by George R. R.
He’d stumbled out of her bower in the dawn, shaken and drenched in sweat, trying not to think about the fact that he’d probably just sentenced thousands of physical copies of himself, drawn from his DNA, to lives of unimaginable slavery. He had secured the vial, one of two major components in the plan. That was what counted. He’d done what he had to do, as he always had, no matter what the cost, no matter how guilty it made him feel afterwards.
The dog-headed man straightened up and gazed in fascination at the rhythmically blinking patterns of lights on the front panels of the mechanism. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” he asked quietly.
Kleisterman didn’t answer immediately. After a few moments, he said, “We wanted gods and could find none, so we built some ourselves. We should have remembered what the gods were like in the old mythologies: amoral, cruel, selfish, merciless, murderously playful.” He was silent for a long time, and then, visibly gathering his strength, as if he was almost too tired to speak, he said, “They must be destroyed.”
* * * *
Kleisterman awoke crying in the cold hour before dawn, some dream of betrayal and loss and grief and guilt draining away before he could quite grasp it with his waking mind, leaving behind a dark residue of sadness.
He stared at the shadowed ceiling. There’d be no getting back to sleep after this. Embarrassed, although there was no one there to see, he wiped the tears from his eyes, washed his hot tear-streaked face in a basin of water, got dressed. He thought about trying to scrounge something for breakfast from the inn’s sleeping kitchen, but dismissed the idea. Thin and cadaverous, he never ate much, and certainly had no appetite today. Instead, he consulted his instruments, and, as he’d expected, they showed a building and convergence of the peculiar combinations of electromagnetic signatures that prestiged a major manifestation of the AIs, somewhere to the northeast of here. He thought he knew where that would be.
The glass-and-metal mechanism was humming and chuckling to itself, still showing rows of rhythmically blinking amber lights. Gingerly, he put the mechanism into the backpack, strapped it tightly to his back, and let himself out of the inn by one of the rear doors.
It was cold outside, still dark, and Kleisterman’s breath steamed up in plumes in the chill morning air. Something rustled away through the almost-unseen rows of corn at his approach, and some songbird out there somewhere, a thrush or a warbler maybe, started tuning up for dawn. Although the sun had not yet risen, the sky all the way across the eastern horizon was stained a sullen red that dimmed and flared, flared and dimmed, as the glare from lava fountains lit up the underbellies of lowering clouds.
Just as Kleisterman was in the process of lifting himself into the sky, another earthquake struck, and he wobbled with one foot still on the ground for a heartbeat before rising into the air. As he rose, he could hear other buildings collapsing in Millersburg below. The earthquakes ought to be almost continuous from now on, for as long as it took for the new plate boundary to stabilize. Usually, that would take millions of years. Today— who knew? Days? Hours?
The sun finally came up as he was flying northeast, although the smoke from forest fires touched off by the lava fountains had reduced it to a glazed orange disk. Several times, he had to change direction to avoid flying through jet-black, spark-shot smoke columns dozens of miles long, and this got worse as he neared the area where the coast had once been. But he persisted, at times checking his locator to make sure that the electromagnetic signatures were continuing to build.
The AIs had gone to enormous lengths to arrange this show; they weren’t going to miss it. And since they were as sentimental as they were cruel, he thought that he knew which vantage point they would choose to watch from—as near as possible to the Manhattan location—or to the location where Manhattan had once been—where the very first AIs had been created in experimental laboratories, so many years ago.
When, after hours of flying, he finally got to that location, it was hard to tell if he was actually there, although the coordinates matched.
Everything had changed. The Atlantic was gone, and the continental mass of Europe stretched endlessly away to the east until it was lost in the purple haze of distance. Where the two continents met and were now grinding against each other, the ground was visibly folding and crinkling and rising, domes of earth swelling ever higher and higher, like vast loaves of bread rising in some cosmic oven. Just to the east of the collision boundary, a line of lava fountains stretched away to the north and south, and fissures had opened like stitches, pouring forth great smoldering sheets of basaltic lava. The ground was continuously wracked by earthquakes, ripples of dirt a hundred feet high racing away through the earth in widening concentric circles.
Kleisterman rose as high as he dared without oxygen equipment or heated clothing, trying to stay clear of the jetting lava and the corrosive gases that were being released by the eruptions. At last, he spotted what he’d known must be there.
There was a window open in the sky, a window a hundred feet high and a hundred wide, facing east. Behind it was a clear white light that silhouetted a massive Face, perhaps forty feet tall from chin to brow, which was looking contemplatively out of the window. The Face had chosen to style itself in the image of an Old Testament prophet or saint, with a full curling black beard, framed by tangles of long flowing hair on either side. The eyes, each wider across than a man was tall, were a penetrating icy blue.
