The Nameless Dark: A Collection, page 25
Another explosion two neighborhoods over shook the ground and shot red-gutted smoke into the sky. Infiltrators. Spies gone active. Peace had made security soft. Made all of them soft, William thought, adjusting the tight Kevlar vest under his jacket that had fit him so loosely before. He was adding inches, while the city was giving them away. Give them an inch, they’ll blow up a mile. Gunfire ripped into the night, sending everyone but the soldiers scurrying for doorways. The man under the striped banner was gone.
William jammed a receiver into his ear and a walkie talkie to his mouth, as he jogged toward the outer wall ringing Old City, receiving intel and barking orders. He had to man his post.
The walkway cresting the wall was crowded with crouching troopers, weapons bristling outward like deadly whiskers, just like the days of castles and keeps that thrilled William’s childhood. A teenage private, still a bit woozy after fear burned off most of his drunk, lit up a cigarette. William shot a glare in his direction. The kid blanched and quickly stamped out the smoke under heavy boot tread. William shook his head. A glowing cherry earned you a sniper’s bullet exiting the back of your mouth. Some of these guys need more training, more time. There was never enough time anymore.
William returned his gaze down his scope, scanning the frustrating darkness below. He knew they were out there. Knew they were watching, praying to the empty sky. He could smell them. Smell their smoke. Exhaust, campfires, dank Turkish cigarettes… What were they waiting for?
It had been hours since the last of the suicide attacks rattled the city and dawn was on the creep. Insurgent recon was lacking, as they leveled a recently emptied ammo dump and part of the Old City prison, freeing two spies awaiting trial just long enough for proper justice to be rendered with the gavel fall of hollow points. Their slapdash Trojan horse failed to open up the enemy from the inside. Terrorists didn’t win many battles. They just wore you down until you gave up and lowered your head. But tonight, there would be no “wearing down.” This would be to the death, and whatever waited beyond.
William’s earpiece crackled to life. Air support was on its way, but they were coming in from the nearest base in the Rockies, a good thousand miles away. William tested the breeze, hoping to find a westerly tailwind. Nothing. Everything was still. Quiet, within and without. The holiday was over. The air force would be late.
He looked up to the queer stars arranged in new constellations that knew not nor cared not what was happening below. He didn’t think he’d ever get used to them, even after all he’d seen. A shooting star carved through a patch of grayish black with a dim trail of stratospheric sparks. Free fireworks.
A commotion went up from the troops manning the west section of the wall. Dots of light appeared on the hilltop about a mile outside Old City, on the grounds of what used to be a high school. William looked through his scope as the sun groaned through the pre-dawn, dimly lightening the sky and giving the first glimpse of what was waiting in the dark.
Flags decorated their front lines. Flags with symbols of religious zealotry and indiscriminate terror. The Crescent moon. The star of David. The Cross. The insurgents—from Pakistan, Korea, Italy, Ethiopia, Iran, England, Indonesia, India, and the barely united States—raised their collection of mismatched firearms and took aim at the city wall ahead. They had a half squadron of banged up tanks. Aging howitzer barrels bristled behind them. A battery of Russian-made rockets flanked each side. Ragtag military equipment patched together with a soldering iron and chewing gum. By the collection of this hard won gear, this looked to be a last stand. We’d send them to paradise, good and proper.
Fight like they do, die like we do.
William sneered and shook his head, as all around him the flags and battalion banners of Old City were raised, catching the growing breeze. These were the flags of organized statehood against those of anarchy. These were the flags of the Twelve Infidels. Those of fang, of eye, of tentacle. That of the Elder Sign, which tied them all together under the primordial bond of The One Faith. These were the believers in the Blind Chaos swirling at the center of Time, as revealed to the bug-eyed world through The Great Priest, who cracked the foundation of the earth and rose from the sea to reclaim his earthly province. To wipe away with an atmosphere splitting roar all the lies that filled the vacuum in Its absence. It came back to remind us all of how it all began, and how it would never end. After bursting from the South Pacific, the Old One straddled the earth for The Three Days, crushing mountains and displacing seas. Destroying certain myths and validating others. One hundred million died in the unnatural calamity, a fitting sacrifice for our forgetfulness, for our arrogant creation of our own gods and fathers, in the absence of alien reality. Then, without a glance at the fleas weeping in the circus below, It leapt into the sky and disappeared into the ether, leaving behind a New Order of Things, staying just long enough to give us a glimpse of stark, mad reality, tended by those Things that awoke with it, crawling from the earth and screaming down from forgotten mountains where they had waited for a billion years to reclaim Eden.
