Grand Junction (44 page)

Fire is coming from everywhere, and men are firing in all directions. Now Yuri is here again with the Mini-14, and then back there with the Mossberg, and farther away with the H&K, and then it starts all over again.

The stars, the fire, the night.

Mounted men, camel riders, bikers, guns, bows and arrows. Animal shrieks, roaring motors, explosions of gunfire. He is living an End Time western.

Gas from smoke grenades rises slowly into the night air; through the filter of amplified optics it dances in ghostly shapes of bluish fog. Orange flashes detonate against the silvery smoke as if on the surface of a broken
mirror. Campbell, a predator of the Territory, an odd smile on his face, shoulders his AK-101. A long, crackling, bright yellow flame erupts in the ultraviolet night. Not far from there, Brother Francisco is decimating the attackers’ southern flank. Yuri sees men fall in bunches from their mounts, animal and mechanical, or spin halfway around, their hands pressed to one part or another of their bodies.

The night is with them. The stars will be on their side. The fire is protecting them.

The six of them are a single organism now, half human and half arsenal, firing endlessly; the thundering roar is deafening.

He is there with the Ruger Mini-14, here with the Mossberg, farther away with the H&K. He is there under the stars, in the fire, with the night. He is there, against motorcycles, against horses, against camels. Against men.

Each individual moment is frozen in time, an iceberg against the universe. The ultraviolet sky is fixed on forgotten constellations. He sees, he hears, he knows, he listens on several distinct channels, like a multifrequency radio-telescope.

Campbell, Vernier, the soldier-monks, the French sniper, him, the night, the moonlight, the starfire, the gleaming steel of the heavy vehicles, the dark masses of the battle animals, the living shadows of the motorcycles on the plain.

Brother Francisco stands in front of the truck; concealed by the heavy bulletproof hulk, he fires long volleys from his Lombard army Sig Sauer SG551 automatic rifle, the Kevlar grip of which is covered with reproductions of angels and the Virgin. It looks like an excellent gun, with a thirty-shot clip and Remington .223-caliber bullets, a compact combat telescope, and camouflage coloring, typical of tactical units, widened at the front optic. Its fire is extremely powerful, something the soldier-monk is taking full advantage of.

His compatriot Brother Friedrich is a bit farther away. With his assault rifle, a Beretta AR70/90, unified Italian army model, NATO 5.56mm-caliber ammunition, fitted with a long telescope of black Kevlar that gleams in the starlight, he has taken up a post on top of the panel between the cab and the platform. It’s a good spot and affords him a good view; he fires in bursts of three shots each with the precision and calm of a machine.

Yuri’s brain is like an organic calculator; everything is factored together even before it fully crosses his mind, like an illuminating rocket.
The zenith, the North Star, Sirius, Vega, the Pleiades, Orion, Andromeda, Venus, Arcturus: all the Beauty of the stars is laid out for them on this night when the Beast is striking.

And Beauty sees the invisible, while the Beast can detect only what is obvious.

The night is black.

There is danger.

There. Yes. Now.

The impact of the blast is so devastating that Brother Friedrich is thrown backward. He falls heavily, like a sack of rags, to the ground, with a soft noise, without even a cry.

There is already blood on the asphalt; there is blood everywhere on the man’s body, so much blood, colored ultraviolet in the binoculars. The night is red.

Campbell, who has just loaded his Remington 7615 patrol rifle with a twenty-cartridge magazine, sends a silent but very clear message to Yuri. His thin smile says everything as he shoulders his gun and opens fire on a group of horsemen and camel riders galloping toward them as a front line, backed up by several bikers and their last sidecar equipage.

We are the Camp Doctors
.

Save him
.

The final frontal attack erupts as Yuri approaches the man from the Vatican and drags him to shelter on a collapsible stretcher with retractable wheels, into a clump of pines about fifty meters off the road. Brother Friedrich isn’t doing well at all. He is in a state of shock, having gotten two high-caliber bullets in the chest while a third ball dislocated his shoulder. Heavy Soviet 7.62-caliber bullets. The operational capacities of their Medikits are going to be pushed to their limits. It will be a white night.

