Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 31 Read online

  Hey. It happens.

  Once the machine (not to mention Lena’s bomb) rendered the wall of the mill into so many smithereens, it lurched but didn’t stop, instead simply veering off to the left a bit. Or maybe that was Topper, yanking on the wheel. Anyway, that’s the part that rattled me more than anything else. I was airborne a good two seconds, then crashed to the slimy floor of the tank-thing at his feet.

  At least I held onto my gun.

  Which stood me in good stead once I’d recovered enough to think again. The freak was looming over me, again paying no attention to the road, or corridor, or whatever it was we were driving down at the moment… yeah, another wall, I think… interior wall. It was hard to tell, jammed underneath two hundred and fifty pounds of insane manflesh.

  I waved the gun at him. “Back off, Topper, I mean it!”

  He called me Marie.

  Oh god.

  Waving the gun again, I tried to look sufficiently menacing. This was no doubt undermined by his view down the front of the corset. He grinned, and mumbled something about San Diego. What the fuck?

  Maybe I was still screaming or something, because just then Lena decided she’d had enough. “Harridan three, we’re coming in. You’re relieved from duty effective immediately. Surrender your weapon to the personnel who will be approaching the tank once we bring it to a halt.”

  I almost laughed. How exactly were they expecting to do that?

  A burst of machine gun fire came from above, mixed in with the aircraft engine. Oh, that’s how. At least it got Topper’s attention. He yanked his eyeballs away from my girls and scrabbled up top.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t want Lena to take his attention. Nor did I want to “surrender” anything to any goddamned “personnel” inside Bethlehem. “Topper!” I yelled, but he was beyond hearing me.

  I took a shot in his general direction, careful not to aim for anything vital. Like around the middle. Riot loads weren’t supposed to be fatal.

  What? Just thinking ahead here. He’d cleaned up nicely once before. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen again? Girl can’t be too picky these days.

  Good. That got his fleeting attention once more. He slithered back down below and stood before me. “Marie?”

  “Not Marie,” I said. Then I reached down and toggled my radio to blessed silence so we could talk privately. “Grace, and don’t you forget it, you moron.”

  “Grace….” The name slid off his pink tongue, making it sound dirty. “Graaace.”

  Oh good lord. We were in for a long night.

  Topper stuttered. That’s what the doctor had called it — not Bryukhonenko the surgeon, but that New Friends woman with three moles on her chin that always made him think of Jules Verne’s War of the Worlds for some reason.

  Threes, all evil things came in threes. That’s why men and women stayed in pairs. That’s why a woman had two tits, a man had two nuts, everyone had two eyes, two ears, two hands, two legs, two nostrils, two lungs for the love of God.

  Threes. And the stutters always came in threes. Dr. Roseglove, that was her name, like she had thorns turned inward to her hands, tiny red-brown spikes to pierce the skin, an Orchidglove would have been a very different doctor indeed, or a Lilly-of-the-Valleyglove and when he stuttered he lost time, he lost control, he lost his marker in the place of life.

  Bad things. Threes. A woman named Marie, not Grace. But he’d known Marie? Had she been a twin? Or worse, a triplet? Was Grace her middle name, her secret name, her confirmation name, her gang name, her spymaster’s handle?

  She was shouting. Outside something was bombing. His thigh hurt like fucking hell where something bad had happened.

  Adrenaline, he thought, a moment of clarity amid the stutter. Adrenaline and a pressure bandage, before I die of assassination.

  Why would anyone want to kill our Topper? Even he cannot answer that. Well, other than all the people he’s killed over the years, of course, but very few of them have anything to say about it now. Dead is dead, and no one’s got relatives no more, not in this fragged world.

  She’s still yelling, this woman, but he’s ignoring her in single-minded pursuit of his wound. He doesn’t worry so much about the scattered pellets embedded in the flesh of his leg. They will either kill him or they won’t.

  Topper jacked up into his open hatch. Rough Beast wasn’t equipped for anti-air operations. An angry woman loose with a riot gun down below was a problem. Amplified voices and high explosives outside were a bigger problem.

