Masked (2010) (27 page)

“The virus is still in the atmosphere. Every year a handful of individuals are infected and modified. Many of them live and die without ever knowing they are potential Damocletians. But if some accident befalls them, an exposure to low pressure or vacuum—”

“As befell me.”

“We contact those who become aware of what they are. And we invite them to join us up here, when they are ready.”

I felt angry. “I was
meddled
with, my whole life changed, by engineers who were dead long before I was born. What about ethics? What about my rights, my choice?”

Mary sighed, a peculiar noise in the back of her throat. “Actually, this is typical of the Heroic Solution generation’s projects. Given immense budgets, huge technical facilities, virtually unlimited power, and negligible political scrutiny, their technicians often experimented.
Played.
Even the Stack was an innovative solution to the problem of building a space shield—innovative compared to the big discs thrown up by the Chinese, for instance. But they often went too far. Some of the Heroic Solution outcomes are effectively crime scenes.
We
, however, have recognition of our status as citizens with full human rights by the UN’s Climatic Technology Legacy Oversight Panel.”

“But you’re forced to live on the Stack.”

“Not forced. But it’s what we’re for. Where we’re at home. We have shelters, of course; most of the time we’re out of the vacuum. We have factories and workshops. We repair old mirrors and manufacture new ones—no, that’s the wrong language, it’s more than
that, more spiritual. We tend the field of mirrors, as a gardener tends a flower bed. Flowers of light. In Iowa we had a garden. This is the same. It’s. . . enriching.”

“And that’s what you want of me. To come and join you in the endless weeding of your mirror garden, all for the benefit of those down on Earth, who know nothing of you and care less. For that I should leave behind my life—”

“Your identity as Vacuum Lad?”

I blushed behind my horny outer layer of skin.

“You have family?”

“Yes. They would miss me. And I, I would even miss Muhammad. My brother.”

“Yet they are not like you. Yet this is your place.” She embraced me. “Listen. It’s wonderful here. We live as no human has before. And we aren’t limited to the Stack. Look again at our yacht. We sail on light, down to the Earth—away to the Moon, where the children play in the craters and kick up the dust. Some of us are talking about an expedition to a comet.”

“A comet?”

“Why not? We can live anywhere, anywhere between the planets and the stars.” She twisted so she was looking down. “We protect the Earth. That is why we are here. But sometimes the Earth looks very small. It is easy to forget it even exists. Those long-dead geoengineers didn’t mean it to be so, but that’s the way it worked out.

“Some say that the adaptations of microbes and animals which the geneticists used to manufacture
us
are relics of a dispersal of life across space in the deep past. Now those same adaptations are being used to spread life once more, human life, across the solar system. We are the future, Vacuum Lad. Not those down below.”

And she withdrew, breaking her long kiss.

I fulfilled my obligations. I returned to the shuttle, and flew on to the Hilton. On a secure link I told Professor Stix of all that had
happened to me.

For now my life will go on. I continue to earn. I have my family to think of—even Muhammad. And for now Earth needs Vacuum Lad. That’s what the contracts and my agency agreement with Professor Stix say. And it’s what I believe, too. It is my duty.

And then there is the Earth First League to be dealt with. My enemies have tried again to assassinate me, more than once. Mary Webb talks of war, war between the Damocletians and the League, between the sky and the ground. A resolution is approaching.

Beyond that I am unsure.

In space, I look down at the comfortable fug of gravity and air where my family lives. But on the ground, I look up to the stars where Mary Webb and her Damocletians swim, and my skin itches to harden, my lungs to empty of stale air.

I often wonder how I will know when it is time for my ascension. Perhaps, as I ride another shuttle on the way to another routine money-spinning job, there will be another scratch on a space shuttle window.
Welcome home, Vacuum Lad.
And then I’ll know.

I think I’ll keep the costume, however.

Chris Roberson
is the author of fourteen novels (and counting), among them
The Dragon’s Nine Sons, End of the Century
, and
Book of Secrets
, as well as
X-Men: The Return
. For DC Vertigo, he has written the miniseries
Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love
, and is the cocreator of the ongoing monthly title
I, Zombie
. Roberson is also the publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies, and he is the editor of the anthology
Adventure Vol. 1
. He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award four times—once each for writing and editing, and twice for publishing—twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and three times for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning the Short Form in 2004 with his story “O One” and the Long Form in 2008 with his novel
The Dragon’s Nine Sons
). Roberson is currently writing the first “authorized prequel” to Philip K. Dick’s
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
for Boom! Studios, a twelve-issue comic book miniseries entitled
Dust to Dust.
A prolific writer across multiple media, Roberson always displays a strong pulp influence and a staggering imagination.

C
HRIS
R
OBERSON

As the chimes of midnight rang out from the tolling bells above, a hail of argent death rained from the twin silver-plated Colt .45s onto the macabre invaders from the Otherworld, and the cathedral echoed with the eerie laughter of that silver-skulled avenger of the night—THE WRAITH.

F
ROM
THE SECRET JOURNALS OF
A
LISTAIR
F
REEMAN
S
ATURDAY
, O
CTOBER
31, 1942.

I dreamt of that day in the Yucatan again last night. Trees turned the color of bone by drought, skies black with the smoke and ash of swidden burning for cultivation, the forest heavy with the smell of death. Cager was with me, still living, but Jules Bonaventure and his father had already fled, though in waking reality they had still been there when the creatures had claimed Cager’s life.

