Authors: George P. Saunders
Of course, Mathias thought automatically. An army of the living dead. Mathias' terror vanished abruptly as the full impact of the Growler's statement rammed itself into his dying brain. No one could destroy them now. Not even Big Jack, the Edenite Hack!
Baby? Baby?
And suddenly, he
felt
like a baby – like the Growler said. He was crying now. Tears of joy and gratitude. The god of Maddogs, The Father, had come down and appeared to
him
– and was delivering to him the world.
He
had called him "baby"; sure, why not, Mathias thought cheerfully. What else could a father call his son? It was the only logical conclusion Mathias could satisfy himself with; in truth,
all
sense of logic had eluded him permanently as madness, cool and brilliant and simple, turned his mind into foggy marshland.
Out of that murky world stepped the zombies of victory.
There were more than ten of them, Mathias could see moments later. From out of the dark, they came, marching silently past him, toward the Maddog encampment. Twenty, thirty, forty; Mathias stopped counting. The Growler walked with Mathias back to the campsite of the Maddogs, as growls and screams of surprise and terror began to fill the air. Mathias was sympathetic; after all, it had taken
him
nearly a minute to accept the everyday premise of dead men coming back to life. Extreme tolerance would have to be observed in dealing with those as yet still unenlightened.
He acted quickly, his pain-free megalomania giving him the confidence of kings, breaking through the silent ranks of the zombie army and positioning himself on top of a battle worn jeep. The camp fire glow made his face appear ethereal. So captivating was he that many of the Maddogs present shut up fast. Mathias looked to the Growler, who was watching him with pride.
The pride of a father.
Mathias had never known such happiness before.
I'll be a good baby
, Mathias said with his eyes to the Growler.
Promise, with a cherry on top
.
The Growler sounded pleased. "I know."
Mathias put up his arms, (arms without pain) and spoke.
"They're our friends!" he yelled, trying to calm the frightened mutants, who were not so quick as he to grasp the advantages before them all. Nay, the love, he quickly amended.
"The General has found them to fight with us!"
The Maddogs quieted, growing slowly accustomed to the corpses, unmoving now, their eyes lava beacons of crimson. With the mention of fighting, interest prevailed over fear and unease.
"Death to Dr. Calisto!" Mathias howled in rapture, deciding that further explanation was extraneous.
His instincts proved correct; the death chant was repeated once, then yelled, then roared.
Gradually, the Maddog encampment became a screaming gibbering, uncontrolled mass of happy, collective mutant enthusiasm. If the Growler was truly inspired, then that inspiration had been infectious, spreading out from him to Mathias and from him to every gleeful Maddog in town. Braver Maddogs approached the silent sentinels of the dead, patting them on the back, holding hands, laughing; trying to make their new allies feel like kin.
The corpses did not respond further than staring directly ahead, as if oblivious to any attention given them, friendly or otherwise.
Mathias did not question what he knew to be impossible. Today, in this world, the dead walked. Fine by him. The Old Growler was gone forever;
how
, Mathias did not care. What took his place, his body – and most importantly – his ability, was enormously more attractive to Mathias than what the original version could ever have offered. The New Growler showed promise – and resourcefulness. The New Growler could take away pain.
The New Growler could awaken the dead.
"Long live the General," Mathias yelled over the deafening cacophony of noise.
Mathias had never believed in heaven – before the War – or after. Now he did. For the first time since the New Growler had spoken to him, Mathias turned his face to God and smiled.
With the holy conviction of a joyful newly converted apostate, he knew that some serious ass was going to finally get kicked.
TWELVE – THE UNINVITED
Walter had never remembered flying so high before.
Only a few feet below the perpetual sooty envelope of poison that never dissipated, she could see a hundred miles in all directions. To the south, the burned, skeletal remains of Laura's compound lay black and twisted and still, as of a day ago, forever unattractive to the surviving Stiffers that had pursued her destruction so patiently, at last to no avail. To the far west, and only barely visible on the horizon, were the blasted, ruptured remains of Las Vegas. Broken spires of glass and marble clawed their melted ruins skyward – unnoticed shrines and monuments to Mankind's final gamble – now forever lost and forgotten. To the east spanned an immense vastness of desolation that promised to continue eternally, boasting only sand and dust and radioactive ash. Perhaps, Walter imagined from the geography she had learned through Jack's maps, after two or three hundred miles of the same scenery, a city would crop up; St. George, probably, in Utah – smaller than Vegas, but just as extinct. Metropolitan graveyards, like thousands of others littering the globe, their mourners would be few in number. Windblown relics belonging to a civilization that flared brightly for a few eons then flickered out completely, these mighty ruins would now serve an elite type of parasite; the common cockroach.
The gutted ruin of every city on earth now teemed with millions of this enduring life form. Had it the understanding or the pride, or the opportunity to both, any cockroach would gloat over its hundred million year supremacy over humanity. Even in this brutalized environment of burned-out fission, the cockroach
would toast in the next twenty millennium with the same resilience that its prehistoric ancestor had done while watching the giant reptiles of the Jurassic and Triassic age mire themselves in tar 65 million years earlier; thus emerging victorious yet again over the reigning civilization of the day. In this much later age, the roach had seen Man come and go; perhaps, at a later date, Man would come and go again, then pass forever into oblivion.
It was all the same to Mr. Roach, Walter thought.
The roach alone would survive; and it alone, without rancor or despair over the current state of affairs in the world, could continue the busy process of living, appreciating Man's great, swollen, charcoaled cities for what they
really
were; tremendous real estate acquisitions. Home to millions of roachies, all swarming happily ever after.
Walter found this idea rather hilarious, though she doubted whether Jack or Laura would share her humor on this issue. She did not have time to consider the matter further. As she turned her attention northward, toward Eden, her bemused daydreaming abruptly gave way to grave concern.