  He left his stutter behind when he realized that his enemies had come to ground. Obliging of them. Rough Beast was very well equipped for anti-personnel operations.

  A beefy woman stood in the red glare between shadows cast by his own arc lights, shouting for someone named Jason Adair to stand down. Topper didn’t know any Jason Adair, not since before the wars began when he might once have answered to that name, so he activated the electrically controlled chin turret that looked like a fuel junction and could surprise an unwary, beefy woman and turned this one into a spray of blood and cloth.

  Then he ground the crawler straight toward the ducted fan aircraft grounded before him. Topper admired the engineering of the thing — innovative, frightening, probably stolen from the Germans — until Rough Beast crushed it to scrap.

  He wasn’t sure which was more annoying: Marie screaming from below or some woman screaming from the crushed cockpit of the aircraft. In either case it didn’t matter. The metal yard was ahead, and that was his purpose here.

  Okay.

  Fuck.

  Breathe. Just get hold of yourself: breathe, bitch.

  ‘Cause when Topper took out Lena and her bodyguard du jour, not to mention the whole fucking aircraft thank you very much, well, okay, it sent me into a bit of a spin.

  So maybe I shot him again. Just a little bit. I’m really not sure, frankly. Everything got kind of crazy and blurry there for a few minutes. Like maybe there were psychotic drugs floating in the air around Topper.

  No, I didn’t mean anti-psychotic drugs. That would have helped. I meant what I said. Pay attention, I’m not going to say it again.

  It didn’t make a damn bit of difference to his apparent sanity, or lack thereof. I mean the shooting-him-again part, if it happened. The drugs, I have no idea. That was just a metaphor kind of thing. I was making a comparison, one thing to another.

  Although who knows?

  Anyway, my sanity, however. Well… like I said, I lost a few minutes there. Once everything was tracking again, I saw that the aircraft was a pile of oily rubble behind us, and Topper was rolling the tank forward, muttering about Germans.

  He never stopped with the verbiage, that one. If only any of it made the smallest bit of sense. I’d love to see him across a poker table. Looked like every thought was immediately broadcast.

  Not that I was likely to be playing poker again any time soon. Anyway, Lena had my deck of cards. Probably they were ground into the mud behind us, too.

  Mud and oil and blood and…

  Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it!

  I clipped my riot gun back into the rack beside the seat, just in case I was tempted to use it again. Because the part of my brain that had been functioning throughout the little misadventure of the past few minutes had just presented me with the irrefutable fact that my fate was now tied to that of this overgrown monkey, the one now drooling and gibbering and steering this massive bit of machinery towards what had to be the biggest metal yard I’d ever seen.

  In other words: no more Sisters, not for me, not here, not now. By climbing aboard this contraption. I’d thrown my lot in with Topper.

  God, I hoped he still cleaned up nicely.

  I sidled forward in the cab, or at least something reasonably approximating sidling. Tough to do when the thing was rolling and grinding and rocking back and forth, throwing me from side to side like a hamster in a blender.

  “Marie!” he said, catching sight of me. He gave me a del
ighted smile.

  I fell into the copilot’s seat beside him, or whatever you’d call it. Jump seat. Small bit of cushioning in a vast expanse of well lubricated metal parts and pieces. “Grace,” I said, in a friendly and conversational tone.

  “Marie-Grace?”

  “Just Grace. Remember, sweetheart, how we went over this?” He kept staring at me. “Well — never mind that, anyway. Just watch where you’re driving, okay?”

  “Driving, doing, zooming, duckling,” he said. But his head wafted back in the general direction of forward.

  “Good boy,” I said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” Sooner or later, some of this was going to make sense. For now, he just had to keep us alive.

  “W-74,” Topper sang out. “Tungsten steel. Hard as a shield, cuts like a blade, keep it sharp, never be late… Burma Shave!”

  Marie-Grace Just Grace snorted at him. He was pretty sure she’d shot him a bit earlier, but she had a nice smile. Maybe he’d been wounded one of the dizzy bitches from that airplane.

  Bullets fell on Rough Beast’s hull like lead rain. The locals were getting to it. But now he was in the metal yard, the El Dorado of this Pennsylvania hellhole.

