Every few nights, Lonnie Wayne comes out to our spot with his radio on his hip for talking. He moves slower than he did when we first met. That was back when the war started and I was running with wannabe gangbangers. Lonnie stepped in and acted like a father. Told me not to mistake being a gangster for being a warrior. He showed me how to become a man instead of just an adult.
Seems like we have the same conversation every time.
“How are the boys in Iron Cloud squad?” I’ll ask, my voice whispering out of his radio like the ghost of static.
“They’re all right, I reckon,” he’ll say. “Give them some time. It’ll be fine once we get home. Best you keep your distance for now. Hank’s got unofficial orders out there to shoot if y’all come closer than a football field.”
“Would they?”
He never answers that one, just cocks his hat and heads back to the campsite of the day. Gives me a lazy wave over his shoulder and squints into the setting sunlight.
The general returning to his troops.
Gray Horse Army is a sprawling parade. A thing of beauty. Patched together and rambling and shuffling down abandoned country roads. Dozens of times we pass through the remains of long-evacuated towns. It’s not often that anybody greets us. More likely they see the dust rising on the horizon and they light out. Wait until we’ve fanned out and taken everything we need and moved on.
Probably a smart move.
Spider tanks haul the heavy-duty supplies. High rankers get to ride up on the turret decks. The rest of the infantry marches in a loose line, staying close to their platoon vehicle but well out from under its feet. It’s a kilometer-long line of men and machines, all walking, stretching and contracting like an earthworm. Some segments stretch too thin. Other parts bunch up into vulnerable clumps. The war is over, but the sergeants still sprint up and down the column on their tall walkers, ferrying messages and barking commands down to the infantrymen.
“Keep your spacing!”
“Shut up!”
“Move out!”
Most of the troops on the ground have to ass everything they need to survive. Some squads have rigged up scavenged Rob quads, field-stripped into what the guys call “mules” or “pack dogs.” Headless, mid-sized walkers that trot mindlessly behind their home squad, following dutifully, curved metal backs sprouting hundred-pound canvas packs like mushrooms.
Sometimes I get a flush of adrenaline thinking that I’ve forgotten and left my supplies behind. Then I remember I don’t need anything to survive. Not a fire, not shelter, and not food or water. Whatever Rob nightmare is buried in the base of my neck is all I need to keep moving. I just have to keep a football field between me and what used to be my people, or else my old friends will blow my head off.
“Tell me of the prairie again,” says Chen Feng as we walk. Her soft strange voice comes over the radio embedded in my head. I smile mentally. She thinks this is the afterlife. That we dozen parasites are on some kind of odyssey through a ghost world. She’s just interested in seeing the sights.
“You talking the tallgrass prairie? Well, first of all, it ain’t flat like people think. It rolls. Up and down, like an ocean. And it isn’t empty. You’ll see foxes and owls. Bison and deer and rattlesnakes and toads. Grasshoppers that just flicker everywhere in the sunlight, back and forth like bullets. There’s nothing like it, Chen. You can stand out there in the tall grass under that big sky and feel the breath of the wind coming down to push your hair over your face. . . .”
My face. I remember my face. I wonder if Chen remembers hers, but it seems rude to ask. I resist reaching up to touch the place where my jaw used to be. Trailing off, I keep walking and try to rein in my thoughts.
“The other spirits are afraid,” says Chen. “They believe the villagers of Gray Horse will punish us.”
I might have had the same thought.
“It’ll be fine. It’s a nice place with nice people,” I transmit. “We fought and they’ll respect that. Don’t be afraid.”
“I am not afraid,” she transmits back. “We must accept punishment for our sins before we can move on to meet our ancestors. We will all be judged.”
I can tell that a lot of the Osage soldiers can smell home. Months out and with a winter to get through, permanent grins are still settling into their weathered faces. The sergeants scream louder and the infantrymen pay less and less attention. Home, is what they’re all thinking. Home is near. The shared thought is a current of excitement arcing between every man in the Gray Horse Army.
