thoughts might be on your mind, those are all things that you can share with him, through me.”
Malcolm’s shoulders rose and fell. He just stared, as if trying to decide whether this opportunity to commune with his son was for real, or just the sickest sort of con artistry. She supposed that she couldn’t blame him. There was a time, before old Slim met with his end, and her dark gift was received that she could remember doubting some of the things that Nana Hess had passed on to her that had supposedly from her mama. Made her a little mad, at times. She reckoned it was a lie because her mama never had much to say to her in life, so she couldn’t understand why she’d suddenly become so talkative after death. The day old Slim was killed, and the doors to Nod opened, she was made to come to a full understanding of why dead folks changed so awful much.
“He’s asking me, if you liked the gum that he sent you.”
Malcolm raised both hands in a sudden gestu
re of surrender. He waved them as he turned, and reeled slowly away. Pow. She’d got him good that time. Maybe too good. Cecile watched him as he staggered off down the deck, stepping over the deliquesced forms of his crewmen, both palms pressed to the front of his mask. In a quiet spot, he dropped to his knees, dumping forward until his helmet struck the deck. His back began to heave, while torrents of bubbles gushed through his cartridges.
###
“General Cobb? We just got an emergency dispatch over military band, originating three repeaters east. That steamboat transporting your St. Louis VIP just took a direct hit, wiped out all personnel on board, but two.”
“What’s the status on the VIP?”
“Don’t have that information, Sir.”
“Hunters?”
“No, Sir. Pod of dragons, and they’re headed our way.”
“Three repeaters east?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“That’d be about a hundred, hundred-fifty miles.”
“Yes, Sir. I’d say we have about ‘til sundown before an attack.”
“That’s assuming there ain’t a pod in closer range,” the General said, rising from his seat at the cheap desk pushed to the far end of the Airstream trailer. He lifted his beige Stetson cowboy hat from atop the stacks of maps, placed it squarely upon his balding head, and then straightened the Civil War coat that had been gifted to him by the boys up in Fort Leavenworth when he delivered them a few crates of whiskey.
There was a ruckus, outside. The General cocked his head. Through the walls of the Airstream, nickering horses and the clopping of countless hooves upon concrete filled the trailer with the poignant nostalgia of a nearly forgotten world.
“You hear that?” the General asked.
“Yes, Sir. I do.”
“Damn, but I love the sound of them horses.” The General smiled, nodding his head almost imperceptibly. “All Arabians, every one of them. Beautiful animals. War horses. Bred for endurance in the most extreme conditions.” The General picked up his mask last of all, and held the thing reluctantly in his gloved hands. He stared down at his reflection, cast upon the tinted visor. “Don’t suppose you’ve ever heard the story of ‘Al Khamsa,’ have you?”
“No, Sir. I have not.”
“It means ‘The Five,’ in Arabic.” The General looked up from his mask, fixing his leaden eyes on the young corporal. “Legend has it, when those Arabs decided to breed a better horse for desert warfare, they released a few hundred of their toughest mares out onto the Syrian plateau, subjected them to weeks of brutal conditioning, running them night and day. Ran some of them to death, I’d guess. On what was to be their final day of it, they waited ‘til the hottest hour of the afternoon, then turned all those dehydrated horses loose, right near a big oasis. Now, just as the first mares were about to reach the water’s edge, they blew a war horn, which the horses knew was their call to return to battle. Of those hundreds released, only five of those mares turned their backs to water, and headed right back out for the Syrian plateau. It was from those five, they sired the bloodline of the Arabian war horse.” The General winked, and allowed a chuckle, smoothing his silver mustache. “I’m kind of a horseman. Least, I used to be. I sure love to hear the sound of them.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“How we coming along, up there on the bridge?” It was almost a rhetorical question, since General Cobb wasn’t lingering around for an answer. His mood had darkened. He’d already pulled on his mask and brushed by the young corporal, before the kid could begin to answer. The General threw open the Airstream door, marched down the plastic tunnel inflated with amyl nitrite gas, and then stepped through the sterile airlock onto the downtown Kansas City street. More than anything else, he hated wearing the masks. The luxury of chemically filtered air in the regular army’s trailers and railcars was always a welcome respite from smothering inside a steamy, synthetic confine. He was a man of wide-open spaces, and there was no sense of freedom behind a mask. Back home, on his Riley County ranch, if one of his dogs ever decided to run away, he could just sit there on his porch drinking iced tea and watching the son-of-a-bitch run away, from dawn ‘til dusk. They liked to compare the flatness of Kansas to that of a pancake, but studies had shown that in fact, Kansas was flatter.
Horses champed by, wagging their masked heads indignantly, en route from the rail station to the upper level of a parking garage that had been sealed and rigged with wind turbines that continuously drew KMnO4-filtered air through a complex system of canisters and tubing that looked like something out of a pothead’s wet dream. Carbon-filtered water was pumped manually, and continuously, from the bottom of the Missouri River. It was treated gravimetrically from a series of drums of God-knew-what that was metered mechanically into their potable water supply from ranks of paddlewheel piston pumps powered by a vacuum of pure uranium. The water tasted so foul that he wondered how thirsty those fresh horses would have to be, before they could ever be encouraged to drink it. That was the biggest problem with commissioning horses. They were thirsty sons-of-bitches. General Cobb had staked more than just his reputation on a trade to bring three-hundred masked and cagey Arabians all the way from Montana, by steam rail, but he was a horseman, after all. They’d served their country well in the past, and by God, the U.S. Cavalry was going to ride again.
