by Jack Yeovil
The bubble expanded, and she saw the ruin that was left where the courtyard had been. The flagstones were gone, and even the sand stripped away. The surface was uneven, strewn with detritus. A dome of sand-thick air curved over the area. Krokodil looked up, and saw the bodies sinking through the storm to the fragile bubble.
Several sets of legs dangled into the bubble, and were followed by man-shaped things. They were puppet-strung on tentacles, and twitched like galvanized frogs' legs.
Twelve corpses, dressed in bloodied black, touched down, and bobbed on their tentacles. They were all broken in various ways, but they were sprouting new organs from their rotten flesh. They were poison fungi, Krokodil knew, the stings of the Jibbenainosay.
The Dead Dozen stood in ranks, unsteady but mainly upright. Most of them didn't have faces any more, but those she could see were ordinary. They were dressed in the remains of outfits like the one she always saw Nguyen Seth wearing. One zombie, hunched over because of the tentacle stuck through his spine, even still retained his wide-brimmed pilgrim hat. These people had been Josephites, like Seth's fools from Spanish Fork. She knew more had been sacrificed for the benefit of the Elder's Great Mission.
She looked up at the boiling sand roof of the bubble. The face was there again, between the dangling tentacles.
"Freak you," she said, opening her optic. Her patch burned away, and the lase struck upwards, striking Seth's laughing face dead centre. It was broken apart, and a shower of sand fell into the bubble, dusting the zombies with muddy dandruff. Krokodil wiped her face off.
The nearest of the Dead Dozen made a grab for her, a bloated scorpion tail uncurling from its mouth. She twisted its neck with both hands, and the body fell lifeless. The disembodied head and its poison appendage still whipped around on its tentacle. The eyes popped on stalks. With an optic blast, she singed it to a skullcinder, and the tentacle was withdrawn in a whipping movement.
She unslung the machine pistol from its shoulder harness, and drew it out from beneath her padded jacket. It was old-fashioned and she doubted whether it would be much use against a Dark One, but there was still a Jazzbeaux part of her that took comfort in 20th-century deathware.
She gave the zombies a burst at chest height, and fleshflowers burst open where her slugs struck home. One or two were damaged beyond repair, and just hung useless, but the rest were still mobile enough to come for her. Her next spray was at head-height, and she gave a few lase jabs with her optic as well.
About half of the Dozen were out of commission. The rest were not recognizable even as former human beings. One scuttled towards her on its hands and the myriad crablegs that sprouted from its hips. Its Josephite hat bobbed as its head receded into the chest cavity. She emptied her clip into it, and it leaped like a Mexican jumping bean, green fluid splashing in spirals. It kept moving until she brought her booted foot down on its spine and pinned it to the ground. She swept with her lase, and severed the tentacle. The Josephite convulsed, and went limp, cockroaches bursting from its split mouths.
The remaining five corpses fell back into a close formation. She slipped a new clip into the pistol, and spattered them with fire. They still stood, linking arms, their tentacle strings twining together like the strands of a rope. They were growing together, forming a composite creature. Arms and legs reached out to steady the roughly spherical, multiply-headed beast. Its umbilical tentacle was thick and rough-skinned, like an elephant's trunk. Skins burst, and organic weapons poked through: stings, claws, mouths. A stiff tube spat pips at her. The tiny things exploded in the air, puffing sick-smelling smoke.
She held her breath and got out of the way. She put another burst of fire into the thing, and it swallowed the bullets with pleasure. Her lase blasts made smoking pinholes, but did no damage.
There were still human heads in the morass, and they were whispering to her.
The thing stumped towards her, agitated, and she danced back towards the chapel. She was always at the centre of the bubble, she noticed. She could not run into the storm and take her chances there.
The thing knew which way she would go, and kept pace with her. The Jibbenainosay was playing around, she realized. It could snip her head off with a single stroke, but it was prolonging the game.
A tightness was growing in her chest. Without knowing why, she opened her mouth and began to suck in air. Her lungs filled, but still she sucked. She inflated a little, but was able to take it. With the wind, she tasted power.
