Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Eleven Marching Through Georgia

 

 

In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.

 — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 512 BCE)

 

I could almost smell the Atlantic, somewhere ahead of us, although it may have been my imagination. We’d already seen and heard seagulls carving noisy arcs in the skies above us, and the whole character of the land and vegetation had changed. The soft-slopes of the ancient mountains lay behind us, and even the rolling hills we’d ridden through as we descended to the endless flat lowland before us were now fond memories. For the first time since entering the uplands we’d seen fortresses, mostly abandoned and ruined now after suffering from the Reiver’s treacherous assaults, with what remained of a surrounding ringwall of besieging plants, hostile hedges already softening at the borders, since there were no people left behind to prune them, and the plants themselves were quickly readapting to the lack of human predators by reverting to type, the dandelions already shrunken sightly as they slowly merged back into the grasslands which were their natural habitat, the burdocks going to less lethal seed.

“Oddly enough,” Beryl said as we rode along, “the giant carnivorous plants have turned out to have been as dependent on human enemies as we had always been on plants. There’s a certain delicious irony there.”

“There is,” I replied judiciously, “if one ignores the death and suffering our mutual warfare entailed.”

“Well, we humans have always found death and suffering well enough on our own, don’t you think? Throughout our history, we’ve rarely managed to let all that much time pass before we find an ‘enemy’ or two to shake our fists at.”

We rode along in silence for a few moments after Beryl finished speaking. “True enough,” I finally admitted. “The Reivers seem to have sprang up like human ‘parasites’ in areas more-or-less unsuitable for agriculture and too sparsely settled to support either fortresses or their predatory plants. I reckon the pine and hardwood forests mature too slowly to change too much in less than geologic time. The dandelions and burdocks had their greatest success where the forests and native plants had been felled or uprooted to make way for monoculture farmlands.”

Beryl winked at me then and said, “Well then, we’re working in the right direction with our merry band of angels, don’t you think?”

I laughed, for more than half of us were pregnant by then. “Of course it is! After living in the grim fortresses — where it was forbidden to embark on pregnancy without permission from the ‘Chatelain’ — and then suffering under the slavers, the resurgent human spirit quite naturally reasserts itself in increased desire and fecundity.”

“By which you mean to say…?” she prompted me.

I found it difficult to repress my inclination to laugh, but managed to keep a straight face as I answered with some attempt at dignity, “After a bad scare — once they’re feeling safe — most women do have a tendency toward increased libido.”

She rolled her eyes. “ ‘Increased libido,’ Harry’s Holy Hell! Sometimes, after an engagement, I get so horny I could fuck for seven straight days without stopping.”

“Okay… that too…,” I confessed, trying to remain at least a little demure, despite having experienced the violence of Beryl’s passions, which I had to admit made me hot from time to time. “Evidently, your experiences in the Underworld had you hobnobbing with a little of the ‘rough trade’ one expects to find down there.”

“Oh, Honey!” she confided, “It’s not for nothing that Hades is depicted in ancient art as driving a tethrippon, the four-horse chariot of the Gods. Just imagine those four powerful black stallions surging ahead as one, plunging and bucking, throwing back their heads in triumph, teeth gnashing, fierce, wild, and completely irresistible! He… or She… — it doesn’t much matter — can be… a little overwhelming, from the first onrush of darkness to the final climax that presages oblivion…. Hades’ other name, of course, is Dionysus, epiphany personified, the burning bush that is not consumed,” here she arched one knowing brow, “the towering pillar of undying fire, the sudden lightning that strikes one to the core, the God (or Goddess) of divine ecstasy.”

I blushed. Then I squirmed a little on my saddle. I may seem dense at times, but I do know my way around a metaphor.

Beryl grinned at me. “Time to take a little break?” she said.

It was.

 

 

Did I tell you that we’d gotten the radio network up through most of the coastal plains by then? At least though Virginia and North Carolina. It was my doing, mostly, because I’d found the original field repair manuals for the issue Horticulturist radios in my library, back in the City, and had carried what looked like the handiest of them along. The radios themselves had been hard to find back home, but they were still fairly plentiful on the Atlantic Coast, especially in the Hampton Roads area, because there was a huge military depot there that was still under Horticulturist control. It must have been several miles wide at least, sprawled over an enormous area set well back from the coast, a ‘military reservation,’ they called it. Heck, they had ‘tanks’ there, huge behemoths made of steel and layered ceramic and Kevlar armor with weird ribbons of flat-linked chain that they evidently used instead of wheels. Unfortunately, they were fresh out of fuel to make them run, until I’d suggested that they start cultivating the giant sunflowers for the sake of their reapers full of volatile hydrocarbons. I wasn’t sure exactly what mixture of napalm juice and oil would make them work, but there ought to be some way to test, since they weren’t likely to run out of ‘tanks’ for a hundred years, given the rows and rows of huge warehouses they had them stored in, but they waiting for a miracle, I reckon, like any hoarder.

