She looks us each in the eyes and smiles.
“Who are you?” the general shouts at her. “Who sent you?”
The crocodile writhes and her skin splits, blood dripping from hide. Her mouth opens wider.
“Who are you?” I shout in echo. “What kind of Mercy are you?”
The crocodile’s no longer a crocodile. She ripples up out of the skin, her face through the teeth, her fingers through the claws.
“I am,” the old woman says, “the Thirteenth Mercy.”
The Mercy of the Uncleaning
The Thirteenth Mercy was originally the Mercy of the Cleansing of Sins. In Reverse, the Thirteenth is the Mercy of Filth, the bestowal of all of our sins into the souls of the enemy, the crushing beneath sins of everything living. Everyone is evil in the Reversed Mercy. It’s constructed around the knowledge of hopelessness.
It is performed with bleach and wool.
Had we completed it at Kinotra, a cloud would’ve risen over the prison, and in it, the enemy would have drifted, driven forward across the sky by our hatred, sleepless and hungry forever.
The sacrifice stands for everything we’ve lost, everything we’ve given over to fighting, soldiers’ lives spent placing bombs in public squares and buses, centuries of soldiers’ time spent poisoning and lynching, all the labors of war both just and unjust, all the orders followed, all the sins accrued by souls that did not ask for them. The pursuit of the truth is complicated. Sometimes the truth hides in the organs of the enemy, and sometimes it does not.
There is no way to know unless one looks deep.
The Execution of Nobody
The general signals and the ropes spin up from the mud, wet and twisting, lassoing her legs and tail, knotting around her throat.
Major Harmer hauls Nobody up, grunting, hissing the phrases of his half-broken Mercy, cursing her children and her children’s children, cursing her past and future.
Nobody opens her jaws and shows us teeth, and then opens claws and shows us fingers, the delicate hands of a woman pressed beneath the claws of a crocodile.
She has silver hair and orange eyes. Her scales are black enough to make her disappear. Our camouflage doesn’t hide us. She’s the kind of thing that can see in the dark.
At last we see her in full.
This crocodile hangs from our gallows now, we five remaining Merciful around her. We’re winning. She’s our enemy. When we kill her, we’ll be free of everything.
We’ll complete our Mercies and end this torment. Then home. We’re all thinking it.
She’s our mission, revealed to us at last. She’s what we came here to destroy.
I can see her moving, her tail lashing. The rain doesn’t cease. It’s harder, hard enough to bend the trees surrounding us, and a wind gasps into life, breaking branches around the clearing.
Our gallows hang heavy with the monster and she swings, jerking, strangling, the bodies of our company already in her belly. She gags and chokes and becomes an old woman again. She’s thin enough to break, but she doesn’t. She hangs by her neck at the end of the rope, but gravity doesn’t hold her. Not her, this old woman not old woman, her claws and her black-scaled tail, the crocodile parts that surround her body.
The Photographer
There’s a click, a sound from the world, and I turn my head to see the general holding a camera like someone from a hundred years ago, a hood over his head to make a portrait of Nobody’s execution.
Major Harmer makes a noise of betrayal.
The photos from Kinotra.
I think of a pale young man walking out of a cave with two charred heads in his hands, our punishment part of his Mercy.
“I will be Merciful,” Nobody says, and smiles at us from the gallows. Her mouth is full of teeth. She isn’t seven hundred years old, I think, but seven thousand, and she’s been hired by someone to destroy everything.
That was supposed to have been our mission, not hers.
“You’re mistaken,” the general says, his eyes brighter than they were before, his face clenched. “This is the last round of Mercies. My Reversed Mercy will complete it.”
She laughs, and her skin shudders off entirely from her female body and becomes a crocodile, smaller now, and then another woman, still smaller. The noose doesn’t tighten, though we lean backward, gunless, ropes slipping through our hands.
We’ve failed in our Mercies, and now the general stands and shouts, and the woman in the noose doesn’t. She does not hang. She doesn’t die.
The crocodile skins she’s left behind are jerking in the mud, and they rise up to tilt the gallows while she hovers there, arms extended, smiling.