The thing stopped, and stood ten yards away from her, its appendages waving in the draught.
She sucked in more.
Stones came away from the chapel wall, a hundred feet away, and flew through the air.
Her inbreath continued.
She was Krokodil. The Ancient Adversary. She lived only to bring down the Dark Ones.
The thing was shaking now, pulled out of shape by the wind. Its tentacle was tangled, and the strands were parting.
Through her mouth and her nostrils, through the apertures of her eyesockets, through the pores of her skin, Krokodil drew in air…
The thing was struggling with itself. One of its components tore free and, manlike, made a dash for the edge of the Bubble. A pincer struck out, and sheared it in half.
Krokodil paused, and held the breath. There was a terrible quiet.
Then, she exhaled.
X
In the Tabernacle, Nguyen Seth was preaching. He eulogized the sacrifice of the Inner Circle, and vowed to his congregation that their deaths would not be in vain, that their bodies would be foundation stones for the greatness of Deseret. Choirs sang as he spoke, filling the vast space with heavenly music. He was eloquent. His words flew like birds.
Roger Duroc sat near the back, exhausted, not hearing the Elder's speech. His world had been transformed completely by the manifestation of the Jibbenainosay. He was sobered. Now, for the first time, he fully appreciated the vastness of the work upon which he was engaged. Nothing else mattered. Literally, nothing else in the entire history of the universe had ever mattered. His own life was less than nothing, and he was one of the handful of human beings who had anything at all to contribute to the Purpose.
Seth was enthusing the congregation. Tomorrow, when Krokodil was dead, he would select a new Inner Circle, and the process of initiation would begin. Duroc was impressed by the Elder's attention to petty details. A lesser immortal would have sunk to his knees in the presence of the Dark One and let everything else disappear from his mind, but Seth knew how important it was to retain his grip on the minutiae of the Great Work.
Duroc could not think of anything but the Jibbenainosay. When he closed his eyes, he saw the blackness of the thing. Behind tne beautiful harmonies of the Josephite Tabernacle Choir, he heard the Dark One's symphonic roar.
Elder Seth recounted the good deeds—manufactured especially for this service—of the martyrs, and listed their names among the saints. Above him, on the cross, a stone Jesus was forgotten. His tear-filled eyes averted from the preacher. This had nothing to do with Him, either.
Then, in the midst of his flight, Seth paused. He put out his hands to the lectern to steady himself, and shook his head.
He did not resume his speech.
Duroc was alerted, and looked up. He left his seat, and joined the throng pressing towards the Elder.
Nguyen Seth was shaking, in the throes of a grand mal seizure. Duroc had seen him like this before, when Krokodil bested Dr Proctor. But this was more serious.
Duroc realized that the finish of the battle being waged to the South would tell heavily on the Elder, whichever way it came out.
Seth staggered away from the altar. His jacket was open, and Duroc saw he was bleeding from the wound in his belly. Yellow tears crept from behind his dark glasses, and trickled down his white cheeks.
Duroc pushed his way through the Josephites. They fell back, reverentially. He knelt by the Elder, and hugged him.
Seth was trembling. Duroc held him fast.
He waved his hand. "Clear the Tabernacle," he whispered. His order was taken up, turned into a cry, "Clear the Tabernacle! Clear the Tabernacle! Clear the Tabernacle!"
The people flooded out, until they were alone.
Seth didn't speak. Duroc took his spectacles off, and saw the naked pain in his master's eyes.
Seth's hand found Duroc's arm, and grasped. His fingers fixed painfully into Duroc's flesh.
He was speaking now, an outrush of words in a dead language.
The battle continued…
The composite creature burst like a squashed puffball when Krokodil's blast hit it. Bodies peeled away from its mass, and were smashed into the sandstorm, where they were lost. The tentacle pulled it up off the ground, and its limbs kicked. There were shreds of bone and fleshmatter swirling around, and it was destroyed completely.
Krokodil yelled in her triumph, and seemed to expand inside herself. She was not just her tiny physical form, she was a vast jacket of energy. Her body was simply the core.
