by Neil Clarke
He’s a bad man, our Topper. Used to run child-soldiers over the St. Lawrence to the Froggies during the Quebec-and-Michigan War. La troisième mutinerie, the Quebecoise called it in one of their endless prayers to St. Jude, for if ever a cause was lost surely it is theirs. Wolfe had put paid to their ambitions at the Plains of Abraham two centuries earlier, but no Frenchman ever born minded much dying for the romance of a shattered heart.
And there was no heart so shattered as that of a patriot whose country has been brought to ground.
And so we have Topper, driven bird-mad in the trenches of the Somme when it would have been kinder for him to have just died. Came home he did to the quack attentions of the New Friends of Sweet Reason, got caught up in the Technocracy movement as exhibit A, and finally fell apart as the country itself did in Roosevelt’s dying days.
Now there’s Wehrmacht units on the loose from Nova Scotia to New Jersey, the South has risen again (and again), the Federals are barely hanging on in the Mississippi basin, issuing wireless dispatches from Washington-on-the-Rails while the Great Madness takes anyone stupid enough to be caught outside at night anywhere between the Wabash and Pamlico Sound.
Only those who started mad can stand the stuff, and move faster by night than any prayerful man might by day. Especially Topper in his Rough Beast, which once upon a time was a machine meant to kill other machines before he made so much more of it, oh so much more.
“Metal, my pretty,” he whispered, patting with a clattering crackle of steel the crawler’s upholstered dashboard between the engraving of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the platinum-dipped weasel skull with the rhinestone eyes. Only one of those two had he killed, Topper, and some days he knew the difference. He squinted into the depths of night through the prism that made up Rough Beast’s forward vision block, watching for the mill which loomed close, its fires never banked.
Fate and fortune walked on the greased knuckles of Topper’s war machine, as never they had since Poland’s borders collapsed in the first of the lightning wars.
I patrolled the unquiet streets south of the steel mill, cussing as I walked back and forth in my own precious allotted square block of turf, practically wearing channels in the concrete with my steel-heeled stilettos. “Bastards,” I muttered, thinking of the Best Sister and her Little Chums. Well, ‘bitches,’ technically, but I didn’t fancy using such a term of endearment when referring to their ilk.
“Bastards,” I growled, as I turned the corner for the seventeen-thousand-and-thirty-second time, only this time I was thinking of my crib mates, the ones who had sniffed out some sort of rupture in my soul and handed me this godforsaken turf as my undue reward.
“Bastard!” I screamed, jamming to a halt as the ferocious machine loomed before me. Hadn’t heard the fucker coming at all. My NKVD surplus large-bore riot gun was already raised and trained on the madman coming up from a top hatch, red-lacquered nail rattling against the trigger as my finger trembled with desire. Then I saw it was Topper.
Which didn’t change my assessment of the situation, or my epithet. But I did lower the gun, and hike up my leather miniskirt an inch or two.
The gibbering fool grinned down at me, leaning over the console in a halo of actinic light to stare down the front of my corset. I set my shoulders back to improve his view and leered right back up at him.
“Going my way, big boy?” I called out.
“Bethlehem, Bethlehem, Bethlehem!” he chanted, his eyes rolling in his head. Oops, there went the tiny whisper of sanity I’d detected a moment ago. I danced back a step, just in case the worms in his brain told him to gas up that monstrous vehicle and put paid to the sexiest thing he was likely to see all day—any day.
My heels tapped on the sidewalk as I leaned against the wall of the foundry behind me. “And what are you going to do when you get there, mm?”
“Steal,” Topper said, letting the word do its double duty. “Stable.” Another word doing double duty. He stared down at the woman. Someone from another lifetime, Topper knows with animal cunning and vestiges of functional memory.
He has had many lifetimes, our Topper. Lived them all together inside one much-mended head, until his name has become legion because he is many. Swine out of Garaden could not be more multiplicitous than this man. But even through the palimpsest of his personality, this woman emerges like a slave ship out of an African fog bank.
