Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

Good news, faithful reader. I’m not dead yet.

Okay, that was it. Good news now officially over.

I’ve seen some of the comments in the last few posts suggesting I might not be the least racist person you know. Let me take a moment to make something clear. I think there’s a lot of really great Muslim folks out there. Lots of them. There’s a guy here with the head of a crocodile who was pretty devout for a long time. He’s a nice fella. Cat Stevens? Love him. Rumi? That guy’s poetry got me laid in college, and I shall be grateful forever.

Okay, I suck. I don’t know any Muslims, okay? I didn’t know any Egyptians before I came here. But it’s not because I’ve got anything against them. Allah doesn’t seem any weirder to me than the version of Jesus that the Pentecostals are all fired up about. I don’t cross the street anytime I see a woman in a head scarf. I’ve never secretly toilet-papered a mosque. I’m a fucking liberal, okay? We love everyone but Newt Gingrich.

There’s only one kind of Muslim I really fucking hate—the kind that’s trying to kill me. And if they converted on the battlefield, became Episcopalians? I’d still fucking hate ’em.

The New Temple in Karnak fell a week ago. We put it off as long as we could, me and Fortune and Lohengrin. We even stopped the armored division for a while. We had some help at the end from a local ace who could summon up scorpions. Battle of the Bugs, we called it.

She’s dead now.

They came in force. I don’t know how many. Hundreds, thousands. The Living Gods who’d stayed behind to defend their homes and their temple were slaughtered. Lohengrin would probably have died there, too, given the chance. A lot of people went when they lit the New Temple itself on fire. His armor is pretty kick-ass, but I don’t see it stopping him from crisping up. The way they did.

Horus. Nice guy. Wings, but can’t fly. In New York, he’d be just another schulb in Jokertown looking for work. In Egypt, he was a god. And now he’s dead. One of the last things I saw there before I pulled the last of my wasps in was his body being paraded around on a stick. Lohengrin still thinks we should have stayed. Fortune says it was better to move on. To live long enough to protect the people we still can.

I’m not sure anymore who those are supposed to be. We’re on the road south to Aswan. The local folks are under the impression we might be safe there, but every day that hope looks more and more like a pipe dream. The attacks are coming daily now. Not full-on, we’retaking-you-out Götterdämmerung , but skirmishes. At a guess, we lost about a hundred people yesterday. We’ll lose that many more today. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Think I’m making this up? Bug boy sounding a little histrionic? Well, I’ve still got my cell phone, and it’s still good for shooting video. It took all night to upload this—a 28.8 line from an abandoned trading post or convenience store or whatever that was—and now you can watch it here and here. Make your kids leave the room first. Seriously. Do it now.

These are real people, folks. Children, dads, moms, husbands, wives. They’re the wrong shape, they think the wrong things, and they’re really dying. Some of them have guns. A few of them are aces. Lohengrin is doing what he can. Fortune and his new girlfriend Sekhmet are doing what they can. I help out. But we’re up against tanks and helicopters and guys who know how to use AK-47s. We’re fucking amateurs here.

And here’s the other thing. Schistosomiasis. Ever heard of it? The Nile is so polluted, it’s become a breeding ground for something called bilharzia. I looked it up on-line. Liver flukes, or something. The upshot is, if you drink this water it will kill you, just not right away. Explain to an eight-year-old who’s burning from thirst that she can’t have a drink. The part where you tell her it’ll kill her really doesn’t have the same oomph you’d expect when she’s just watched her brothers get shot. Funny how that works.

We’re low on food. We’re low on water. I can count the number of Westerners here trying to help out on one hand when I’m missing two fingers. And when you turn on your TV sets, are you seeing this? Are you thinking about it when you order your delivery pizza? Honest to God, people, are the things going on here really less important than the latest challenge on American Hero?

Fuck.

I gotta go. They’re coming.

Back now. It’s about eight hours later. I forgot to hit the post button, so let me give you a little update. The army flew a helicopter over a bunch of refugees who were walking south at about three this afternoon, when I was writing that last part. The alleged human beings up in the copter dropped a couple dozen grenades on them and strafed the survivors when they ran. We lost twenty. Another ten will probably be dead by morning, and about that many are going to be too injured to travel. Which means leaving them here. Which is pretty much the same thing as dead.

It’s still maybe a week before the first of us reach Aswan. Maybe another two days before the stragglers get in. Everyone’s looking to it like it’s the Promised Land or Oz or something. Me, I keep getting the feeling that the army’s herding us there. There was about twenty minutes when I was sure they were going to wait until we were all on Sehel Island and then blow the High Dam and kill us all. Fortune or maybe Sekhmet pointed out that blowing the Aswan High Dam would also kill everyone else in the country and wash Cairo into the sea, so I might be getting a little paranoid.

Any way you cut it though, we’re in trouble here. I need to sleep. I’m afraid to sleep.

If anyone out there knows someone in the Egyptian army or if you’re one of the folks in Ikhlas al-Din, listen for a minute, okay? This is the part where I beg.

I know someone killed the Caliph, and I know that’s a very big, very bad thing. I know that someone attacked you, and you’re pissed. But please— please —stop this. Because I’m here on the road with the people you’re killing. I’ve talked to them. I’ve eaten with them. And here’s the thing. Killing the Caliph?

They didn’t do it.

2934 COMMENTS | POST COMMENT

…They didn’t do it.

What’s worse than being hated for what people think you did?

Wally Gunderson, aka Rustbelt, aka Toolbelt, aka You Stupid Tool, aka Hey You, aka Racist, sat in the darkness of his bedroom in the Discard Pile, scrolling through Bugsy’s blog. It chronicled cruel people doing senseless things to others. Harmless and undeserving others who hadn’t said or done anything wrong.

The monitor cast a sickly hue across his cast-iron skin, tinting the midnight blue-black with green, like he was a nat mottled with half-healed bruises. It fit the ooky feelings that he’d carried in his gut since he got kicked off American Hero. Sadness. Confusion. Shame. Anger.

The blog didn’t help matters any. As confusing as this Egypt thing was—Wally didn’t really understand the details—it was depressing, too. Innocent people were dying for no good reason; he got that much.

But reading still beat venturing outside. The place was awful crowded; all but five of the American Hero contestants had joined the Discard Pile. (Twenty-three aces. Four bathrooms.) Of those not living in the overcrowded mansion, two had up and left the show: Bugsy was in Egypt, and Drummer Boy had decided he’d rather be a rock star than a discard. The other three—Curveball, Rosa Loteria, and, of course, Stuntman—were still competing.