First the wounds are thoroughly cleaned with Recyclo cotton wool and sprayed with analgesic and antibiotic ultraspray, disinfected with freeze-dried alcohol and then biodegradable antiseptic strips, and then the man is quickly injected with cardiostabilizers, neural antitraumatic and anticoma agents, microcapsules to prevent hemorrhaging and scar accelerants, programmable neuroleptics, and pseudomorphine. Chrysler prepares oxygen and the cardiopump as well as the first plasmosmart emergency bandage, and at the same time he cannot ignore the twenty or so mounted men bearing down on either side of them.

He sees Slade Vernier take down a half dozen men with a single lateral blast of his AR-15 before shouldering his huge Israeli Desert Eagle. The young French marksman, flat on his belly under the truck’s platform and sheltered by its enormous uncrushable double tires, carefully takes out the entire rear line, diminishing the enemy forces via constant attrition, periodically picking off one of two members of the attack wave. On the other side, near the Ford pickup, Campbell and the other soldier-monk form a veritable battalion of two with the strength of their fire. The night is there; it is their ally. The stars are still watching over them.

It is war. And this man from the Vatican will surely die. At any rate, he will die if they can’t finish off their attackers from Maine very soon. …

Yuri sees an enormous shadow looming over him; he barely has time to hit the ground. To prepare himself for the worst.

It is a horse, a mustang; it is apparently coming from the west and it almost trampled him. The small man riding it is holding a rifle much like Yuri’s own and he is firing it with one hand, haphazardly, aiming at the truck and screaming in a guttural language. Yuri wonders if the rider even saw him.

The men bearing down on the Silverado are stopped by the joint fire of Vernier and Campbell, who has come to support him. Those that try the same maneuver from the side of the Ford are taken down by Brother Francisco, prudently stationed at the angle of the pickup and the heavy military truck.

The French sharpshooter continues imperturbably killing men, whatever their distance or position; then, in a movement of astonishing fluidity, he turns and engages the small Islamic rider, who instinctively spurs his horse to safety in the underbrush. Not a chance, thinks Yuri; besides, the Frenchman’s gun is empty. He reloads at lightning speed, but it is to concentrate on the men swarming around the Silverado. Vernier is nearly submerged, and the other flank needs reinforcement. Campbell, his AK-101 firmly in hand, dashes back over to the Ford pickup. Both of them have spent their time in this way, running from one side to the other of the metal fortress, supporting the others when they are at the point of being overwhelmed. “The Firefighters of the Third Reich,” remembers Yuri, thinking of an old article about the Waffen-SS units at the Russian front he read once in the military library Campbell inherited from his father.

This is war. Beauty is wedded to the Beast.

Yuri observes the scene; around sixty meters in front of him, the
mounted man is riding up out of the underbrush in a cloud of dust, reloading his rifle. He is wearing an Arab kaffiyeh printed with a black-and-white design that hides the lower half of his face; his eyes are filled with the irrepressible desire to kill.

The horse is a Canadian prairie mustang, white and tawny. Young. A beautiful little runner.

The rider sees Yuri and the body over which he is crouching. He does not hesitate for a fraction of a second. He bears down on them, shouting a sort of bark, kicking his horse hard, the rifle held firmly in one hand in front of him. He’ll fire when he gets close enough, thinks Yuri.

Very calmly, he takes the Tokarev from his cowboy holster, switches it to his left hand, and listens to the first bullet drop into the chamber with a dry click. Then, still without any nervousness at all, he pulls the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer from his shoulder holster—no need to cock it; he has used it so recently that it is still hot. In the space of two or three breaths he empties the two guns simultaneously into the horse and its rider, who has only time to fire one bullet in a reflexive motion; it arcs harmlessly into the trees.

A mountain of flesh collapses into the dust, rolling over on itself in a chaos of limbs and cloth. In the starlight it is like a strange meteorite crashing to earth.

Neither the horse nor the man moves. Yuri knows he got both of them cleanly. Ural-made 7.62-caliber bullets, the kind that won the Battle of Berlin. Given the ten bullets remaining in the magazine of the nine-millimeter German-Swiss gun, the rider doesn’t have a chance in hell. The night is black.