The mud of the world begins to dissolve. The dirt of my garments, the filth of my skin, the matted hair and snarled beard, the quiet horrors I’ve fed on to fatten myself, all the dark things I’ve kept inside my heart.
The general screams, and I watch his body rise to her hands. She touches his face, and he hangs high in the air, the noose leaving her neck and looping around his.
“The Thirteenth Mercy,” she whispers, “is the Mercy of Cleansing of Sins.”
The Flood
Waters rise then. I remember, as we stand in river to our knees, as the jungle roars and sings, as our guards disappear beneath the surface, that the Mercy of the Flood is another Mercy, not one of the Thirteen, but an older measure. A Mercy that cannot be performed by humans, neither itself nor its Reverse.
Below the waters the old woman brings, battalions march tongueless and fingerless in the deep, and crocodiles swim through black silt, their eyes above the water, and cradles full of babies rock, and the land we fought over for so long is obliterated.
I see, as the waters rise up to my eyes, an image of a Mercy, the general’s body bent back and hanging in midair as Nobody’s jaws open his flesh, tearing his skin away from his bones and peeling him like something overripe and finished.
Beneath the water, we feel our enemies drowning as we drown, and we all begin again together, in a world without any of us.
DALE BAILEY
Lightning Jack’s Last Ride
FROM The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
THEY SAY LIGHTNING JACK died in a fiery crash just outside of Atlanta, racing west toward freedom into the teeth of a setting sun. I remember the scene in digital video, the way I saw it then, on the ancient flat-panel affixed to the wall of a dingy apartment in Biloxi. He’d rolled coming out of a curve on I-20, and even then that struck me as laughable: three lanes of abandoned highway, all that room for error and him the finest driver that had ever lived.
Yet there it was on the screen. The networks looped the tape over and over in the days that followed, snippets of Lightning Jack’s blistering death interspersed with archival footage of the moments that had made him a legend: hoisting his trophy in triumphant youth at his first Talladega, squiring Julie Marina down the red carpet to collect her Oscar, slamming into the wall as he roared out of the third curve at the last legal Daytona.
But they always came back to that final cataclysmic sequence. Captured by antiquated cameras installed in an era when I-20 still saw civilian traffic, it had, even then, the look of video you’ll be seeing for the rest of your life, the flat, inarguable reality, the banal composition of history in the making: Hitler at the Reichstag, Kennedy in the motorcade. The opening images have the archetypal familiarity of a scene apprehended in a dream. The leaden vault of sky looms over a sweeping plane of empty asphalt. But for the heat rippling above the pavement, it might be a still photo. It’s that static, that timeless. And then, suddenly, like an apparition, the car appears, a low-slung black blur, tires smoking as it clears the curve. The rear end slews to the right, threatening to send the vehicle into a spin, and then—impossibly, inconceivably—the driver overcorrects. It’s over almost as soon as it begins, an anticlimax; only our knowledge of the man inside the car—only our knowledge of Lightning Jack’s myth—redeems the paucity of drama. One moment the car is
skidding. The next, it’s airborne, skipping across the pavement like a stone. Then it smashes into the concrete crash barrier and jolts to a rest atop its shredded tires.
A moment of stillness follows, a moment in which I always expect the door to fly open and Lightning Jack to step out, cradling the Heckler & Koch G40 he cosseted like a baby, his lean face creased in a roguish grin as he prepares to go down in a hail of New Federal lead. He always vowed they’d never take him alive. But the door does not open. The car merely sits there, frozen beneath an armor-plated sky for a heartbeat longer. Then suddenly it bursts into flame.
