"My ass, it's Abdul," Wachowiak grumbled. "Dunebilly dirt-farmer going after jackrabbits with a musket, maybe."
"These hills're crawling with Shiite resistance groups, shithead," Stauffer hissed back. "Kill you for your food and boots."
Chief signed for silence. The breeze dropped off, drawing a curtain of lunar quiet. Even in the dark of the new moon, the stars cast almost enough light to read by. The lone tumble of boulders where they'd seen the strangers offered the only cover within range for an antique rifle. Storch trained his gun on it, breathing shallow through his nose, ticking off each rocky silhouette and daring it to move. Hillpeople wouldn't tangle with them even if they did spot them, and Shiites hated Saddam more than they did, and would probably beg for food rather than try to take it. For a change, Wachowiak was probably right.
"Chief? Dale, man, look at this."
Storch turned back to find that everyone was staring down at the burning bunker again, and when Storch looked with them he could understand why they had forgotten the shots.
The three strangers were coming out of the ruin, as calmly as if they were strolling back from the latrine. The ghastly particolored flames washed them in livid colors as they walked out of the most deadly place on earth.
Green smoke streamed off them like the fumes from burning plastic. Their hair and headgear was on fire, weird tongues of greenish flame dancing around their skulls like Blackbeard's pitch-soaked braids. One of them stopped and waved once, pointed something right at them.
"He's flashing us with an infrared pointer," Stauffer said. "He's saying 'Howdy'."
Two more shots sounded from behind them just then. One struck Preston's and Chappelle's screen; the other made the back of Chief's head into a drive-thru. Gagliardo stood up from the radio to face his holemate and squad leader and sat back down too hard to get up again soon. Stauffer barked "Jesusfuckinchrist" as the ghoulish green image of Chief's brains on the half-shell swam into focus, ducked down and proceeded to empty the magazine of his MP-5 up the canyon. They all joined in, laying down a perfect three hundred sixty degree fan of automatic fire for four seconds, then ducked for incoming, straining to hear past the deafening echoes of their own shots.
The silence dragged on, nobody acknowledging Stauffer's "Nedick's dead. Storch is the one." Storch, wanting so badly to see something, alive or dead, couldn't open his mouth to reply, wasn't asked to. That control had slipped out of their hands so fast, that they'd just seen men walk in and out of a burning chemical weapons bunker, that they'd lost Chief Warrant Officer Dale W. Nedick to fucking sheepherders, sent his brain spinning.
Storch barked out orders by rote. "Preston! Watch the canyon for those three interlopers. Shoot on sight! Wachowiak and Stauffer, watch those rocks!"
"Nothing, nothing down there," Preston whispered. Twiddling the gain knob on his goggles, he turned round and round. At Chief's feet, Gagliardo continued his unanswered prayer into the phone, "St. Bernard, this is Pit Bull One-Three, repeating, we are compromised, surrounded and squad leader is down, requesting exfil soonest, over."
Storch was the first to notice the wind changing. "Suit up and shoot up!" he shouted, and pulled his own atropine kit out and injected the anti-nerve gas serum into his right thigh, watched the others do the same. He wrestled his way into his MOPP poncho, struggling against Tue to get it on without putting down his gun. The big Samoan already wore his heavy rubber chemical suit, but didn't move to put on the hood until Storch yanked on it. Steeped in the new-plastic-hospital-vomit stench of the hood, Storch couldn't imagine how gas could smell much worse.
Something deep within the chemical lab exploded again. The shockwave was almost a visible wall in the sand, cracking like a whip underneath them, shaking them to their knees in their holes.
Storch fought not to get trampled as Tuetagoloa scrambled out of the hole, held down the trigger of his gun and started spinning. He didn't see the advancing cloud of black-green vapor that oozed up the canyon walls until it was at his feet. The chemical plant was a cauldron of superheated toxic gases, and it was boiling over. The heavier than air fumes slid among the rocks like serpents. In seconds, they would fill in the holes, and in a few seconds more, eat through their suits. Tue's body jolted with three shots to his chest, but a shout from behind the boulders answered his sacrifice. A robed silhouette collapsed atop the rocks, and another went down trying to pull him back out of sight. A volley of rifle fire finally knocked down the burly gunner, who dropped and was immediately swallowed by the green fog.
