Air Force One, Part One (3) "Oh sure," Mick answers him, "It could happen. But I mean it does seem like we are stacking the coincidences kind of thick here, doesnt it? It could have gotten off before the bomb. It could have been flying around for the last ten years. It might have a good reason for not landing in all that time. "But have you noticed how nobody has ever actually seen it? It's always more like 'I know this guy who says his buddy heard that somebody saw it out west.' Right? And that didn't even start until a few months ago, right? All of a sudden. Just like it would if some bored trucker told a story by a campfire and it started spreading? Isn't that right?" "Hey, man!" the second trucker complains, "I didn't say I believed it, did I? You're the one who said it had all the fancy engines and shit, not me. Well, that sounds pretty good to me! And now you're jumpin' down my throat about it? What's your hang up?" "My hangup," the innkeeper says back, "is that I'm tired of fantasy. Aren't you?" He gestures sharply to include everyone in the room. Annie comes in from the kitchen carrying a towel, her expression already guarded. Mick looks at her for a long moment, and then returns his gaze to his truckers. He continues more quietly, but just as intently. It's as though, of all the after-dinner stories he has ever told in his capacity as the Wolverine's chief entertainer, there has never been one that he wanted to convince people of more than this. "What I don't want," he continues, "is for us all to sit around here pretending that there has just got to be some Great Divine Justice in the world and it's Up There Even Now, punishing all those bastards who brought the Wars on us. "I mean," he laughs, "do we need any more evidence to the contrary?" He gestures angrily, and every trucker in the room understands it. The simple sweep of one hand indicates the whole dying country that they all see every time they manage to carry a single precious load of freight from one island of life to another. Their nation has become an abode not of people, but of ghosts. "Listen to what you're saying! You're halfway to convincing yourselves that the bastards who did all this to us really are doomed to endlessly wander up there among the storm clouds in some goddamned aerial Flying Dutchman! "And you know why? Because it's easier for you to believe a load of bullshit than it is to admit that the President and a bunch of Generals and whoever the hell else just simply got fried in about one millisecond and left all the rest of us to suffer for the next ten or twenty years or however the hell long we can stick it out! "It would be nicer to believe that everything the Wars, the ones we lost, what we've all been doing since then to try and keep going that it all meant something. It makes it easier to go on! That all." "So we all tell ourselves things. We've all been doing it ever since the Wars. Things like: we're going to come out of this OK. There was a reason for what happened. There's still justice in the world. We can still do something to make things better. There's still a future." He glances toward his wife, but she's gone. Her husband has become a man she no longer cares much to listen to, least of all on this topic. "I guess," he says to his customers again, "my hangup is that I'm just finally getting too damned tired of lying to myself." The Door Mick opens his eyes with a start and looks blearily toward the door. Something is happening, but he doesn't know what. Did he hear a noise? He can't remember. In fact, he can barely think at all. Has he been drinking? He feels ashamed. An innkeeper shouldn't get too drunk on his own beer to take care of his guests. And now something important is happening, and he has no idea what it is. Groaning, he levers himself to a sitting position, then stands up and tries to get to the door. He must have had a dream. He dreamt that something terrible was coming, and he had to do something about it. He has to protect his people. But as the memory comes vaguely to him, resentment grows. Why does it always have to be him? Why does he have to be the one? His shoulder connects with the door jamb, jarring him to a halt. He tries to curse, but the pain is not actually all that bad. And anyway, he can not quite remember how to curse. Or even how to speak. Incredible. He's never been this drunk before. It's all he can do to push himself into the hallway and stumble into the bathroom, banging off the walls every few steps while barely feeling the collisions, feeling as though he were walking on pillows. In the bathroom, the electric lights seem almost supernaturally bright. The very air around them seems alive and glowing. And that's odd, isn't it? Should there even be electric lights? Didn't they all quit working a long time ago? He frowns, shaking his head. He's too confused to think about it right now. He tries to look at himself in the mirror. It costs him an effort to focus at first, but he gradually succeeds in seeing himself, wreathed in light, leaning heavily on the countertop with both hands. With