Her consciousness spread inside her extended sphere of power. She outgrew the bubble the Jibbenainosay had left her, and spread out through the storm.
The Dark One could not hide from the Ancient Adversary that way.
Hawk-That-Settles saw Dr Proctor drop into the storm, and felt unsteady. With nothing beneath his feet, it was hard to balance. Then, the sand came up for him, engulfing him completely. He did not know whether he was falling, shooting upwards or flying through the skies. But he was moving.
The Jibbenainosay raised another million tons of sand and held it in the air, thickening the atmosphere. The business with the human tools had been a feint, designed to dislodge the Pawn of the Nullifiers from the womanspeck, Krokodil. It had drawn out its Adversary now, and swelled in readiness for the serious fight.
As its passion built, continua were created and destroyed in the discharges of its energy. Dark thunderbolts struck all over the desert, blasting stretches of sand into polished glass darkmirrors the size of small cities.
Time stopped, then jerked backwards, then forwards again. The Jibbenainosay chewed at the fabric of reality, sucking in the Chaos from the Beyond, and spitting it out in phlegmy dollops.
Throughout Creation, the cacophonies were heard.
Dr Proctor had stopped struggling as soon as the impossibilities started. He accepted his fate as a cartoon character, and allowed the world to stretch like elastic around him. His head had exploded like a firecracker, but instantly reassembled. Anvils, safes and pianos plunged towards hapless citizens, but he was ascending like a hot air balloon.
He knew that, so long as he did not look down, he would never fall like the Coyote to the canyon floor miles below.
The Indian bobbed about, maybe twenty feet away. In Dr Proctor's mindsight, Hawk-That-Settles was three figures: a wiry, gaunt, nearly middle-aged Navaho in bloodied denims, covered in sand; a large bird of prey, wings outspread, talons pointed for a strike; and a tubby cartoon redskin with a big nose, a feather in his oiled black hair, warpaint on his cheeks, and fluffy moccasins on his feet.
In the storm, he heard the Warner Bromers' Orchestra race through a Spike Jones arrangement of "What Do They Do on a Rainy Night in Rio?" before doing a segue into "Tell the Doc to Stick to His Practice, Tell the Lawyer to Settle His Case, and Send the Indian Chief and His Tommy-Hawk Back to Little-Rain-In-My-Face."
The Tasmanian Devil howled for his dinner. He wanted Devilled Hare!
He leaped at the Indian, his legs kicking the air, his claws out. Stretched horizontal, he saw the boiling clouds of sand below, and felt the pull of gravity tugging at his face.
He was frozen for a second, and then the whoosh pulled him down. The sand hit him hard as he sank into it, and then he was plunging through the unknown darkness towards a rocky ground.
It would be all right. He might flatten like a pancake on impact, but he would pull himself together double-quick and bubble back to his original shape within a few beats.
Dr Ottokar Proctor fell…
Throughout the world, seismic instruments exploded at the same instant. Clocks stopped, or raced towards an unimaginable future. Millions subject to epileptic fits fell frothing, and hundreds of thousands of others, hitherto unaffected, joined them. It was as if a maxiscreamer the size of Saturn had been let off next to the planet.
Globally, a number of people equal to the population of the largest megapolis on the planet, died. Heart attacks, spontaneous human combustion, asphyxiation, a new species of instantaneous cancer, cerebral haemorrhage, suicides, massive discharges of bodily electricity, and simple shut-down were the major causes of death, but there was an increase of hostile activity in all the world's war zones, and an epidemic of murder that swept around from country to country like a contagious disease for weeks afterwards.
The computer records of a major corporation, located in a site under Nevada secure against nuclear holocaust, were wiped, precipitating an international money-market collapse that even rocked the solid foundations of the GenTech corporate empire.
Firestorms raged throughout the arctic tundra, and chunks of ice the size and shape of Silbury Hill poked through the sands of the Sahara Desert.
