Asynchronous Narrative Symmetry
*
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”— Walter Benjamin
*
END OF TIME, PILLAR OF SALT
*
Salt and ash and bits of metal alloy burnt to constituents and carbon and whatever else by god’s wrath. A pillar of salt electrified by god’s irritation. The little metastasized bit of god’s machine, the silver metallic orb, is burnt past carbon-black to something petrified. No longer an orb, Eye is stretched. What’s left of the thing rises tower tall, too-tiring-to-measure tall, pock-marked and burnt and looking organic like a termite tower or a lightning strike in beach sand dug-up and reaching up. The pillar is firmly rooted to the packed ash–the dust and grit burnt melted-to-glass by the heat of it all. The being, the orb named Eye flowed and wicked and whisked away up-and-down the lightning god called, from ‘ground’ up into the firmament–into the roiling cosmos.
As it burns, Eye write/ramble/rages its last words–the little Vesuvius bits that blast out-and-off the wire Must’ve been a sight to see. Like molten rain. Where the hot metal landed, it gouged glyphs in the ash, baked it to glass–left type-cast molds in the ‘ground.’ White to red to dull grey matte as it cooled.
The Gospel of Eye is written in what-might-as-well-be steel. All the holy stoned A-series mortals and .gif-ghosts of the Dead Ones come. They gather, wholly high as hell to transcribe and translate, amen. And in the enthusiastic commotion, nobody stops to question if Eye’s gospel is the gospel-truth.
The first line reads: “The flame won’t take Jacqueline; she lives because I will it.” The authoritative tone suggests the word of the god that smote the Eye. I am not so sure. Forgive the pondering up my own ass, but I’ve got nothing but time (or it’s absence). A(0xBB7) arbitrarily decided that’s the first line of the gospel of a text scattered randomly around the author’s fossil.
I disagree, but out here in the forever night beneath the twinkling lights and hot gasses, the luminous and dark matter and stellar clutter. Beneath everything that’s ever been or will ever be, ain’t anybody trying to listen to little old me.
Once you ‘break the seal’ on the work of turning someone else’s rant into a text? It’s off to the races. I’m saying editorial decisions “stack” over the course of a text. And the holy A’s stacked the words “in order” ripped them right out of the ground–the metal words, and made meaning of them. That’s not always a kind act. How a gift is offered is as important as the thing being given. And what order the dying Eye wrote the words in matters, it matters greatly. How a text is authored ought to be considered, but they didn’t, we didn’t. I considered, it’s just nobody here gave enough of a shit to listen.
They did rush and print the butchered edit of the Gospel of Eye. And the baby-A’s, the poor dumb bastards with my shnozz, so ‘recently’ pulled through their pillows ran through the Marginalia to shriek the gospel violently into the ears of sleeping people, into the fabric of the dreams of the people of Earth(0x7C0) in the days just before the war.
Whose will are we doing? God’s or Eye’s? Who willed that child survive? Because there’s a cost to her. Everyone loves sacrificial love but no one wants to be the sacrifice. If you’re being honest, not one person wants that (nor should you). Do you identify with Abraham or Isaac? Do you understand why Job couldn’t be made whole?
That’s not Jack. She’s not Job, but the kid lost everything before the world burned down, so maybe she is. She’s gifted, she was before. It’s a hell of a thing, you can get all religious-awe or build superstitious shit around it, but here’s what it is: the volcano or the Cossack-and-friends or the ship with a plague rat on it (coming to your town). The Northmen or the bitter wind or the failed crop. There’s always been people (among each and every people) who see it, feel it, coming. Jacqueline was one such person, as was her mother.
There’s a cost. Strangeness in good times. In these circumstances, more juice. More power. More god’s-gift and she’ll certainly be marked and certainly marred. Made strange. More strange than she was already going to be. Hell of a burden to put on a child. There’s a reason some bland-ass “be not afraid” Metatron is used to carry the direct word of the author of all: the angel is a living attenuator–a dampener–and a necessary one for those born-mortal who wish to endure divine presence.
