The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  “Need help, friend?” I called in Türkik. The engine of the auto before me shuddered and stopped. The lights remained on. I heard a door swing open. Heeled boots crunched against the desert. A figure crossed over the lights, a silhouette that marched toward me. Tall enough to be Song. What if she’d found me?

  The silhouette called out something in Mandarin, his voice hard and sharp as a razor. That settled it. Army. I picked my passport off the seat and held it out the driver-side window.

  “I’m here on business.” I called out in Türkik.

  “This is a restricted area.” This man spoke it naturally. He sounded hard. Not some half-trained boy like those who ran most checkpoints. “Turn off your headlights.”

  I did. And then pulled back the hammer of the revolver. I could see from his silhouette that he didn’t have a weapon drawn. But who knew how many more men might be in that truck. I licked my lips. Pulling out the gun might be a death sentence. But then maybe I was already dead.

  He started walking toward the truck. A mistake. It would make this easier. I held the revolver against my belly, low enough that he wouldn’t see it until it was too late. He reached down to his belt. I tensed, waiting for him to take out his firearm. But instead he unlooped an electric torch from his belt and clicked it on.

  “What are you doing out here this late?”

  “I’m on my way to the base,” I said, squinting against the lights that beamed into my face. “They’re importing machine parts for the tests.” The dragon-bone handle was slick with sweat. I just needed him to get a bit closer . . .

  “The base is three hundred miles to the south. What’s your clearance? What—”

  The desert scuffed beneath his boots as he stopped before the drivers’ window. His eyes locked on the gun that was pointed up at his head.

  “How many more in your truck?” I whispered.

  “Three.” He said it without hesitation. This close I could finally see his broad pock-marked face, his shaved head with long angry scars webbing their way across the scalp. Patches of shadow hid his eyes, but I knew they were narrowed about my face. “Drop the gun and everything will be okay.”

  “Step back,” I said, calmly as I could manage.

  He didn’t move for a moment, and then took a half pace away from the truck. I dropped my documents and then opened the truck door, gun aimed at his face. I swung out into the desert. I waited for a sound or cry from the still-idling truck. Nothing. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no plan here. “Drop the torch.”

  He glared at me, and then let the long chrome tube slip from his hands. The glass cracked against a rock and the light flared out. “Turn around,” I said.

  “No.”

  The word hung in the air. I was shaking. Could I pull the trigger? Could I kill this man in cold blood? “There’s nobody else in that truck,” I said. “We both know it.”

  “Put down the gun,” he said. “I’ll let you get in the truck and drive away.”

  Sweat ran down my brow and froze against my skin. “Just turn around,” I whispered. I could hear the desperation in my own voice.

  He stared at me a moment, and then turned his back to me. I sucked it a breath. Without taking the gun from his back I knelt down and picked up the torch in my spare hand.

  “I don’t know what your plan is,” he said, “but you can—”

  I swung the butt end of the torch with all my strength. It cracked against the base of his skull, splitting the skin open. He staggered forward, blood flowing over the collar of his uniform. He cried out in pain. I hit him again. He staggered to his knees. A third hit and he was face down in the desert, not moving. Blood pooled beside him.

  I was panting. In the light of his truck’s headlights I could see dark red glinting on the end of the torch. Had I killed him? Cautiously I paced over to his prone body. As I neared I could see his chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.

  Relief flooded into me. I took calming breaths. Now what to do? I looked up at his truck, then mine. I looked up at the horizon, where the faintest glow of dawn was beginning to spark in the distance. I needed to make a decision.

  The petrol cans and water I moved over to his truck, which was actually a canvass-topped reconnaissance car. I stuffed them into the flatbed which already held several boxes of spare uniforms. I tore the sleeve off one and tied it about the unconscious man’s wound, and then dragged him over to the back of my own truck. I punctured the fuel tank and let all the petrol run out into the desert sand. Even if he did wake up he would be miles and miles from anything or anyone, unable to alert the Mandate army before it was too late. By time he walked back to the road and flagged down a passing truck I would have Attia and be out. Or so I told myself.

