Люциус Шепард - Eternity and Other Stories

GRob stirs, stands, and comes to join him on the lip of the fountain. She unlatches her gauntlets and dips her bare hands into the water and splashes her face.

“Go on take a bath if you want,” Wilson says, grinning. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

She shoots him a diffident look. “Uh-huh.”

“Hey, I’ve seen your ass before.”

“That was training. You see it now, you might take it for license.”

The clear modulation of her voice and her use of the term “license” alert him. “You’re not on downs,” he says.

“I boosted IQ when I racked out. I wanted to work through this mess.”

“Yeah, same here.”

“You hit on anything?”

Wilson tells her his theory in brief and then asks what she came up with.

“We’re close,” she says, patting her face with damp hands. “But I don’t think this place has anything to with Paradise. I think it’s all hell.”

“How you figure?”

“Only things we’ve seen so far are flowers, the wolves, and a pearl with some blood on the door and nobody inside. Now maybe the pearl came from Paradise, but whatever dropped it, dropped it in hell. We find a door that leads out of it, it leads to the brass trees with the boiling fucking air.” With a flourish, she wipes her left hand dry on her thigh. “Hell.”

“Might be other doors.”

“Probably thousands, but I don’t get they’re gonna lead us anywhere good.” GRob cups her right hand, scoops up water and lets it dribble down her throat onto her chest. “Maybe you can reach Paradise from here, but I figure we might hafta pass through somewhere bad to get there. And even if we find it, what the fuck we supposed to do then? We’re infidels, man. We’re unbelievers.”

“You may be taking this all too literally.”

“Taking it metaphorically just makes you confused.” It seems she’s about to say more, but she falls silent, and Wilson says, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t hold back now. You got something, let’s hear it.”

“Okay.” GRob dries her right hand. “Maybe it’s BS, but back in Tel Aviv I was doing a tech lieutenant. Guy’s always trying to impress me what a huge deal he was. Mr. I’ve-Got-A-Secret. He told me they were fixing up something special for Al Qaeda. A bomb. Didn’t know what kind, but he was working on the triggering device. Part of it was this big fucking electric battery produced seventy thousand volts. So when I saw him at the compound…”

“Fuck!” says Wilson.

“See what I’m saying? I saw him here, I remembered all that shit about hell and seventy thousand ropes. I said, Okay, maybe it’s a coincidence. Then when Baxman started running his mouth in the carrier, when he mentioned it, I was like, Aw, man! This is too weird, y’know.”

Wilson studies the back of his left gauntlet, the grain of the plastic forearm shield, his thoughts looping between poles of denial and despair.

“Seventy thousand’s such a weird number,” GRob says. “I thought it was like a special number for ragheads, so I did a search. Only time it’s mentioned is in relation to hell. Seventy thousand ropes. Seventy thousand volts. Some ol’ raghead mystic back in the day, he got the word wrong… or he received the message right and didn’t know what volts were, so he said, ‘ropes.’”

“Fuck,” says Wilson again—there seems little else to say.

“No doubt.” GRob hefts her rifle. “I say we blow a few holes in those brass trees. Clear a path. See what’s on the other side.”

“Might be a big goddamn forest,” Wilson says dubiously.

“Didn’t you read it? It’s not that big. And we got a lot of goddamn firepower. The other side of it reads infinite, but…” She shrugs. “What’s the option? We hang out here, live off battle juice and C rats? That sucks.”

“Baxter’ll come up with something.”

GRob snorts. “Forget him! Man’s sitting over there drooling into his food tube. I never heard anyone give an order like he gave us. Take downs in the middle of the shit? What’s that about?!”

“You were acting pretty crazy.”

“I saw a fifty-foot wolf that smelled like a dumpster eat my best fucking friend! If I was outa line, Baxter shoulda slapped me down. No way he shoulda told me to get druggy.”

“He’ll bounce back.”

“Oh, yeah. He just needs a nap. That’s whack, man! He was right for command, we’d have stopped five, ten minutes, then kept on burning. He’s over! You’n me, we gotta look to each other from now on.”