Kleisterman had encountered this creature before. There were hierarchies of Byzantine complexity among the AIs, but this particular Entity was at the top of the subset who concerned themselves with human affairs, or of one such subset anyway. Sardonically, even somewhat archly, it called itself Mr. Big—or, sometimes, Master Cylinder.
The window to the other world was open. This was his only chance.
Kleisterman set the timer on the mechanism to the shortest possible interval, less than a minute, and, keeping it in the backpack, let it dangle from his hand by the strap.
He accelerated toward the window as fast as he could go, pulled up short, and, swinging the backpack by its strap, sent it sailing through the open window.
The Face looked at him in mild surprise.
The window snapped shut.
Kleisterman hovered in midair, waiting, the wind whipping his hair. Absolutely nothing happened.
After another moment, the window in the sky opened again, and the Face looked out at him.
“Did you really think that that would be enough to destroy Us?” Mr. Big said, in a surprisingly calm and mellow voice.
Defeat and exhaustion coursed through Kleisterman, seeming to hollow his bones out and fill them with lead. “No, not really,” he said wearily. “But I had to try.”
“I know you did,” Mr. Big said, almost fondly.
Kleisterman lifted his head and stared defiantly at the gigantic Face. “And I’ll keep trying, you know,” he said. “I’ll never give up.”
“I know you won’t,” Mr. Big said sadly. “That’s what makes you human.” The window snapped closed. Kleisterman hung motionless in the air.
Below him, new mountains, bawling like a million burning calves, began to claw their way toward the sky.
<
* * * *
David Morrell
A soldier’s life often depends on his fellow soldiers, forging a bond that can be closer than that of brothers. But what happens when it’s your brothers who are trying to kill you? . . .
The creator of Rambo, one of the best-known warriors in contemporary fiction, David Morrell is a bestselling author who has over eighteen million copies of his novels in print, and whose thrillers have been translated into twenty-six languages and turned into record-breaking films as well as top-rated TV miniseries. His famous first novel, First Blood, was the origin of the character Rambo. He is also the author of more than twenty-eight other books, including the classic Brotherhood of the Rose spy trilogy, The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, The Covenan
t of the Flame, Extreme Denial, Desperate Measures, Creepers, and many others. His short fiction has been collected in Black Evening and Nightscape, and he’s also produced a book of writing advice, The Successful Novelist, as well as other nonfiction books. Best known for his thrillers, he has also written horror, fantasy, and historical novels, and has three times won the Bram Stoker Award. The International Thriller Writers organization honored him with its prestigious Thriller Master Award. His most recent book is The Shimmer. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
* * * *
My Name Is Legion
The mission is sacred. You will see it through to the end at any price.
—Part of the French Foreign Legion’s Code of Honor
Syria
June 20, 1941
“The colonel found someone to carve a wooden hand.” Hearing Durado’s voice behind him, Kline didn’t turn. He kept his gaze focused between the two boulders that protected him from sniper fire. Propped against a rocky slope, he stared toward the yellow buildings in the distance.
“Wooden hand?” The reference didn’t puzzle Kline, but the timing did. “This isn’t April.”
“I guess the colonel figures we need a reminder,” Durado said.
“Considering what’ll happen tomorrow, he’s probably right.”
“The ceremony’s at fifteen hundred hours.”
“Can’t go,” Kline said. “I’m on duty here till dark.”
“There’ll be a second ceremony. The sergeant told me to come back later and take your place so you can attend.”
Kline nodded his thanks. “Reminds me of when I was a kid and my family went to church. The colonel’s become our preacher.”
“See anything out there?” Durado asked.
“Nothing that moves—except the heat haze.”
“Tomorrow will be different.”
Kline heard the scrape of rocks under combat boots as Durado walked away. A torn blanket was over him. His uniform was minimal—tan shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, faded by the desert sun. His headgear was the Legion’s famed kepi blanc, a white cap with a flat, round top and black visor. It too was badly faded by the sun. A flap at the back covered his neck and ears, but for further protection, Kline relied on the blanket to shield his bare legs and arms and keep the rocks on each side from absorbing so much heat that they burned him.
His bolt-action MAS 36 rifle was next to him, ready to be sighted and fired if a sniper showed himself. Of course, that would reveal Kline’s position, attracting enemy bullets, forcing him to find a new vantage point. Given that he’d smoothed the ground and made this emplacement as comfortable as possible, he preferred to hold his fire until tomorrow.
Enemy bullets? Those words had automatically come to mind, but under the circumstances, they troubled him.
Yes, pulling the trigger could wait until tomorrow.
* * * *
Kline wasn’t his real name. Seven years earlier, in 1934, he’d arrived at the Old Fort in the Vincennes area of Paris, where he’d volunteered to join the French Foreign Legion, so-called because the unit was the only way foreigners could enlist in the French army.
“American,” a sergeant had sniffed.
