Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (18 page)

“Big Steve and Mike Allen” (their two assistant directors) “can cover Act One in the morning. I think we should be on the ground for that one.” Mark felt his nerve catching up with these brave words as he spoke them.

The Third Act had closed on a resounding slaughter of APPs. How would Val field a full force tomorrow? For answer, they had only one vague rumor gathered from insiders at Panoply: the Second Day’s assault force of APPs would be a “big surprise.”

Both directors carried their own brands of sleep-begone. Mark, resolved now, took a small inhaler from his pocket, and lifted it as in toast to his partner. Razz grinned, and took out his own.

“Bottoms up!” he said.

“Down there,” said Mark, “I’m keeping
my bottom down.
”

*   *   *

“I don’t wanna
know—not just yet,” Jool said. They were holding each other, side by side on a pew.

Curtis said, “I don’t know yet either.” They were talking about the number of their casualties.

In the absence of gunfire, it seemed they sat in stillness, though in the streets trucks growled, gathering the dead, and they heard the hoarse, weary shouts of those clearing and repairing their battlements.

In their silence their growing child was with them. Jool hugged him tighter. “You just sleep right here with me now.”

“Yes…” As carefully as if he was breaking bad news, Curtis said, “But we think we might … have something, and they’re gonna get me up an hour or so early. I want you to keep sleeping.”

“What is it?”

“We think we might be able to burn them after all. The ones tomorrow.”

“Why the ones tomorrow?”

“Would you do me a favor? Let me explain after you’ve had some sleep? Please?”

Jool sighed and let herself settle deeper into him. “Some sleep would be OK,” she said. “You know,” she said, “when this is over, we got a visit to pay. I mean all of us here. A visit to L.A.”

At first Curtis didn’t get it. And then he did. He nodded, and they sank in sweet darkness together.

Curtis was stung in the back of the neck. His eyeballs began to swell, grew to big hemispheres that half-covered his head. He had to find Jool, to protect her, but his sight was a mosaic of hundreds of faces that filled the town around him, and he had no other eyes to search this array, to pick out Jool’s from the multitude.

He tore them off his face, and had a shotgun in his hands, and there was Jool down the street in a doorway, and the sky was a pavement of monsters at hover just over the rooftops, and he knew that if she stepped out and saw them, the child in her belly would turn to monsters, and he sprinted to reach her, to thrust her back into the doorway—now their house’s doorway. He tried to call to her to make her meet his eyes and not look up, but he had no voice.

A hand clutched Curtis’s shoulder and he was awake. The sky beyond the broken stained glass was a steely gray. It was Ricky Dawes’ hand on his shoulder. The actual world filled back in around Curtis. The world in which his Auntie Drew no longer lived. From which she would be absent for the rest of his life.…

“Need you ta help me Curtis—that OK?”

“Sure Ricky—shhhh, let her sleep.” He gently disengaged from Jool and followed Ricky out of the church.

“They mostly all gathered,” Ricky said as he led Curtis toward the south end of Glacier. Curtis understood that by “they” Ricky meant their dead. “But,” he said with a faraway voice, “there’s still … someone they haven’t got yet.”

Curtis shot him a look. Said carefully, “You knew him? Or her?”

Ricky shrugged oddly, not meeting his eyes. “Up there, in that alley past Bartlett I think…”

The man lay leaned back against the wall at the alley’s far end, in a strangely upright posture for a corpse, but one which both men were already used to. So swift was the wasps’ poison, the dead often lay strangely poised or propped. There was just enough light now to see that this man’s beard was near white.

He was a small corpse that either one of them might have taken alone in a fireman’s carry, but the way Ricky took him under the arms from behind told Curtis to take the man’s legs and carry him slung between them, which Curtis understood that Ricky meant as an act of respect.

From the moment the two of them were joined face-to-face by this corpse, Curtis knew he must not say a word, that Ricky was struggling to bring out of himself some kind of prayer or testimony for this fallen old fighter (they’d belted a machete that they’d found lying near his dead left hand) and that, not naturally a glib-spoken man, Ricky was trying to find the right words for it. “This here—” It came out in a hoarse bark that startled Curtis slightly. Ricky started again.