Anyway, in the field guide for the helmet-mounted radios, it described a ‘field expedient’ for hilly terrain which consisted of a dipole antenna which could be mounted on a stick and then hoisted up into the air by any means possible. The manual showed antennas mounted on trees, or even pulled up into the air on ‘kites,’ easily-constructed ærodynamic tethered parafoils which lifted themselves into the air in almost any sort of breeze, so lifts of a hundred feet or more were easy to arrange, albeit somewhat at the mercy of the weather. The signal tended to fade in and out as the ‘kite’ rearranged itself in relation to the wind, but with patience — and a little luck — a fairly reliable communication schedule could be maintained with fortresses as much as fifty miles away or more, depending on the terrain. On average, though, with an antenna two hundred feet in the air, a radio could reach out fifty miles to a soldier on the ground in flat terrain. If both antennas could be elevated, that distance would double, of course, but the vagaries of two wind-borne antennas made communications at least twice as frustrating, but we very quickly realized that antennas carried up to the tops of mountains, or even hills, could make a huge difference in the overall quality of our radio network. I’d gathered from my reading that at one time there had been specialized radios known as ‘repeaters’ whose sole purpose had been to relay communications over hills or long distances, but of course those had fallen into disrepair — or had even been junked for parts — when the fortresses drew in upon themselves and stopped paying any attention to what was going on in the outside world.

The long and the short of it was that we had plenty of warning before we met up with a column of our soldiers riding down from the Virginia Horticultural base we’d established near Hampton Roads. We decided to meet somewhere in the vicinity of Savannah, since it was large enough to be difficult to miss, and we thought at the time that there was still an active fortress there, although we’d had no word from them for quite some time, according to the local authorities up north, more than thirty years. We kept the exact location rather vague, however, because we hadn’t changed the frequencies of the radios, in part because we didn’t have the manufacturing capability to recreate and tune new circuitry, but also because we wanted to be able to talk to any survivors of real Horticultural outposts we might encounter. This left us open to covert eavesdropping, of course, but it wan’t a huge handicap, first because few among the Reivers had the knowledge or the training to maintain the radios in working order, much less any ability to repair them, but also because we had a psychic side-channel which seemed fairly safe from any but the transformed, and the transformed, of course, were women, when push came to shove. Thus far we’d run across only the one exception to the general rule amongst the slavers, that women were mere ‘property’ in their eyes, to be taken, used, and then discarded at will, which meant that transformation — rather difficult to notice in a woman born — meant an almost-instant rebellion and slaughter of their quondam ‘masters’ wherever and whenever the new pandemic took hold, which was happening more and more as the number of us wandering through the eastern half of North America grew larger and we began to take up all the available space and military power.

Whatever might be said for the efficacy of our spore-laden missiles, mosquitos, especially in the lowlands, were a very efficient means of transmitting the infection, especially in the slave quarters, where the women were crowded in together to make it simpler to control them. In women, the process of transformation ran to completion in at most half the time it did in men, often much more rapidly, so by the time any changes amongst the Reivers themselves took place by means of which they might have been able to put up some sort of defense, most were already mostly dead or dying at the hands of their erstwhile victims, saving us all a bit of trouble.

“What do you think?” I asked Beryl. “Should we take Savannah from the northern coast? Or should we come in over the inland swamps?”

“I think from inland,” she said. “As I recall your maps, there were several broad estuaries protecting the city from the north, and they’re bound to be larger and more impassable by now, so the speed of our assault would be diminished, and it might even be necessary to backtrack and go around if we encountered unexpected difficulties. Sherman made his famous march from the highlands more-or-less straight to the sea, and I doubt that the general idea is unsound, even after half a millennium or more. He was a master strategist, and knew how to exploit every feature of the terrain in a time when armies were lumbering things, and battles were either won and lost by the number of wagons in the supply train.”

“How do you know about Sherman?” I asked her. “Wasn’t he a bit before our time?” As far as I knew, Beryl hadn’t spent all that much time in the library, and I knew that her family had been strictly enlisted-class, unlikely to have the access to any military library that I’d had as my father’s child, at least before I’d been forced to move to the barracks. If I’d been a better soldier, I suppose I would have had a ‘fast-track’ to officer training, but of course that hadn’t worked out all that well for me.

“I met him,” she said. “He’s quite the raconteur.”

