Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  More salamanders appear, first dozens, then hundreds of them, doubtless drawn by the kill. A slithering herd of identical terrors. They prowl alongside his path, crawling over one another's tails, snapping and poking their snaky heads toward him, scuttling ahead and then peering back as if they're saying, Come on, man! You can make it. Maybe we'll let you make it … or maybe not. He's afraid, but fear won't take root in him, his mental soil's too dried out to support it. Without the governance of fear, his courage is reborn. He begins to find a rhythm as he walks. The bongs grow more regular, aligning with the soldiering beats of his heart, until it's like they're overlapping, one "Allah" declining into the rise of the next, and underneath that sound—no, surrounding it!—are voices too vast to hear, spoken by people too large to see. He senses them as fluctuating pressure, the shapes of their words, like the flames, flowing around him. The intercession, he thinks. They're singling him out, debating his worth, judging his faith. He can't worry about their judgment, though. He's got his job, he's tasked to the max. Keep bonging, keep ringing out the name of God. He's entirely self-motivating now.

  · · · · ·

  2322 hours

  · · · · ·

  Paradise awaits.

  Somewhere faraway in the absence, like a ragged hole in black cloth open onto a glowing white sky—a light, cool and promising. That's what Wilson sees on waking. The rest is darkness. There's a rushing in his ears that might be a faint roaring from the wall of fire, but he believes it's a river nearby and he's on the bank. He's not overheated any longer. Tired, but calm. Pain is distant. The drugs are good. His helmet array is still lit, though the digital display screen is out, or else it's showing nothing except black. He feels remote, cast down upon a foreign shore, and he gets an urge to look at his pictures, summons them up. Mom. Dad. Ol' Mackie. Laura. They don't hold his interest for long. They're past considerations. He checks his medal file. It still seems incoherent—the IQ's worn off—but nobody's going to be reading it, anyway. Then he decides to change number 10 on his 10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know list. Just for the hell of it. Maybe they give out medals in Paradise. They give you better clothes, jewels and shit … so Baxter said. Why not a medal?

  He wonders where he is, exactly. The border of hell, for sure. The shade tree, he supposes, lies between the light and the spot he's resting in. Thinking comes hard. He keeps drifting off, hearing clicking noises, screams, the voices of ghosts. He considers doing more IQ. No, he tells himself. Let them see what they're getting. The infidel, dumb as a stump, but janitor-smart. It's what they expect. Lights start up behind his eyes, though not the light of heaven. That's steady and these are actinic flashes. Phosphorous flares and rocket rounds. Some taking longer to fade against the blackness than others. As if inside him there's a battlefield, a night engagement. He's transfixed by their bursting flower-forms. It's time, he realizes. Time to get going. Tempting as it is to lie there. He blanks out for a while and the thought of GRob brings him back. At least the thought begins with GRob. Her face. And then her face changes to Baxter's face, to another, to another and another, the changes occurring faster and faster, imposed on the same head shape, until the faces blur together like he's seeing the faces of everyone who was alive, the history of the world, of judgment day, of something, refined to a cool video image …

  He's got to get up.

  That's an order, Wilson! Move your ass!

  Yes, sir! Fuck you, sir!

  Charlie! You're going to miss the bus!

  Damn it, Charlie! Do I have to do this every morning?

  All right! I'm up! Jesus Christ!

  The Lord's name in vain, Charlie. Every time you say it, He takes a note, he writes it down on the floor of hell in golden letters you can't read …

  You dumb little fucker! I swear to God, man! Stand up again, I'm not gonna knock you down, I'm gon' fuck you up!

  Charlie!

