Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) Page 12

  They nailed one at last down on Glacier—drenched it with gas as its stinger was sunk in a victim, and gunned it alight. It went high all afire.

  You could only call clenching what the fucker did then. Its body contracted, turned black and crusty and absorbed the flames. A smoking cinder with wings still whirring it hovered, and then raining off it came a shower of ash and the bug rose intact again, smaller perhaps by a third. Torching didn’t work on them!

  Bullhorns were blaring, “Blobs! Watch your feet!” I saw ’Manda Drake, a woman that Momma’d been tutoring, writhing on the ground with gel globed round her foot. The guy that snatched her up slipped on another blob, almost falling as he dragged her clear. And because we couldn’t stop firing, gel just kept raining down on us.

  And every so often I couldn’t help looking up at the Studio’s cam fleet sucking up every tick of this carnage. You could see them working, their whole formation seething as each boat shifted or tilted or rose or dropped for its camera angle, a huge flock of carrion birds feasting midair on our photons.

  All was delirium. I was hammering monsters to pieces that flew back together, and the roar of my gun erased my mind. And as my brain went away my gunning got truer, my tracers a half-beat ahead of their movement and I was nailing them, nailing them just as they got there. I had one now, was tearing away at its upper thorax, and I kept it pinned just long enough that its head flew off.

  Head and body dropped like stone—a fifty-foot fall, and both parts had reverted to gel before impact.

  “Take off their heads!” I screamed to the town. Screamed it again. Did anyone hear?

  I tried to do it again, but now that I was trying I couldn’t seem to manage it. We were all in unison once more, a town-size storm of gunfire that brought down nothing but a rain of gel spattering the streets. And that gel kept rivering, meeting, and merging. There were globs of it prowling everywhere underfoot.

  And then there were no wasps in the streets anymore. They all hung at hover well above roof level. They dove and feinted and pulled back up. Drawing our gunfire aloft but no longer engaging.

  It was like a musical pause. Panoply was setting a tempo, playing our town like an organ. Now it was filming our recovery work, the damage control we all had to turn to the instant this moment allowed it. Bullhorns called for fire control. Gas had sprayed wild from pump-gunners trying to drench diving targets, and hot shot had set the porch of the library on fire along with some walls here and there.

  Other horns blared for medevac. This was grim work. There were casualties like Amanda—a guy who’d reached behind himself to break his fall and now had gel up to his elbow, and a few others losing feet or legs even as we carried them off for amputation. But apart from these, “medevac” meant carrying stone-dead Sunrisers back to the industrial zone, and laying them out in the big lot beside the lumber mill. One hit from those stingers and you were stone dead.

  “Hey Curtis!” Cap, down in the street, had to shout because we had gunners still working the sky. There was a gash on his head and he was bleeding from both arms, his own blood on the grip of his machete. His shield looked hammered and splintery on the front.

  “How’re those workin, Cap?”

  “They work! Lock up their stingers, but we can’t kill ’em. Their legs tear ya up while you’re tryin to chop ’em. Cut off their stingers an they fly up an grow another. Half my guys quit, went back to guns. I heard you killed one!”

  “Yeah! Shot its head off! Pass that around!”

  He had to dodge as he ran off, because the wasps were coming down again. We’d already lost dozens of friends. Our score so far: one. My lucky shot.

  * * *

  Act Two was over. The sun was near the far western hills. A chill breeze dried our sweat and made us shiver.

  Japh and I were carrying a corpse out into the industrial zone—a big older guy, a Hanger whose name we didn’t know. We were tired to the bone, and black-grim at heart, and both of us trying not to let the other see it. The dead seemed so heavy, and we were so tired.

  “Little closer, Curtis,” Japh said. We laid him up tight against the outermost body, one more flagstone in a pavement of dead. There was need of close stacking. The first rank lay tight to the side of the mill, and four more ranks lay beside that. More than a hundred dead, and at least fifteen people unaccounted for.

  The battle had flowed out here in the Second Act. To have foot room for fighting we’d have to start laying the next act’s casualties two-deep.

