by Paula Guran
Something struck him between the shoulder blades. He staggered. There was an icy digging at his shoulders – he howled. Steel claws sank into his flesh and lifted him off his feet – he could feel the muscles of his shoulders straining, threatening to tear. The claws opened, released him and he fell face down; he lay for a moment, gasping on his belly. He had a choppy impression of something blue-black flapping above and behind. He felt a tugging at his belt, and then he was lifted into the air, the clawed things carrying him by the belt as if it were a luggage handle.
He was two, three, five meters above the concrete, and spiraling upward. He heard a gunshot, thought he glimpsed the cop fallen, a winged darkness descending on him.
The city whirled into a gray blur. Max heard the regular beat of powerful wings just above. He thought: I’m too heavy. It’s not aerodynamically possible.
But he was carried higher still, the flying things making creaking, whipping sounds with their pinions. Otherwise, they were unnervingly silent. Max stopped struggling to free himself. If he broke loose now, he’d fall ten stories to the street. He was slumped like a rabbit in a hawk’s claws, hanging limply, humiliated.
He saw two of the flying things below, now, just climbing into his line of sight. They carried the policeman – a big bald man with a paunchy middle. They carried him between them; one had him by the ankles, the other by the throat. He looked lifeless. Judging by the loll of his head, his neck was broken.
Except for the rush of wind past his face, the pain at his hips where the belt was cutting into him, Max felt numb, once more in a dream. He was afraid, deeply afraid, but the fear had somehow become one with the world, a background noise that one grows used to, like the constant banging from a neighborhood construction site. But when he looked at the things carrying him, he had a chilling sense of déjà vu. He remembered them from the dreams. Two mornings before, he’d awakened, mumbling, “The things that flew, the things with claws . . .”
They were made of vinyl. Blue-black vinyl stretched over, he guessed, aluminum frames. They were bony, almost skeletal women, with little hard knobs for breasts, their arms merging into broad, scalloped imitation leather wings. They had the heads of women – with DayGlo wigs of green, stiff-plastic bristles – but instead of eyes there were the lenses of cameras, one in each socket; and when they opened their mouths he saw, instead of teeth, the blue-gray curves of razors following the line of the narrow jaws. Max thought: It’s a harpy. A vinyl harpy.
One of the harpies, three meters away and a little below, turned its vinyl head, its camera lenses glittering, to look Max in the face; it opened its mouth and threw back its head like a dog about to howl and out came the sound of an air-raid warning: “GO TO THE SHELTERS. GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE SHELTERS. DO NOT STOP TO GATHER POSSESSIONS. TAKE FAMILY TO THE SHELTERS. BRING NOTHING. FOOD AND WATER WILL BE PROVIDED. GO IMMEDIATELY . . .”
And two others took it up. “GO IMMEDIATELY . . .” in a sexless, emotionless tone of authority. “TAKE FAMILY TO THE SHELTERS . . .”
And Max could tell that, for the harpies, the words had no meaning. It was their way of animal cawing, the territorial declaration of their kind.
They couldn’t have been in the air more than ten minutes – flapping unevenly over rooftops, bits and pieces of the city churning by below – when they began to descend. They were going down beyond the automated zone. They entered Edge-town, what used to be the South Bronx. People still sometimes drove combustion cars here, on the potholed, cracked streets, when they could get contraband gasoline; here policemen were rarely seen; here the corner security cameras were always smashed, the sidewalks crusted with trash and two-thirds of the buildings deserted.
Max was carried down toward an old-fashioned tar rooftop; it was the roof of a five-story building, wedged in between three taller ones. All four looked derelict and empty; the building across the street showed a few signs of occupation: laundry in the airshaft, one small child on the roof. The child, a little black girl, watched without any sign of surprise. Max felt a little better, seeing her.
Where the shadows of the three buildings intersected on the fourth, in the deepest pocket of darkness, there was a small outbuilding; it was the rooftop doorway into the building. The door hung brokenly to one side. A cherry-red light pulsed just inside the doorway, like hate in a nighted soul.