  This last voice, a woman's scream, does the trick. It's an effort, but he makes it, he's up. On his hands and knees. He can't stand, his knees won't lock. His arms are trembly, but he's okay for strength and only mildly dizzy. He can't feel much at all, not even the ground beneath him. It's like he's resting on something as solid and as insubstantial as an idea, and because the idea is without form or void, it's impossible to get his bearings. But he knows what to do. Find the tree. Trust to faith that you'll find it. Throw a move on the world before it throws one on you. Here we go. Left hand forward. Drag the right knee. Right hand forward. Drag the left knee. Breathe. You repeat that ten thousand times, Wilson, you just might get to be a soldier. Alternate method. Sliding both hands forward and then dragging the haunches. Slower, but more stable. It's a tough choice, but he'll work it out, he'll devise a pattern of alternation, a system by which he can rest different muscles at different times and thus maximize his stamina. He knows how to do this shit. It's all he's ever done, really. Going forward against the crush of force and logic. Moving smartly when smart movement is called for. Crawling through shadow, looking for shade.

  · · · · ·

  10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know

  · · · · ·

  1: Everything I've ever known has been no more than a powerful conviction.

  2: Nothing motivates like sex and death and sound effects.

  3: Politics is the Enemy.

  4: Jesus and Mohammed would probably hang out together.

  5: GRob is a hottie, maybe not as cute as Laura Witherspoon, but a woman who can kick ass is a definite turn-on.

  6: Love is all there is, but there ain't enough to go around.

  7: War is the geometry of chaos.

  8: Only in the grip of fear can I appreciate the purity of my life's disguise.

  9: Survival as an occupation: I am the worker bee. Survival as religion: I am its revenant priest.

  10: My pink-and-black skateboard with the design of the demon gleaming the cube, it is the bomb!

  Over Yonder, by Lucius Shepard

  2003 Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning Story

  It was a black train carried Billy Long Gone away from Klamath Falls and into the east. Away from life itself, some might say. And if you were to hear the stories of those who watched it pass, you'd have to give credence to that possibility … though you'd be wise to temper your judgment, considering the character of the witnesses. Three hobos drunk on fortified wine, violent men with shot livers and enfeebled hearts and leaky imaginations who lived on the wild edge of nothing and were likely half-expecting their own black train to pass. Every car was unlettered, they'd tell you. No corporate logos, no mention of Union Pacific or Burlington Northern, no spray painted graffiti. And the engine wasn't a squatty little unit like they stick on freights front and back nowadays, it was the very image of the old Streamliner engines, but dead black instead of silver. The sort of train rumored to streak through small American towns in the four o'clock dark with a cargo of dead aliens or parts of a wrecked spacecraft, bound for Roswell or points of even more speculative military purpose. But all this particular train carried was Billy and the big man in a wide-brimmed hat who had stolen his dog, Stupid.

  You could scarcely ever tell when Billy Long Gone was mad, because he looked mad all the time. If you had caught sight of him that night, stomping along the tracks with his shoulders bowed under his pack, breath steaming in the cold, his eyes burning out from tangles of raggedy graying hair and beard, regular Manson lamps framed by heavy ridges and cheekbones so sharp, they like to punch through the skin, you'd have sworn he was the Badass King of the Hobos come to pay his disrespects. But truth is, Billy was rarely mad. All the glare and tension in his face that people took for anger was just a feverish wattage of weakness and fear. He was an anxious little man. Anxious about everything. About if he had money to buy sufficient wine to keep his head right, or if it was going to rain, or what was that noise out in the weeds, and was the freight schedule he'd gotten off the bull in Dilworth the real thing …
or had the bull just been fucking with him? Nights when he got talky high on cheap greasy speed cooked up from starter fluid and sinus remedies, he'd try to explain where all that anxiety came from. He'd tell himself and anybody else within earshot a lie about a girl and a shit job and some money gone missing and him getting blamed for it. A lie, I say. The details simply didn't hang together, and everything that had happened to him was someone else's fault. But his friends knew it was standing in for another story hidden deep in the addled, short-circuited mess he'd made of his brain, something not so dramatic, something he'd juiced up to make himself feel better, something he couldn't help living inside no matter how much wine or crank he buried it under, and that one was probably not a lie.