  Along Glacier Avenue, tired fighters huddled on porches and slumped back against walls. People circulated on bicycles carrying wine and water and bread and cheese for those not too exhausted to eat.

  We walked in a kind of trance. When the APPs had swarmed off to the hills, amped voices from the shoot-rafts had called Intermission until full moonrise, more than two hours off. It seemed like a new kind of time we were walking through, where you could look around and draw an easy breath.

  Japh went to find Kate and I started for the church to see Jool and our ladies. Everyone was OK. No APPs had gotten in, but a lot of gel was blown off them that’d made things risky underfoot in the church. We’d dragged the dormant stuff out before we’d sat down to rest together.

  I commed her now as I headed back over there.

  “Just come here, hon. Just come here,” she told me, and clicked off. I heard bad news in her voice. I started jogging. I saw from a couple blocks off that everyone had come out of the church and were grouped on the sidewalk.

  She stepped out of the crowd to meet me, wrapped her arms around me and held on like a limpet. I knew now it was either my auntie or her momma, and then I saw Momma Grace weeping there, being comforted by Gillian, and Jool was saying to me, “I’m so sorry, hon. I’m so sorry.”

  I don’t remember going inside the church—only standing beside the pew they’d laid her on. Her tight little face in its white puffball of hair looked like she’d gone to sleep angry and the anger was just fading out of her features as her sleep got deeper.

  Her left leg was gone to the knee. She looked so small … and I realized that my auntie was small and always had been. And that it was only her fierce little mind, and the love in her, that had made me see her as larger all my life, even when I was nearly twice her size.

  I knelt down and took her in my arms and let the tears come. Tears don’t help at all—that’s why they’re tears. But somehow when they’ve fallen they do help. They help to collect in your heart all you’ve lost.

  I remembered her so pissed at me she smacked my hand with her mixing spoon for scooping out the dough with my fingers, and I remembered laughing at her for even hitting me gently. It made her laugh too, ticked though she was.

  I remembered so clearly the morning she taught me what reading was. The sun was pouring through the window, and here on my lap was my pal, The Poky Little Puppy. And here was Auntie’s finger, touching these little marks below my pal, and saying a word with each one she touched. And it hit me: these little marks were talking to me, me, about the Poky Little Puppy!

  I remembered the first bad fight I’d gotten into at school in the fifth grade. We’d both gotten pretty colorful, and the principal had really reamed us out about it, and Auntie had already been called when I got back home. There was thunder and outrage in her eyes, and she wouldn’t say a word to me, just started cleaning up my cuts and scrapes and none too gently either. I felt pretty low.

  Then she went and stood by the window, glowering. I realized years later that she was thinking of when she’d been eleven, down there in the Zoo. She’d worked long and hard to get from down there up to here, but she was trying to recapture that long-ago girl down there and trying to find what to tell me.

  She came and sat down in front of me and took my right arm and squeezed my wrist.

  “Yow!”

  “I know it hurts, Curtis. See how swollen it is? That’s because you didn’t keep your wrist straight. Give me your left hand. Now hold that
wrist straight with your elbow like this. Now throw that whole arm with your punch with your back in it too.”

  Of all the things she gave me, maybe that was the hardest for her.

  Jool knelt near me. “Listen. People who’ve … lost parts to the gel. They say it’s not pain, just cold and pressure. We think it’s just shock that…”

  “That killed her.” I nodded, trying to let her know it helped that there had been no agony in her passing. I laid Auntie back down on the pew and touched her face with both my hands, and drew them back. This touch, this sensation on my palms, was the last I would ever have of her. I said good-bye to her. I knew I’d be saying it for the rest of my life.

  Japh was there. When he hugged me, I found I had more tears for her in me. So did Japh. He’d stolen her cookie-dough too.… We wrapped Auntie in blankets, carried her back to the altar, and laid her near it.

  * * *

  As they walked together over to the theater, Japh asked Curtis, “Whaddya make of those?” Here and there along the street lay actual dead APPs—beheaded wasps that had not gone to gel, but lay like little wrecked planes on the pavement.