Max lost sight of the red glow as the vinyl harpies turned, circling for a landing. The rooftop rushed up at him. There was a sickening moment of freefall when they let go. He fell three meters to the rooftop, struck on the balls of his feet, plunged forward, shoulder-rolled to a stop. He gasped, trying to get his breath back. His ankles and the soles of his feet ached.
He took a deep breath and stood, swaying, blinking. He found he was staring into the open doorway. Within, framed by the dusty, dark entrance to the stairway, was a man made of red-hot steel. The heat-glow was concentrated in his torso and arms. He touched the wooden frame of the doorway – and it burst into flame. The harpies capered about the tar rooftop, leaping atop chimneys and down again, stretching their wings to flap, cawing, booming, “GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE SHELTERS, GO IMMEDIATELY, GO GO GO . . .”
The man made of hot metal stepped onto the roof. The harpies quieted, cowed. They huddled together behind him, cocking their heads and scratching under their wings with pointed chins. To one side lay the lifeless body of the policeman, its back toward Max; the corpse’s head had been twisted entirely around on its neck; one blue eye was open, staring lifelessly; the man’s tongue was caught between clamped teeth, half severed.
For a moment all was quiet, but for the rustling of wings and crackling of the small fire on the outbuilding.
The man of hot chrome wore no clothes at all. He was immense, nearly two-and-a-half meters tall, and smooth as the outer hull of a factory-new fighter jet. He was seamless – except for the square gate on his chest, with the little metal turn-handle on it. The gate was precisely like the door of an old-fashioned incinerator; in the center of the gate was a small, thick pane of smoke-darkened glass, through which blue-white fires could be seen burning restlessly. Except for their bright metal finish, his arms and legs and stylized genitals looked quite human. His head was formed of barbed wire – a densely woven wire sculpture of a man’s head, cunningly formed to show grim, aristocratic features. There were simply holes for eyes, behind which red fires flickered in his hollow head; now and then flames darted from the eyeholes to play about his temples and then recede; his scalp was a crest of barbs; eyebrows and ears were shaped of barbs. Gray smoke gusted from his mouth when he spoke to the harpies: “Feed me.” The wire lips moved like a man’s; the wire jaw seemed to work smoothly. “Feed me, while I speak to this one.” He stepped closer Max, who cringed back from the heat. “I am Lord Thanatos.” A voice like metal rending.
Max knew him.
One of the harpies moved to the corpse of the policeman; it took hold of the arm, put one stunted foot on the cop’s back, and began to wrench and twist. It tore the corpse’s arm from its shoulder and dragged it to Thanatos, leaving a trail of red blood on black tar. The harpy reached out with its free hand and turned the handle on its lord’s chest. The door swung open; an unbearable brightness flared in the opening; ducking its head, turning its eyes from the rapacious light, the vinyl harpy stuffed the cop’s arm, replete with wrist-com and blue coat-sleeve, into the inferno, the bosom of Thanatos. Sizzlings and poppings and black smoke unfurling. And the smell of roasting flesh. Max’s stomach recoiled; he took another step backward. He watched, feeling half paralysed, as the harpies scuttled back and forth between the corpse and Thanatos, slowly dismembering and disemboweling the dead policeman, feeding the pieces into the furnace that was their lord.
And his fire burned more furiously; his glow increased.
“This is how it will be,” said Thanatos. “You will serve me. You can look on me, Max Whitman, and upon my servants, and you do not go mad. You do not run howling away. Because you are one of thos
e who has always known about us in some way. We met on the dream-plane once, you and I, and I knew you for what you were then. You can serve me, and still live among men. You will be my emissary. You will be shielded from the cowards who would prevent my entry into your world. You will go to certain men, the few who control the many. The wealthy ones. You will tell them about a great source of power, Lord Thanatos. I will send fiends and visitations to beset their enemies. Their power will grow, and they will feed me, and my power will grow. This is how it will be.”
As he finished speaking, another harpy flapped down from the sky, dropping a fresh corpse into the shadows. It was a young Hispanic man in a smudged white suit. Thanatos opened the wiry mouth of his hollow head and sighed; blue smoke smelling of munitions factories dirtied the air. “They always kill them, somehow, as they bring them to me. I cannot break them of it. They always kill the humans. Men are more pleasurable to consume when there is life left in them. My curse is this: I’m served by half-minds.”