Every living man, anyway.
The living don’t see us, but we sure do see the living. On the camp perimeter, the small group of us wearing parasites are watching and listening. These days, we don’t hardly even sleep.
Best you keep your distance.
The grisly sight of my own body reminds me that my homecoming may not be all smiles. No matter what Lonnie tries to tell me, or what I try to tell Chen. The fear of what’ll happen when we reach Gray Horse keeps me awake. And the fear is what tells me to keep a close eye on the round man, Hank Cotton.
For better or worse, the fear is why I learn his secret.
It’s the full moon. Midnight on the scrub prairie and the campfires have burned down to cinders. Even the Cotton patrol has fallen asleep in the dull whispering cold. When I see the flash of light in the sky, I move. Will my legs into motion and lurch alone through the darkness of a rutted meadow. Years ago this was a cornfield, but now it’s damp earth sprouting thousands of stiff, rotting stalks. That flickering light in the sky is some kind of radio talk. It flares every now and then through the darkness like somebody with a hand half covering a flashlight.
I’ve been seeing flashes of blue smoke to the south for a few weeks now, like a lightning storm just over the horizon. Every now and then, I catch snatches of formal communication protocols. Query this. Assertion that. It reminds me of my old friend Nine Oh Two. Reminds me that I kind of miss him. It strikes me that, at this point, I may have more in common with that walking scrap pile than I do with my old squad.
The freeborn talk in blue wisps, but this here is an altogether different light.
Chen watches me go, saying nothing, but turning slow in the field like a broken mannequin. She watches me until I’m out of view. We may be dead, but she still has feeling enough to be protective of me in a way the other parasites are not.
Before long, I see a weather-beaten farmhouse.
In the final march of the New War, when the parasite claimed me and forced me to take the lives of my comrades in a nightmare haze, ribbons of evil light poured out of the sky and into my skull, controlling me. It was an orange haze, sick and cold. And now I’m seeing that same fearsome light.
It’s sputtering like a candle in a jack-o’-lantern from the broken-out window of the farmhouse.
I creep slow through an overgrown lawn, pushing through dead, knee-high grass toward that gaping window. The orange light calls to me. I can feel it, pulsing like radiation. It’s Rob-made and I keep thinking maybe it’s speaking, whispering something secret that makes my ears ring.
At the window, I see. Something is real wrong with Hank Cotton.
The big Osage man is on his knees in the pitch-black living room of the abandoned farmhouse. He’s in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, wearing some kind of pale white helmet, the toes of his work boots propped against the dust-coated hardwood floor. In his hands, he holds what looks like a cube made of black glass.
“Praise be to you,” he says, whispering hoarsely. “Praises upon praises.”
This man hardly looks like Hank. In the last weeks, pounds of muscle and fat have slithered off his bulky frame. He’s getting downright skinny, his skin fading like an old photograph and hanging slack and loose. Those high cheekbones that used to anchor a chubby face have started jutting out in a gaunt, skeletal kind of way.
Something dark is running from his temple down the side of his face. It drips onto the floor quietly, like a clock ticking.
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Tap. Tap. Tap.
It’s not a helmet that he’s wearing. Old Hank has hauled an autodoc out here into the woods. Just the head-trauma unit. Running on one of those portable Rob batteries. Here in this hollow wooden living room, he’s got it set up and it’s working hard.
“Praise be to you,” he whispers again, clutching the black cube against his chest. Orange sparkles of light are prickling the air in a line between the cube and the autodoc. That thinker must be controlling the surgical machine, guiding its sharp fingers.
The autodoc has got the skin of Hank’s forehead peeled up. Two forceps holding the small wound open. A chunk of his pale white skull has been sawed away. Inside, his brain is a gray smile. Black claws pry and prod, building something. Taking instructions from the cube of metal he holds tight in his fingers.
Hank chuckles, still whispering his praises.