New Fed officials turned the tape over to the newsnets not thirty minutes later. The story of Lightning Jack’s final caper unfolded in the hours that followed. Soon enough the network faces had that footage as well, cobbled together from vehicle-mounted military cameras. It showed Jack’s standard operating procedure for cutting a gasoline tanker out of a military convoy, a task as audacious as it was dangerous, requiring six people in the kind of rolling iron that would stiffen a gearhead’s pecker: a Midori Spyder, a Mitsubishi Gilead, and, God help us all, Lightning Jack’s sweet sugar itself, a modified black Chevy Dragon straight out of the heart of old Detroit. Three vehicles, two to take out the gunners in their crow’s nests atop the tank, and one more—Jack’s Dragon—to match the trucker wheel to wheel. Then, hurtling along at seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour, the swingman would lever himself out the passenger-side window of the Dragon, fling himself across the void of racing gray pavement to the running board of the tanker, and take out the driver with a single pistol shot to the temple, bang through the window glass. The most perilous moments of all followed. The truck veered out of control as the swingman wrenched open the door, shoved the dead man aside, and took the wheel. If things went as planned, they’d coax the tanker with its three-car escort down the nearest exit and disappear into the tangle of surface streets below.
Fifty years previously, the maneuver wouldn’t have been possible. A law-enforcement satellite would have lit them up the minute they cut that tanker loose. But in these days of peak oil and global warming, a satellite is lucky if it can punch a signal through the atmospheric murk once in a million pings. Still, it was a daring crime. In a U.S. of A. coming apart at the seams, with D.C. irradiated, Manhattan blown clear off the map, and insurgencies booming from sea to shining sea, a single thermos of petroleum was a hell of a thing to lose. There must have been half a dozen gangs working the black market in gasoline in those days, from Gallant Jim’s up around the lakes to Victor Albertini’s out on the left coast. But famous as some of them were, none of them could match Lightning Jack’s crew or his legend. None of them could match his style. He’d sign in on Channel 19 to mock the truckers on their CB radios as the shit rained down, and he’d send thank-you notes—he had the prettiest script—when he was done.
But this time things had gone wrong. They’d taken out the driver and cut the tanker free of the convoy all right, but as the eighteen-wheeler swerved across the lanes, it clipped Lola Bridger’s Spyder. She went spinning back into traffic where a tanker crushed her like a bug and jackknifed in the middle of the highway. The next fish in line slammed it side-on, igniting an explosion so big that it must have singed God’s beard. A heartbeat later, the swingman rolled his own rig, reducing Joe Hauser’s Gilead to a greasy stain on the pavement. Lightning Jack dropped the hammer, and that Dragon leapt forward like a rabid Doberman fixing to break its chain. Four and a half minutes later, it struck the crash barrier on I-20. That fire burned hot and clean. By the time it was done, there was barely enough left to put in a pine box. The networks reported it all the same and DNA confirmed it: the Feds had gotten their man.
But there are those who’ll tell you that the charred carcass they pulled out of that car was a ringer and that Lightning Jack lives to this day. Some say he’d finally made his nut and retired to some clement place like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or maybe Edmonton, others that he took his thieving ways out west, where he gave Victor Albertini a run for his money. That’s the way with famous outlaws. Some men will attest to this day that Jesse James died of old age, and that John Dillinger wasn’t the man the FBI pumped full of holes in front of the Biograph Theater.
I’m here to tell you that they’re wrong. Lightning Jack died almost forty years ago. Don’t bother telling me otherwise, because I’m the only man who knows the truth. After all, I was there. I knew Jack, you see. I knew him from the time he was a bean.
He’d already acquired the nickname—some say he gave it to himself—by the time I met him, and he was barely out of diapers then. The man—if you can call a seventeen-year-old boy a man—was flat great behind the wheel from the start, and I’ll swear to that until my dying day. I knew it the first time I ever spoke to him. I’d been knocking around the Truck Series for a year by then, trying to catch on somewhere, when I saw him blow a sticker at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I’d had my eye on him for weeks. He’d been in the lead until the tire betrayed him. This was maybe a flaw in his driving—he hadn’t pitted as often as he should’ve—or maybe a flaw in the tire, but as he coasted into pit row, flapping leather, the field sped past him. I figured the wheel was too bent to mount a new scuff, but we’ll never know for sure: the front tire carrier fumbled the exchange. Lightning Jack came out of that truck like a piston firing. His helmet went one way and Jack went the other, straight up into the tire carrier’s face. Jack probably would have hit him—he did fire him—if Joe Hauser, the rear tire man in those days, hadn’t simmered him down.