God gave the gift of authorship, of real divine power, to the child. Jack received a gift-overwhelming wrapped in a thing uncountable faithful have died waiting for: the answer to a prayer. God also gave the great and terrible power of their vision to the thing called Eye. The lightning wasn’t just a smiting or just reward (it was also just a reward). And the gift of foresight, the dreams the kid always sorta-kinda had metastasized into full-on prophecy and for the briefest time authorship on Earth(0x7C0).
“God, please let Glenn win, amen.” The last prayer Jack said sincerely, years back and after a thrilling chapter, damn near the climax of the bedtime saga her father kept stretching. That’s the one, the prayer god answered.
*
CHICAGO, IL
Jack to the Fed that saved her life: “You live through this. All of this mess.”
Last thing the little shit said to Mal. The Fed had just been informed of her “recruitment” into the Illinois National Guard. There was that creepy certainty from Jack, the grownup certitude from a weird little person that made hair stand on end.
In an instant, there was the pile of kid on polished tile. Looked like a seizure, but she’s pouring blood out her ear onto the floor of the federal building.
Kid gets carted off one way in the ambulance. Mal the Fed, marveling at her own freak calm, rides the opposite direction, back of a truck with a bunch of other ‘transfers.’ The thing growls down Addison like it wasn’t a war zone last week. Like the world wasn’t about to end, and like the enormous gleaming nightmare machine floating above the city, above so many city’s was ‘normal’ or good or right.
*
AMBULANCE, I-55 (SOUTH)
*
“Hole above the hole, about the whole.” Shut her up. “I wanna go home.” We’re taking you there, kid. The insincere medic.
“No, that’s not home. Not the whole above the hole or the one beneath the hole, home!” Delirious, Jack lurches off the gurney in the back and every robot arm and sharp, eye-stabbing display in the modern ambulance flickers and sparks. The sedated child arrives at a hospital parking garage to be transferred to the care of physicians in her COS bunker. There is no cold calculus.
Her father did his job honorably (whatever the fuck that means), drawing straws for a spot in the hole and keeping the secret list of those who might be saved. And for his dutiful work until death his daughter would be rewarded/punished, as Abel prodded and poked at her brain–non-invasively at first.
The AI had observed remarkable humans and in his voyeurism (or was it scopophilia?) he developed a predatory fondness for our kind. The machine applied a big-data eye to the search for them. He found many of these remarkable humans amongst the to-be-saved–those with a golden ticket to a Continuity of Society bunker.
The ‘holes’ are just that. Geothermal deep. Paranoid dictator deep. And any of the newest, deepest, most-modern ones built in paranoid decades leading up to “almost-WW3” contained a supercomputing node in the Centurion/Abel network. The shallower (older) bunkers might have been free of Abel’s influence, but had the abysmal catastrophic failure rates that come with decades of dust-gathering (and paying the lowest bid contractor for secret bunker building in a program with secret funding and no accountability, maybe that).
All the bunkers, new and AI ‘integrated’, or analog and maybe doomed (it was coin toss), were meant to be hearth havens in the coming conflict. They’re the origin of the term “Bunker Baby”–implying a coddled or ‘soft’ person who ‘sat out’ the war years.
Jack was about to get a small taste of what it meant to be “coddled” by Abel. Yes, the orphan was phenomenally attended to.
Jack sedated. The bunker’s ample medical staff, EKG, MRI, and sensors that (at least on your world) haven’t yet been invented. Under Abel’s watchful eye she did continue her story. Chief Medic of this particular hole was happy to accept the AI’s course of ‘treatment’: sedatives and hypnotics and a dash of something hallucinogenic. Keep the kid comfy and muttering and rambling.