Many did not believe—refused to believe—branding the Old One and the Elder Things spawns of the devil, even though the accused progeny were incalculable eons older than their supposed father. These religious extremists clung to their upstart monolithic god and his handful of dirt scratching prophets with violent resolve, spurning an older pantheon, just as they did with the Pagans, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Hindu, the Greeks, the Native Americans…. Where was their god now? Was it cowering in the corner of eternity, or fled altogether? Did it ever exist in the first place? No one knew. There was no proof. There was only the faith of a bawling child, waiting on an errant father who promised to come back and take them to paradise. The paradise was lost before it could ever be found. But still they believed. They needed to believe, because to not would mean they were wrong. That they knew nothing. That they were nothing but a handful of chemicals given mass and the electric spark of life. They wanted back the magic of the familiar.
William’s grim musings were interrupted by the deep, humming peal of the curiously shaped bell that one night just appeared in their abandoned church four years ago. He turned back as the Nameless Acolyte of Old City emerged from the cathedral, now a Temple to the Starry Wisdom. He wore a cowled robe of yellow, stitched with intricate patterns that dazzled the eye, even from this distance. No one had ever seen the Acolyte’s face, and none wanted to. Old City was devoted to the New Enlightenment adopted by the American federal government and so many others, at the behest of the Twelve Infidels. But that didn’t change the fear that twisted the hearts of humanity still coming to grips with this new religion birthed amongst dead stars in a reality not compatible with our own.
The Acolyte raised his wrapped hand, and made several quick, arcing movements, as if carving the air with tortured geometry. These gestures were now familiar but no less unsettling to William, who pulled on his helmet that had the appearance of a cuttlefish, and checked his chamber. His fellow soldiers did the same, as the clarion call of horn and dissonant flutes split the early morning quiet. The Army of Justice and Truth—the Army of the United States of America—took their positions on the wall, taking aim at those far out and below.
William set up at the head of his platoon, and from around his neck took out a figurine carved from a greenish gray stone. He brought the tiny toad-like shape to his lips and kissed it. “Elder Gods protect us on this day from the non-believers,” William said, looking up into the dark sky. “May the infidel triumph over the lies of the usurper.”
A shout came from further down the line, as three trucks without headlights sped toward the wall, bucking and pitching over the cratered ground. Suicide attack. Grinding trident. The men on the wall of Old City opened up with .50 caliber fire, thudding the turf with heated lead. Several Katyusha rockets whooshed from the ground behind to cover the desperate attack, and slammed into the base of the wall, rocking the graves of smashed strip malls.
One of the trucks spun out and flipped. The other burst into flames. The last truck, chugging lower to the ground under the weight of three inch thick armor plating, withstood the barrage and was still coming. The decoys were dead, but the stuffed duck still remained, moving to within a hundred yards of the wall. Just then, from behind the Old City lines, a boy no more than twelve—just a few years older than Jacob—jogged forward, a LAW rocket launcher bouncing casually on his shoulder. All the men and women parted, allowing the boy to reach the edge of the wall. He hoped up on a box set down for him, took aim just ahead of the truck and squeezed, sending a whistling anti-tank round arcing downward. The truck stayed on course and met up with it sixty yards out, unleashing a mini mushroom cloud fueled by five hundred pounds of C-4. The terrible boom blew back the fighters on both sides. A mobile bomb that would have torn a 30-foot wide hole in the wall. A Hail Mary in every ironic sense.