  Now you'd do better coming between a man and his wife than you would stealing a tramp's dog. It's a relationship where the thought of divorce never enters in, a bond sealed in the coldest cracks of winter and the loneliest squats in Godforsakenland. Steal a tramp's dog, you might be stealing the one thing that's keeping him walking and above ground. So while Billy was mad some that night, he was mostly shaken up. He couldn't figure why Stupid, a slobbery none-too-bright black Lab mix with small tolerance for strangers, had gone and trotted off with his abductor, wagging his tail and never a backward glance—that's how the three hobos he'd been jungled up with described what happened while he was off fetching wine from the ShopRite. He had no reason to doubt them, drunks though they were. Neither did he doubt that they had, as they claimed, tried to stop the man, but couldn't handle him because of his size. "Big as goddamn Hulk Hogan" was the phrase that most communicated to Billy. He loosened the ax handle he kept stowed in his pack, but he had no clear idea what he would do if he found the man.

  The train was stopped on a siding outside the Klamath Falls switchyard, a stretch of track that ran straight as an avenue between ranks of tall spruce, and as Billy walked alongside it, peering into the open boxcars, he noticed a number of peculiarities. The walls of the cars were cold to the touch, yet not so cold as you'd expect steel to be on a chilly night, and they were unnaturally smooth. Not a scrape, a ding, or a dent. The only imperfection Billy observed was a long ridged mark like an old scar running across the door of one. As for the doors themselves, they had no locks, and while mounted in the usual fashion, they moved soundlessly, easily, and seemed fabricated of a metal considerably lighter and less reflective than steel—a three-quarter moon hanging overhead cast a silvery shine onto the tops of the rails, but the surfaces of the boxcars gave back scarcely a glimmer. Then, too, the damn thing didn't smell like a train. No stink of refried diesel and spilled cargoes and treated wood. Instead, there was a faint musky odor, almost sweet, as if the entire string of cars had been doused with perfume. Ordinarily, Billy would have been spooked by these incongruities, but he was so worked up about his dog, he ignored the beeping of his interior alarm and kept on walking the tracks.

  A stiff breeze kicked up, drawing ghostly vowels from the boughs, and the spruce tops wobbled, then tipped all to one side, like huge drunken dark green soldiers with pointy hats, causing Billy to feel alone among the mighty. He knew himself a tiny figure trudging through the ass-end of nothing beside a weird mile-long something that resembled a train but maybe wasn't, far from the boozy coziness of his fire and his friends, spied on by the moon, the stars, and all the mysterious shapes that lived behind them. It minded him of an illustration in a children's book he'd looked at recently—a pale boy with round eyes lost in a forest where the shadows were crookedly, sinisterly different in shape from the limbs and leaf sprays that cast them. It comforted Billy to think of this picture; it gave him a place to go with his fear, letting him pretend he was afraid instead ofbeing afraid. He spent a lot of his time hiding out in the third person this way, objectifying the moments that upset him, especially when he was frightened or when he believed people were talking against him, whispering lies he couldn't quite catch (this is why I'm telling the story like I am now, and not like I will later on when I relate how it was for me after things changed). So when he spotted Stupid poking his head out the door of the next boxcar up, his heart was made suddenly, unreservedly, childishly glad, and he went forward in a shuffling run, hobbled by the weight of his pack. Stupid disappeared back into the car and by the time Billy reached the door, he couldn't make out anything inside. The edge of his fear ripped away the flimsy shield of his imagination. He yanked out his ax handle and swooshed it through the air.

  "Stupid!" he called. "Come on, boy!"

  Stupid made a happy noise in his throat, but stayed hidden, and—to Billy's surprise—another dog with a deeper bark went woof. Then a man's voice, surprisingly mild, said, "Your dog's comin' with me, friend."

  "Hell you say!" Billy swung his ax handle against the door and was startled—the noise was not the expected clang but a dull thwack such as might have resulted from hitting a sofa cushion with a two-by-four.

  "You send him on out!" Billy said. "I ain't fuckin' with ya!"

  "I got no leash on him," the man said.