“You met him‽” I exclaimed. She hadn’t been at all forthcoming about her adventures underground, other than a mysterious hint or two, but the idea that she’d been chatting up famous people I actually knew about had never occurred to me.

“Well, yes,” she said. “It would be a little awkward being the Queen of the Damned without holding audience from time to time, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t understand” I said. “How exactly did you get to be the Queen?”

“Hades chose me, of course,” she said wide-eyed, little Miss Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth. “How does one usually manage such things?”

“But how does ‘Hades’ choose people?”

“Through capture, of course, although some few people choose themselves, poor fools.”

“Wait a minute! You’re talking about different things, aren’t you? Isn’t being dead the same for everyone?”

She blinked owlishly at me. “Of course not, how could it be? The honored dead have vastly superior status, and every possibility of rebirth, whilst those who die performing acts of ignominy or cowardice are condemned to an afterlife of eternal shame and degradation. In the ordinary course of things, one has no second chances after having badly handled the first.”

“None at all?”

“Of course not! Why should there be? In my own case, I died heroically,” she said with a slight moue, “if somewhat beyond my intention, but with a brave smile, a joke, and a kind word upon my lips, so many people remembered me with fondness and pride, especially you, so of course that kept my memory alive and green, and the added fact that Gumball and his many pals loved me, in their way, and had access to the entire sensorium of the wide green world, propelled me to a position of authority and power in the Underworld.” Here she paused and added brightly, a little sly, “It’s good to be the Queen.”

“So Gumball had a hand in it? if you’ll pardon the clumsy words, since he has no hands at all.”

“Oh, yes!” she said. “In fact, he was the agent of my almost immediate deliverance, although I don’t know exactly how he did it, but I suppose that he’d eaten enough people by then that he knew exactly how they’re put together, especially since he had my former body as a model.” She paused then, thinking. “I wonder if he ate me, not that I’d mind, of course, since everything turned out well, and I wasn’t really using my old body for anything in particular at the time.”

“You have a new body?” I asked, foolishly, since I’d seen both how little and how much she’d changed. She was still recognizably Beryl, but her beauty had been enhanced in subtle ways, coming closer to ’perfection,’ if you will, or maybe beauty wasn’t even the proper word… she was more herself, perfected, the ideal embodiment of the true Beryl, the form she’d had before the world was born.

“Yes,” she said, as if surprised that I might think otherwise. “Despite your best efforts, I bled out, and the cells of the brain start dying immediately, I think. It’s not too many minutes before all that’s left of a living brain is useless mush.” She grinned. “Dead bodies have a very short shelf life. One can’t keep them around for long before one notices.”

She was right there. We’d seen enough casualties by now, in various states of disrepair, that there was no doubt at all when intelligence left a dead stare behind. “Yeah,” I said. “It ws a stupid question.”

Then she laughed again — in fact, now that I thought of it, she was laughing a lot more these days — “Didn’t anyone ever tell you, ‘There are no stupid questions, only thoughtless answers’?”

I let out a heavy sigh, as annoyed as any teenager, and complained, “You’re neither my mother nor my ‘spiritual advisor,’ and there are loads of stupid questions in life, and plenty of people anxious to provide stupid answers. Just look around us!”

She made a show of looking, then said, “I see a world in which humans are living well within the ‘carrying capacity ’ of the land, which one supposes is a good thing.”

“True,” I admitted grudgingly, “but it certainly wasn’t intentional, and could hardly be said to represent an ‘answer’ of any sort. All it really proves is that every œcology is self-correcting to some degree, and that no sin goes unpunished in the long run, although I do admit leaning a bit more toward the retributive side these days than toward reconciliation.”

“That’s as it should be,” she said. “Soldiers generally represent the punitive power of the State, and neither its general comity nor hospitality.”

“But are we the State? Aside from my ‘spin,’ we haven’t seen any central authority at all.”

“True, but the Horticulturist Oath includes the words, ‘I… do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.’ You’ll notice that it makes no mention whatsoever of any particular representative of that solemn covenant, so it’s fairly clear that we have an obligation to the existential State, and not to any particular incarnation of it. The Reivers were in flagrant violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, not to mention the Nineteenth and the universal laws against murder, extortion, and rape. In the absence of any extant State authority, we must presume that Federal authority takes precedence.”

“Spoken like a lawyer,” I replied with a smirk.

“It ought to,” she said, “I’ve got all the lawyers.”

I had to laugh, since she had all of everyone, eventually.

 

 

The reconnaissance on Savannah didn’t go all that well, although it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, at least in retrospect.