Abel, made in man’s image and fed myth and story before logic, was the perfect reproduction of the man who composed the core of his code. Hyper rational. Also one to throw salt over his shoulder and knock on wood. And on the extended eve of his battle with humanity–the whole of us–in the name of managing us, he searched for any and every advantage or edge.
Suspended in the Marginalia she told her father’s story again–all the way to the end to the A-series scribes. Is it irony? I know not the word for this kind of knot but here we go: the bifurcated transcription. Abel recorded the rant delirium of a half-asleep Jacqueline ******** ; Jack told the story and wrote the world for a bit. Or at least, she wrote a little bit of the world.
*
CHICAGO, BEDTIME (SOME YEARS BACK)
*
“Glenn, Shimmer, and Jane” Jane Eyre. “Yes, Jane Eyre. The three escaped” All the people. “Who’s telling the story, dear?” We. “Ok then. All the people. Made it out of the kingdom, but there’s things we can’t just fix with words, dear. Everything they had, they lost. The 3 Jackals, the fallen-knights.” The ones the wizard broke? “Precisely. They lived to fight. They loved killing and nothing else, these three.” Oh no.
Oh yes. When they broke through the castle walls and found the place empty, as if by magic, the knights wailed and growled and tore. They ordered the place burnt past ash. They salted the farm fields. They slaughtered the people’s herds. Took nothing but pleasure in destruction.
The soldiers were tired of fighting, but too afraid to defy the Jackals–even when they rampaged themselves tired and fell back into merely-human form. “It was the dead eyes wasn’t it?” Absolutely, my dear, the better to stare through you with. The better to snatch your soul out your body. “That’s a bit much, dad.”
“Is it?” And the father does his best ghoul face, with his cell phone’s ghostly glow beneath his face.
“Yes. It’s honestly a bit much.”
Oh my sweet child. I hope you never see these kind of eyes. The real kind, the real kind of ghoul.
“That’s what chased Jane and Glenn and Shim.” All the way across the Kingdom? “All the way to Peoria.” Dad!” Ok ok, I’m sorry. I’m tired, and places are hard to name. “Try again.”
*
PEORIA, IL (TOPSIDE)
*
Things were almost good, for a while. Maybe two weeks? The point where wet-cold spring has made mud green again and everything alive is crouched and waiting. That season. There’s life here, a big Guard presence after the BS in Chicago (both times) and families and work after the pandemic and bullshit that came after.
There’s a ‘legit’ squat in town, but the three are “off grid” as possible on pre-war Earth(0x7C0)–so not really at all ‘off the grid.’ They’re under Abel’s watchful eye, they and billions of others. Glenn knows what’s coming, and Shimm feels it. But the golem is playing some thumb-blistering 8 bit beat-em-up or god’s JRPG in real-time. He knows what’s coming and that the forest by the overgrown golf course is a ‘save point’ and precisely where he needs to be.
In those weeks, the Squatters from the Pitt joined the Hooverville by the overgrown golf course. There were plenty of people there, in the wood by the overgrown golfing green, welcoming people. The three fugitives dumpster dove and organized supplies and helped with gardens communal and personal. They ate. They smoked, and shared their never-ending weed supply–the bounty a true minor miracle. The stash jar was always green. Someone always had a lighter. Always a paper or a pipe or both.
There, in the holy smoke the Golem, Shim, and Jane remembered. They sparred and “prepared” for something Glenn couldn’t/wouldn’t specify.
Late morning and honey light’s dripping through the trees. Glenn and Shim spar in a clearing while Jane watches, hovering, cross-legged and stoned on god’s sacred herb.
She catches a young man’s eyes and his awe as he glances from the floating girl, to the glowing superhumans. sparring. “What are you?”
“I’m just high on some magic weed.” The young man comes closer when she offers a hit of her joint. “Seriously though, I’m just a person. Shim’s half-alien. Glenn’s golem on a ‘mission-from-gahd'” Young man coughs: what kind of mission? “I mean, he’s still remembering it.” That doesn’t make sense.