Max thought:Why didn’t the harpies kill me, then?
The vinyl harpies tore an arm from the sprawled dead man, and fed it into their master’s fire. Their camera-lens eyes caught the shine of the fire. Thanatos looked at Max. “You have not yet spoken.”
And Max thought: Say anything. Anything to get the hell away. “I’ll do just what you ask. Let me go and I’ll bring you lives. I’ll be your, uh, your emissary.”
Another long, smoky sigh. “You’re lying. I was afraid you’d be loyal. Instinct of some sort, I suppose.”
“Loyal to who?”
“I can read you. You see only the semblance I’ve chosen. But I see past your semblance. You cannot lie to one of us. I see the lie in you unfolding like the blossoming of a poisonous purple orchid. You cannot lie to a lord.”
He licked barbed-wire lips with a tongue of flame.
So they will kill me, Max thought. They’ll feed me into this monstrosity! Is that a strange death? An absurd death? No stranger than dying by nerve gas on some foreign battlefield; no more absurd than my Uncle Danny’s death: he drowned in a big vat of fluorescent pink paint.
“You’re not going to die,” said Thanatos. “We’ll keep you in stasis, forever imprisoned, unpleasantly alive.”
What happened next made Max think of a slogan stenciled on the snout of one of the old B-112 bombers from World War II: “Death From Above”. Because something silvery flashed down from above and struck the two harpies bending over the body of the man in the smudged white suit . . . both harpies were struck with a terrible impact, sent broken and lifeless over the edge of the roof.
The griffin pulled up from its dive, raking the tar roof, and soared over the burning outbuilding and up for another pass. The remaining harpies rose to meet it.
Other figures were converging on the roof, coming in a group from the north. One was a man who hovered without wings; he seemed to levitate. His body was angelic, his skin dazzling white; he wore a loincloth made of what looked like aluminum foil. His head was a man’s, haloed with blond curls, but where his eyes and forehead should have been was a small television screen, projecting from the bone of his skull. On the screen was an image of human eyes, looking about; it was as if he saw from the TV screen. Two more griffins arrived, one electroplated gold, another of nickel, and just behind them came a woman who drifted like a bit of cotton blown on the breeze. She resembled Mother Mary, but nude: a plastic Madonna made of the stuff of which inflatable beach toys are made; glossy and striped in wide bands of primary colors. She seemed insubstantial as a soap bubble, but when she struck at a vinyl harpy it reeled back, turning end over end to fall senseless to the rooftop. Flanking her were two miniature helicopters – helicopters no bigger than horses. The lower section of each helicopter resembled a medieval dragon attired in armored metal, complete with clawed arms in place of landing runners. Each copter’s cab was conventionally shaped, but no pilot sat behind the windows; and just below those sinister windows was a set of chrome teeth in a mouth opening to let loose great peals of electronically amplified laughter. The dragon copters dived to attack the remaining harpies, angling their whirring blades to shred the vinyl wings.
Thanatos grated a command, and from the burning doorway behind him came seven bats as big as vultures, with camera-lens eyes and sawing electric knives for teeth and wings of paper-thin aluminum.
Max threw himself to the roof, coughing in the smoke of the growing fire; the bats whipped close over his head and climbed, keening, to attack Our Lady of the Plastics.
Two dog-sized spiders made of high-tension rubbery synthetics, their clashing mandibles forged of the best Solingen steel, raced on whirring copper legs across the roof to intercept the angel with television eyes. The angel alighted and turned to gesture urgently to Max. The spiders clutched at the angel’s legs and dragged him down, slashed bloody hunks from his ivory arms.
Max saw Lord Thanatos catch a passing griffin by the tail and slam it onto the roof; he clamped the griffin in his white-hot hands. It shrieked and began to melt.
Two metal bats collided head-on with a copter dragon and all three disintegrated in a shower of blue sparks. Our Lady of the Plastics struck dents into the aluminum ribs of the vinyl harpies who darted at her, slashed and boomed, “GO IMMEDIATELY,” bellowing it in triumph as she burst open – but they recoiled in dismay, flapping clumsily out of reach, when she re-formed, gathering her fragments together, making herself anew in mid-air.