  “Here, Missy Marie-Grace Just Grace,” Topper said, handing her down a gas mask. “Wear this a while and don’t get nothing on your skin.” He paused, solicitous as a fragment from some long-forgotten safety briefing (back when “safety” and “briefing” were applicable concepts) emerged into his forebrain like pack ice on a midnight river. “You weren’t planning to have no children, were you?”

  “Not right now,” she squealed.

  Topper wasn’t sure that Marie-Grace Just Grace had taken the real point of the question, but duty had been discharged. He pressed the big red button labeled “DO NOT PRESS.” It was wired just below a portrait of Bing Crosby with a Hitler moustache.

  Several loud, ominous thumps echoed from the outside of the crawler’s hull. This was followed by a hissing noise. Topper belatedly remembered to pull on his own gas mask, then wondered what he’d done with the chemical suit.

  The part of him that was sane enough to keep the rest of the traveling circus alive watched the sweep second hand on the dashboard clock — Swiss timing in a genuine hand carved Chinese ivory casing, and possibly the most valuable thing aboard Rough Beast. Topper liked his treasures portable. He was a man who’d left more towns under more clouds than Seattle saw in a year.

  One hundred and eighty seconds later he bailed out into the dissipating yellow fog. Defending fire had stopped, except for the occasional stutter of a weapon discharged as a finger shriveled too tightly in death. That hardly counted, though Topper knew a bullet was a bullet no matter who had fired it.

  He wasn’t moving right. The dizzy bitch really had shot him. Couldn’t have been something too fierce, or his leg would be shattered. Riot gun with rubber loads, maybe? Who the hell would hang around a Pennsylvania mill town at night armed with sublethal munitions? That was like bringing a housewife to a bullfight.

  Ahead of Topper were thirty-six pallets of high grade tungsten steel. Finest kind, ready for shipment to the manufactories of Detroit and Fort Wayne. Or ripe for the jacking by an enterprising man with good intelligence and solid orders.

  Or woman, he reminded himself. Topper turned to stare at Rough Beast, wondering what he’d been thinking and which part of him had been thinking it. Her head poked up now, insect-eyed and blank-faced in the gas mask.

  An electric turret whined as she brought one of the Bofors to bear on him.

  “Screw you,” Topper shouted, and began dragging the cargo chains out. It was hijacking time. He didn’t have what it took to die again right now.

  After monkey-boy propositioned me a few times, I knew we were getting somewhere. Excellent. I could work with that.

  The discussion of children, however, was a tad premature. I almost said something, but then he pressed some big goddamn red button and all manner of excitement began.

  No, the other kind of excitement.

  That all changed once he’d killed everyone within a ten-mile radius of the tank. Or so it seemed, anyway, given the swath of destruction all around us. After that, he turned back to me, with a terrible, deeply insane look about him.

  I mean, he’d been insane all along. I knew that. You might have even said it was part of his charm. But I’d just watched him kill everyone I worked for, lived with, fucked and fought. Then I’d watched him kill everyone at the mill I was supposedly defending. Then he turned and looked at me.

  “Now or never, baby,” I said to myself, cranking one of his cannon turrets to point at him. That ought to put the fear into him.

  All he did was proposition me a third time, then turn away and start fooling with a tangle of chains.

  I threw my riot gun at him. Insane I can handle. Inconsistency: that makes me crazy.

  “Mary Grace Just Grace,” he babbled on, as he started spreading the chains out on the gravel in front of us. He ignored the riot gun completely, after glancing at it. I clambered down out of the tank and retrieved it, but it was too big to hold if I was going to help him get the pallets aboard.

  Sure, I helped him. He could barely move the damn things. I was in far too deep to back out now. Might as well get our business done in here and get the hell out. Then we could talk about children, or whatever the fuck he wanted.

  Men. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t stake ‘em out for the vultures. Though some of them might be improved. Including this crazy old bastard.

  He was my last ticket.

  Topper yanked the cold steel out of the charnel house of the mill one quarter-ton ingot at a time. The winches could handle the load, no problem — they were made for much heavier work than this, naval-grade hardware salvaged off a captured Kriegsmarine surface raider which had been broken in a gray-market yard hidden up the Rappahannock.