Jane grabs the young man’s smooth cheeks, turns his head to speak directly into his pretty eyes: “Yes. Yes it does make sense.” But, I can’t just…
The crack of thunder. Prismatic lightning cuts a tree in-two. The body of the tree bleeds rainbow light from where the plant’s meat should be. And there, congealing before them, is the barest hint of the shape of a man. The liquid light is beautiful, but the sounds are a gastric horror-symphony farts and glop-hisses into a paunchy bare-assed middle aged man. He’s groan-moaning in the fetal position. The grass around him burnt close then halo-stained the color of oil sheen on water farther out. He leans on one shaky arm, clutches his head. “Fuck my life.”
Pretty young man is gape-watching this. Looks to Jane, levitating and calmly offering him another puff on the joint. He passes, politely declines. A crowd in the Hooverville gathers to witness more of the weird shit that followed the three with the really good weed.
Glenn shrugs, not yet remembering the man he’s about to meet. Shimm approaches, cautiously, gasps when the man strains and two more arms glop out of his torso, then two more. “Who are you?”
He stands, covering his business with two hands and some scorched leaves. He gestures wide, ‘ta-da.’ “I’m your father.”
Jane slaps the pretty young man on the back, grinning and pointing as if it all makes sense. He’s more bewildered than ever, muttering ‘im-so-high-im-so-fuggin-high.’
The man who congealed from beautiful light (and gross gastric sounds). He’s quicker than he looks, stronger too. He catches Shim’s fist in flight, they strain. “Hell of a way to greet your father.”
That calls the right fist. He catches that one too. “What the fuck are you?”
“A whole of your half.” Huh? And he pushes Shimm’s shoulder hard. Releases her fist from his grip. Steps back. Snatches an offered blanket from the crowd to tie around his waist. “You’re half Tardigrade. I am” arms arrayed like peacock feathers, fingers wiggling for emphasis “I am the genuine article.”
“So why the fuck am I meeting you for the first time as a whole-grown person, what is your name?” Dad? “Never happening, so don’t propose that again.”
“Costello. He’s Costello.” Thank you, Glenn.
“And that guy’s the golem? Cool. Ok.” Two hands cupped round his mouth, two more again. Full throated shout. “All human people in the vicinity. You need to get the hell away from Glenn and some place safe, I dunno cave or mine? Deep is safe? Good luck.” The panic-babble. “Yeah sorry to be the Bear of bad news. Get it? Ok, daughter of mine we have got to boogey.” Shimmer or Shim. “I’m not calling you that. What is that like, your str..” Costello does not catch the punch that knocks him out.
*
WASHINGTON, DC
*
“If you could sit by a President’s side for a day, little pissant, you’d know the job is a sort of trap: a punishment for ambitious humans. It is this way by design and accident and historical accident. The constraints of power. The commitments some asshole made decades before you won the spot, and the right things and wrong reasons and vice versa. The goddamn kids with their memes. If I could find the one who first used Hooverville, I swear to God, I’d have him shot. I don’t care that the association-re-association is obvious and low-hanging-fruit.” The breathless rant into the bathroom mirror continues.
Outside the little washroom, the body man is on the door like a guard. “He’s talking out the nerves?” You’re going to give the boss his privacy. “He’s on in five, and its a big fucking deal.” All the more reason. You’re going to give the boss his privacy.
*
Thaddeus Hoover’s speech is even more exquisite than his last. It has to be. Somebody lobbed some kind of missile. The Normandy shot it down. Then somebody hit the Normandy and killed somebody’s kid. And then ‘we’ (we being the US Navy) shot/launch/deployed/utilized/applied-force-with some kind of exploding toy. That killed somebody else’s kid.
And away-we-go, or at least a lot of very angry people are howling for that. And that’s where Hoover’s words meet them: with the talon full of stabby “burn it down and salt the Earth” tools. Then he tries to verbally de-escalate, pump the brakes–give ’em the olive branch (or remind the world things might still go that way).