“Coming with?” Topper asked. He gunned his twinned diesels for emphasis. Rough Beast shivered like a dog about to piss. The woman looked scared but determined, a combination which even Topper cannot ignore.
He locked down the upper hatch, set the brakes, pegged the clutches, disarmed the antipersonnel charges on the outer hull, and crawled back between the ammo cans and the fuel bags to undog the ventral hatch. As he twisted the clamps, Topper hoped the woman hadn’t run away or been jumped or something. He can’t protect her from up here. Rough Beast is made for salvage runs and fighting heavy metal, not personnel escort.
Topper is confused about a lot of things, but he’s not confused about what his crawler does.
The woman was still outside, armed and dangerous. And that was just her looks. Dark hair swept back from an aristocratic face. Pretty teeth, which Topper remembers from white rooms full of screams. She had a big gun, too, a riot weapon meant for stopping dogs or people caught in the Great Madness.
“You’re going to the plant,” she said.
It was not a question.
“In,” Topper ordered by way of a non-answer.
Indecision flicked across her face like a trout in a mountain stream, then she climbed the metal steps he’d dropped down for her. Rough Beast had ground clearance that would give an arborist’s ladder a bad case of envy.
Distant gunfire echoed as Topper dogged the hatch, but the incoming wasn’t to their address. He wormed back up to the driver’s station, leaving the woman to follow or not as she chose.
The crawler got moving with a shuddering lurch which foretold trouble for the portside throw bearings. He could rebuild. He just needed some high-grade ingots to trade out for the finished parts. That was how he took care of everything on this monster.
A single man wasn’t meant to maintain and operate something like Rough Beast. Not even a single man as profoundly unalone as Topper.
The woman squirmed into the radio operator’s seat behind him. That surprised Topper, he’d already forgotten about her. No radio, never had been one, but there was part of a sandwich rack out of an automat right in front of her face, as if she could plot their course in egg salad and bologna and trimmed crusts.
“So.” Her gun thumped briefly against the floor. He noted she was smart enough to clip it to the seat pedestal. “When did they let you out?”
Topper had to think that one over for a while. Finally he said, “Ain’t sure they have yet.”
Call it boredom if you like. I won’t dispute it if you do, not at all. Boredom, ennui, a sense of adventure left unaddressed for far too long—any of that could explain why I left my post and crawled up into that oil-dripping beastie with the lunatic pilot.
When I’m summoned before Best Friend and her bitches to explain myself, though—and you know I will be—we won’t be talking about any ennui bullshit. No, I’ll be spinning some tale about surveillance and undercover and getting on the inside of the enemy camp and all that sort of yak.
To support this notion, and also because I was damned curious, I slithered up the ladder at the behest of the grisly creature. (Hey, don’t let it be said I never plan ahead.) I’d known Topper before, of course; knew him before he was the raving lunatic we’d all come to know and love in the Madness. Not that he was ever entirely sane.
Who is, any more?
I knew him because I’d been part of the crew that had taken him down, during the last round of the world-shifting adventures. We’d taken him hard, real hard, even before handing him over to the New Friends for, shall we say, readjustment therapy. I’d never expected to
see him again. Which was shame, in its way.
So here he was, grinding up my street on his way to god-knows-what kind of tomfoolery down at the plant. Didn’t even bother to deny it. Invited me aboard.
How could I resist?
I settled in behind him, looking around everywhere, trying to take it all in before he came to whatever shred of senses might have been left him by the New Friends and booted me out of there. Because, right, surveillance. Remember? I kept my right hand close to the NKVD riot gun in case Mr. Topper decided to get cute. But he had already started the monster rolling again, ignoring me completely.
He answered my question well enough, I suppose. All things being equal, you never really do get out, do you?
I fell silent after that, wishing the asylum refugee had thought to put windows back at my seat. What was I supposed to do with A-4 and D-0? I’d had a lovely lunch already, thank you very much. The rats are fat and sassy, this part of town.
Oh, Jesus, just kidding. What do I look like? I don’t eat rats. You think this figure comes from eating street sludge like rats?