“This here old son of a bitch is Hag Barger.” A pause. “This old asshole used to hound me every day of my life since I was, like, eleven! Hootin and brayin at me right out in the street about being an ignore-anus and a school-dodging little retard! Him calling me this! I don’t think he could even read! Or read very much. He’s had me readin the newspaper to him every weekend down at the tavern for I don’t know how long!”

In silence they crossed the street toward the industrial district, while Ricky’s grim face digested yet again this almost lifelong grievance. “There was no place for me to hang out an’ relax in this whole damn town!” he resumed. “He really, like, trammertized my childhood! I mean I’d literally have to go up an’ sit in the hills to have some peace an’ quiet, an’ then sometimes he’d come up past the water tower an’ stand there shouting up the slopes. ‘Hey! Ignore-anus!’ I mean I started to go to school because it was the only place I could get away from him! All this coming from him! He just drank an’ fucked off all day! Grew a little dope and was such a cheat at the scales no one would buy it! The bars didn’t even bother chuckin him out at closing. They just draped a blanket over his head where he sat on his stool, an’ unwrapped him again when they opened!”

In the shadows of the warehouse zone, lay Sunrise’s gathered dead—a strange, long pavement of them, all aligned, all their heads aimed hill-ward, staggered so that the second layer left the chests of the first layer exposed.…

When they’d laid Hag down, Curtis found one of his shoes needed retying … and then found the other one needed it too, giving Ricky a chance to wipe his eyes on his sleeve unobserved.

Curtis gently thwacked Ricky’s gnarled shoulder. “You know what Ricky? We’re gonna kill the shit out of these motherfuckers. I mean those ones!”—And he swept his arm at the slice of sky that Panoply’s scythe had vacated a few hours before. “I mean the Studio. The next shoot is gonna happen there.”

Ricky cleared his throat. “Man, Curtis. You got that sooo right!”

Then, as the pair left the dead, new visitors approached them in a couple of pickups loaded with provisions. These, off-loaded and positioned around the perimeter of the corpses, proved to be machine guns, and spray tanks of gas.

*   *   *

Mark and Razz
hung low over the slopes a mile up in the hills above town. “I’ll take south end,” said Mark. “You north?”

“Fine. Meetcha at the water tower—first one hides, second finds him.”

Razz slid downslope at half throttle. He loved this terrain-skimming, dipping and winding, the grass tickling his bottom, just hugging the landscape. He was high on this whole derring-do bit, born for it, flowed with it … and saw a squat, fast-approaching structure, an outlier of the industrial zone’s upslope rim. Keying the raft to tilt, he set it propped on edge, leaning against the upslope wall. Even from one of the town’s rafts, it would be tough to spot.

He ghosted now through the grass at a crouch toward the water tank’s derrick—would surely beat Mark to it … and just as he reached it, noticed a zone of electric lighting in the otherwise dark warehouse zone, mostly hidden by the bulk of a building. Climbing a ways up, he saw some figures approaching that light, and climbing a little more, was just in time to see two men carrying a body before the building obscured them.

A whisper in the grass. “Razz?”

His partner emerged below. Straining to blend their silhouettes with the beams and cross struts, they climbed the tank’s supports till they could just make out a machine gun on a tripod flanking the lighted zone, and someone manning it.

The two traded a long look. “Maybe they heard some rumor we didn’t,” said Razz.

“Yeah. I have a feeling that down there is just where we want to be camming, come sunrise.”

A short silence followed. “It won’t be easy,” said Razz, “finding cover down there. All that open space.”

“… And we want it between us, want to get crosswise angles on it.”

“We’d better get started before it gets lighter.”

XXII

TICKING DOWN

Gillian opened her
eyes. In the void where the Virgin’s head had been was gray sky, and the raft-scythe was already aloft there, waiting for sunup. She looked down at Jool, asleep at her side.

Gillian had grown up on rezzes in three different states. And now she had a second dear friend from L.A., this second friend once her first friend’s lover. She touched Jool’s cheek, smiling with the new thing she’d learned: when you’ve saved someone’s life, you love them.

Jool’s eyes came open, as if she’d heard her thought. Their gazes caught and mingled, sharing an unspoken hope that they might get to live as friends, as sisters. Gillian said, “It’s near time. We should get everyone up.”

