by M. C. Norris
He turned toward the clatter of hooves against pavement. Mounted cavalrymen rode the last of the Arabians up what was once Kansas City’s main drag, and by God, they were flying the colors. General Cobb snapped and held a proud salute as the first wave of his beloved dragoons thundered by, stirring the dust of erstwhile skyscrapers, stars and stripes flapping in the poisoned air, while a hundred whoops and gunshots resounded throughout the funereal ruins. It was the first moment in almost one year that Cobb was actually glad to be wearing a mask, hiding those streams of tears that spilled warmly from his eyes. God bless America.
Chapter Seven
The paddleboat tacked round a river bend that afforded the first glimpse of a shattered skyline, set afire in the hellish incandescence of the setting sun. Malcolm sounded a long blast from the Sawyer’s steam whistle. With the body of their captain committed to the river, Malcolm had taken the Sawyer’s helm. It was a relatively simple machine, devoid of buttons and switches that might’ve been blinking intimidatingly across the instrument panel of a modern riverboat. Much beyond a throttle and a wooden helm, there was little more to confuse the eye than a row of pressure gauges that seemed to loiter in a relatively constant differential between intermittent blasts from the steam pop-off valves. So long as he didn’t run the paddleboat aground, the operation of this watercraft appeared to be fairly straightforward.
Malcolm frowned, straining his ears to discern the source of a rhythmic pounding, his eyes searching the columns of black smoke that roiled over the gleaming towers of the Heart of America Bridge. For more than two hours, he’d listened to the thunder of a distant battle, the dull fusillade of howitzer shells, the unmistakable thumping of Bofors guns. The percussion that now drifted over the ribbon of poisoned water was a sound of a different sort. It struck him as something that he guessed he hadn’t heard in almost a year. Was it music?
He keyed up the ham radio on his helmet and sent a dispatch directed toward his mission contact, one General Cobb of the Kansas City Militia, a man who’d been designated to escort them to the second phase of their journey at the old stockyard train station. Nothing but dead air. He keyed up again, still no reply. On several occasions since they’d left St. Louis, he’d attempted to receive some bit of news over the radio, but for the last four hours, the military band had been jammed with chaotic chatter much beyond the last repeater. This close to the city, the lack of response seemed peculiar.
He keyed down the radio, cranking his head around to peer through the wheelhouse window. Still no sign of Cecile. They hadn’t spoken a word to one another since the disaster, which was probably for the best. Even if he’d really wanted to speak to the woman, he couldn’t exactly leave the helm. If she needed anything, he guessed that she could come to him.
There was a part of him that was curious. She’d aroused anxieties within him that wanted desperately to become new priorities in his mind, but they had little to do with the mission at hand. These thoughts became urgencies that whistled up like strange mortars through his core, chilling his flesh and unsettling his innards. He tried to respond to them in the way he’d always done, by suppressing them, crushing them back down with a hot sledge of anger—anger that he tried to direct toward her, for manipulating his mind in such a tactless way—but he found the usual sledge to be slippery in his emotional grip. It was becoming more difficult to stay angry, even with her.
This wasn’t the first time in his life that he’d found himself questioning his temperament. He’d questioned it for weeks after Brenda filed for divorce. He’d questioned it dozens of times during his service to his country, following those violent spells that so frequently consumed the men of the Gann family name. None of the Ganns were proud of their fiery trait, but it was in fact, a trait that had served many of them well in their chosen capacities. They were fighters, most all of them. Soldiers, athletes, and even violent criminals, squabbling on every branch of the Gann family tree. Every fighter learns that the remorse passes once you’ve dismissed your waffling, and carried on.
This time, it was different. He had difficulty eliminating this particular set of misgivings, as they pertained to Jacob, a presence that seemed suddenly more tangible, less an abstract ghost of some bygone world. To dismiss Cecile’s offer to commune with him, even if it was all just a goddamned gypsy ruse, felt a little bit like turning his back on Jacob, and that was a sin already committed, and one for which he was very ashamed.
Malcolm listened to the tribal drumbeats, narrowing his eyes at the billowing clouds of black smoke that obscured his view of the distant bridge. He’d burned the crayon drawing. He’d burned the square of gum, along with it. At the time, it had seemed the right thing to do. It was over. His life. All of it. He was to begin marching from Afghanistan to Germany. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East, which no one thought would ever end, had finally ended. Z-Day brought an end to everything, and there was always that possibility that one of the world’s corrupt powers would seize the opportunity to inflict a death blow against their crippled enemies with a missile strike. It was a dramatic time in his life, and he’d given himself over to the romance of it all by building a small fire out there in the Afghan desert, where he’d burned every trace of a past life that no longer held meaning. He sat there, watching the single square of gum melt and bubble over the blackening folds of Jacob’s drawing. The depiction of a tearful stick figure of a boy, holding hands with the stick figure of a man in a helmet dissolved, like the rest of the living world, into ash.
“Kum hom Dade.”
How could he explain that moment to his son? How can you explain to a five-year-old boy that it’s fucking easier to forget about them, to burn every shred of evidence that they ever existed, than to own the agonies of your failure and regret? There was no explanation good enough to justify what had been a private moment, and that he never in his life could have imagined that he might one day have to explain—to him. That chapter of his life was supposed to have remained closed, and that voodoo witch had reopened it.