Feral cats, now: that’s where it’s at. Yum yum, meow yum. Excellent diced and stir-fried, with tree ears and a sprinkling of hoisin sauce right at the end.
After a particularly difficult highway crossing, Topper’s mind wanders back to the woman. She was muttering under her breath now. Something about rats and cats and someone named Hawser Ann. He could smell her breath even in the diesel-and-metal reek of the crawler.
Cats was right in there. Topper cackled. He’d had a cat once, lived in the bed with him in the pale green room with the telephone that whispered secret vices in his ear-of-virtue, and blessings in his ear-of-vice. He knew what had happened to that cat too, every time he blinked his eye.
Our Topper spent some quality time under the close personal care of Doctor Sergei S. Bryukhonenko, after the good doctor B. had fled the collapse of the Eastern Front and wound up under a New Friends of Sweet Reason ban working out of a former mental hospital in the quiet fields near Yellow Springs, Ohio. The fields were quiet then because of the gas pooling in the low-lying watersheds which killed off everything with a central nervous system.
Dr. Bryukhonenko had been the beneficiary of good pressure seals and a number of human canaries chained to stakes in a three-mile radius around the hilltop facility. Our Topper had been the beneficiary of Dr. Bryukhonenko’s newfound health and safety.
Until the psychosurgeries began.
Now he saw in strange shades of gray, a world of movement and chiaroscuro, relying on childhood memories of paintboxes and flower gardens to fill in the colors. Topper still knows the curve of a woman’s breast from the rounded nose of a bullet—he’s not that far gone—but so much else slides past the greased corners of memory, electroshock therapy, and deep conditioning, as if he were a human carpet afflicted with flea’s eggs.
“Food?” he asked the woman. A gap yawned before the crawler, smoke crawling up out of some nether hole in the Pennsylvania soil. Mine fire? Enemy attack? Wrath of God? He navigated around it while one of his inner selves listened to her answer.
“Is that a request or an offer?” She began suggestively polishing the barrel of her riot gun.
“Dunno,” Topper said. “Thought you might have some catsmeat.” He felt vaguely like a cannibal for asking. Then his attention was distracted by the towering stacks of the mill, his destination. Someone flew a small aircraft close above them. He resisted the urge to jump up into the air and swat at it.
For all Topper knows, he might be able to do just that. Muscles he didn’t know he had creaked at the thought.
“Rowr,” the woman growled.
He wondered if she would purr, as well,
“You don’t remember me, do you?” I asked the lunatic, after he’d failed to respond to my clever sally about the cat. I’d even growled to remind him. Good times. But I’m not even going to tell you about the look on his face when I did that, now.
Suffice it to say, crazy or not, the man had a strange charisma. And not because I was hard up, either. Not that I was ready to hop into the sack with him. Not right then. Not even the floor of this machine, or up against the wall of the mill. Not me.
The mill! A squinting straining gaze through what I could see of the forward view told me we were almost there, though Topper hadn’t even been paying attention to the road. “Road”—such as it was, of course. The route, more like.
“Harridan Three, Harridan Three, do you copy?” a small voice crackled from my satchel. Damn, it must be one of the bitches in that plane buzzing overhead. Checking up on me. They don’t trust me to wipe my own ass, anymore.
Of course I couldn’t respond, not overtly. But if I didn’t send her on her merry way, she’d land that overgrown horsefly right in our path, and . . . well, let’s just say I didn’t fancy being two feet behind Topper when he was suddenly beset by Sisters in a well-armed aircraft, attempting to halt his forward progress.
“Nice rig you got here, Topper,” I said instead. “I especially like the seats. Ooh, comfy.”
He tore his attention away from peering up at the sky and stared at me. A droplet of slobber formed in the V at the lowest point of his lip and hung there. “Seats?” he finally asked.
“Yep,” I said loudly, patting the foul cracked vinyl next to me. “These seats right here, in this-here vehicle you’re driving me around in. Yep. Love it.”