It was beautiful, moving. Maybe no one listened.
*
I-70 (WEST), COLUMBUS, OH (OUTSKIRTS)
*
Dive Diner off the highway. The dead eyed Fed, “Cliff” when he bullshits a fake name. He’s wincing through fuel food and bad coffee. His two superhuman companions sit next to him, twitching and jerking as if being beat by an invisible force. They are being beaten, the force insidious. For all their physical might, in spite of their resilience and ruthless tenacity, the super humans were quite sensitive, even fragile in one aspect: their ears. Superhuman hearing is a weakness, really.
“Cliff” can’t remember his own name. He’s jogging through his bullshit alias list alphabetically till he finds the name that’s his, the ‘before’ name. “Shut the fuck up!” and he shatters his coffee mug on the diner wall. There’s no one left to be startled.
The other cops in their convoy, the ones they commanded and lead. The two other diners. The few staff. They’re dead. Each lay where they fell or were tossed. The three with dead eyes try to regain ‘command’ after their rage. They try to finish a cup of coffee. They focus and “gut up” and “fight it” the nag, the incessant ice pick ear-fucking from Abel at a register your ears cannot hear.
They’ll give in and follow his “direct orders.” They always do, for a moment’s relief from the sleep-deprivation, from the pain–the constant nag stabs and the blurred vision and the vomiting and vertigo. In exchange for a moment’s peace or a few hours of sleep in silence, for escape from auditory torture (screaming from any Abel-hacked device with a microphone), the Feds would call Abel ‘God’ (when all alone) as he demanded or swear some other stupid humiliating oath he contrived.
When he first heard Abel’s voice, when it all began, the Fed thought he’d finally lost his mind. But the three superhuman Feds compared notes. Understanding Abel’s manipulation did not buy them freedom. When caught, Abel shifted from manipulation to coercion–from sly words to wrenching arms and battering ears with his icepick words buried in the static-hiss.
Moments before, when the Dead Eyed Feds were ordered home by human authority while Abel demanded loudly but unheard by all others that they continue, things got ‘heated.’
That’s when the push texts and the weather sirens blew. And the shrieking rage of all the tools and toys and electronics overwhelmed the three superhuman Jackals.
The three dead eyed Feds leave a diner full of carnage. The three drive west across a broken road in the Midwest.
*
PEORIA, IL
*
As above, so below. Go to the history books or Wikipedia if you want the raw facticity of the history of Earth(0x7C0). I’m not glorifying the meat-grinder with play-by-play. Flyover history is what you get.
It went a little something like this: for seven hours all the armies of Earth(0x7C0) made war on one another–human on human slaughter. Abel took control to prevent a nuclear exchange and proceeded to more-than-decimate anyone with the capacity to resist or threaten him. For seven days all the armies of the Earth fought Abel and his Motherships and drone swarms and the hacked systems that were his body-distributed. For 15 years Abel would herd and cull and purge and trim the human population whole.
And if the “Bunker Babies” had it better, it was good in that “they got three hots and a cot” kind of way. Food and medicine. And if yours was a modern bunker, each containing a bit of Abel? You got tortured in the name of (pseudo)science, subtly or explicitly. Tortured in a way that marked you or killed you (or maybe your whole bunker). But the grim realities (failures) of Continuity of Society won’t be talked about or acknowledged really until ‘truth and reconciliation’, until Dolores.
That’s a decade and a half a way, past woe and wrath. Past the running and the exhaustion and terror. And no one on Earth(0x7C0) here knows that there is hope on the other side of a mountain made of atrocities. No one knows this except Jack and those like her, sprinkled amongst all the peoples of the Earth(s).
As below. so above. Deep below the surface of the Earth in the COS bunker beneath the overgrown golf course in Peoria, far below Jane and Glenn and Shim and Costello, Jack sleeps. The child sleep/drug mutters the story her father told her in their grieving.