General Cobb had a new vision for the old cow town of Kanas City. The vision was yet muddled a bit, but the picture was steadily becoming clearer. Kansas City was a centralized location, being an old railroad hub from the 1920’s, and it was situated at the confluence of two major rivers. Cobb saw promise in the redevelopment of KC as something of a new, national military headquarters, and a trading hub. It would all start right here. Their steam locomotive was key, running routes from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Riley, and all the way out west, as far as Portland. When he climbed and stood atop the limestone bluffs of Huron Hill, what he saw, looking eastward across the old packinghouse district, was not just a tumulus of ransacked buildings. No, it was the beating heart of a national system of supply lines that would bring livestock and natural resources down from the unscathed hinterlands of the north, and ship them west, by rail, float them south and east by steamboat and hot air balloon. His country had taken a big hit, but it not yet crippled, not in General Cobb’s estimation, so long as there were able-bodied men fueled with patriotic vindication, determination, and places—undisclosed places—where precious resources could still be gleaned. He had faith that America could and would rise from the ashes of the so-called apocalypse, and start along a glorious path of reinvention, reconstruction, and redemption. General Cobb had already determined what was most needed, and where, all across his wounded nation, and he was bent on moving those critical resources to them. This was how it would all begin. Trade, it was the spark that would ignite a new rage for genesis. His vision was perhaps a lofty goal, but he’d received his first shipment of horses, and horses, well, horses were a damned good start.
The horse was more than just a beast of burden, a mode of transportation. In America, the horse represented something far greater than the sum of its potential. This animal was an American icon. It boosted morale. The very sight of a mounted rider in this dark era would inspire renewed passion for the fight, for selfless acts of bravery and heroism. The sight of a horse would trigger an embrace of that manic constitution known by warriors of eras past who galloped straight for hell’s gates in want of freedom. In America, glory rode upon a horse.
The flared barrels of a battery of the world’s most powerful machine gun, the Bofors 40 mm, bristled from either end of the Heart of America Bridge. These were his little gifts from Fort Riley. First developed by the Swedes, these vintage antiaircraft guns were built in America by Chrysler, and had been packed in crates of grease, resting peacefully in the bowels of an armory, ever since the Second World War. They’d been modified with extended magazines that fed horizontally stacked clips of high explosive rounds as long as a man’s forearm. These weapons wou
ld shred a dragon to pieces.
On the bridge deck, gifts from Portland bristled over the girders, fore and aft. Mounted between rows of carefully arranged vehicles, the barbed tips of explosive harpoons protruded from a battery of Japanese whaling guns. Here was to be an interesting experiment, if any of the creatures were unlucky enough to drift within their short range. Many of the suspension cables were necessarily unbolted from the girders and left swinging to afford some room for what would follow if a whaling harpoon struck its target.
Atop the hill of downtown Kansas City stood Liberty Memorial, where the obelisk monument to the soldiers of World War I still loomed over the ranks of M1A1 pack howitzers, the M2 90mm antiaircraft cannons, with their ventilated barrels all aimed in the direction of the river’s southeastern bend. They would pound the enemy with everything they had before the dragons ever drifted near the city, lured by the electric signature of a uranium-powered klystron generator, the world’s most powerful vacuum tube, anchored a safe distance from the city on an armored barge, just a few clicks downriver from the bridge. The few dragons to survive the shelling of the long-range guns would find themselves pinned between the twin batteries of Bofors guns positioned to deliver a big shipment of dragon guts downstream to St. Louis.
This was to be the first organized clash of American artillery against the invaders. Previous engagements were crippled by the bursts of chaos particles that knocked fighters and guided missiles right out of the sky, disabling any and all conventional military tactics that relied on computerized systems. In this engagement, every battery was armed with vintage World War II era artillery, the good, old-fashioned stuff, and the bugs didn’t stand a chance.
In a world drowned in ambiguity, hope could still be anchored by the solidity of facts. One of these facts was that there were a finite number of dragons. Finite. Wasn’t like the battle of Iwo Jima, where unknown thousands of Japanese fighters were embedded in tunnels throughout that volcanic island, where every brutal engagement seemed to birth ten-thousand more. Given the worldwide communication breakdown, and the ongoing conflict in every nation, it was difficult, if not impossible, to come up with an accurate estimate of the dragons’ remaining numbers. Most of the creatures had first emerged from beneath the world’s pyramids. There were an estimated five thousand pyramids, worldwide, that were believed to have been constructed right around 3000 B.C., which seemed to be the date that the incubation of dragon eggs had begun. Five thousand years, five thousand pyramids, five thousand dragons. That was the best estimate of their population. Since Zero Day, a significant number of the bugs had been slain, had died in territorial clashes against each other, or had been killed in their attempts to copulate with municipal power plants. How many were left? In General Cobb’s mind, the answer to that question was less important than how many of those sons-of-bitches would be showing up to the big party in Kansas City, tonight.