“Harridan Three, we copy,” came the voice in my bag. It was Lena: bad news. And she was clearly pissed.
But the drone of the plane engine faded, and then the mill loomed large.
Too large.
“Stop!” I screamed, just as this abortion of a tank crashed through the wall.
Topper came round to paying attention to what he should be doing just after a few dozen tons of masonry bounced off the roof. That plane had buzzed off, but it had dropped him a present on the way out.
He spun Rough Beast left, just to confuse anyone who might be sighting in on him. From the sound of things, the crawler was now taking out another portion of the mill’s outer wall. The hull pounded and shuddered, a brick rain.
“Where’s the map?” he screamed over the deafening war.
She shook her head. Useless bitch, he thought. Bring a girl on a picnic, she doesn’t even remember napkins. Topper keyed off the antipersonnel charges ringing the upper hatch and jacked his chair for a look. He let his feet do the driving.
Thing about a cat’s eye is it sees in darkness. Not the pitch black of coal mines or a politician’s soul, but places where a human being would stand blinking and wondering which way to the egress. The very bad Dr. Bryukhonenko had built a neural jumper block so the input from the cat’s eyes jammed swollen and dry into Topper’s skull could be made sensible—sense-in-light for a man who lives in the endless nonsense of his own head.
All of which meant that with the Bethlehem mill running on blackout except for the glow from the Bessemers further down the compound, only Topper could see what was going on. The defenders had to rely on triangulation and their own knowledge of the terrain. Topper was ignoring the terrain in favor of the direct approach.
“Damned loading yard ought to be down here somewhere.”
Rails had been torn up a long time ago—their fixed routes were useless in this age of rolling borders and continuous sabotage—but the rail yard was still useful space.
Having gotten something resembling his bearings, Topper spun Rough Beast around. The wide open area had been behind him.
A woman was screaming from down near his waist. She sounded familiar. He jacked the chair low and looked around.
“Marie,” Topper said, pleased as hell to see her. “What are you doing here in San Diego?”
The look on Marie’s face was almost frightening. The gun in her hand worried him more, though. When had she learned to shoot?
Outside, the aircraft buzz had come back. Fucking spotters, he thought. “Whoops, got to go,” he said, �
��bad guys up above. Hold that fire til we need it, kiddo.”
By the time Topper was back out of the hatch and heating up the solenoids in the remotely-operated turrets, he’d forgotten what he’d gone down for. Until a gunshot echoed from inside the hull of his crawler.
Bastard flipped completely out on me after the impact. I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it wasn’t like I’d been having a peaceful day up till then, so I was a bit, well, off guard.
Hey. It happens.
Once the machine (not to mention Lena’s bomb) rendered the wall of the mill into so many smithereens, it lurched but didn’t stop, instead simply veering off to the left a bit. Or maybe that was Topper, yanking on the wheel. Anyway, that’s the part that rattled me more than anything else. I was airborne a good two seconds, then crashed to the slimy floor of the tank-thing at his feet.
At least I held onto my gun.
Which stood me in good stead once I’d recovered enough to think again. The freak was looming over me, again paying no attention to the road, or corridor, or whatever it was we were driving down at the moment . . . yeah, another wall, I think . . . interior wall. It was hard to tell, jammed underneath two hundred and fifty pounds of insane manflesh.
I waved the gun at him. “Back off, Topper, I mean it!”
He called me Marie.
Oh god.
Waving the gun again, I tried to look sufficiently menacing. This was no doubt undermined by his view down the front of the corset. He grinned, and mumbled something about San Diego. What the fuck?
Maybe I was still screaming or something, because just then Lena decided she’d had enough. “Harridan three, we’re coming in. You’re relieved from duty effective immediately. Surrender your weapon to the personnel who will be approaching the tank once we bring it to a halt.”
I almost laughed. How exactly were they expecting to do that?
A burst of machine gun fire came from above, mixed in with the aircraft engine. Oh, that’s how. At least it got Topper’s attention. He yanked his eyeballs away from my girls and scrabbled up top.