  I jumped into his military car, turned a tight bouncing circle, and then drove off into the desert, glancing back only once at the silhouette of the rusted truck I left behind. I hurtled forward toward Attia and whatever else waited for me.

  It was dawn when I arrived. The sun had just lifted over the horizon when I saw a massive dark form come into view at the end of the track. There, its enormous skeleton half-buried, black rib bones arcing into the sky like scythes, was a dragon.

  I rammed the transmission into a lower gear and rolled down toward the body. The road seemed to end here. Beside the dragon loomed a rock tower that at first I’d thought was a massive yardang, but on closer inspection seemed to be ruins of a building. Nothing moved as I neared. I rolled the vehicle to a stop and carefully climbed out.

  I closed my hand tightly about the curved handle of the gun. “Attia?” I called. My voice seemed to boom over the desert and salt flats.

  No response. I crunched over the gravel toward the crumbling stone tower.

  “Attia!”

  Silence. Just a ruined tower and a long-dead dragon. I was alone. Just like in that kaffahouse, all those years ago. She wasn’t here.

  She wasn’t coming.

  I felt something inside of me break. Some fragile lockbox where for years I’d held all my hope. I yelled at the dead things in front of me. Screamed. I could feel tears welling in the corner of my eyes. I spun back to the auto. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Where I was going to go. She had left me again.

  But then, as I spun back around, blinked through tears that still welled in my eyes, I saw a plume of dust rising up on the horizon.

  My heart wedged itself in my throat. Somebody was coming. Was it Attia returning? Or had somebody found that army officer already.

  Blood thundered in my veins. My head felt light and dizzy. What was I going to do? Hide. The tower, looming above. I ran to the base of the rock hill that it stood on and scrambled up the loose slope. I ducked through the low doorway and into the dark tower.

  The inside was pitch black and colder even than the desert. I pressed myself against the wall by the door. I could not see far into the ruin, and had no interest in exploring. Anyone or anything could be in that darkness, watching me.

  I heard the tires of an autocar rattle over the gravel. A door opened and then slammed. Boots crunched on the loose rock.

  “Artur,” Song called. “I know you are here.”

  My mouth was completely devoid of moisture. How had she found me? I remembered her eyes in that hotel where I’d first met her, in the safehouse as she’d studied me. I pulled the gun from my pocket.

  What could I do? Hide until she made her way up here? Shoot her when she stepped into the building? What if Attia was wrong? Or was playing me for a fool? What if Song was who she said she was and was only trying to help me? I had been so sure Attia would be here to explain it all! What a fool you were. I felt the gun in my hand. The weight of it. Something inside of me resolved.

  I stepped out of the tower and into bright sunlight.

  Song stood between the two trucks. She had eschewed the business outfit that she’d worn through the border and now sported desert khakis.

  She spun toward me as I emerged from th
e tower, the gun in her hand trained on my head. I raised my hands into the air and paced down the rock slope toward her.

  “She’s not here,” I said. “If you were hoping I would lead you to her, then I’m sorry. Looks like neither of our plans worked out.”

  She lowered the gun. “Why did you run off like that? You scared me.”

  “Don’t pretend, Song, or whatever your real name is. You’ve been in control the whole time, moving me like a piece on a bloody game board.” I dropped my arms to my sides. “You, Attia, everybody has been acting on me. Acting through me.” No more. I’d been pulled around by my nose for too long. I wanted answers. I raised the gun, aimed it at her.

  Song looked neither surprised nor afraid. “What are you doing, Artur?”

  “There never was anybody else at the museum, was there? You’ve been lying to me the whole time.”

  “Artur, listen to me. If I meant to betray you, why would I have given you that gun?”

  “Because you loaded it with empty shell casings.” I cocked the hammer back. “I sorted that out though.” The shopkeep had helped me with that.