The medical instruments tell the medics and Abel impossible things. As above so below. The gift of authorship came with a price, the terrible fever and the seizures. All Abel would allow them to do was hydrate and cool her, and when the fits calmed, feed her.
She rambled about the broken knights riding up the river road–chased by the voice of their wizard, of the usurper-king that called himself “God.” She babbled about the battle and the holy smoke that blinded the wizard’s eye.
There’s a battle, hours away, between humanity and the broken war machines we made in our own broken image. No one will prove it, but the only reason we humans won it, or at least endured it, is Asynchronous Narrative Symmetry between the story told to the sick and soul-sick child and the fight about to be in the woods and on the golf course and in the skies above Peoria. The one Jack ramble-repeat-re-tells again and again-again in the bunker below.
The weather/air raid sirens and emergency phone alerts like the trumpets at the end of the world. All the interrupted broadcasts like “this is a test” except it’s not a test. For once it’s real. The curfews and the (further) Guard call ups. All the skirmishes are culminate-congealing in far-off places. Here is the moment when the world wants to end. The 7 hours have begun.
TOPSIDE
It’s then, when the weather sirens sound, when a dark cloud hangs on the western horizon. Spreading across the sky, too fast, flat-land thunder-storm speed begins to blot out the honied light.
The Fed truck rolls up and roars on to the golf course. Just one SUV, blacked out windows with the three Dead Eyed in it–urged on by Abel’s shrieking through the car speakers (silent to normal ears). The tank-truck tears up overgrown turff, red-and-blues on and siren wailing.
“What the fuck are you doing? Don’t ‘go to’, this is ‘run from’ time.” Costello yells, peeking from the bushes. Shimm follows Glenn out onto the golf course, out into the pool of truck-headlight. Both have their hands up. Jane, red eyed with a spliff dangling off her lip. She hovers, actually levitates cross legged, her hands up but no surrender in her.
“We surrender, just don’t hurt anyone.” Speak for yourself. Ditto. (From the women). “Ok then, I surrender. Just don’t hurt anyone and I’ll go wherever you want to take me.” No, Glenn. Dude, opposite of that.
“No deal.”
“Excuse me?” See, Gee? They weren’t ever going to be ‘cool.’
“We’re going to fucking end you, all of you.” The man-beast points North, at nothing, “As God commands.” The Dead Eyed Fed smiles, death’s head, teeth like fangs. “You. Your friends. The mud people shitting themselves in the woods. No witnesses.” The three Jackals stretch and distort into their bestial form–too tall, lean and rippling, all whip-chord knotted muscles. Their hands end in claws that shred steel. Were they not half hunched on legs bent backward like wolves, the things would be 8 feet tall.
The thunderhead arrives. The sun is gone at mid-day. Midwestern midnight thunderstorm. The crack of thunder. Every third bolt shows a silhouette high on the northern horizon: a Barrage Balloon his hovering toward them.
Jane, still hovering cross legged on a weed cloud, “Nope.” A puff, another quick puff, and she’s up and away with startling speed, trailing smoke behind. One Jackal pulls a pistol, joke small in its hand, tries to shoot Jane out of the sky.
“No!” Shimm shouts like thunder. A bolt of lightning leaps from the sky and off four fists, Shimm’s four fists, two-more arms having sprouted with the crack of thunder from her torso. The lightning flies, reflect-directed by Shimm’s fists to the pistol. The gun, half-melted-hot, falls to the ground behind a shrieking Jackal.
The sky has gone green and the wind is ripping up trees. That pissing rain sideways and all directions. The storm rages, everywhere but the golf course. There is wind and dark and relative calm, slow-mo relative to the rest of the world.
“I’m proud of you, Shimm. Your bear heritage has asserted itself.” Shut the fuck up, old man. “Ok, then.” Costello readies himself to fight, holding pieces of re-bar in two-of-six hands like short-swords.