Then, the man stops speaking midsentence. Sniffs the air and closes his eyes. For a moment, all is still and quiet save for the quick grinds of the autodoc motors and the tapping of blood on hardwood. Then, real slow, Hank turns his head to face me. It is too dark for him to see me, but I feel his eyes settle on my face.
The dagger fingers of the machine keep operating, flickering, caressing that glistening gray pinch of meat over his eyes.
Hank smiles in the dark, lips peeling away from his teeth in a skull’s grimace. Orange wisps of communication rise up off the cube, and I get the feeling that they’re searching for me, threatening. Rising like cobras and swaying in the air.
“Do you love him?” asks Hank, eyes half closed.
I only stare, horrified.
“Lonnie is the closest thing you got to a father,” says Hank. A little smile darts around his open mouth. He looks like a man who is dreaming. “You love him like you would love your own daddy. If you had one.”
Without a face, I can’t speak. My voice is only over local radio and I don’t remember responding, but I do. The cube hears me. It can hear me and because of that, so can Hank.
“I do,” I say.
“Then don’t tell him,” says Hank, head still tilted to the side. The skin sags from his face and that dark line of blood moves down his temple. “I’m his best friend. Don’t tell him about the spooklight. Leave his troubled mind be.”
Spooklight?
Hank’s eyes are pulsing with an orange glint.
Those gleaming wisps are floating over Hank’s face and seeping into the dark open wound on his forehead. The black cube is in his hands. It’s glowing now, forming complicated patterns. A brain box. And whatever is inside it is doing something to Hank. Putting some bad medicine on him.
Hank keeps smiling at me, his big head hitched sideways and teeth crooked and gleaming. He looks like a hanged man. Another corpse walking in the night.
“Sssshhh,” he says.
I stagger away quick.
Back through the rutted field and on to my home spot.
The Chinese soldier is waiting for me, pale as a mummy in the moonlight. Her eyeballs are white-frosted but she sees perfectly well in the night. All of us do.
“Where did you travel?” asks Chen.
“Nowhere,” I respond.
“The soldiers do not want us here,” she says. “The living and the dead should not mix. We spirits are meant to walk alone in Dìyù. Only after we are judged can we move on—”
“Stop it,” I hiss.
Saying nothing, I finally notice: Our moonlit clearing is empty. It’s just Chen and me. There are a few low, martial silhouettes of sleeping spider tanks a couple of hundred yards away among the embers of dying fires.
“Where are the others?” I ask.
“Our kindred spirits were afraid. They have gone walking into the woods.”
“You stayed with me?”
The small woman stands tall, not moving. Head up and blind eyes wide. I sense that she is smiling.
“Why?” I ask.
“This is our path. We must wander the courts of Dìyù until we are allowed to move on,” she says. “Perhaps I will see your tallgrass prairie after all.”
5. THE STACKS
Post New War: 5 Months, 27 Days
In its death throes, Archos R-14 transmitted a torrent of information via seismic vibrations. My careful study of the Ragnorak dispersal patterns revealed another presence hidden under the frozen surface of extreme eastern Russia. Outside the small city of Anadyr, a previously unknown artificial intelligence was buried in a mine, tended to by a maintenance man named Vasily Zaytsev. Under his care, the sentient machine was treated like an animal and exploited for its tactical contributions to keeping the local human population safe. After the seismic disturbance, however, the machine called Maxim found that it had a new friend—an unwelcome guest who was not about to leave.
—ARAYT SHAH
NEURONAL ID: VASILY ZAYTSEV
From deep in the twilight stacks, I think I hear the seashell roar of the freight elevator. I crouch in place, listening, the hair on my arms standing up. Someone is coming down the shaft.
This is the first time in two weeks.
I throw down my bolt cutter and struggle to stand on cramping knees. Holding my sore back, I hobble down the narrow aisle to the elevator anteroom. I shield my eyes against the overhead fluorescents as I emerge from the stacks.
“How long?” I ask.
“Thirty seconds,” replies Maxim, his soft voice echoing over the distributed speaker system.
“I thought we disabled the shaft?”
“They found a way to enable it.”