He approaches the two entangled creatures, man and horse united like a centaur in death. A bit higher up, on the road, the firing continues, but the spaces between volleys are lengthening; the cracks of gunfire seem to be retreating in the direction of Maine. The night is black and the stars are shining.

He is very close to them, the man and the horse, the mass of intermingled flesh; his binoculars confirm the kill. The sky is ultraviolet; the mountain vegetation gleams like moon metal. The flesh is the color of electrical interference, the blood is a low vibration just above infrared. The night is black, the stars are shining. Men are killing one another.

He gets even closer to the two. Yes. He killed both of them cleanly.

The horse.

And the boy.

*   *   *

Anyone who has seen a battlefield after the battle knows the meaning of the word
desolation
.

Everyone is now aware of Yuri’s discovery. The boy soldier was about the same age as Link de Nova—twelve, thirteen at most.

They have found six other bodies of children or young teenagers around the convoy, crushed under the masses of their sidecars, their mustangs, their camels, their motorbikes, their corpses full of holes of every caliber. They are dressed in various military uniforms and long Afghan-style brown tunics, Pashtun turbans and Arab kaffiyehs. They are pale beneath the watery light of the glacial moon. They seem even younger in death, as if their lost childhoods were revived at the moment of their deceases.

No one in the group really noticed their presence in the heat of combat.

Except the French sniper.

He gives them a technically perfect summary of the operation, concluding with a final stroke:

“The SR25M has an effective range of a little over eight hundred meters; it’s a semiautomatic but still very precise up to that distance. At first I thought they had hired jockeys! When I realized the truth, I have to say it only strengthened my motivation. I wasn’t going to let them become experienced adults.”

It is truly the Law of the Territory. The Law of Bronze. The one that will crush everything in its path to save this library. Everything. Including a bunch of children.

“I should also tell you that I probably sniped the fucker that was commanding them. There, to the east, around six hundred meters away; he’ll be easy to find. He was riding a white stallion. His bodyguards were both kids I had just picked off; he had binoculars and he was speaking into a walkie-talkie. He was wearing a sort of khaki turban and a Nazi uniform.”

“A Nazi uniform?” Campbell repeats, intrigued.

“Yes, a gray-and-green German uniform from the Second World War, with swastikas and SS insignia. I am French. I would have recognized it without night vision.”

Yuri realizes that “Magic Bus” has been playing on repeat for almost an hour. During the entire battle, while men, horses, dogs, camels, and
children
were killing one another, the tape had imperturbably continued to play.
Too much, magic bus!

The economy of the Territory has its own rules, more implacable than those of nature, since the Territory has outlived not only nature but its destruction. This economy is already in full activity. While Yuri puts together a complete plasmapack for Brother Friedrich’s chest, he can see the two poles of this singular organization click into place, geographically, ethically,
naturally
. Under the black sky, the dusting of stars, the curving silver sliver of the moon, the starlight reveals a whole secret world; the dark light of the night sky is the light best suited to portray this world, this economy, this way of life.

Slade Vernier, first: Yuri gave him the first emergency medical care; like Yuri, he had been lucky—the high-caliber bullet, fired at close range, had exited his body after piercing an outer section of the femur. Rather than risking gangrene or surgery in the middle of the night in a mountain desert, Yuri had administered a transcutaneous-osmosis triple bandage and then placed a powerful Textromed exomembrane over the wound to keep the partially broken bone in place.

Vernier’s enormous Desert Eagle, loaded with .50-caliber bullets, gleams in the diamond light of the moon. He limps heavily as he walks; the wound is severe, but he marches with absolute, mechanical regularity. It is the Law of Bronze—he may limp, but he will walk.

The economy of the Territory has its own, very strict rules, and one of them is “Never waste anything.” Salvage everything. Chrysler is busily doing just that, loading a rolling stretcher with all the weapons and ammunition he can find. He searches each soldier carefully, without any pointless brutality. For him, they are only merchandise. Or, rather, they are
the market
.

Slade Vernier, beginning his progress toward the other side of the plateau, is not following the same section of the Bronze law book. He is not salvaging; he is taking. He does not exercise any
pointless
brutality, either.