Kline had received a meal of coffee, bread, and watery bean soup. In a crowded barracks, he slept on a straw-filled mattress at the top of a three-tiered metal bunk. Two days later, he and twenty other newcomers, mostly Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks, with one Irishman, were transported via train south to Marseilles. They were herded into the foul-smelling lower hold of a ship, where they vomited for two days during a rough voyage across the Mediterranean to Algeria. At last, trucks took them along a dusty, jolting road to the Legion’s headquarters at the remote desert town of Sidi Bel Abbès. The heat was overwhelming.
There, Kline’s interrogation had started. Although the Legion had a reputation for attracting criminals on the run from the law, in reality it understood the difficulty of making disciplined soldiers out of them and didn’t knowingly accept the worst offenders. As a consequence, each candidate was questioned in detail, his background investigated as thoroughly as possible. Many volunteers, while not criminals, had reached a dead end in their lives and wanted a new start, along with the chance to become French citizens. If the Legion accepted them, they were allowed to choose a new name and received new identities.
Certainly, Kline had reached a dead end. Before arriving in France and volunteering for the Legion, he’d lived in the United States, in Springfield, Illinois, where the Great Depression had taken away his factory job and kept him from supporting his wife and infant daughter. He’d made bad friends and acted as the lookout for a bank robbery in which a guard was killed and the only cash taken was $24.95. During the month he’d spent eluding the police, his daughter had died from whooping cough. His grief-crazed wife had slit her wrists, bleeding to death. The single thing that had kept Kline from doing the same was his determination to punish himself, and that goal had finally prompted him to do the most extreme thing he could imagine. Responding to an article in a newspaper that he happened to find on a street, he ended his anguished wandering by working as a coal shoveler on a ship that took him to Le Havre in France, from where he walked all the way to Paris and enlisted in the Legion.
According to the newspaper article, no way of life could be more arduous, and Kline was pleased to discover that the article understated the facts. Managing to hide his criminal past, he endured a seemingly endless indoctrination of weapons exercises, hand-to-hand combat drills, forced marches, and other tests of endurance that gave him satisfaction because of the pain they caused. In the end, when he received the certificate that formally admitted him to the Legion, he felt that he had indeed made a new start. Never forgiving himself or the world or God for the loss of his family, he felt an unexpected deep kinship with a group that had “Living by Chance” as part of its credo.
* * * *
The Irishman called himself Rourke. Because he and Kline were the only men who spoke English in their section of volunteers, they became friends during their long months of training. Like everyone else in the Legion, Rourke referred only vaguely to his past, but his skill with rifles and explosives made Kline suspect that he’d belonged to the Irish Republican Army, that he’d killed British soldiers in an effort to make the British leave his country, and that he’d sought refuge in the Legion after the British Army had vowed to use all its resources to hunt him down.
“I don’t suppose you’re a Roman Catholic,” Rourke said one night after they completed a fifty-mile march in punishing heat. His upward-tilted accent sounded melodic, despite his pain as they bandaged the blisters on their feet.
“No, I’m a Baptist,” Kline answered, then corrected himself. “At least, that’s how I was raised. I don’t go to church anymore.”
“I didn’t see many Baptists in Ireland,” Rourke joked. “Do you know your Bible?”
“My father read from it out loud every night.”
“ ‘My name is legion,’“ Rourke quoted.
“ ‘For we are many,’“ Kline responded. “The gospel according to Mark. A possessed man says that to Jesus, trying to explain how many demons are in him....Legion.” The word made Kline finally understand where Rourke was taking the conversation. “You’re comparing us to devils?”
“After putting us through that march, the sergeant qualifies as one.”
Kline couldn’t help chuckling.
“For certain, the sergeant wants the enemy to think we’re devils,” Rourke said. “That’s what the Mexican soldiers called the legionnaires after the battle at Camerone, isn’t it?”
“Yes. ‘These are not men. They’re demons.’“
“You have a good memory.”
“I wish I didn’t.”
“No more than I.” Rourke’s normally mischievous eyes looked dull. His freckles were covered with dust. “Anyway, after a march like that, we might as well be devils.”
“How do you figure?”
Wiping blood from his feet, Rourke somehow made what he said next sound like another joke. “We understand what it feels like to be in hell.”
* * * *
Rourke was gone now.
Kline’s years in the Legion had taught him to banish weak emotions. Nonetheless, the loss of his friend made him grieve. As he stared between the boulders toward the seemingly abandoned sandstone buildings, he thought about the many conversations he and Rourke had shared. In 1940, as Germany increasingly threatened Europe, they’d fought side-by-side in the concrete fortifications of the Maginot Line that France had built along its border with Germany. Their unit endured relentless assaults from machine guns, tanks, and dive-bombers, counterattacking whenever the Germans showed the slightest sign of weakness.