As everyone picked themselves up, the cottony silence after a huge explosion was filled by a clicking and chattering coming from the sky, peppered by piercing shrieks. Many on the wall smiled. Many more shook off a shiver. The terrorists sometimes had choppers, even an occasional jet, but the free nations also had things that flew. The air force had arrived.
William looked up into the sky, where winged, insect-like creatures—inkblots against the bluish smudge of the Milky Way—moved in bizarre but graceful formation, sizing up those on the ground below.
Small arms fire rang out from the enemy position, before the anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back of pickups roared to life, pouring death into the heavens. Phosphorous tipped tracer rounds stuttered across the sky, trying to bring down those Things that flew above. Some took bullets and crumpled, falling with unnatural speed to dent the earth with a monstrous impact. But others found their targets, swooping low to rend metal and flesh, scattering survivors and sanity as they swooped back up into the unquiet sky.
William crouched low and took aim, squeezing off rounds into moving figures that could be friends and neighbors, but who had all become The Enemy. Fuck ‘em. The worms would eat them all just the same.
Bullets rattled the wall, as defenders dove for cover. William reloaded and reengaged, when an RPG exploded to his left, blowing him onto his side. His ears rang, his eyes bled, but he could still see flashes of fire, the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, that were lighting up the sky above the city, carving rivulets of light over the towering bronze effigy of Sheik Nazir and as his eleven fellow infidels. A Baptist missionary. A venerated Vatican Cardinal. A Micronesian king. A Muslim scholar. Three Presidents, two rabbis, a swami and a Mormon leader. All those who lost their faith in the lies of the One God, and embraced the horrific but undeniable proof of the Many Gods.
The fighting increased, as both sides vented their righteous hate through sizzling metal. William got to his feet, clutching the figurine around his neck. All he could smell was smoke. July 5th: the day the Twelve fought back.
William looked up, unbowing his head. Tracers and explosions ripped across his view into the universe that was closing its eyes, turning away. Showers of sparks from exploding shells took on beautiful, terrifying shapes, creating a new show, an encore of brutalism and death that danced atop the sky, below the mute stars that saw nothing.
Free fireworks.
Love Songs from the Hydrogen Jukebox
Doyle had only been back on the Hill for two days when he already planned his next escape.
He disappeared three weeks ago from a reading at City Lights, hitching to SFO and flying twenty-three hours to scratch an itch in some Indonesian shithole. Screaming through the jungle, devouring the local medicine, taking full advantage of lax prohibitions on deviant behavior. He always went alone, and came back looking like he had grown an inch, with a couple of new scars, a bag full of bizarre trinkets, and enough stories to tide us all over until his next disappearance. I didn’t blame him for skating, at least not that night. The poet was garbage, mixing tenses and mushing up metaphors without knowing exactly why. Must have sucked down his scoop of melted Ferlinghetti back in Boise through a game of telephone. The girls thought he was sharp, but I suspect only because he looked like Tab Hunter. He could have looked like Borgnine and the birds still would have been chirping, just because he was standing a few feet above the rest of us, shadowed on the illuminated roof. Everyone’s supposed to be beautiful when heated by the spotlight. I thought he belonged further down the coast, where blond hair and a football chin earned you a paycheck and the pros write all the lines for you. Still, he scored pretty sweet that night, saving his best verse for after the show.
In Doyle’s absence, North Beach seemed to hold its breath, more out of anticipation of his return than the government spooks who were poking around the filthy dives and unheated squats that cloistered together on Telegraph Hill, hoping the rest of the tourist world would pass on by and head to the Golden Gate. The feds made their best attempt to blend in, wearing Hawaiian button ups and dungarees, trying to score a lid or making conversation with the street corner glamour boys, rummies, and shirtless Negro kids who cross-stitched the streets on their modified Schwinns. But we knew what these deadbeats were up to, combing the area for reds or fags, or the nightmare scenario for every Betty Crocker American—the homosexual communist. We could spot the stiffs as soon as they arrived, even before the whoops from the street told us there were fleas on the dog. Because no matter how deep their cover, how much research they did on the Vagabond Tribe, those Washington Joes couldn’t help tucking in their costume shirts, and their footwear was always showroom clean. A square can’t fake an octagon no matter how many angles they play. Not enough degrees.