Stauffer climbed out of his hole next, even as the vapors poured in. The legs of his suit dripped a trail of molten plastic. The Bedouins shot him down two steps ahead of the tide. The others froze, all their training suspended for a moment as they stopped thinking how to survive and took up choosing how to die.
"Evacuate the hide! Fall out and take that fucking rock, gentlemen!" Storch did his best imitation of the Chief, punctuated it with a grenade from the M203 launcher mounted under his rifle. The grenade skipped off the top of the rock, soared up in a lazy arc and dropped on top of the remaining Bedouins just as the fuse burnt up. The dull crump, the sharp screams awakened them to who they were.
A bullet, or a piece of shrapnel from his own grenade ripped through his right hand. He ducked down and examined it for a full second, waiting for the pain to come. He was still watching it, could still almost feel his thumb there, when the green fog spilled into his spiderhole. Hands knotted in his plastic hood and hauled him out of the hole.
They were climbing out of the holes, but too late, the fog closed over them, and their suits were sloughing off of them and their skins burned, and the tendrils of gas worked their way into their sinuses, and they were holding their breath…
And the wind whipped the green gas to ribbons and scattered it away from them, scoured their wounds with pure, stinging sand. The wash of a helicopter just above their heads, voices in their ears, and sleep, and Sgt. Storch was already beginning to forget what really happened…
1
July 4, 1999.
It rained on the Fourth of July in Death Valley. Great black clouds tore themselves apart in the livid blue noon sky, punishing curtains of gunmetal rain that the Bad Mood Guy swore would be full of frogs and octopi.
"Is it over?" the Bad Mood Guy woke up and wanted to know. His shrill voice vibrated the weatherbeaten porch beneath their feet. "Did it happen?"
"No. We're still here. Go back to sleep," Storch told him.
"Fucking gyp."
"Moody's got a point. Nostradamus said the world's going to end today," Ely Buggs said. He quoted, "'The year 1999, seven months. From the sky will come a great King of Terror—
—To bring back to life the great King of the Mongols, before and after Mars to reign by good Luck,'" Hiram Hansen finished. "Bullshit. He only said it would start to end. Anyway, Nostradamus was just a courtier-spy for the Merovingian dynasty—"
"Hugenot," interrupted Bad Mood Guy.
"All his prophecies were either coded reports on the royal family's private business, or attempts to influence same. Edgar Cayce said we've got a good five hundred years yet. And he was an American."
"Cayce predicted in his sleep. He was dreaming. Nostradamus predicted wide awake. Stared into the sun. He saw the day coming. Nostradamus and five bucks says it goes down on the Fourth."
Zane Ezekiel Storch moved to swat a fly dancing a tarantella on his scalp, gave up. It would drown in sweat soon, anyway. "Both full of shit. Don't want to hear any more apocalyptic bullshit on my porch."
"Two kinds of people 'round here these days, young Zane: them as're afraid the world's gonna end and them as're afraid it won't," Hansen said. "This ain't no place for an honest man with his head on straight anymore." The coroner/taxidermist/librarian fumbled out his tobacco pouch, a tanned baby gila monster with a zipper in its belly, dumped out a pinch of his rust-red blend. Rolled a cheroot.
"Tellin' ya, if it was gonna happen, it should've by now. Fucking gyp," the Bad Mood Guy growled from under the porch. The Bad Mood Guy had sacrificed two hundred dollars and his satellite dish to the Field Marshal's Armageddon Betting Pool—and eaten two sheets of acid to forget about it.
They sat on the porch of Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply, watching the old man they called Pop Sickle as he weighed and pinched at foil pouches of freeze-dried astronaut ice cream on aisle three like they were cantaloupes. Pop Sickle never talked, and Storch nurtured a supernatural dread of what he might say if he ever did. An albino giant with a beluga whale's torso and pipestem limbs, Pop Sickle had horrible weeping lesions and gigantic bruises on nearly every exposed inch of moonstone skin. Circulation so bad you could hear whatever he used for blood sloshing inside when he moved. He was hairless but for a tumbleweed goatee of fiber-optic polar bear hair. He wore a spelunker's helmet, ski goggles and a nylon and rubber spring wetsuit, but even on a hundred and six degree high summer day like today, he didn't—or couldn't—sweat. But even so, Pop Sickle lived up to his name. He melted.
