Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars (31 page)

Municipal Grid 17 wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where they went berserk and smashed windows when the lights went out, but Morton still bombarded Stu Fiedler with panicked phone calls while he was getting the batteries recharged. Fiedler told Morton that if he had a brainstorm for how to rush the job without going to the gas chamber, he was all ears.

The new cold fusion system used the first truly clean-burning, inexhaustible fuel, but there were still major supply issues.

The power station itself was lit by a cranky dinosaur of a backup generator that still burned biodiesel. It was the only light for two miles in any direction.

Morton waited at the door for Fiedler’s truck. Sweat plastered his sole surviving lock of hair into an inverted question mark on his ruddy forehead. “What kept you? Are they rioting?”

Fiedler pushed the loaded dolly into the control room and over to the primary generator. Even with all the insulation and tanks of liquid nitrogen, the new model took up less than half the space of the turbines from the old system. “Relax, Mort. There’s not even traffic. I got the runaround, though… I had to try five hospitals.”

“Ridiculous! They’ve got to clean up these snarls in the distribution, or they’re just setting us up to fail.” Morton pulled on gloves and donned a welder’s mask, then turned to the hatch in the belly of the generator. Black frost crumbled as he wrenched the hatch open with a pair of long tongs. The cold that wafted out was like Christmas on Pluto.

Fiedler averted his eyes and pushed the dolly up to the yawning mouth, then backed away to suck on a nicotine pop.

Morton slotted the batteries into the generator and slammed the hatch. “Where did you get these?”

The batteries had been warm, like loaves of aluminum bread, like newborn babies. Fiedler scrubbed frost from his eyebrows. “Does it matter?”

Morton flipped the mask up. Spiky puffs of crystallized breath floated out of his mouth. “Sure, it matters... not the way you’re thinking, but... well, if we have to listen to it all night...” His hands shook as he tugged off the gloves.

Fiedler tossed the spent pop stick in the trash and went over to the board. “It still bugs you?”

“I won’t pretend it doesn’t.”

Fiedler threw the big switch. “Nothing gets to you, unless you let it.”

The generator hummed and the batteries squealed as the circuit closed. Both men looked at each other, then at their feet as, like steam pouring off the big, frigid machine, the voices leaked out.

“Jack... it’s so cold... Did you let the pilot light go out?”

“Jesus, when my wife finds out, she’s gonna kill me—”

Fiedler reached for the radio, but Morton pinned his hand to the desk hard enough to leave a mark. “No, Stu. Listen...”

The voices were faint and brittle, but there was no shutting them out. They used the shell of the generator as their larynx, and the crackling of the cold fire that bathed them for their breath.

“Ynez... darling... there’s something you have to know...”

“...Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb—”

“Mommy, I’m scared—”

Fiedler bolted for the exit, double-hulled and soundproofed, but the voices spilled out and followed him into the night.

“Sure…” Morton peered nearsightedly into the dark, unscrewed the lid on a tarnished silver flask and took a long, searing belt from it.

“You know what I miss, Mort? I miss smog. I miss purple sunsets, and harvest moons, and oil slicks...”

Morton took the flask and scoured the chill out of his bones with three short, sharp shots. “Everything that turned to oil was alive once, too,” he said.

They toasted oil, dinosaurs and darkness. They killed the flask just as, two by two all down the avenue, the streetlights came to life.

An Afterword by Jeremy Robert Johnson

First, a heartfelt thanks goes to You for checking out this Swallowdown Press title and letting Cody Goodfellow’s magnificently weird shit into your cranium. Your continued support for the independent press ensures that oft-beleaguered authors with no desire to write tween vampire romance will still have access to essentials like beer and tacos (though we will go without tacos if we have to).

Second, welcome to Planet Cody. If you made it this far, and if this happens to be your first exposure to his work, then you are now aware of the truth: Cody Goodfellow is The Business. And these odd/astonishing tales keep rushing out of his fingers and on to the page without any sign of relenting, so watch for more from Cody and Swallowdown in the near future, including the wild, mind-bending novel
Perfect Union
.

As an author I have immense respect for Cody’s talent and eerily glowing imagination. As a reader I can’t wait to see what he’ll do next. And as a publisher I am lucky enough to read his new stuff early, which means I can tell you he just keeps getting more berserk and spellbinding. Stay tuned (and be certain to check out his Perilous Press epic Radiant Dawn/Ravenous Dusk and manic duets with horror icon John Skipp in the meantime).

Third, it’s nice to see you again. Swallowdown Press entered a sort of existential coma for the last few years (as indie presses often do), but now we’re awake and we’ve grown a crazily long beard and we’ve acquired a two-to-three year roster of amazing books from diverse folks like Cody Goodfellow, Forrest Armstrong, Mitch Maraude, J. David Osborne, and more. The next few years should be fun for fans of strange/smart/surreal fiction.

And fourth, VIVA BIZARRO! The Weird Wave rolls ever onward!

Take care, friends,

JRJ

Portland, OR 2009

Cody Goodfellow
was born in San Diego in 1970, and almost immediately adopted into the Free School, a nomadic hippie apocalypse cult whose existence has been repeatedly denied by the FBI. Roaming the back highways of the Southwest in ice cream trucks, subsisting only off trash from rest stop dumpsters and semi-annual ritual cannibalism on high hippie holidays, he enjoyed a blissful semi-feral childhood until 1981, when the Free School was savagely massacred and sacrificed by a rival drug-running Santeria cult in Baker, California. How Goodfellow alone walked away, and how he survived in the hostile Mojave Desert for the next thirteen years, remains a mystery. When discovered by authorities digging through the trash behind a Boll Weevil franchise in El Cajon, his vocabulary was still limited to words appearing on Jethro Tull eight-tracks.

The road to rehabilitation was long and arduous, but when Goodfellow finally began to speak out about his brutal ordeal, his harrowing autobiography was dismissed as a product of false trauma or Munchausen Syndrome. After alternate careers as a cult deprogrammer and psychic surgeon failed to take off, he turned to harvesting his apparently false memories for profit. Under the supervision of a professional hypnotist, he automatically writes accounts of experiences he does not remember, but subconsciously believes were real events in his life.

Cody Goodfellow has written three solo novels—
Radiant Dawn
,
Ravenous Dusk
, and
Perfect Union
—and
Jake’s Wake
,
The Day Before
and
Fruiting Body
with John Skipp. His short fiction has also appeared in the recent anthologies
Mighty Unclean
,
Monstrous
,
The Bleeding Edge
and
Up Jumped The Devil
.

He lives in Los Angeles.