Max sensed that the real battle was fought in some other dimension of subatomic physicality, with a subtler weaponry; he was seeing only the distorted visual echoes of the actual struggle.
The spiders were wrapping the angel’s legs with cords of optical fiber. He gave a mighty wrench and threw them off, levitating out of their reach, shouting at Max: “Take your life! You—”
“SILENCE HIM!” Thanatos bellowed, stabbing a hot finger at the angel. And instantly two of the harpies plummeted to sink their talons in the throat of the angel with television eyes. They tore at him, made a gouting, ragged wreckage of his white throat – and Max blinked, seeing a phosphorescent mist, the color of translucent turquoise, issuing from the angel’s slack mouth as he fell to the ground.
I’m seeing his plasma body escape, Max thought. I’m realizing my talent.
He saw the blue phosphorescence, vaguely man-shaped, drift to hang in the air over the body of the dead Hispanic. It settled, enfolding the corpse. Possessing it.
Sans its right arm, half its face clawed away, the corpse stood. It swayed, shuddered, spoke with shredded lips. “Max, kill yourself and lib—”
Thanatos lunged at the wavering corpse, closed hot metal fingers around its throat, burned its voice box into char. The body slumped.
But Max stood. His dreams were coming back to him, or was someone sending them back? Someone mindsending. You were of the Concealed.
Thanatos turned from the battle, scowling, commanding: “Take him! Bind him, carry him to safety!” The spiders, gnawing on the corpse of the angel with television eyes, moved reluctantly away from their feeding and crept toward Max. A thrill of revulsion went through him. He forced himself forward. He knelt, within the spiders’ reach. “Don’t hurt him!” Thanatos bellowed. “Take care that he does not—”
But he did. He embraced a spider, clasping it to him as if it were something dear, and used its razor-sharp mandibles to slash his own throat. He fell, spasming, and knew inexpressible pain and numbness, and grayness. And a shattering white light.
He was dead. He was alive. He was standing over his own body, liberated. He reached out and, with his plasma-field, extinguished the fire on the outbuilding. Instantly.
The battle noises softened, then muted – the combatants drew apart. They stood or crouched or hovered silently, watching him and waiting. They knew him for Prince Red Mark, a sleeping Lord of the Plasmagnomes, one of seven Concealed among humanity years before, awaiting the day of awakening, the hour when they must emerge to protect those t
he kin of Thanatos would slaughter for the eating.
He was arisen, the first of the Concealed. He would awaken the others, those hidden, sleeping in the hearts of the humble and the unknown. In old women and tired, middle-aged soldiers and . . . and there was one, hidden in a young sepia-skinned girl, not far away.
Thanatos shuddered and squared himself for the battle of wills.
Max, Lord Red Mark, scanned the other figures on the rooftop.
Now he could see past their semblances, recognize them as interlacing networks of rippling wavelength, motion that is thought, energy equal to will. He reached out, reached past the semblance of Lord Thanatos.
A small girl, one Hazel Johnson, watched the battle from a rooftop across the street. She was the only one who saw it; she had the only suitable vantage.
Hazel Johnson was just eight years old, but she was old enough to know that the scene should have surprised her, should have sent her yelling for Momma. But she had seen it in a dream, and she’d always believed that dreams were real.
And now she saw that the man who’d thrown himself on the spider had died, and his body had given off a kind of blue glow; and the blue cloud had formed into something solid, a gigantic shape that towered over the nasty-looking wire-head of hot metal. All the flying things had stopped flying. They were watching the newcomer.
The newcomer looked, to Hazel, like one of the astronauts you saw on TV coming home from the space station; he wore one of those spacesuits they wore, and he even had the US flag stitched on one of his sleeves. But he was a whole lot bigger than any astronaut, or any man she’d ever seen. He must have been four meters tall. And now she saw that he didn’t have a helmet like a regular astronaut had. He had one of those helmets that the Knights of the Round Table wore, like she saw in the movie on TV. The knight in the spacesuit was reaching out to the man of hot metal ...