  Curtis didn’t answer. Japh gripped his shoulder and answered himself. “I think it’s just cinema myself. For the visual effect. A lull in the battle, tired Sunrisers clearing the wreckage, and in the streets, dead monsters here and there. Their cams never sleep, right?”

  “Margolian. I’m gonna tear that sonofabitch’s throat out.”

  “We both are.”

  More than half the crowd in the theater were asleep, in chairs or curled on the floor. Others leaned or lay resting, in a buzz of low, tired talk with their neighbors … or holding them as they wept.

  “Anyone sleeping, let ’em,” Smalls said. “Then we’ll all do some sleeping in shifts. First the good news. Best we can figure, we’ve killed at least eighty of those sonsabitches—no offense ladies—an’ maybe more. Thank god for Cap’s swords-an-shields. We had fifty workin it by last act’s end, but he’s got the gear for a lot more teams and we’re gonna field ’em next act. Gunners keep working the air and those that come divin at you, but when they get in close enough we’re gonna decapitate ’em.

  “Remember, when those APPs nail that wood, lean into them to snag ’em and tilt that shield hard, twist that stinger to lodge it in the shield. And you machete folk get in there quick and swinging hard. Cap, we got a lot to thank you for.”

  “We’re makin more in the mill right now,” Cap said. “Listen—hear that?” And they could—a faint shriek from two blocks away: Cap’s machetes bleeding streams of sparks from the grinding wheels.

  Ricky Dawes had just come in, looking glum. He raised a voice gravelly with fatigue. “I think it’s the ones’ve already stung someone we’re mostly draggin down. We had two break away from us, but the others we got just after they’d nailed someone. Like the stinging had weakened ’em maybe.”

  “Fuckin high price to pay for a kill,” someone growled.

  “Yeah,” sighed Ricky. He threw a hesitant look at the people around him. “Can I get up there a minute?”

  When he had, he cleared his throat and looked at us all. From under his shaggy brows, his eyes seemed a tired old coyote’s, a friendly enough dog, but one who had some bad news for his pack-mates.

  “Well first, I don’t want you all to think I’m—what’s that word for someone that thinks he’s gonna be, like, defeated?”

  “Defeatist,” several voices offered.

  “Right. I don’t want you to think I’m a defetus, but I think we have to by-god decide right now that whoever of us gets through this fight tonight, has to get busy, get ATVs together, and get every woman and girl out of this town a hundred miles gone before sunrise—no! No! No offense! I just mean…” Ricky was shouting his last few lines because of all the women shouting at him: “Fuck You! You run! C’mere an’ I’ll whip your ass for you!”

  “Just please listen!” he shouted. “And I mean all the young men too, I mean all the ones under eighteen should go, because we want Sunrise to survive, and I don’t think anyone stays in this shoot is gonna. I mean, survive. I’m really sorry, but our dead count’s lookin way off. We been like, tallying, an’ there’s like twelve, maybe fifteen people we can’t account for, that it’s lookin like gel musta got ’em. I mean just the loose gel they melt down to when you chop ’em up! And we got as many more too crippled to fight. And tonight in the dark’s gonna be the worst fight yet, an that’ll just be half the battle. And … we’ll fight the second day on five hours’ sleep.”

  Ricky’s voice got quieter toward the end, because the whole big room had done the same.

  Smalls said, “Thanks Ricky. We all had to look at it. When it’s time, we’ll look at it again. Please all do some sleeping if you can.”

  XIX

  A BARBECUE

  Curtis trudged back toward the church, to check on Jool. The street was half cleared of bodies and debris … but here came a congested stretch where the patrol vehicles had to go to one lane around a big flatbed. The truck had a tension scale on the tail of its bed. Near were gathered a number of the headless APPs that had not gone to gel, and Dr. Winters seemed to be weighing them.

  Curtis paused to watch him as he directed two men to hoist an APP between them. He set the scale’s load hook around the crooked tubular segment joining the wasp’s thorax and abdomen. The springs creaked and Winters said something to Trish, which she keyed into her com.