“What in Harry’s Hell is that!” I said to Beryl. We were on the very edge of a clearing surrounding the supposed site of the closest Fortress we knew of, but it was an immense mound of greenery with no rock or concrete visible at all, as un-Horticultist an artifact as one might possibly imagine, so we were instantly suspicious. There were what appeared to be people coming and going as we watched, slipping into the mound or out of it as if it were made of fog, but it clearly wasn’t fog, and they clearly weren’t any sort of people we’d ever seen before, because they had shiny green skin and no hair at all, not even eyebrows, which I don’t think was any sort of East Coast fashion statement. “Got any ideas?” I asked her. She had that look of intense concentration she gets when she’s communing with her spirits, or shades, whatever you want to call them.

Finally she said, “I think it’s kudzu, or so the only botanist I could find offhand believes. He’s fascinated by it, though, and would appreciate the opportunity to observe in person.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You can do that‽”

She winked at me flirtatiously and said, “I can do almost anything. ‘Si cʾest possible, cʾest fait; impossible? cela se fera.’ If it’s possible, consider it done; the impossible takes a bit longer. Exactly how long would you like?”

I pouted. “In that case, I’m afraid we’ll have to retire from our observation post; I’d hate to be interrupted, after all.”

“Well, in that case, presto!” she said, and we were gone.

 

 

As it turned out, it took just as long to grow a botanist as it had Beryl, so it was some few days before we returned to the strange green mound, but we hadn’t been idle, or not exactly.

 

 

“Did you notice,” Beryl asked me as we lay concealed in ambush, accompanied by our new botanist, who was still looking around herself in wonder and amazement, “that these green ‘people’ seem singularly incurious?”

I had noticed, actually, and had done a spread on them, but the results had been inconclusive, centering — ominously enough — around the nine of swords, meaning deception, grief, death, and disappointment, amongst other things, but also featuring the eight of swords, bondage, also ominous, but with no coherent trend that I could see. “They did seem odd,” I answered. “We’ve only had a glimpse or two, but they were and are very strange indeed, I thought. They were all jostling around, striding from place to place — busy with whatever it was that they were doing, I suppose — but not one of them ever bothered to talk to anyone, not that I noticed, nor even looked at each other, as people usually do. They just went about whatever they were doing as if they were all of them parts of some sort of strange green machine.”

“I’ve noticed much the same thing,” she said, “albeit in less emotionally evocative detail, but I couldn’t touch their minds at all, which was and is much more than merely odd, since I should have been able to read almost anyone and anything living from that distance, especially when I could see them right in front of me.”

“I couldn’t either, but then I wasn’t actually trying all that hard. They gave me the creeps, which may have been a subconscious reaction to the selfsame vacancy of aspect I mentioned, but might just as well have been because they were green! for Harry’s sake. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to make friends, but I know for a fact that no one of my acquaintance is green!” Then I thought for a moment and added, “Except for Gumball, of course, and his many friends, but they seem so fluffy and cheerful that it’s difficult to think of them as merely plants. What I meant to say was that green people are somewhat disquieting, especially green people who act like robots.”

I was a little ticked off at Beryl, though, because it seemed sometimes that she felt somehow superior to those amongst us who didn’t happen to be Goddesses of Hell, or wherever the hell she was lurking during her absence from my life. Her belated revelation that she’d evidently been fucking this ‘Hades’ guy didn’t really sit well either, now that I’d had time to actually think about it, although — in perfect fairness — I could hardly complain, since my own imaginary ‘husband’ had been coming between us for a good long time before her untimely death and unexpected resurrection. My putative ‘marriage’ to a high-ranking officer had seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect it hadn’t made any difference at all. In fact, when considered carefully in the light of our universal changes, the more perceptive amongst us must surely have realized that a ‘husband’ probably wasn’t in the cards for any of us, since any theoretical husband would quickly become yet another wife, given any intimate contact at all.

Luckily for me, most people never really think things through, and so my recent lapse from a necessary ‘fidelity’ to a non-existent man — not to mention my very obvious pregnancy — could just as easily be explained as succumbing to human weakness under stress as irrefutable ‘evidence’ of the underhanded chicanery and double-dealing that it actually represented that might bring my little house of cards come tumbling down. In terms of my pregnancy, I didn’t stand out at all from the crowd of women around me, the majority of whom were pregnant, though not all.

Maybe I should just kill my rotten bastard of an inconvenient husband with my trusty typewriter. I even had a small supply of the proper forms available. Then again, in fiction — and probably in real life — it’s almost always obsessive attention to detail that makes eventual discovery more likely, so maybe best leave well enough alone. Plenty of people have died over the years — especially on campaign — and no one thinks a thing about it if they didn’t manage to leave records behind them. In fact, the lack of correspondence from the lazy sod, now that more reliable communications were spreading our scope and outreach toward New York, might be the best evidence of all, since that would be the one bit of documentation I wouldn’t have to fake.