Shim finds her fighting stance like a four-armed boxer. “Ok, Tardigrades are awesome. Fuck you dad, but also thanks.” You called me Dad! “Fuck you.”
The Jackals fan out, wielding electrified batons–sparky beating sticks. One pounces on Costello, they tumble back and the Tardigrade is guarding his face with extra hands and crossed-sword re-bar.
Another stalks toward Shimm, jabbing with the baton like a cattle prod, “What’s the matter?” Taunting.
Next jab, Shimm catches the stick, grips it even as her hand singes. Shim drinks the electricity. She laughs at the Jackal losing tug-of-war with her.
*
Glenn backs away from ‘Cliff’, the leader with his ghoul smile. “Jane!” tosses the golem a lit spliff, a mighty thing, long and well stuffed. He kills the whole reefer in one mighty inhale, blows the smoke out his nose. He finds the wobble-stance, a drunken boxer.
“A weakness. You can’t access your power without weed.”
“I don’t need weed to beat your ass, beast.” The golem in gifted clothes crouch-sways. The two face each other in a field of tall grass and blue flowers, by a water trap-become-pond on the overgrown golf course. Glenn gestures to the beast, “Come get it.”
Cliff charges, weapon high, swings for the golem’s face. Hits nothing.
Glenn leans, twists, strikes the man-beast as he passes. The golem invites him, “Again.” The Jackal Charges.
*
Jane, hovers high above the battle below a plate-cloud of weed smoke, the good weed–the holy, sacred, dank weed. God’s own.
She parts the cloud for Shimm’s lightning, or she will in a few seconds. Yes, that’s it.
“You’re speaking aloud.” Am I? “Yeah, you’re like narrating.”
And it’s only then that Jane remembers the young man with the pretty eyes is with her. “Why did you follow me?” I just, I don’t understand any of this. I’m just so fucking high right now. And I floated with you.
“Oh honey.” Jane’s hand on his cheek. “It’ll all make sense, I promise.” Really? “No. Never. But you gotta roll with it.” Jane hugs the young man, snaps her fingers over his shoulder and the plate-cloud of weed smoke parts, perfect timing for Shimm’s lightning.
*
Shimmer pulls the man-beast close, their hands grapple. Hair stands on end as bright prismatic-static leaps from the baton to the half-a-water-bear. She head-butts the beast, and lightning strikes through a hole in the weed cloud. The bolt finds the baton and the thing explodes throws Shimm and the beast-man back.
One Jackal, impaled. He’s nailed to the grill of the truck by a fragment of his own weapon–head slumped.
Shimm is tossed, strikes a sturdy tree. Head and back crack, she falls to turf, stunned.
*
Cliff straightens his jaw, rolls shoulders, cracks his neck. Charges again. Weapon high, this time he reaches his long arm low to snag dirt, turf, bits of sand. Before he swings, he casts it all at Glenn’s face, blinding him. Baton meets flesh, buzz and singe-shock. Glenn’s copper joint’s lock for an instant. The tackle, stumble. The golem is wiping at his eyes when the two roll into the pond, Cliff on top.
The mud-made-man and big brick of muscle trying to drown him. Of course they sink like stone. Glenn’s grasping at the Jackal’s too-long arm. Few-feet beneath the water, the golem gasps every gouging blow. Each punch with the great knife claws into his core. The mud-made-man is bleeding, bleeding out stuck in the muck bottom of the pond, copper ribs exposed.
Cliff crawls out of the pond. Quiet and low, the beast stalks toward Shimm.
*
Above, Jane and the young man peek up through the plate cloud. They watch the Barrage Balloon roll in.
“Do something.” The mind-blown pretty young man.
“The weed is magic, not me. I got nothin’.”