  Her face became a stone mask. “Has she been in contact? What did she tell you? Tell me what she said to you.”

  “You wanted me to be alone after the museum. Why?”

  “I thought if I left you alone Attia would make contact. I didn’t realize she had until I came back to the safehouse. How did she get a message to you?”

  “The kaffa tin.”

  Song closed her eyes and shook her head. “Of course.” She looked at me then. “Whatever she told you, you can’t trust her. She has used you for your entire life. How do you not know that by now?”

  “And so what? I should trust you?” I said the words, but at the same time couldn’t shake her words. Why was I putting my life on the line for a woman that had betrayed me and everybody I loved? Who had pulled me halfway across the world for reasons that I couldn’t understand. Why?

  Song said, “I can’t tell you that you should trust me but—”

  And then, mid-sentence, she threw herself to one side, raised her gun.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  Two gun-blasts exploded through the desert. I squeezed my eyes shut and when I opened them again I was on my back, looking up at the big blue sky. Pain radiated from my shoulder.

  Oh . . .

  And then desert became the streets of Aelia Capitolina and I was on my back again, surrounded by screaming students and hammering feet, the diesel belching of trucks and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. Feet crunching toward me through the cold and wind of the desert; in the muggy heat of the city, Sina pacing, gun in hand. Two skies, both blue and yawning.

  Sina-now-Song leaned down over me. Their faces were one face, separated by twenty years. Agents of the Commissariat, cold, calculating.

  They aimed their gun at my face. I was, had been, certain I was going to die. I squeezed my eyes shut. I had cheated death the first time, all those years ago, and now it had come to find me again. Full circle. What choices, what path had led me out here to this patch of desert to die?

  I had come here because I loved her still, I realized now.

  Another gunshot. A final one.

  My eyes fluttered open. Blue sky. No Song, no Sina. I turned my throbbing head and saw her.

  Attia. She looked the same, just older. A few more lines. But those eyes, those beautiful mismatched eyes. She stood like a figure from memory, in the entrance of that stone tower, a Mandate rifle smoking in her hand. Attia stood just like she had stood in Aelia Capitolina all those years ago with a gun in hand and a look of shock on her face. This time there was no shock.

  “Attia,” I croaked. She looked at me. All at once those years were swallowed up.

  She scrambled down the loose rock that led from the tower and came to kneel beside me.

  “Cacō, Gaius,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” There were tears in her eyes.

  What is happening?

  She felt at my arm, pulled my shirt open. I turned my head and saw Song’s body beside me in the desert. Her face, slack now in death, looked no longer like an immovable stone.

  “You saved me,” I whispered.

  “No,” she replied. She sniffed through the tears. “Not yet.”

  She untied a kerchief knotted about her neck and pressed it into my shoulder wound. I growled in agony. “Res mutatae mutatae non sunt,” she intoned. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” She laughed bitterly through the tears. “Probably not quite what we meant.”

  What does this all mean, I tried to ask. Why weren’t you there? Why did you leave me? Why are you here now . . .

  But the pain was bright light and it was shooting through my vision. I could only manage a grunt. All the exhaustion of the trip pressed down on me. The days on the road without sleep. The terror at being caught, at being found out. The fear of finding this woman who now leaned over me . . .

  The more things change . . .

  I passed out.

  EXCERPT FROM “ON DRACI AND REVOLUTION” (REDACTED)

  It was once said that the true power of the draci lay in the fear that they engendered. They kept a vicious balance. Who dared start a war when the retribution would likely raze all your cities to the ground? Who dared start a revolution when it could be swallowed in searing flame? Nothing burned so bright or so hot as dragonfire. Nothing.

  10

  I woke inside the tower. Night outside – again or still, I wasn’t quite sure. White bandages were wrapped about my shoulder, and by the lightness that spread now through my body I guessed that I was probably on painkillers. I touched the wound tentatively. It seemed that bullet had only grazed me. Another scar.

  Attia. Had that been her, truly?