some relief, he sees that he doesn't appear to be particularly ill. Although his hair seems weird. It hangs in dark almost-curls in an unruly mass halfway to his shoulders. That can't be right, can it? Isn't it a lot thinner than that, now? He squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head angrily, trying to clear the confusion from his mind. The effort of thought is making him feel almost ill again. Resting his elbows on the countertop, he bathes his face with cold water and instantly feels better. Of course! Cold water is what you always need. He used to know that. As he splashes the abstract liquid against his skin, his thoughts begin to come more clearly. Wiping the water from his eyes, he looks up into the mirror again and the lights have gone out. Instinctively he whirls toward the door. Even though he hasn't figured out how the lights could have been on in the first place, he definitely does not care for the idea of someone being close enough to reach around the corner and turn them off. Yet the switch is still in its proper position. He can see it in the moonlight. Moonlight? He looks up, his heart pounding impossibly loud in his chest. What's going on? There should be no way for moonlight to be in the bathroom! But he sees that the ceiling now has a very large, flat skylight. Framed in it he can see the brilliant full moon looking twice as large as it has any right to. Is it closer now, he thinks, or are we higher? The skylight is a lot like the one they had in their first house in Ann Arbor, before the Wars. Quite a bit larger, though. Has Annie had it installed to remind him of the old days? But shouldn't she have at least told him first? Or has someone else installed the skylight? The question sends shivers down his spine, and, as if in answer, night air moves chillingly through the room in a sudden draft. But from where? He feels an even colder certainty beginning to drift through his mind. Nothing here is what he thinks. Nothing here has ever been what he thought. He moves cautiously into the dark hallway, drawn against his will toward some kind of conclusion in a direction somehow implied by this strange night, laid out around him like a subtle gravitational field, a bending of the spacetime of the soul, caused by planets and powers that he cannot perceive or understand. Unable to resist, he looks toward the end of the hallway and sees another new feature that he somehow knows his wife had nothing to do with. At the end of the hall stands a tall door, closed, but rattling in its frame. It definitely does not belong there. Yet, it hasn't been recently installed. The door doesn't look new. If anything it looks older than the walls around it. The drywall that was hiding it all this time has been chipped and torn away, to reveal this ancient wooden door set in a wall of stone whose existence no one has ever even suspected. But now here it is, revealed. And behind that rattling door could be anything. Anything at all. With a start he realizes that, without intending to, he has walked halfway down the hallway toward the shaking door. As if in response the door's rattling redoubles, and the whole hallway shakes and echoes with the thunderous noise. He knows with immediate certainty that there is something huge on the other side of that door. And it wants in. That, certainly, would seem to be quite enough bad news for one night. But wait! he realizes, there's worse to come! Much worse. Somehow he knows that whatever is out there beyond that door can't get in without somebody's help. And as he takes another step down the hall against his own will, he understands perfectly well that his own hand will open that door, however he might try to resist. He has never known such terror in his life. His legs move woodenly. He can hardly feel the impact of his feet on the floor. And yet there's a kind of peace in knowing that there is no choice remaining to him. He could cry and scream and beg, he could claw the walls with his hands. It wouldn't matter. He will still reach that door, open it, and be utterly overwhelmed by whatever lies beyond, subsumed by it, and lost. In the last few moments its terrible shaking has slackened, awaiting him. But the vast presence is still there, on the other side. He can hear the great, irregular ebb and flow of its breath. At last, his hand rests on the door's iron handle, and pulls. Perversely, it resists, and an insanely fervent hope instantly burns in him that he will, after all, be spared. And then the door bursts open, too powerful to be stopped. A boy grows to become a man. He lives for twenty, forty, sixty years. He sees triumph and misery, hope, love, pain, joy, fear, death, and birth. But there are moments that a lifetime of experience cannot prepare a man to face. Beyond the door at the end of the hallway there is nothing but mile after endless mile of night sky. Its vastness stretches across the leagues of air into infinitely rarefied space. In this great sky sail the brilliant stars in their myriads, and an impossibly large moon. Far below the few tattered