  Billy peered into the car and thought he spied a shadowy figure against the rear wall. He whistled and Stupid made another throaty response, but this one sounded confused. "Son-of-a-bitch! Fuck you done with my dog?" Billy shouted.

  A third dog—part terrier by the sound—let out a high-pitched rip of a growl. Paws clittered on the floor of the car.

  "Tell you what, friend," said the man. "Ain't a thing I can do 'bout your dog. Dog's in charge of where he's headed. But I don't mind too much you want to ride along."

  These words bred a cold vacancy in Billy's gut and his legs went a little weak. Broke-brained as he was, he knew that taking a train ride with a giant in a pitch-dark boxcar was not the solution to any reasonable problem; but he couldn't figure what else to do. A throbbing, rumbling noise started up. It didn't have the belly-full-of-grinding-bones fullness of a real diesel engine, but an engine's what it must have been, because a shuddery vibration shook the car, and the train jerked forward a couple of feet.

  "Best hop on if you comin'," said the man inside the car.

  Billy glanced around to see if maybe a bull or somebody else official was nearby. It wasn't in his nature to be running the yard cops in on anyone, especially a fellow tramp, but these were extreme circumstances. No one was in sight, though. Nothing but a bunch of cold dark and lonesome. The train lurched forward again, and this time it started rolling. All the dogs inside the car— Billy thought he could hear a half-dozen separate voices—got to yipping and woofing, as if excited to be going somewhere. The train began to roll faster.

  Billy knew he had only seconds before he would no longer be able to keep up, before he'd lose his dog for sure. Desperation spiked in him, driving down his fear. With a shout he shucked his pack, heaved it into the car, then hauled himself in after it. As he lurched to his feet, ready to fight, the train lurched heavily and he went off balance, his arms windmilling, and rammed headfirst into the end wall of the car, knocking himself senseless.

  · · · · ·

  Billy woke to find Stupid licking his face. The drool strings hanging from the dog's dewlaps flicked across his cheek and chin. He pushed Stupid away and sat up holding his head, which was gonging something fierce.

  "Welcome aboard, friend," said the man's voice. Billy swiveled his neck around toward him, a movement that caused him to wince.

  Flanked by four mongrels, the man was sitting against the far wall. His stretched-out legs seemed to reach halfway across the car, and his shoulders were Frankenstein-sized under the Army surplus poncho he was wearing. He was in better health than any hobos of Billy's acquaintance. His shoulder length hair was dark and shiny, his eyes clear, and his horsy face unmarked by gin blossoms or spider veins or any other sign of ill-use. An ugly face, albeit an amiable one. He had a calmness about him that rankled Billy, who could barely recall what calm was like.

  "I ain't your goddamn friend." Billy rubbed his neck, trying to ease a feeling of compression.
>
  "Guess not," said the man. "But I'm bettin' you will be."

  The dogs gazed at Billy with the same casual indifference as that displayed by the man, as if they were his familiars. They were a sorry bunch: a scrawny German shepherd; a runty collie with a weepy right eye; a brindled hound with orange eyes and a crooked hind leg; and a stubby-legged gray mutt with a broad chest that, Billy thought, had probably been responsible for the yappy growl. Not a one looked worth the effort it would take to keep them fed and healthy, and Billy speculated that maybe the man suffered from a condition similar to the one that had troubled his old traveling companion Clueless Joe, who had tried to persuade a railroad bull in Yakima to marry him and his dog.

  A couple of other things struck Billy as odd. First off, the train had to be traveling forty miles an hour, enough speed so that the sound of their passage should have been deafening; yet they weren't yelling, they were speaking in normal tones of voice. And then there was a faint yellow light inside the car, like the faded illumination that comes during a brown-out. The light had no apparent source.

  Spooked, Billy spotted the ax handle lying on the floor and grabbed it up. The collie came to his feet and barked, but the big man gentled him, and the dog curled up with the other three once again. Stupid, who had lifted his head, sighed and rested his muzzle on Billy's knee.