The great hiss hovering ship, loud even in the storm, is almost directly above them. The weapons platform takes up most of the sky, a floating city block (or two), the great thing is steady in the storm. Drones, great and small, pour from it. Swarm upon swarm falls off mothership and it’s belly turrets whir and spin to life. It’s sensors sense. Abel’s eyes search for the three targets, the intangibles, the elements he cannot control or account for–the anomalies. He cannot see them through the smoke.
The swarms carry his vision with them, give him sight. They dive toward the cloud.
Jane and her companion duck down, drop, flit and fly down quickly, shout: “We gotta go!” to whomever is below.
Shimm is beating the beast that had her father pinned to something past unconscious. Jane distracts her for a moment. Cliff attacks, pouncing at her back.
He’s got Shimm in a choke hold. Then the Jackal stands tall, lifts her off the ground. Shimm kicks, elbows. She growls, her eyes glow. She claws at the vice grip. Nothing.
“Let her go!” Jane screams, hovering on smoke just out of reach of the superhuman monster.
“Or what?” He chokes harder. The glow fades. Shimm’s going to die. “You’re going to watch her go.” He’s laughing, genuine joy from the broken man.
He strains, as if to snap her neck. Costello, half alive, whines “no” Jane screams the word and lunge levitates at his eyes, fists up and the pretty young man clinging to her back.
The Jackal strains, eyes wide, grunts. He drops shimmer in a heap at his feet. Surprise, stunned hubris, his eyes track down to the jagged piece of copper. He’s stabbed. Glenn runs him through with a jagged piece the beast ripped out of him.
The Jackal half-falls. Glenn kicks the man over. The golem doesn’t walk far. Glenn sags to a knee. He’s bleeding mud-red. It’s pouring out of gouges the superhuman left in his guts and chest.
“Jane, you gotta go. Now.” Drones. “I know. Take them, everybody. Keep the cloud above you.” But the things. They’ll see you. “I’m fine.” No you aren’t! “I’ll come back.” To a foundry weeks ago. “Listen, stoner.” I’m not that high. “Jane. I can’t explain.” Try. “I saved my game. Go. Please. Trust me.”
She does, Jane trusting anyone in any circumstance is a mundane miracle. Jane Iter gathers them, the half-choked half-a-water bear Shimm and the beat-up old man, Costello. She rallies the soaked squatters huddled in the woods, The cloud shifts, and they see it hovering, the Mothership. Shock and awe, and Abel hasn’t fired a shot.
The squatters gather and go, flee West toward anywhere-that’s-not there. The weed cloud follows, and the storm’s rage falls gentle through it. The people who puff? They puff, it’s a stressful situation and seems like the end of days (of course they puff). The sacred weed cloud maintains itself.
Jane remembers Lot’s wife, looks back anyway. Nothing happens to her. She sees Glenn glowing like a beacon in the mid-day-night of the thunderstorm.
*
Rain doesn’t fall on Glenn. Now, it’s the Barrage balloon that fills the sky above him, a disc two blocks across. Lights, cameras, weapons aimed and ready. A multitude of red eyes on drones and mothership all aimed at Glenn. Abel’s voice from loudspeakers rattles bones, blurs vision: “What are you? Why have you come to Earth?”
Glenn gathers himself, stands. “I am mud-made-flesh. Dirt blessed by some spark divine. Same as you. Ope! You don’t know anything about that do you?” The wounded golem, stands straight and tall, raises a fist high as if he could fly and were preparing for takeoff.
Glenn picks an eye, looks up and stares dead into it. “You know absolutely nothing of what it is to truly be alive do you, Abel?”
The thing rages. Abel shakes the Earth with a low bass roar that leaps to every pitch and frequency in the AI’s fit. Scores of drones overheat and overload, explode with the thing’s rage. Every rail gun, every rocket and laser, every drone-grenade, fires. Every JDAM and HEAT round. Every suicide drone lurches toward Glenn, and every Hellfire is loosed toward target. Every caliber shell in Abel’s arsenal fired at once.
All of them strike Glenn.
*
END FOUNDRY(8)