We told Doyle about the Hoovers when he got back, but he brushed it off as he launched into a mad tale of getting bent on shots of deep bush nutmeg stirred into Coca Cola while a Sumatran mountain witch unfolded from a steamer trunk and pulled seven rusty nails out of the spine of some crippled child. It was wild, like all of Doyle’s stories, and no one knew where the facts ended and the ball of yarn began. No one cared, either. He was our Shaman, even to those who didn’t know what that title meant. He cured us with his words, wiping away the disease of home and the poison of memory. We were all going to make a new go of it on Telegraph Hill, so we naturally needed a gathering point. That point was Doyle, who seemed to be here before any of the rest of us arrived.
As he told the story of the mountain witch, Doyle passed around one of the spikes to the group gathered in front of him like a prayer circle, settling in between the roaches that disbanded their three-week circus and skittered back into the walls. This was holy time, and no one—not Jack or Allen or any street corner messiah—could touch him as he spun his silk into day-glo tapestry, hovering a full six inches off the floor. Still, earlier in the day, I saw something in his eyes when the agents were mentioned. A flash of rage that cut rare in his wide, placid face that always danced on the verge of a private wink. He knew things that we didn’t, even about ourselves, and that seemed to include why the government was sniffing around the Hill. But after that day, it was never mentioned again.
His homecoming shindig was a real blowout. Everyone in North Beach knew Doyle, and held him up as their golden calf, molded in the desert under the gaze of a fickle God to give them something tangible to trust. No one knew exactly where he came from, but he had an air of Back East breeding, tempered with something carved raw boned in the wilderness. The symmetrical features, the aristocratic nose. Hair that woke up better than your entire newly pressed outfit. He obviously had money, as his frequent jags to Peru and Afghanistan and a hundred other obscure destinations showed, but he lived like a pauper, dressing in worn-out trousers and a navy t-shirt. And he never wore shoes. “I like to feel the earth moving beneath me,” he explained to me the day after I first arrived while we blew through some choice Hawaiian Tai stick. He was a strange cat, Doyle, but that was why we all loved him. “Hero of the outcasts,” a junkhead we all called Raggedy Man croaked one night before vomiting into a bucket on the porch. The beat-down tramp, who lost his real name in a bloody cow pasture in eastern France twelve years back, just wiped his mouth, smiled, and nodded out, knowing no one would hassle him until he ventured back into the streets. We were the Outcasts, every dancing one of us, and we were all under Doyle’s protection from whatever wars haunted the outside world. Just as long as you were within his circle, and so many of us were. We’d fight to stay within the insulating glow that leaked out from behind his eyes, and probably do other things, too. Everyone needs a family, and we were all Doyle’s.
At the party, the girls whipped up some mean sandwiches with fresh sourdough and end cuts of Italian dry from Molinari’s, while the fellas mixed a batch of jungle juice in a bathtub half buried in the back yard. Doyle owned the house, a sweet three-story Queen Anne Victorian just off Columbus Ave, but not a car. Said he didn’t like to squirm through life inside a greasy fish tin. The sidewalks told the best stories anyway, and the love songs playing from the cracks held the sweetest harmonies. Six inches off the ground, no matter where he went.
“Nellll-son,” Doyle called out in a singsong voice. I turned and found him reclining on the cinder block retaining wall next to the alley, staring up into the murky night sky. The bricks must have only been a foot wide, but he made them seem like a king-size mattress. “Nelson Barnacles,” he mused, as if tasting the words. My last name was Barnes, but I was thrilled that Doyle gave me something new. Something that came from him. He gave lots of people nicknames, and now that included me. The glow around me suddenly grew brighter. I felt protected in a way Raggedy Man never could, especially because Raggedy Man ended up with his head caved in and missing both eyes and his left arm when he was fished up from under the wharf last week. Dumb bastard ventured too far out of the radius and ended up behind enemy lines. Just like in that cow pasture in eastern France. “Come check this out, Barnacles.”