  “Hey Doc,” said Curtis. “You got any idea why these ones didn’t melt?”

  “Not likely to be a glitch in the programming. Must be some purpose to it.”

  “We think the Studio wanted the visuals—the alien dead lying with our dead, monsters’ bodies mingled with our own, et cetera.”

  “Whatever the reason, Curtis, we’re finding them very … informative. Is there a sizeable crowd in the theater?”

  “Yes. Mostly sleeping.”

  “They’ll have to wake up. We all need to discuss something. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Curtis went on to the church. Found Jool and Gillian awake and flanking Momma Grace with their arms around her shoulders. Momma Grace had fallen asleep between them, the tears on her face not quite dried, and the young women spoke gently to one another across her sleeping form, sensing that their voices comforted her grieving dreams. Women and youngsters were asleep all around them. He slipped in beside her. “You should both clock some z’s”—keeping his voice low—“there’s an hour and a half still left for it.”

  “Lemme talk to my girlfriend, Curtis,” Jool murmured. “She saved my life.”

  Gillian smiled, “We’ve been savin each other’s life all day long.”

  “Hush, I’ve been knowin you a while girl, but I’m feelin you now.”

  Curtis kissed Jool, and touched Gillian’s shoulder. “Then I’m feelin you too, Indian girl. I’m just gonna close my eyes a minute, gotta get back to the Majestic. The Doc has something to tell everyone.…”

  And a moment later, Jool smiled sadly, feeling his head sag to her shoulder. Asleep. She stroked his cheek and whispered, “Sleep hon. Heal your heart.”

  * * *

  Dr. Winters and Trish came into the Majestic muttering to each other, and mounted the dais still talking in an undertone. Gentle wake-ups were murmured through the room, and not a few awakened with a groan, or a yelp. Oddly—perhaps merely forgetfully—Trish had a gas tank and hose hung on her shoulder. Dr. Winters greeted his audience with the easy address of a thirty-year teacher.

  “Friends, we’ve been weighing the wasps, and trying to answer a question their bodies have raised for us. Let’s start with the fact that their weight’s not uniform. They’re all identical—they don’t vary in size, or in any structural way at all, but the weights of our specimens vary within a range of thirty-five kilos. This is a fairly remarkable range because it makes individuals at the low end thirty percent lighter than those at the upper end.”

  “It’s
the poison’s weight,” said Laoni Meeks, one of the lean, solemn women who ran sheep on the lower slopes. “They pump it in three, four seconds at a hit.”

  “The same thought occurred to us, Laoni. But let’s save that, because I want to consider just their overall mass for a moment. We’ve examined a random sampling of ten individuals. This group contained four top-weight individuals. Of the other six, two weighed about twenty kilos less, and the rest, nearly forty—some thirty percent of their maximum mass. This is scant data, of course, but Trish and I are convinced of its meaning. We think the differences relate to the number of times our samples struck prey. The heaviest, we think, were beheaded before they struck anyone. When they do strike, we believe the wasps are injecting significant quanta of their mass into their victims.”

  He paused with a solemn air, as if expecting a general reaction. Complete silence greeted his revelation.

  “My friends,” Winters said, showing just a touch of exasperation, “surely you’ve noted that these are ichneumonid wasps. They are modeled—except for their large heads and eyes—on Megarhyssa.” And, after another silence, “Oh, why did so few of you come to my Biology One!? Never mind. Never mind. Ichneumonids oviposit their prey. Their young devour the hosts from inside.”

  “Their young…” said Smalls in the silence, his voice rusty from his absorption in these words.

  “We can only speculate,” Winters said, sounding gentler now, “but it stands to reason. We’ve destroyed probably eighty wasps. Body parts they lose while alive, so to speak, revert to base-mode gel, and enough of this is loose in town to pose a serious threat. A score of people have lost hands or feet, and we’re pretty sure more than a dozen have been entirely ingested. Some sizeable masses of gel have coalesced and will be actively hunting. Still, raw gel just won’t provide the large-scale homicide they want for their cameras.