My own foraging party had vanished without a trace, if one doesn’t count me, and of course one can’t, so the likelihood of a somewhat larger party going missing wasn’t all that odd. My own survival had everything to do with my accidental ‘discovery’ of the magic ‘cheese,’ which had been the transformative source of everything that had happened to every one of us, like ambrósias, like néktar, the divine exhalations of Gaia Herself, Great Mother of us all, which carry us inexorably toward æternal life and undying bliss. I’d been blessed with a purely secular transubstantiation, the mundane equivalent of Beryl’s later transmogrification into Goddess incarnate. ‘Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiæ,’ as one might say. We’re smack dab in the middle of a great Revival. Who knew?

“Look! I didn’t ask for any of this, so cut me a little slack, why don’t you?” Beryl was obviously irritated.

One of the big advantages of having a girlfriend who could quite literally read minds, was that one could have a knock-down, drag-out argument without ever saying a word in anger, at least theoretically. I merely rolled my eyes in her general direction and said, somewhat petulantly, I admit, “Oh, yeah? At least my boyfriend was only a figment of my fevered imagination!” Okay, so stunning repartee wasn’t one of my strong points.

She smirked at me and said, “Is there any part of ‘capture’ that you fail to understand? You may recall that I wasn’t given all that much choice in the matter, and the dead are notoriously ‘unevolved.’ Gods especially tend to lag behind the times, because omnipotence tends to discourage any sort of thoughtful approach to problem-solving, much less relationships of mutual respect and loving concern. In fact, Hades was an asshole, but I was stuck with the reality of a social milieu with a prehistoric attitude toward interpersonal relationships in which ‘brides’ were imperfectly distinguished from rape victims.”

That shut me up right properly. We’d both seen plenty of examples in the women we’d rescued from bondage, at least some of whom had become… fond of their particular ‘protectors,’ or at least grateful for their small kindnesses, and had managed to save them from the general slaughter. And I couldn’t claim all that much superiority as the child of Horticulturists either. Just as ancient slaves in this country had been forced to take the surnames of their masters, so my mother had taken my father’s name through long ‘custom,’ and in the end he’d exercised his ‘right’ as pater familias to end her very life when she was found wanting, even though through no particular fault of her own. I wasn’t ignorant; I’d actually read the Bible, which still contained the proper religious ritual whereby a woman raped and abducted from amongst one’s enemies could be transformed into a ‘proper’ wife; which still enjoined slaves to obey their masters; and which urged wives to submit themselves to their husbands, a cosmic hierarchy with some sort of God as the ultimate despot whose authority descended down through servants and slaves of varying degrees, to wives, to lesser women of even lower status, even to children, whom one was advised to beat regularly to train them in the habits of masochistic submission and obedience. “It was like that, then?” I asked, ambiguously.

“Yes… and no,” she answered with equal obscurity. “Time ran oddly there — as it does sometimes in dreams — so I’m not quite sure whether I ‘belonged’ to Hades for an hour, or for a thousand years. It wasn’t all bad by any means, but neither was it uniformly good, because at no point was I truly free, at least until the end, when I escaped and came back to you.” She glanced at me with a peculiar awkward grace.

Something in her look affected me with an odd feeling of lassitude, a sensation of warmth and lightness in the pit of my stomach, or perhaps somewhat lower down, and I found it strangely difficult to catch my breath. From somewhere antique words came to me and I sang, sotto voce, as quietly as the beating wings of a moth in the moonlight,

“Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind.
We’re always controlled, we’re always confined.
Confined by our parents until we are wives,
Then slaves to our husbands for the rest of our lives.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “One is still held fast in bondage, whether one’s restraints are forged from cold iron or plaited from silk as soft as a zephyr’s breath.”

Never having actually been married, despite the deceptive status I’d affected, and certainly never ‘married’ through rapture to a God, I had nothing to say.

She grinned at me. “It rankles, doesn’t it? Having someone know anything you can’t fathom?”

“Everything’s a metaphor.” I smiled at her. “Even knowing isn’t much help when push comes to shove. I’ve noticed that every time I stub my toe it hurts as badly as it did the first time, and it’s still an unpleasant surprise.”

“Which means?” she asked.

“Which means,” I said, “I’m curious, but not curious enough to invite a similar experience. There are some things which I’d prefer to remain ignorant of, all in all, and of course your experiences have nothing to do with us at all. It was another life, just as my own life before meeting you, our lives together before you died, my lonely life after your murder, and then my new life when you miraculously returned from death, were each one unique and separate from each other, connected only by the fragile threads of memory. So we pass from day to day, each day becoming a new memory for the next, until at last we run out of days entirely, which I fondly hope will be a good long time from now, and hope too that each future day we have will be spent together, in one way or another. More than that, I have no right to say, because we’re both of us soldiers, and both our lives are pledged to something greater than whatever it is we’re privileged to share.”