They were a considerable distance from Eden - perhaps a two day trek at least - but Walter was not happy in identifying Maddogs milling around a few half-buried structures surrounded by fencing. Her altitude was too great to determine more detail than this, but that they were Maddogs was unmistakable. She could smell them from here, their sickness, their hate, their desperation. She wondered what they were up to this time, convinced that whatever it was had some dismal bearing on Eden's well-being.
Had she the time, Walter would have nosed down for a bit of spying on the Maddogs. But her search was for other things at the moment. She would not be distracted.
There were no Light Clouds to be seen below. And so she wondered, not for the first time, if the Light Clouds were phenomena that were strictly earthbound. In all the times she had ever witnessed a Light Cloud appearance, the strange vapor never strayed far from the sands. Yet to assume that their stomping grounds were restricted to land only put an unbelievable limitation on the Light Clouds power, of which, Walter now believed, must be considerable. Still, she could not rule out the possibility that this was indeed the case; as matters stood now, she knew less than
nothing
about the glowing lights that Jack claimed he now understood.
Walter regarded the sky above her. She had never entered the brown swirling overcast before; and it was not because she was fearful of excessive exposure to radiation. Jack had long ago discovered that Walter was somehow impervious to radioactivity; an impossibility, of course, but like so many other things in this world reborn, irrefutable. Jack preferred to think about Walter's immunity as little as possible. Walter never thought about it at all, in fact, did not even consider it terribly important.
She ascended into the noxious cloud cover determined to get above it if she could. A thousand feet later and she entered a brilliant zone of gold and turquoise; for the first time ever, Walter was seeing a blue sky and a sun. She had witnessed such things on television, in Jack's video movies and in the many books she read while Jack was asleep. She could imagine what they looked like, how a warm sun against her body felt, the joy of flying against the backdrop of rich blue sky. But nothing could have prepared her for the actual experience of discovery; of seeing what there was above the churning furnace of filth and squalor that covered a world equally violent below.
Walter soared - on this rare occasion - actually grateful for the avian body she possessed that allowed her to embrace so much splendor. If only Jack and Laura could see
this
, she thought drunkenly; but, of course, they
had
, she remembered a split second later. This was the way the world
used
to be. Full of blue skies and suns; full of warmth and freedom. Full of life and beauty.
And, of course, she was sad again. Sad for Jack and Laura and Gleeson and Brandon and Jim and Gus and the other Edenites. Sad for the Maddogs, too.
This
, Walter realized, surveying the slow curve of blue drifting over the cloud bank horizon then the sun above, had been taken away from them. Perhaps, never to be returned. A cruel, irreversible form of capital punishment levied against Man by a vengeful god – or an uncaring universe.
So captivated was she by these dismal thoughts that Walter didn't notice the Light Cloud maneuvering itself silently behind her, 30,000 feet above sea level.
* * *
The blue sky abruptly vanished.
Taking its place was a black void, cluttered with brilliant points of light. The lights were moving in a roughly circular motion, keeping pace with one another, never colliding, reminding Walter of ants that trafficked themselves so efficiently to and from an anthill. Like those ants, these lights never interfered with or impeded the motion of their respective trajectories. The collision of rare and remote quasars seemed more probable than these motivated light entities crashing into one another. Walter thought that the lights seemed almost alive.
The void stretched into infinity, as did the lights themselves. Walter noted that the temperature in this blackness was rather comfortable; not warm, not hot, just neutral. She did not feel fear because she knew where she was.
Somehow, she
knew
.
And in that moment, she came to understand something more about the Light Clouds.
They were
good
.
It was all the communication she needed from them. Here, in this void, inside one of the clouds, she could discern an array of emotions ranging from love, to kindness, to compassion. The cloud was filled with benevolence.
And she also knew something else now.
The Stiffer had not lied to her. She
was
like the Light Clouds. The Clouds had come to
her
. Though she could not do so at the moment, she felt as if she should join the lights in their perpetual quest toward the furthest parts of the void. For deep at the end of the void, Walter felt, lay something divine. Something
right
. An answer to all her questions. A peace.
Maybe, even Jack, eventually.
An answer to a prayer, a dream come true.
Another answer had been given to her. She would not discover a means for killing the Stiffer. Not here. Not in this place of blessed pacifism, this place free of hate and malice. For all their power, Walter deduced, (a power far exceeding that which the Stiffer possessed), the Light Clouds would not wield it for purposes of destruction. The clouds had more important matters to attend to, Walter perceived; the business of the universe, eternity and forever.
Perhaps what lay at the end of the void – that Divine Something, for lack of anything better to call it – could help her. Walter hoped so. She spread her wings and dived ahead – only to find herself in blue sky again, with the blazing sun that had not seen the ground for five years, glaring above.
The Light Clouds, the brilliant spectacle within, the void that stretched into infinity – were gone. Yet even this realization failed to surprise Walter. She circled several more times, luxuriating in the cleanness of this upper atmosphere, then descended into the murky interior of smoke; there to return to the earthly business of tackling the Stiffer once more – without the blessing of divine intervention.
Walter was not disappointed. In a matter of seconds, the Clouds had somehow explained their purpose to her. She had been afforded a glimpse of Creation; somehow, she knew she would see more of it. Later.
Perhaps much later.
After she was finished in hell.
* * *
The Stiffer's eyes blazed.
Even from this appreciable distance, here in Jack's laboratory, he could easily control the stupid, maimed body of the Growler with little effort. The Stiffer had been dreading his dealings with the animalistic Maddogs; in some ways, he thought coldly, they were as pathetic as the kind of creature whose body he had recently taken hostage – and was presently residing in.