  The girl helped. She was small, and weak, and not half-rebuilt out of spare parts and Soviet medicine, but she was tough and smart. Topper wondered how he knew her. Good-looking, too, and not just in an any-woman-in-a-war-zone way.

  Somehow having his hands on all this hard-case metal was bring him back into himself. Memories spiraled in kaleidoscope paths to land in partially assembled chiaroscuros somewhere deep in our Topper’s head. Like how a real person might think, it occurred to him, coherent images and more than a little bit of focused recall stitching together into timelines.

  He wanted to turn away from some of them — deeply unpleasant, unpleasantly deep, or just infused with a stunning sadness for the boy and man someone with his name and face might once of have been.

  It was her, he realized. Not the metal. Not the dead. Not the distant thump of artillery and first drone of engines gone raiding in the cold, smoky sky. Not the screaming cats and bleeding eye sockets of memory. Not the white coats and wire-rimmed spectacles which had dominated so much of the intervening years.

  Her.

  Topper stepped closer, subtle as a pork roast in a synagogue, and sniffed.

  “What the hell are you doing, you cre-” she shouted, then stopped when she got a good look at his face.

  “M… Grace,” Topper said, and looked her full in the eyes. He could fall into that pooled, dark amber forever, he realized.

  Something was waiting to be born here beneath the shadow of Rough Beast, behind the walls of Bethlehem. He could feel it stirring inside him.

  A soul. Hope. Affection.

  Love?

  He closed his eyes and breathed her in. She struck him all the way down into the lizard brain, scent and smell wired by million years of evolution and a hundred thousand generations of hairless apes dropping from the trees to say, this one. This is the one.

  Before he could open his eyes again, she kissed him.

  Somewhere inside the shattered Japanese puzzle box of his head, he was made whole.

  “Let’s get the last of this stuff on board,” Topper said, rough but gentle as he drew her into his arm
s. “Then we’re gonna say screw it to the Sisterhood and the New Friends and the Federals and the Wehrmacht and go be alone together. There’s freemen in the Alleghenies would pay good money for our cargo, and hire us to raid for them.”

  His mind was dancing with visions of a quiet cabin, an open sky, and skin exposed for no purpose more sinister than a long slow trail of the tongue.

  God, it was like being a kid again.

  For the first time in his life, Topper had woken up.

  Yeah. So. Okay, I kissed him. Like I said, I’d kind of run out of options at that point.

  But it was more than that. Much more.

  When Topper turned and looked at me, really looked at me; when he got my name right; when the man that lived somewhere underneath all the layers of insanity our world had thrust at him suddenly bled through and took charge… I kissed him.

  And when he pulled me into his arms and I caught the scent of him — the real, true scent, beyond the oil and blood and gasoline and the rank sweat of fear and battle — it hit me right below the belt.

  Yeah, there. I meant what I said. How do you think things become clichés, anyway?

  “Right,” I said. “Last load and we’re out of here.”

  And we rumbled off into the sunset. Sunrise. Whatever: I’m telling the story here, okay? The light changed and took us with it into a different world.

  About the Author

  Jay Lake lives and works in Portland, Oregon, within sight of an 11,000 foot volcano. He is the author of over two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with novels from Tor Books, Night Shade Books and Fairwood Press. Jay is also the co-editor with Deborah Layne of the critically-acclaimed Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press. His 2009 novels are Green from Tor Books, Madness of Flowers from Night Shade Books, and Death of a Starship from MonkeyBrain Books. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has also been a Hugo nominee for his short fiction and a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee for his editing. {{{ Website: http://jaylake.com {{{ Shannon Page{{{Shannon Page was born on Halloween night and spent her formative years on a commune in northern California?s backwoods. A childhood without television gave her a great love of books and the worlds she found in them. She wrote her first book, an adventure story starring her cat, at the age of seven. Sadly, that work is currently out of print, but see the Fiction page of her website for current and upcoming publications. Shannon is a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, has no tattoos, and lives in San Francisco with nineteen orchids.