Shifting winds wimpled the curtain of smoke that flapped black, as a piratical flag from anchor points on the gutted husks of buildings with their exposed, ribbed cavities and ragged edges; butchered structures, smoking in the electromagnetic haze like mirrored sides of beef. The ruins jutted haphazardly over great reefs of river steam, the blood of slain molecules in a microcosmic genocide. Acrid and tenuous, the mist burned the lungs and mucous membranes through masks designed to filter only the most lethal components from the fetid air. The fog hung low over the poisoned water, where human bodies now rolled and tumbled in the Sawyer’s wake, cast like a troupe of performers in some languid interpretation of death’s rapturous bliss. Arms swept gracefully over chests as they pirouetted through eddies, disappearing and reemerging, folding easily around the paddleboat’s bow to pinwheel off through wreckage that snagged their clothing, clung briefly, until garments sloughed away.
Summertime, and the living was easy for them, drifting down the acid river. Their war was over. Their sin of living was at last forgiven by that wrathful god of entropy who knew no love for the music of chirring insects in twilit bows, the laughter of smiling children with slices of watermelon on paper plates, a dog’s bark, a lawnmower’s drone, an evening breeze that stirred leaves with a waxy clatter. These were all things once taken for granted by these river dancers, who’d at last been released from this planet of gas and flame.
Malcolm seized the helm and swung the bow of the Sawyer starboard, but the boat still struck the ragged hump of chitin. All fringed with blubber and pale meat, the mass slid beneath them. The vessel canted port as the horned carapace squealed and ground against the Sawyer’s timbers, filing off great strips of wood and paint until the churning paddle pushed them off their high-center. It was dead.
Bubbles surged through Malcolm’s cartridges until his breathing slowed back down. There was another, just ahead. Great tangles of what appeared to be intestines snaked past the Sawyer’s bow. He s
pun the helm to the port and backed down the throttle, slowing the vessel’s speed as they avoided a near collision with a second carcass, and entered something of a misty graveyard where humans and dragons shared common interment. Enmeshed remains of mortal enemies drifted past in rafts of splintered bones and gassy bladders. Malcolm tried to focus on navigation, but the drumming was so much sharper in the fog. Every beat seemed to travel more quickly and more clearly through this floating miasma, hammering in his ears until he felt panic’s onset seize him icily by his throbbing heart.
The thumping of a Bofors gun was succeeded by shrill ululations that came keening through the mist. It was a thin chorus of celebratory whoops and howls that might rise from a stadium in the grotesque aftermath of a day’s main event, when any real competition had passed, and the festivities were devolving into theatrical acts of desecration. Goal posts being torn down. Police cars rocked and flipped asunder. Blood-smeared faces. Pretty creatures, poised and senseless in the spotlight’s allure, flaunting to their throngs of would-be rapists. Malcolm recognized this atmosphere. A battle had been fought, and won.
He released a piercing blast from the steam whistle, lest heady soldiers whose bloodlust was not yet satiated fired upon them. The Sawyer bumped and ground through a field of biological and automotive debris. What remained of their mighty enemies was ensnarled in tangles of steel cable, drifting by as unrecognizable masses of shell and gassy innards. The burning fire behind their eyes, of those that still had them, was extinguished. Geysers of yellow venom spewed from wounds in their armor. Nameless gases billowed from the great craters that halved them. The river was jammed with their smoldering remnants, too many to be numbered. The legs of some, still articulating reflexively, paddled weakly in the stew. As Malcolm sounded the whistle for another wailing report, the Sawyer’s bow pierced the bank of dragon fog, and the bridge rose into view.
Rusty girders spanned a lake of fire, where tortured things set ablaze dangled from cables affixed to the structure, writhing in the infernal torrents of burning fuel poured down upon them. The titanic ornaments spewed their jettisons of plasma, inflating bladders to give lift to their harpooned bulk that rose from the flames like macabre balloons, only to draw the thumping attention of innumerable guns that delivered them back to Hell’s pits. The doomed things had no grasp on the hopelessness of their situation, so bewitched were they by that klystron generated current of electricity. Clinging to girders, to the tension cables, to each other, the mindless supplicants estranged from a queen mounted instead the backs of their dying and dead brethren, thrusting pale, tented organs with indiscriminate fervor into any opening, natural or new. These clumsy couplings evoked howls of laughter from the jeering crowd. They threw bottles and baptized them with fire, gladly directing weapons at the novelty of exposed dragon genitalia. These targets were shredded. Blood and ejaculate gushed from flaccid trunks. Confused, they still clung, as their thrusting tonnage was pared steadily away by bursts of concentrated firepower, dropped in segments and discorporate limbs until their greater remnants fell steaming into the flames.