“First I have to pee. Both of me have to pee.”

“Me too.”

The church had a two-stall ladies’ room. Jool said through the partition, “You know, I’m clumsier, but I think she makes my mind clearer. Like she helps me think.”

“So you think she’s a she.”

“I just know she’s a she.”

As they washed their hands and faces, Jool added, “It’s like I feel her warning me—to your right … behind you—like her thoughts coming right up my wiring. Like she’s got my back in there.”

“Got your back and a lot of the rest of you too.” They laughed. Gillian gave her a hug. “You’re tough.” She smiled.

“So are you.”

“Yeah. I can fight. But you’re like … an antibody. All those streets you’ve traveled growing up, colliding with other corpuscles, fighting what came along.”

“So I’m round, like a corpuscle.”

“A tough corpuscle.”

They went back out, still laughing, and began to wake the others, getting the youngest and oldest to the bathrooms first.…

*   *   *

Mark Millar, though
just a bit terrified, exulted. He was on the roof of a building that neighbored the larger one along which the dead were laid. It had a slightly sloped roof with a parapet around it. He lay snugged in the parapet’s corner, his cam snaked down and out through its drain port. The corner would shadow him when the sun emerged. He wasn’t invisible, but pretty damn close, at least till the sun moved overhead. His cam showed him a breathtaking field of potential action.

In the arc lights surrounding them, the dead looked composed. Visible wounds were few. The scuffs and scrapes of vigorous battle marked them here and there, but their calm was absolute. Naked faces and limbs embroidered the array with flesh. This flesh seemed surreally solid, looked like a pavement of dense matter as old as the mountains. In their solidity, in the staggered pattern of their stacking, these dead looked like the first-laid length of a funereal highway that might climb to the peaks of the Trinities.

In a broader ring surrounding the arc lights, the crude machinery of self-defense was deployed. Here was epitomized the eternal human struggle with death: blunt hammers arrayed to strike down that dark angel so inhumanly swift.

Twenty machine guns were arrayed in a crescent along the outer rim, their muzzles exquisitely aligned to keep the flow of fire pouring lengthwise up the dead array, avoiding both ricochet from the wall, and mutual damage. Flanking each gun on the right was a fire team: a guy with a tank-and-nozzle and a flare-gunner to ignite the gas.

Why would these people vandalize even further that unearthly pavement of their kin and friends? Then he realized that somehow they’d learned it was from their dead that today’s new death would come.

Mark’s gift had always been to grasp Val’s genius, and he acknowledged it now. Great art must be implacable, and Val was great, he granted this. But he also thought, and not for the first time, that this was a vile kind of greatness. Was Mark, rising master of Live Action, rooting for the extras now? He was.

But would he lay by the crown that his work here would win him? Abandon Live Action forever? No way.

Aiming his lens across the yard, he zoomed on the rear of a three-story house. It was dormered, and in the lower corner of the dormer’s window frame he found the little glint of Razz’s fiber-optic winking back at him. Whatever happened here would be captured between them.

Mark felt a faint prickle of anti-grav along his back. Two steel circles bit against the nape of his neck.

“As I live and breathe!” A woman’s voice that he knew. A merry voice. “It’s Mark Millar! Vid-wizard extr’ordinaire!”

It amazed Mark, how huge those two steel holes felt, pressed against his neck. Endless space in them, two tubular voids where his whole life could vanish in a tick.

Soon after, in her raft, Sharon Harms sat enjoying the sight of him. Mark was seated as she was, but shackled to his chair. Her cornflower eyes and freckles somehow made her sweet smile scary. “First things first, Mark. Let’s go get your raft.”

*   *   *

Around the gunners
that flanked the dead we set up an outer machine-gun ring to get anything that got up past them. The sun when it came would hit us in the eyes. Less than fifteen minutes left …

Four rafts set down on the yard behind us. Two were ours, loaded with weapons. The other two were sleeker and more high-tech looking. Our rafters began installing guns in these sportier boats.

Sharon Harms flew out over the lot, and in her cheerful, neighborly way told us the news—telling it to our dead as well it seemed, who lay waiting among us to wage a second day of war.