As the camazotz came out of the bone forest toward us, their bat-wings stirring vortices in the smoke, I turned to tell my friend
not to worry, and that the daykeepers would come to save us with their silvered blades at any moment. But it was no longer Cager beside me, but my sister Mindel, and in the strange logic of dreams we weren’t in Mexico of ’25 anymore, but on a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side more than a dozen years before. And I realized that the smoke and ash were no longer from forest cover being burned for planting, but from the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that had ended her young life. “Don Javier will never get here from Mexico in time,” I told my sister, as though it made perfect sense, but she just smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Alter. This is the road to Xibalba.” Then the demons arrived, but instead of claws, they attacked us with the twine-cutting hook-rings of a newsvendor, and we were powerless to stop them.

Charlotte is still out of town visiting her mother and won’t be back until tomorrow. When I awoke alone in the darkened room this morning, it took me a moment to recall when and where I was. In no mood to return to unsettling dreams, I rose early and began my day.

I ate alone, coffee and toast, and skimmed the morning papers. News of the Sarah Pennington murder trial again crowded war reports from the front page of the
Recondito Clarion
, and above the fold was a grainy photograph of the two young men, Joe Dominguez and Felix Uresti, who have been charged with the girl’s abduction and murder. Had it not been an attractive blonde who’d gone missing, I’m forced to wonder whether the papers would devote quite so many column inches to the story. But then again, there were nearly as many articles this morning on the Sleepy Lagoon murder case just getting under way down in Los Angeles, where seventeen Mexican youths are being tried for the murder of Jose Diaz. Perhaps the attention is more due to the defendants’ zoot suits and ducktail combs than to Governor Olson’s call to stamp out juvenile delinquency. If the governor had the power simply to round up every pachuco in the state and put them in camps, like Roosevelt has done with the Japanese, I think Olson would exercise the right in a heartbeat.

I didn’t fail to notice the item buried in the back pages about the third frozen body found in the city’s back alleys in as many nights, but I didn’t need any reminder of my failure to locate the latest demon.

But this new interloper from the Otherworld has not come alone. Incursions and possessions have been on the rise in Recondito the last few weeks, and I’ve been running behind on the latest
Wraith
novel as a result. I spent the day typing, and by the time the last page of “The Return of the Goblin King” came off my Underwood’s roller it was late afternoon and time for me to get to work. My
real
work.

As the sun sank over the Pacific, the streets of the Oceanview neighborhood were crowded with pint-sized ghosts and witches, pirates and cowboys. With little care for wars and murder trials, much less the otherworldly threats which lurk unseen in the shadows, the young took to their trick-or-treating with a will. But with sugar rationing limiting their potential haul of treats, I imagine it wasn’t long before they turned to tricks, and by tomorrow morning I’m sure the neighborhood will be garlanded with soaped windows and egged cars.

I can only hope that dawn doesn’t find another frozen victim of the city’s latest invader, too. After my failure tonight, any new blood spilled would be on my hands—and perhaps on the hands of my clowned-up imitator, as well.

The dive bars and diners along Almeria Street were in full swing, and on the street corners out front pachucos in their zoot suits and felt hats strutted like prize cockerels before the girls, as if their pocket chains glinting in the streetlights could lure the ladies to their sides.

On Mission Avenue I passed the theaters and arenas that cater to the city’s poorer denizens, plastered with playbills for upcoming touring companies, boxing matches, and musical performances. One poster advertised an exhibition of Mexican wrestling, and featured a crude painting of shirtless behemoths with faces hidden behind leather masks. A few doors down a cinema marquee
announced the debut next week of
Road to Morocco
. I remembered my dead sister’s words in last night’s dream, and entertained the brief fantasy of Hope and Crosby in daykeepers’ black robes and silver-skull masks, blustering their way through the five houses of initiation.

The last light of day was fading from the western sky when I reached the cemetery, wreathed in the shadows of Augustus Powell’s towering spires atop the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony. A few mourners lingered from the day’s funeral services, standing beside freshly filled graves, but otherwise the grounds were empty.

I made my way to the Freeman family crypt and, passing the entrance, continued on to the back, where a copse of trees grow a few feet away from the structure’s unbroken rear wall.

As Don Javier had taught me a lifetime ago in the Rattling House, I started towards the wall, and an instant before colliding with it turned aside toward an unseen direction and shadowed my way through to the other side.

Don Mateo was waiting for me within. He’d already changed out of his hearse driver’s uniform and had dressed in his customary blue serge suit, western shirt printed with bucking broncos and open at the neck, a red sash of homespun cotton wound around his waist like a cummerbund.

“Little brother,” he said, a smile deepening the wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. He raised his shotglass filled to the rim with homemade cane liquor in a kind of salute. “You’re just in time.”

When Mateo speaks in English, it usually means that he’s uncertain about something, but when he gets excited—or angry—he lapses back into Yucatan. Tonight he’d spoken in Spanish, typically a sign his mood was light, and when I greeted him I was happy to do the same.

“To your health,” I added in English, and, taking the shotglass from his hands, downed the contents in a single gulp, then spat on the floor a libation to the spirits. Don Javier always insisted that there were beneficent dwellers in the Otherworld, and libations in
their honor might win their favor. But while I’d learned in the years I spent living with the two daykeepers, either in their cabin in the forest or in the hidden temples of Xibalba, to honor the customs handed down by their Mayan forebears, and knew that the villains and monsters of their beliefs were all too real, I still have trouble imagining there are any intelligences existing beyond reality’s veil that have anything but ill intent for mankind.