  I pushed myself upright and fought a spell of dizziness. I swallowed the vomit that rose in my throat. I stood and stumbled out into the night.

  She sat at the bottom of the slope, by a low fire, tending it with a stick. My heart lurched. She sat hunched and lost in thought, her brow furrowed. She looked up at me when I emerged from the tower. She smiled.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  I didn’t move. I didn’t get any closer. “What is going on?” I said.

  Attia bit her lip, her smile faltering. “Come,” she said. “Sit down.”

  I hesitated. The strain between us was palpable. What had I expected after all these years? I made my way slowly down to the firepit. A beaten metal pot rested among the coals, and steam poured from it. I noticed then that Song’s body was gone. As I sat I saw that beside Attia was a metal chest, about the size of a suitcase. The clasps were firmly shut and “GA-239” had been etched on the smooth surface. “I suppose we have a lot of catching up to do,” she said.

  “I waited three days for you,” I whispered.

  She exhaled loudly. “I know.”

  “What happened?”

  She prodded the fire with the stick. “I was arrested,” she said. “Not long after we split up. I thought I was going to be killed.” She shrugged. “Apparently they thought I was too valuable to waste away in the labor camps. They wanted me to work for them. Weapons research.”

  So she had been arrested.

  “After all they did. All our friends they killed.” I didn’t even feel angry anymore. Just tired and confused. “You could have said no.”

  “I was ready to die rather that work for them,” she said. I could hear the anger in her voice. “Until they told me that they’d found you. That they knew where you were. They even showed me fotos of you sitting in the kaffahouse where we’d agreed to meet.”

  I remembered suddenly the fotos that the Commissariat major had shown me in the hotel. Those fotos from all those years ago. A slow realization bloomed inside of me.

  “They said that they would leave you alone if I worked for them. They said that if I didn’t do what they wanted, if I tried to talk to you, then they’d kill you.” She looked up at me t
hen, tears in her eyes. “I did terrible things Gaius. I did them to protect you. Because I loved you.”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around what she’d said. “All these years, I’d thought . . .”

  “I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  All those years on the run, hiding, alone. I remembered every relationship I’d tried to forge, how they had all been poisoned by the bitterness that I carried within me. I thought of the image I’d made of Attia, the coward, the betrayer. The woman who had cast me away for the sake of her work. The one who had left me alone and ruined my life. I’d made a story in my head, a story of my own life, that of a man wronged and cast aside. But the opposite was true. The self-pitying narrative I’d crafted, the one that had controlled my life, was a lie.

  She’d loved me enough to throw away her life, to go against everything she’d believed. And in return I’d hated her.

  “Attia,” I said. I was beside her. In her blind spot. Her face had shifted, contracting like it did when she worried over an unsolved problem. I reached out and brushed her arm lightly. She was so close. She smelled like the fire and lavender soap.

  I stood. “Look at me Attia.”

  She did.

  I reached down and pulled her to her feet. In those mismatched eyes I saw my own pain, mirrored back at me. Look what they’ve done to us. I reached for her with both arms, one good and one bad. She staggered forward into my embrace. Her body felt so familiar against mine. I hugged her tight, and didn’t care about the pain that arced through my shoulder. I held her, and hugged her, and then I started crying. As I wept I felt as though she was the one holding me, but then her body began to shake with tears and we were holding each other.

  We stayed like that for a long time.

  Afterward we fell back to the ground around the fire and sat with our arms about one another, silently staring at the low flames.

  “I worked for them for years,” she said after a time, her words muffled into my chest. “In their labs and universities. I thought of you. I dreamed of running away, finding you, and escaping. But I was watched too closely. I couldn’t risk it. Then, several years ago, agents of the Primary Directorate came to me. They said they wanted me to defect to the Mandate, to supply them with information on their weapons programs. I did what they wanted. I came here, worked with the best scientists in the Mandate, feeding the Commissariat secrets all the time. I helped them build a weapon.”