"Shit, Hi. It ain't just here," Ely picked up the lost conversational thread. "The artificial threshold we've set up in the Millennium is nothing more than an appointed time for us to clean out our collective unconscious. Millennial psychosis is a timed anxiety release, throughout history. The problem is, the nuts who really expected the big one to come down get really fucked up when they're denied the cathartic vindication of their psychoses. Case in point the Bad Mood Guy down there."
Storch knew who Ely Buggs was really talking about, but he let it lie. Pissed about Harley Pettigrew, his store manager, two hours AWOL; pissed at his cashier running down his old man. Pilgrims came to Thermopylae in the heart of Death Valley to burn their insanity away, or gave it free rein to thrive in a boundless wilderness of blank canvases on which to paint their fantastic, paranoid mindscapes. In one way or another, they were all pilgrims.
Ely Buggs, smiling, always smiling into the sun, smiling and waving, cooking up apocalyptic prophecies, posing for satellite photos, wants to believe he's blowing some National Reconnaissance Office spotter's mind. Ely was obsessive-compulsively driven to kick people in the brains. He had been much sought-after as a computer programmer, but collected SSI because he couldn't pass someone who wasn't looking where they were going without assaulting them. Always said that when people surrender their personal safety to a painted crosswalk or the defensive driving of others, it is incumbent on their fellows to shock them back to their senses. He hitchhiked into town one morning eight months ago, and immediately signed on. To Storch's one question job interview: "Why are you here?" Ely Buggs answered, "To get away from the powerlines. They play hell with your DNA." The first and only time he jumped on his boss, Storch broke three of his fingers and his wrist with one twist of his bad hand. He apologized, got a field splint from aisle five and went back to work. Buggs was a good cashier.
"Judas git home, he's doing it again!"
Pop Sickle doffed his helmet and commenced to scratching at his bald pate. The wound flaked and slobbered clear plasma tears into his helmet. The albino's scalp glittered like the bowels of a geode, adorned with crystalline keloid scars; his bare skull shining through the bloodless sores. He swam in flooded uranium mines, reservoirs tainted with mercury and illegally dumped DDT. He glowed in the dark, made the geiger counters go batshit on aisle nine. He paid cash.
Storch cocked an ear, heard an engine, civilian RV wheels chewing gravel. The RV hove into view and came to rest in front of his store, a gargantuan refrigerated biosphere on wheels. With it, an ambitious tourist could colonize Venus. The cabin door popped open with an audible hiss and a middle-aged couple climbed out. Banana Republic togs, urban cowboy boots, no sunburns. The man had a video camera on his shoulder. Tourists. Plastic in high impulse-buy gear.
"Buggs, behind the counter. Hi, don't you scare 'em off, or you can start paying rent for that bench. And go wash yourself, you're making everything stink like fucking formaldehyde." Storch felt the headache coming on.
Buggs behind the counter, Storch eyeing the tourists as they ogled the wares. City-slicker types video-sightseeing, insurance against Deliverance-style yokels, snaps from the fringe for the folks back home. They poked around the surplus goods, Storch thankful he took down his father's exhibit of SS regalia, wishing Harley was here to handle these idiots so he could get back to work. The Army taught him to obey orders and like it, but not to look like he enjoyed sucking up. The tourists, conspicuously not bargaining or asking questions, not trying on doughboy helmets or gas masks: just swiveling, scoping through the camera for the folks at home. Sidling up to him, needling the local yokel suddenly the main attraction. He recoiled from the greedy camera in his face.
"So, are you folks survivalists?"
"Everybody's a survivalist, mister. We just cater to those who take their survival seriously." His father's words, sounding stupid from his mouth. "Death Valley is a harsh place. You may or may not've noticed, in your RV, out there. It takes a lot to stay alive here. We sell most of it."
"There a lot of militia groups around here?"
Question hinky from a tourist. Storch smelled fuzz. "None that I know of. We get a lot of hermits. People who just want to be left alone."
"Death Valley is the last refuge of the true individualist," Buggs chimed in.
The camera homed in on Pop Sickle as he approached the checkout. The old mutant jumped back like a bushman afraid the infernal device would steal his soul.