A ring of spy satellites recently put in place by a Gottschalk Geselleschaft in conjunction with the Soviet Union as an attempt to counterbalance GenTech's orbital superiority burned out at the cost of nine hundred billion ECUs. Every nation in the no-longer-terribly-exclusive Doomsday Club opened their silo doors and chained button-pushers to their consoles in readiness for an attack from the unknown.
A stretch of the Caribbean rose to the surface, bearing with it the wrecks of numberless ships and the ruins of a pre-human civilization, while a wave of water rippled across Louisiana, carrying away what little was left there. Solar flares jetted a million miles into space.
Beyond the galaxy, stars went spectacularly nova, snuffing out tens of thousands of life-bearing planets in a fireworks display whose light would not reach the earth for a billion years.
There was no one in the entire world, in the entire universe, who did not hear, feel or experience somehow the side-effects of the moment.
"Wilma, what was that?"
"Oh, honey, don't you bother. It was just another air crash out at Edwards. Why those wingboys bother, I don't know."
"Aw, Cheeze, I thought it was the Trump of freakin' Doom or somethin'. I near crapped my pants."
"Oh, honey, don't talk crude. You know Mama don't like it."
"Shaddup, and get me a brewsky, Wilma."
"Another beer?"
"Wilma…"
"'Kay, honey."
Hawk-That-Settles thought he was travelling horizontally until the ground loomed up like a wall, and he found himself stuck to it by gravity.
His head spun, and he knew which way was down again, thank the Lord. His ankle was still crushed, and he had other broken bones. But he was not spread out on the desert like a paste.
Sand was falling around him like rain, and he had to struggle not to be buried.
It was like trying to keep on the surface of a sea. He pushed himself upwards, letting the sand flood in below him, thrashing with his good leg and his arms.
Then, the rain was over. The winds were passing. Somewhere, Krokodil and the Jibbenainosay were wrestling, but Hawk was being left behind.
He rolled over, broken, and saw someone coming across the desert. At first, he thought it was Dr Proctor ready to finish him off. He almost wasn't sorry about that. Relieved, he pulled his shirt away from his throat. Being a good Indian was better than trying to stay alive and sane after today.
But it wasn't Dr Proctor. It was someone riding a horse.
Laughing painfully, he propped himself up on his elbows, and waved.
The horseman wore a battered stetson, and had his kerchief up over his face. Like his steed, he was thickly coated with desert dust. But he was reassuringly solid. The horse had a firm footing, and trod carefully across the
sands. Hawk had a funny feeling about the horseman, as if he were seeing the earthly aspect of a manitou, or the spirit of a great warrior from the days of his ancestors.
"Stranger," he shouted. "Over here."
Rider and horse heard him at the same time, and both heads turned to look.
The horseman twisted his reins, and dug in his heels, spurring his animal to a gallop.
The stranger rode across the desert to Hawk, and the Indian felt safe again.
God was in his Heaven, it snowed in Indianapolis in the wintertime, the President of the United States was a good and honest man, you could get a free lunch, a buck could buy four quarters, the white man always honoured his treaties with the red, nobody got cancer, his father was hailed as a great chief, Jennifer White Dove kissed on a first date, a good Navaho could always hold his liquor, and…
"Friend," the horseman said, his voice rich and deep, "you look as if you could use a hand."
…and there was a Lone Ranger.
"Mr President, you are cleared for the red phone. The connection is being made…now."
"Boris, talk to me…"
"Our people tell us they're on DefCon 3, too. The missiles are not in the air."
"Boris, what the freak are you guys playing at?…What do you mean, 'what are you doing?' This has nothing to do with us, either…"
"He'll be in the bunker under the Kremlin, Mr President. Soviet chain of command has been established. If we struck at the Minsk switchboard intersection, we could gain perhaps five or ten minutes on our first strike."
"Boris, I've got scientists out my ass telling me the world is ending. We're the only guys big enough to do anything about it, except maybe one or two Japcorps, and the UEC, of course, and maybe a couple of Moslems, and…Hell, you know what I mean. I have to think you know what's going down, you know. What…? 'Going down?' It's an American expression, it means, like…uh, happening, I guess…"