I’d known Joe since we’d been boys racing go-karts together. It was by his invitation that I was in the pit in the first place. I had an inkling that Joe might be able to broker me a job, and I had planned to show Jack that I knew my way around an engine, nobody better. But sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Even so, I might have slipped the opportunity like I’ve slipped so many others if it wasn’t for my own big mouth. I always was a talker, and an opinionated bastard to boot, and those traits have gotten me into more trouble than they have gotten me out of, but just then they worked in my favor, for as Jack vaulted the wall and strode into his pit stall, I couldn’t help myself. I said, “You left money out there on the track.”
Jack turned to face me and I saw then what a handsome devil he already was and would become. He aged well, Jack, and even when a New Fed bullet creased his forehead during the Tallahassee job a decade later, the scar it left behind only gave him a rakish look that seemed to make him more popular with the ladies. Some men you just can’t beat.
“What did you say?” he asked, and the whole time Joe is standing behind him, slashing the edge of his hand across his throat. Shut up, shut up.
But I never could. So there we stood in the maintenance stall, me and Lightning Jack, everything stinking of spent oil and smoking rubber and sweat, and what I do is, I turn up the volume. “I said, you left money out there on the track.”
“How do you figure?”
“Two ways. One, you were too aggressive. It ain’t all about driving, son”—this though I didn’t have but five years or so on him—“it’s also about timing. You got to judge your tires and your fuel, and pit at the right time.”
“I reckon driving has got me this far.”
“Well, it’s not likely to get you much farther. NASCAR is big-time racing, son.”
“Don’t call me that again,” he said, and I never did. Some men you have to learn not to push, and others you just know. Jack was one of the latter. I never met a man who had a more charming disposition, but you didn’t cross him but once, not Jack. The front tire carrier could attest to that.
“What’s the second way?” he asked.
“Hell, you know that. Prize money. Who knows whether you could have loaded a tire on that front wheel, but if you’d let the guy try, you might have placed. You don’t have to win every time.”
“The hell with placing. I want to win.”
“Of course you
do. But you have to take the long view. Rack up enough points, you win the series and advance to the next division. From there it’s only a short hop to the show, Jack.”
“You go on and get out of my garage,” he said. “I don’t know how you got in here anyway.”
And he put his back to me.
I should have let him go. But no one ever missed a turn in hindsight, did they? Instead I said, “You need me, Jack. There’s not a thing about cars that I don’t know,” and I think that’s what did it. I wasn’t asking, I was telling. And if Lightning Jack liked anything in a man, he liked confidence. He had it himself in spades. He wasn’t a bragging man, but he knew there wasn’t much he couldn’t do with a car and he didn’t get in his own way when it came to doing it. I think that’s why he spun on his heel to look me over, a long, appraising look, like a man who’s getting ready to drop a fair chunk of change on a brand-new piece of iron and wants to make sure he doesn’t get taken.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Gus March.”
“Well, Gus March, I reckon you can lug a tire as well as any man. I seem to have an opening in that department.”
“It’s a start, I guess. But I’ll be running your crew inside a year,” I said.
“That so?” He smiled as if he’d let go of some internal tension, the strain maybe of the race and losing it, and he looked simultaneously like the boy he was and the man he would become. There was something golden in that smile, a kind of glamour that would charm the knickers off just about every woman that swung into his orbit and make the men give up everything and follow him to the ends of the earth. I know because I felt it then, and before it was over I did follow him. He made a kind of chuffing noise, something between a snort and a laugh. Then he turned away again. “Don’t let me down, Gus,” he said, and his glamour hadn’t rubbed off on me so much that I promised I wouldn’t—not aloud, anyway. But I felt the promise in my heart. In the end, I did let him down, though. We always do, I guess. It’s what makes us human. Still, that was a long time coming. In the meantime, I had other promises to keep, among them my pledge to be his crew chief before the year was out. I did it, too. It’s true: there’s not a thing about cars I don’t know, and there’s less that I can’t fix. I’m not a bragging man myself. It’s not bragging if you can do it.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 22