clouds glow silver in its light. And everywhere, infinite and eternal, is the wind. It blows between the moon and the stars, propels the clouds, whistles around the door jamb, tugs at his clothes, and swirls in his hair. Then it spins and soars away, back into the infinite freedom and possibility of the skies. The wind is alive. The wind goes where it will, and takes whom it will. It forces its way where it has no invitation. It tangles itself with the more timid motions of a man's own spirit, and then pulls him out headlong into voyages and argosies, unfathomable, uncomprehended, and unending. But it is not for him! He knows that now. He does not want this sky, here at the end of his hall. He wants it boarded over and drywalled out: replaced with the certainty of the earth beneath his feet, the wood of his dining room floor and the stone of his hearth. This door should never have been put here! It's ridiculous! An absurdity. An abyss. A danger. He will board the damned thing up immediately. It is just as he lets go of the door jamb with the intention of turning away from that vast night sky that he feels the stranger's hand against the middle of his back, the quick thrust, and the beginning of an endless fall. He wakes up with a gasp in his bed, at the same moment as the dogs begin to bark outside. He lies there, safe in bed, in the room that he has known for twelve years, breathing hard and staring into the same darkness that a moment before was filled with stars. The phantom sound of the door shaking in the hallway blends weirdly with the voices of his dogs, and he only gradually brings himself to understand which fabric of sound is real and which is not. There is no door in the hallway, no hand at his back, no fall. But his dogs, he gradually understands, really are barking. They're angry. He can hear it in their voices. And scared? With that thought he sits up quickly. If something's out there that the dogs are scared of that's not very good at all. "Annie," he whispers urgently. Why isn't she waking up? Then his hand finds only empty sheets on her side of the bed. He curses quietly. She's probably sleeping in Melanie's old room again. She started that not long after their daughter left for the University up North two years ago, but it's been happening a lot more lately. On that side of the house, and with her door closed, she could sleep through anything. His clothes, always hanging on a peg at the bed-side, go on quickly. Then his shoes, and finally he grabs the shotgun from its mount on the wall. It's been a long time since he last fired the big gun in anger, but he runs down the hall thinking that there's only one kind of trouble he knows that the dogs would hesitate to attack directly. Armed men. He bangs hard on Melanie's door a couple of times as he runs past and yells his wife's name. There's no need to talk she knows her role in a crisis like this perfectly well. It's not the kind of thing you forget. The innkeeper doesn't have time for the eerie feelings that the rattling of the door under his blows tries to evoke. He suppresses them as ruthlessly as he would shoot an intruder, and goes plunging down the stairs. If it's men, he has a good idea of who they might be, and it's not good news. It's the gangs, and if they've come in enough force then he's going to need every one of his customers close behind him, and they'd better be every bit as well-armed as they ever are on the road. He has never quite understood how the gangs survived the nuking of Detroit, to rise again years later in the chaos of the suburbs. Maybe the leaders had been living in the suburbs when the nuke fell, and slowly rebuilt their organizations as government forces faltered during the Last War. That seems reasonable. Or maybe, as he sometimes fancies, the real forces behind the gangs are some sort of spirits floating around in the air, and the gangs just kind of crystallize around them wherever they settle. In any case, they started becoming active again in the suburbs years ago. With no police force to resist them, and with the sporadic attention of Federal troops just a fading memory, the gangs spread rapidly through the more populous areas that still existed in a ring around the destroyed city. Most of the sorts of people who might have resisted them had already left during the Troubles and then the Wars, moving to the countryside to escape what they imagined would be the greater dangers of more densely populated areas. And they had largely been right. Nobody had ever thrown a spare nuke into Kalkaska or the farmland plains of the Thumb. Only Detroit itself was worth one of those. And nowhere had the War Flu spread more quickly and effectively than through the endless subdivisions of Livonia, Dearborn, Novi, and Farmington Hills. By the time they understood what was happening well enough to want to get away, the contagion had already spread widely. The would-be refugees found the highways barricaded and the people of the countryside already armed against them. The big roads filled up bumper-to-bumper, into the medians, and on both