Atop the bridge, taunting victors postured. Streams of piss arched over the girder rails. They screamed curses down at their foes, but their insults were wasted upon earless behemoths who perceived the world in ways beyond the outermost valence of human experience. Bottles in hand, men climbed towers and tension cables. Some fell. Disagreements were being settled by the frequent pop of small arms fire. A brawl erupted along the northern railing. Perhaps inspired by the misguided instincts of their smitten enemies, and fueled by the corruptive energy of their drink, their drums, their rage for violence not yet slaked by the humiliation of their enemies, they thirsted for worse. They converged like a murder of crows upon the weaker, who were beaten, stripped, and dragged between cars. Malcolm watched a severed human head fall from the girders, just as a gang of horsemen thundered by on masked steeds. Riders hoisted their bottles, discharging rifles in the air. Their tattered plastic fatigues flapped like wraiths’ shrouds beneath an inverted American flag. There flew the blood stripes of soldiers slaughtered in the defense of a bygone regime, the snowy streaks of forgotten battlefields that received our frozen dead, and the stars of fifty states no longer recognized by government or physical boundary. All had melded into one central state of entropy, unified by mindless violence not suffered in this land for almost two centuries. The sun had not even set beyond the ruins of their erstwhile civilization, while the bloodiest hours of a riot were yet to come.
“Captain Gann!”
Her. Malcom turned from the spectacle on the Heart of America Bridge, and he saw them, three canoes, sliding like insidious blades from some place of concealment. The pilots heaved to their paddles, rifles saddled across their laps, digging their way purposefully over the acid river, gaining on the steamboat with every stroke like a sect of acolytes falling into procession behind their chugging river god.
“Stay in here. Lock the door behind me.” Malcolm snatched his propped rifle from the wheelhouse wall.
“Are they Hunters?”
“I don’t know. You lock that door, and keep out of sight.”
The foremen of each watercraft rose, straddling the bulwarks with their boots, and began whirling hooked grapples. They slung for the Sawyer’s rails, and they climbed. Malcolm saw painted masks festooned with strips of cloth. He should have moved faster. Should have led with a warning shot. It was too late. They were aboard.
“Stop right there!” Malcolm ordered, while invaders clambered over the starboard rail. “Freeze, or I’ll kill you!” Malcolm took aim at the nearest invader, and squeezed off a round that filled the man’s helmet with his brains.
A burst of automatic weapon fire ripped a jagged line of holes through the old ballroom walls. Dry wood hashed the air in great chuffs of flitting splinters. They’d already taken the port side. Too many of them. They’d get to her first. The starboard bunch levelled their rifles as Malcolm unloaded his magazine, shooting from the hip, spraying the pirates with hot lead as he bolted for the wheelhouse. All crumpled. One, still fighting, raised his rifle and sent a few bullets screaming past his ear. Malcom toggled his ham radio to emergency dispatch as he slid around the corner of the wheelhouse, and onto the bow.
“Captain Gann with IDC, aboard steamboat Tom Sawyer. We’re under attack. Dispatch to General Cobb of the KC Militia. I repeat: steamboat Sawyer under attack!”
The wheelhouse windshield exploded in a shower of jangling shards. Ricochets zinged crazily off the bow rail. He caught a glimpse of Cecile crawling through heaps of broken glass on the wheelhouse floor. If he could just draw their fire for a few more minutes—if she could keep hidden. Ejecting his spent magazine, he jammed in a fresh one. He snapped back the bolt while choking the trigger to return an immediate spray of rounds back through the walls at the same trajectory, sweeping his barrel low on the second pass to catch the crawlers. No return fire. Then, he heard the ascending intonations of boot soles upon rungs. Fuck. They were climbing for the upper deck.
Peering back around the starboard side of the wheelhouse brought an explosion of splintering wood right into his face. Death didn’t come much closer than that. His wounded fighter was still in the game. He could hear boot steps, up above, edging toward the upper rail, and still, around the corner, shuffling along the deck at the base of the port wall. They had him pinned on the bow by three lines of fire. If it weren’t for the asset, he’d have jumped. Likely as not, they’d have shot him dead in the river, if the fucking water didn’t boil him first. No, he was trapped. Nowhere to run.
A rifle appeared over the upper rail, clenched in a black bagged hand. Fire spewed from the muzzle as the weapon swung pendulously back and forth, shredding the deck into kindling. Arching his back, Malcolm bailed backwards over the sill of the shattered wheelhouse window, pumping rounds up through the ceiling as he crashed to his back on a bed of shattered glass. He watched the dropped weapon fall past the open window to clatter noisily t
o the deck. Got one. Rolling to his left, he swung the barrel past Cecile’s masked face in the direction of the port wall, hammering the last of his rounds through its base in the general vicinity of the pirates he guessed were lurking there.
At the click of his firing pin, they all appeared in the open window, the barrels of their weapons aimed directly at his face. Bubbles surged through the red KMnO4 cartridges on the jaws of their painted masks. They weren’t Hunters. Just bad men. The big one popped his neck, revealing a flow of blood down the side of his hairy throat.
“We’re IDC,” Malcolm said, releasing his rifle, lifting his palms in a surrendering gesture, “allies with General Cobb of the KC Militia. Everyone knows we’re coming.”
The big man ignored him, pointing over Malcolm’s shoulder at her. “You.” He beckoned with a curling finger. “Come out.”