Baxter’s helmeted face, half-obscured by reflection, seems at peace. Asleep or on the nod, it’s no way to be in the midst of war. Wilson wants to ignore the idea that Baxter’s showing cracks, but he doesn’t dispute GRob’s last statement. “What’s Arizona like?” he asks.

“You live right next-door. Don’t you know?”

“I been to the ruins at Betatakin. That’s about it.”

“Got cheap package stores. Cheap smokes. The desert’ll trip you out. I don’t know. It’s cool.” She gazes off into a private distance. “Running the border towns was the best. We’d start out in Nogales and hit the cantinas all the way into New Mexico. Drinking and dancing.” She gives her head a little flip, and Wilson thinks the gesture must date back to the time when her hair was long and she’d toss it back from her face. He imagines her with a summer dress clinging to her body, laughing, living crazy under the stars, and how they met and had a night beneath the stained ceiling of a twenty-dollar motel room and the next morning they drove off in opposite directions and forgot one another, but their bodies remembered…

“Where’s your head at, man?” GRob asks. “Am I losing you, too?”

“Just a little vacation. I’m back.”

She gives him an even look and extends her hand for the grip. They lock up, chest to chest, eye to eye, and she says, “We get outa this, man… You’n me. For real.”

“Are you motivating me?”

“Fucking A! Is it working?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Think hard. Think a week in Rome. We’ll see how it sets up after that.”

“Naw, how about somewhere by the water? Tangiers.”

“You got it! Soon as we clear debriefing.”

Wilson searches for the place behind her eyes, the place every woman’s got where they keep their soul ray shuttered, and feels it from her. “We’re not getting out of this,” he says.

She holds steady. “It’s still a promise.”

They stay locked, and then she says, “Fuck the monsters! We’re the real monsters here.”

“Fanged motherfuckers!” Wilson says. “We rule the goddamn world!”

“We’re poison in a plastic pill. They eat us, they’ll crap blood and scream for their mamas.”

“They won’t eat us, we’ll eat them. We’ll burrow into their bodies and live there. Raise our babies on their dead flesh.”

“We’re too cool to die! Too sexy!”

“We’re movie stars with mad fucking weapons!”

“We’re scrap iron…”

“We’re wild dogs!”

“…we were born for the shit!”

1323 hours

On waking, Baxter exhibits a passive attitude. He doesn’t seem to care what they do. He’s obviously been running high levels of down. GRob draws Wilson aside and suggests they leave him, he’s likely to become a liability. Wilson tells her he can’t do that yet. He tries talking to Baxter, says they’re thinking about trying the forest, and Baxter just goes, “Whatever.”

The three of them stand in front of the pearl, their rifles set to fire mini-grenades, and walking forward together they clear a path of smoldering brass wreckage. They walk, stop, fire, walk. Wilson plays his tunes to muffle the detonations. Globules of melted brass accumulate on the ground. The trees on either side are blackened, their leaves shredded by shrapnel. Shattered glowing twigs snatch at their suits. Acrid smoke mixes with the rising steam. Big brown rats scurry underfoot, some of them burning. There must be thousands. Their squeaking becomes a shrill tapestry of sound that comes like feedback to Wilson’s ears. Ten minutes in, Baxter calls for a halt and GRob says, “Fuck you, Jim!” and then, to Wilson, says, “Keep firing!” Baxter hesitates, drops behind, but catches up after a few seconds. He fires, however, only intermittently, and doesn’t react when urged to give an effort. It takes almost an hour to carve a four-foot-wide path to within a dozen feet of the forest’s boundary. Through gaps in the gleaming foliage they see what appears to be a field of yellow flowers. The field reads infinite in all directions but one. On his helmet screen, Wilson begins to receive an inconstant digital image of the cave mouth, sections of it eroding into pixels. He’s excited at first, hopeful, but when he goes to a deeper view, the display shows werewolves prowling in the field beyond the cave. He asks Baxter to contact command, but Baxter’s not functioning on a soldier level, so Wilson tries making contact himself. The command channel remains dead.