sides for fifty miles to the north, west, and south. For the virus, that was the best time of all. Long ago, it was the City of Detroit that had built those highways. The great roads and the brilliant cars that flowed over them were a single beautiful system: the circulatory system of a vast new creature, and Detroit was its heart. The roads and their cars had sprung from the fountainhead of the Motor City to flow out like steel and concrete rivers branching across a young nation, bringing a newer, quicker, brighter, louder, richer life to a nation, and then a continent, and then a world. Now those highways became the War Flu's linear accelerators. It danced up and down their lengths like an invisible Vampire Angel, just touching its victims lightly and lovingly at first, then kissing them, then tasting them, and then tearing them apart feasting and gorging on their thousands of tons of warm copper-scented blood, bathing and roaring and exulting in it. And the eaten, in the last hours of their lives, feeling their new lover's Angelic lust, ran from their cars, forgetting their belongings, forgetting whatever few of their loved ones had been spared. They stumbled into the cities and towns and farms along the wayside, burning with desire to spread the good news, wonderful but perishable, coursing in their veins. There they were murdered mostly: gunned down by their terrified fellow citizens. They were shot like mad dogs in the streets, or like unusually clumsy deer in the fields. They were executed even as they begged for life and wept virus-laden tears. They were murdered even as they held their virus-laden children in their arms, and their children were murdered with them. For years afterward people had pretty much assumed that the suburbs were devoid of life, but they had been wrong. Many had stayed behind, hiding from the disease behind locked doors and curtained windows, watching their televisions and listening to their radios until all those voices fell silent. Of those, many had survived. And when they gathered up their courage weeks later to venture into the silent streets, they had begun life again. Maybe the gangs that came later were just another virus, Mick supposes. One that turns cars into motorcycles, and makes people wear leather and carry lots of weapons. But at least it spills blood a little more selectively. Maybe it's just a smarter, less greedy virus. It makes sure its victims have just enough clean water to drink and decent food to eat so that they will live long enough to reproduce more little hosts for it to live in. Whatever the gangs really are, they might very well have discovered by now that a particular innkeeper once played an unexpected part in the destruction of the headquarters and looting of the treasuries of several of the largest and most powerful gangs in the region only two years before. At the time, all they knew was that the biggest, meanest, quickest battle tank that they had ever seen or heard of had fallen upon them like a steel hurricane, shattering buildings and butchering their best troops as though they were unarmed children. Then it had retreated as quickly as it had come, fleeing with impossible speed down roads hard enough to let it leave no track. Vanishing, along with a large part of their wealth, like a nightmare fleeing at the approach of dawn. But if they have learned more in the two years since? If someone has seen the man who was jumping out of the demon-tank and dragging the contents of the breached vaults into its hatch? And if their spies have managed to determine who that man was? Well then, the innkeeper figures, not even all of his well-armed customers will be able to save him or his Inn. And he almost hopes that after the gang warriors have murdered him and his wife, they will also know that he has a daughter, and will go north to find her too. Because then, long before they get within fifty miles of her, that same demon-tank will find them. In the two years since he sent it there, the tank has already found more than a few of their wayfaring comrades who, looking for new territory to plunder, chanced into the arc of land that he set it to guard. So far, none have returned to their warlords. Mick bursts out the side door of the dining room, the door closest to the parking lot, ready to open up with the shotgun until its five rounds are exhausted, and then switch to his sidearm. By that time his truckers will be coming out of the Inn even if they're clothed in nothing but their underwear and gun belts. Then the gang bastards will know that they have more of a fight on their hands than they bargained for. Before the Wolverine dies, it will teach its enemies that it has claws. But the parking lot is empty. He knows it as soon as the night air hits his face. He skids to a stop a few steps down the sidewalk and looks around, confused. The dogs are all just standing there a few yards in front of the big shed, facing outward. Seeing that he has come outside, they bark with renewed fury but not toward anything that Mick can see.
Copyright © 1999 Michael Goulish |