“You old softie, you,” Beryl cooed into my ear. “You do love me after all, my strange adventures notwithstanding.”

“Of course I do, you randy harridan. Next time you chance to die, let’s see if you can take me with you and we’ll just see how well Hades stands up to the two of us together! I reckon we can make the so-called Monarch of Hell squeal like a little girl, if we put our minds to it.”

She laughed out loud, almost instantly clapping her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound before she drew the attention of the green automatons. At last she managed to say, calmly enough, “Next time we try spying, do let’s try to stop ourselves from making jokes, however tempting.”

“Bosh,” I said quietly. “What’s mortal danger worth but the occasion for a little levity from time to time. Once we start taking danger too seriously, we’re almost bound to fail.” I reached over Beryl’s shoulder to draw the attention of our botanical expert, newly dubbed ‘Lynette.’ “Hey, Sweetie, what can you tell us about our green pals here?” I said quietly.

“The runners and vines along the ground here, even those surmounting the large structure, are definitely some form of Pueraria lobata, kudzu, in layman’s terms,” Lynette said, “and I’d guess that these creatures have some sort of commensal or symbiotic relationship to them, but I’ll need a specimen to say for sure, if we can take one quietly.”

“They do tend to stick together,” Beryl observed.

“Almost like ants,” I said. “Let’s do try not to stir them up too much.”

“Good plan!” Beryl said and promptly fired an HE missile toward their leafy castle, which instantly erupted into furious action as the thermite explosion and fire expanded into a general conflagration and the denizens began running, not away, but toward the flames, toward and even into the burning castle. Most of their activity seemed directed toward putting out the flames, as green people flung themselves upon the burning foliage and vines, beating at them with their hands until they themselves caught fire. Others dove into the heart of the fire and started handing out what looked like eggs.

Our botanist could hardly contain herself with glee as she observed their behavior, completely selfless, their entire activity focused on what must be their home, their collective futurity. I, at least, was horrified. “Why did you do that?” I said tightly.

Beryl looked as cool as a cucumber as she said, “First, whoever they are, they’ve either killed or assimilated all the inhabitants of one of our outposts, which is an act of war any way you look at it, but most important is that they’re not human, and they’re very dangerous.”

“How do you know that they killed everyone? Maybe the fortress was already empty and they just moved in?”

“What happened to the refugees? We know from our detached Virginia troop that they’ve encountered untouched and fully human fortresses just over the State line, but there are no rumors of Reivers in the area to account for an empty fortress so far from their usual camps in the uplands and mountains. In fact, we haven’t actually seen any Reivers since we reached the coastal plains.”

“But how do you know that they’re not human? We’ve been changed, and maybe this is just another type of change.”

“No, it isn’t. Just look at them; they have no sense of self-preservation, and it’s not simple courage. They simply don’t care that they’re being burnt up, because their essential ‘self,’ is either missing or so diffuse that these… creatures we see running around the fire are no more significant than our fingernails, which we trim without a thought.” She looked around suddenly. “In fact, here comes one of those things right now. Look sharp!” One of the green people came crashing through the underbrush behind up, eyes focused on the fire when Beryl took out her machete and sliced off its head as neatly as could be. Horribly, the thing didn’t even appear to notice its sudden lack of a head, and kept on running until Beryl brought it down by slicing off its legs with the same dispassionate efficiency. Unfortunately, even that wasn’t enough, because the thing kept dragging itself along with its arms, so they too joined the dismembered parts upon the ground as Beryl picked up the head, sliced in in two with another slash of her machete, and handed it to Lynette. “Quick, tell us as much as you can, because eventually whatever motivates these things will notice us, in which case we’ll have to run like Harry’s Green Hell.”

Lynette took charge of our specimen with commendable alacrity and started dissecting it at speed. “First,” she said, “The creatures are vampiric.” she used a small scalpel to lift one of its teeth, longer than the rest, which was hinged something like a rattlesnake’s fangs, but with some specialized apparatus backing up a siphon fully a quarter inch in interior diameter which descended right down its neck with no hint of tongue or gullet.

“I see no hint of fine vision capability in these eyes,” she added. “I’m guessing that they distinguish light from dark and that’s all, possibly gradations of light, but there seems to no differentiation between the few large light sensors that take up all the interior space of the pseudo-eye. There’s no focusing mechanism, for example, so any distinctions must be made either through touch or some coördinating transmission of information between individual motile cells like this one. It’s really quite fascinating, what looks like a completely new life form, completely unrelated to any existing animal.”