I push greasy hair from my eyes and glance around the anteroom. It doesn’t look good. Itching my thick beard with one hand, I tut-tut over the state of this place.
“They will be worried,” I say.
The anteroom is filthy. Littered with the empty carcasses of military individual food rations. Each brick of plastic is packed tightly with metal tins of porridge with tushonka, gobies, sprats in tomato sauce. Dozens of flimsy metal trivets glint from the floor, charred from the fuel pellets I use to heat my tea. My own waste is in tall PVC buckets pushed against the wall. Flat boards are placed over top, but they do little to reduce the stench.
And, of course, there are the heaps of cables, panels, and computer components that I have been tearing from the guts of this machine. For months, I have been frantically trying to lobotomize this invader that calls itself Archos R-14.
Trying and failing.
“Ten seconds,” says Maxim.
My shadow shivers as the fluorescents vibrate with the approach of the freight elevator. Quickly, I limp around to the incriminating wires and tools and kick them into the stacks. After so much time on my knees crawling over the rock floor, I don’t trust myself even to lean over. My eyes are dim from staring through shadows, but the narrow lanes swallow up the evidence of my tinkering.
My work here is almost done. I cannot allow the scientists from above to interfere. I know they are worried. I stopped talking to them days ago over the radio. They are frightened of what I might do, alone down here with their precious machine.
“Now,” says Maxim, quietly.
The elevator settles into place with a thud. I listen for the sound of army boots on sheet metal. Finger the knife on my hip. If they have sent a squad of soldiers down, then there is no hope to save Maxim. And no hope for Anadyr.
But I hear only the labored breathing of one person. The metal release lever clunks into place and the wooden-slatted inner door rolls up on screaming hinges. Then the steel exterior door rises.
Leonid stands under the elevator light, a lanky silhouette. I say nothing, stand out of the glare. It is too bright for me to look directly at the mathematician.
Slowly, he steps out of the elevator. He holds a plate of steaming food in one hand. Cabbage and sausage. The delicious smell only reminds me of how much I stink. He squints at the small dirty room. There are no surfaces down here. Gingerly, he sets the plate of food on the ground. Notices
me.
“Mr. Zaytsev?” he asks. “Is that you? It smells like a sewer down here.”
“Da,” I say. “I have been working.”
“You’ve been eating field rations,” he says, looking at the mess of torn plastic wrappers and metal containers. He notices the buckets against the wall and hastily steps away from them. Moves into the center of the room, under the light.
“Suhoi paiok does the job,” I say.
“But there is no need for it, Mr. Zaytsev. We have plenty of hot food above. The elevator is fixed. You may come back topside now. You are relieved.”
I lower my head and scratch the back of my neck. Step back and let the shadows settle over my shoulders. It is so bright in the anteroom. I prefer the glittering starfields of the stacks. The chatter of the LEDs comforts me in the cold dark.
“I still have much work to do,” I murmur.
“You cannot solve what is wrong with Maxim,” says Leonid, stepping forward. “You’re just a mechanic, my friend. We admire your attention to the practical details, but please, leave this problem to the experts.”
“Only I can fix him.”
Leonid lets out a bark of laughter, then swallows it quickly. But the echo persists. The thin man’s eyes grow cold. “Enough of this. Come now. Your ministry record indicates you were a troechnik who barely finished professional technical institute. Come out of those shadows. We are leaving.”
I stride out quickly with a lump of anger in my throat. It pleases me to see the thin man step back in fright. I smile through my beard as he presses his back against the wall.
“Don’t be a fool,” says Leonid, looking down his long nose at me. I find that my hand sweeps out of its own accord and wraps firmly around his throat. I hold his bird neck steady, carefully, feeling the lump of his Adam’s apple against the web of my thumb. Foul breath pistons in and out of my nostrils.
“Never call me that,” I say. “I am not a fool. You geniuses up there are responsible for this. I am down here cleaning up your messes. As I always have. You would not even be alive if it weren’t for me. Me and Maxim.”