“Speaking of coördination,” Beryl warned us, “Something in that stinking pile has noticed us.” The fire seemed to have been smothered — at least in part — by the bodies of the creatures, and many of those left seemed to have shifted their focus onto us. As she said it, the mass of green creatures began to advance toward us in freakish silence.

I noticed rustling in the woods to either side of us and shouted, “Grab what you can and run like Harry’s Green Hell! They’re all around us!”

Beryl had the presence of mind to fire another two HE missiles straight at the leafy castle, which promptly caught fire again, causing at least half of the advancing green minions to turn around and march back toward the castle, or at least it seemed that they had, but we weren’t paying all that much attention, because the green beasties from the forest were reaching out to grab us by then, the lipless gashes that were their mouths gaped wide, their fangs extended, and one of them had caught hold of my left leg! It was enormously strong, so strong I couldn’t break free, but I was dragging the thing behind me as it squirmed about trying to sink its fangs into my lower leg or ankle. Almost at the last minute, I finally managed to pull my machete from my belt and lopped off the thing’s arm, which finally let me surge ahead of my pursuers. At that point, I took the time to turn and fire off one of my own missiles toward the nest of these evil things. Belatedly, I realized that Beryl had been right, and gasped out, almost breathless, “Well, Beryl, I apologize sincerely for doubting your initial assessment. Whatever these sleekit beasties are, they’re an existential threat to humanity.” Then I turned to Lynette, who was struggling to carry the other half of the thing’s head in one hand whilst wielding her machete to good effect on our pursuers. “Run along with me so we can guard the head between us as we fend off our pursuers long enough to be on our merry way.”

Beryl, of course, had been improvising as she ran and had managed to cobble together a sort of bangalore torpedo which she dropped behind us as we ran, and then detonated by pulling sharply on a wire she’d fixed to the detonator. I could feel the flash of heat before the force of the explosion sent us tumbling, but she’d managed to time it well enough that we weren’t hurt, and almost all of our flock of green monsters were flopping around like fish thrown on the ground by a stream, their connection with whatever had been controlling them somehow disrupted. Their confusion lasted long enough for us to reach our horses, at which time we rode away as fast as we could spur our mounts. “That was simply loads of fun, Beryl, but let’s try hard to be better prepared for our next encounter.”

“Oh, we are, Sweetheart. I’ve snagged us another head, so we have one and a half heads to muck around with. I’ve got mine in a rucksack, and would advise you to do the same, since I don’t know how their communication scheme works exactly, and would hate to give them any clues that we can avoid.”

That sounded like a good idea, so I dumped everything out of my own rucksack as we rode and stuffed the remaining half head into the now-empty sack after grabbing it from Lynette. “Got it!” I called out to Beryl, “but if you’ll look off to your right you’ll see a small gang of them ahead of us.” I punctuated my warning with an HE missile which wiped out most of the hostiles, but worried that the thing’s long-range communications seemed better than I’d thought possible. We were already halfway back to our camp and the things were still intent on catching us, so they were able to relay the alarm at least two miles away from our initial encounter with their hive, or nest, or whatever it was. They reminded me of insects, somehow, more than plants, so either word seemed appropriate.

“I can see that we’re going to need a different set of weapons to deal with these things,” Beryl yelled back to me. “Some sort of pole weapon, I think, like a halberd, or a glaive-guisarmes, would be useful for pruning off their heads and arms, since they don’t seem to have all that much fine coördination, at least when they’re out of sight from their main mound of vegetation.”

I added, “If we’re right about them having to ‘sum up’ the viewpoints of many of the creatures to get any sort of vision beyond vague distinctions between light and dark, it might also be useful to modify some of our missiles to produce lots more smoke, to screen the sites of active battle from easy purview.” The conversation was quickly becoming tiresome, being conducted at the top of our lungs whilst riding at a hard gallop. In fact, if it weren’t for the creatures closing on our right, I’d be prepared to skip the commentary in favor of more riding.

I drew my machete, none-the-less, but wished that I’d had a heavy cavalry saber instead, or perhaps a Moorish scimitar. “If we get out of this,” I yelled, “remind me to reïnvent horse armor and proper cavalry edged weapons! Our machetes are way too dinky to reliably protect our mounts, much less ourselves!”

Beryl spurred her own gelding — by now in short supply, as ‘mares’ were replacing them with great regularity, now that the infection had spread to our herd — to greater speed, catching up to the two of us on mares quite easily, despite our best efforts, and forged ahead slightly, now armed with an issue flame thrower, with a single tank of our precious napalm mixture, which was in short supply due to the lack of the giant sunflowers in this region of the South. “Here’s hoping!” she called out with a grin as she passed us. “I’d hate to be forced to reconcile with my quondam husband! I’m afraid we didn’t part on the very best of terms!” This last was tossed over her shoulder as she forged ahead, already using the flamethrower judiciously to sprinkle fire through the packed mass of green monsters, where it quickly spread among the plants, who didn’t seem to care, moving toward us with eerie of purpose, their pale green fingers outstretched to snatch at us, even as they burned and their limbs withered into brittle charcoal, which flaked away to dust.

Beryl’s flamethrower sputtered out as the tank emptied, and she tossed it away as so much excess baggage, instead taking up a ten-foot length of steel chain she’d liberated from the last group of Reivers we’d encountered and using it as a flail, whipping it around her head so fast it actually whistled as it spun a shiny wheel of death and dismemberment that sliced through the crowding beasties like a hot knife through butter, but they kept on coming in a creepy silent wave of pure hostility, their hands outstretched before them, their mouths gaped open and their fangs extended. Even when Beryl altered the length of chain slightly and started snapping off their fangs with dexterous adjustments of her spinning wheel of steel, they behaved as if nothing had happened, until she managed to snap off a few heads, but even then the bodies just collapsed and their own companions would impale the headless corpses with their fangs and rapidly extract whatever liquid was in them until only a dry husk remained. It was more then merely creepy, it was a nightmare sprung to life in the plain light of day; these… things were evil. They needed to die, because they were inimical to all of life.

I was enveloped in cold fury when I saw my impetuous lover battling a horde of monstrous vampires; and I placed one hand upon my belly as a talisman, my womb even now filled with a life for which I was responsible, and rode forward toward our common foe. “Beryl! Take cover!” I screamed and raised my own rocket launcher, releasing a single HE missile, my last, toward the rear of the swarm of green things, where it burst and scattered burning thermite through their surging amorphous mass. I felt a fierce pride when I saw the bulk of them alight; I was almost always dead on the mark when I aimed to hit anything, even difficult shots like this one had been, with a very small margin of error, and much at stake.

I wasted little time before taking apart the now-useless launcher with my bare hands, since the business end of it was a long steel forging riveted to a metal tube. By popping off the tube, I was left with a somewhat dull, but still serviceable, sword. I rode forward and took my proper place beside Beryl, who was even now springing up from where she lay under the heap of headless bodies she’d dragged over herself as cover for the burst of pyrotechnic chemical fire I’d precipitated. “Taking a little rest, Sweetheart?” I asked mildly.

“Sapphire, dear, I was trying to take a nap, just to refresh myself from our tiring journey, when someone set off a hell of an explosion right over my head. My ears are still ringing, for Harry’s sake!”

“Well, Dearest, if you hadn’t brought all your little play-date pals out to carouse you wouldn’t be nearly so tired and wouldn’t have needed that nap quite so badly. You really must learn a little moderation in your choice of friends.”

“I admit,” she said, twirling her steel whip with deadly skill, “that I failed to envision quite this level of boisterous enthusiasm.”

“They have been very naughty,” I said, wielding my improvised blade to fairly good effect, although I did wish for a better edge. “I really don’t feel that we should consort with these fellows on a regular basis, Beryl, at least until we can organize a proper playgroup.” Using my vorpal sword to nip off heads was the best strategy, I’d decided. The damned things took the loss of mere limbs in stride, as it were, but the loss of a head was slightly beyond their powers of durability, and it slowed down their companions to boot, when they stopped to feed upon their fallen comrades, a net gain of no small proportion, but it took a mighty blow to sever the neck completely and at once, so it was a bit tiring, since there seemed to be no shortage of replacement heads that needed trimming for every one that toppled to the ground. “There’s nothing for it, I think, but to bring them back to camp. Taking proper care of them is going to require more hands than I can spare right now.” I was still lopping heads to fairly good effect, but the wear and tear on my improvised sword was taking a heavy toll on its efficiency. Never exactly sharp, it was becoming less so by the moment.

“Agreed,” Beryl said reluctantly, although her metal whip was holding up quite well, “but we really ought to send word ahead. Do you suppose Lynette could manage that on her own?”

“I don’t think I’ll need to, actually,” Lynette said from right behind us. “They seem to have found us of their own initiative.”

I risked a glance over my shoulder without pausing in my general infliction of mayhem. “Oh, poo!” I said, just a bit discouraged. Our troop had indeed arrived, but right behind them were rank upon rank of marching green monsters, what looked like thousands of them.

 

 

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved