Grand Junction (86 page)

It was fought according to the rules of animal life.

It was fought in accordance with the primary principle of the Territory.

It is ontological. A firearm without ammunition becomes a hand weapon. It is equipped with a bayonet at the very least; in the best case it is a quarterstaff, a bat, a billy club, a blunt instrument.

The very first weapon in the world.

They still have their combat swords as well: for Yuri, his small Nepalese Gurkha saber with its curved blade; for Campbell, his long-toothed Navy Seals knife. The sword: the first technical perfection of the bladed weapon.

They have something to strike with, to cut with, to stab with, to pierce with, to cut throats and disembowel with.

And so does the enemy.

The enemy. These three people approaching the Circle of Steel, while below, to the south, the rest of the army flees through the last gaps left in the invisible border, leaving thousands of “corpses” behind them.

Yuri and Campbell recognize them instantly. Two men, one woman. Belfond, the rotten cop promoted to general, and his two personal bodyguards: Wanda Walker, the former strip gladiatrix, and Lee Kwan Osborne, the Korean American military doctor turned poisoner-assassin.

Yuri and Campbell emerge slowly from the Circle of Steel. It is time. The moment they were born for has come. The last moment.

Belfond is still holding the long Winchester rifle topped with a powerful telescope that he used to kill Sheriff Langlois.

All three of them know they have lost. They know they will not leave the Territory-within-the-Territory alive, that the ontological barrier will kill them.

The Vessel is getting farther away with each passing minute. In the Ark the light is fading, losing its fluidity; the sounds of infinity disappearing
frequency by frequency, going back to where they came from. The last trap is about to snap shut on them.

There is nothing left to do but kill the people responsible for their defeat.

And, without a doubt, these are the people responsible. The last two Men of the Territory, the last two Men of the Law of Bronze. Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell.

So the very last war will be fought with bare hands. Or very nearly. It will be fought in a false night copied from the dawn of time. It will be fought between four men and one woman. Two against three. The initial ratio has been brought down to a reasonable number, but the fundamental imbalance necessary for the actualization of any conflict is still there, like the last Pillar of the Law.

The last of all wars will end with no eyewitness except the elements and the animals of the Territory, like the large purple crow soaring in high, large circles above the former site of the cosmodrome.

It will end like a family quarrel gone wrong. It will end like all wars begin.

Yuri and Campbell look at each other for an instant, enough time to synchronize their minds one last time, to send a clear and final message.

In this type of situation three tactics can prevail; certain accidental conditions determine the eventual choice:

The problem is not so much knowing who their leader is, who the dominant man is, because Belfond is officially and obviously that man.
The question is, which of the two others is the true weak link? The powerful strip gladiatrix or the Asian expert in poisons of all kinds?

Osborne is like the incarnation of all the old venomous plants that can now be found only in the county of HMV. He is as dangerous as Territory cowbane.

But Yuri and Campbell are the Trap-Men. The floral devices of Grand Junction have been part of their everyday world since they were children. They are the Camp Doctors; poison holds no secrets from them.

The master poisoner, then, will come up against the Territory’s venom.

He will come up against the Law.

And the Law strikes him. Like a flash. A double flash of flesh and shining metal.

It is simple, direct, quick.

Yuri and Campbell fall on him in such a way that Yuri is able to cover a counterattack from Belfond and the gladiatrix. It is very simple, very direct, very quick. The blades come up, sparkling rods of silver, and they sketch lines of mercury as they lunge at the man’s body and pull back, red and glistening, while Yuri and Campbell dance like ghosts around him. Yuri stabs him four times in two quick thrusts; the first slices across his neck, and the second, with the point, gets him right between the shoulder blades. The spinal cord, he hopes, has been cut at least once now. Campbell simply slashes him back and forth across the throat; on the first pass his Navy Seals diving knife cuts the carotid artery, which explodes in a spray of crimson droplets, a thousand scarlet points glittering in the false night that reigns over the world. With the second pass, a very deep gash brings forth thicker, viscous red blood.

The man emits an unintelligible cry mingled with a gasp of surprise. His latex-gloved hands, each holding a long, sharpened spike gleaming with some sort of poison, flap frenetically in all directions.

Campbell finishes him off with a violent slash right in the face. A gout of blood accompanies the man’s final slump onto Territory soil, as his head detaches halfway from his body. The false night is red. Ultrared.

They have broken the weakest link in a single blow. They have broken it so rapidly that the other two cannot even react.

For a few seconds, at least.

The rifles-turned-hand-weapons quickly end up on the ground. They
are moving to the more sophisticated phase of the first war—the battle of blades. It is the last kind of progress. The very last one.

It is at this moment of disconnection that, probably, destiny finds the energy necessary for actualization. The distribution of forces, the redivision of lines of frontal collision, the crystallization of points of no return.

Chemistry.

The chemistry of blood, metal, and earth.

The particular chemistry of men who are going to kill one another.

We always seek to acquire what we are missing, for the good or the bad. We choose each other; we always choose each other in twos, mutually, because we know we will be together until death. We choose each other in the scarlet brotherhood of spilled blood, of blood that will be spilled, of all the blood that has ever been spilled. We choose each other by mutual agreement—as mutual as it is perfectly tacit.

We choose each other because we know that one of us is going to kill the other one.

The couples form, as if on a dance floor; the duos are created, the terminal engagements, the pure love of steel in blinding light.

Yuri quickly finds himself facing off against Belfond, who has just extracted a long, heavy scythe-bladed machete from a holster on his back. Campbell is confronting the gladiatrix from the strip, who is armed with a fireman’s axe. Once more two events happen simultaneously, in parallel, but with their own respective rules. Two perspectives of war, of the Law, of infinity.

Two beginnings, two unfoldings, two endings. Two lives.

Two lives compressed into a few minutes.

Two lives that crystallize, here, now, everything they have ever been.

Within the Circle of Steel, the very last citadel to have fought and the very last that will fall, at the center of the Ridge, the Ark is now nothing but continuous, varying ultraviolet light interspersed with silvery flashes. It has turned from the white of a star into a cobalt blue full moon that will, now, illuminate the final encounter between human predators.

This final encounter that resembles so closely the very first one.

Yuri McCoy. Johnson Belfond.

Chrysler Campbell. Wanda Walker.

A machete, a Gurkha sword, an axe, a diving knife.

It is a strange thing; a battle that lasts just a few minutes can only be described as if it lasted for hours. Because in a battle, each second is directly connected to death. Each second is directly connected to infinity. Each second spans a lifetime, because it could be the last.

Epic metaphor is the only solution, the ellipsis encircling the metaphysics of War, the bloody poetry of the god Mars.

The Dance of Sabers. The Song of Blades. The Music of Knives.

How to juxtapose, one more time, two coevolving realities? How to truly place them in parallel? What central point of view to adopt?

The Dance of Sabers. The Song of Blades. The Music of Knives.

If there is anyone who can follow the ballet along both of its parallel lines, it is the large purple crow flying over the Ridge and the former cosmodrome. The crow sees; it can discriminate; it can adopt several successive points of view. It can see the secret diagrams at work. It can guess who will live and who will die.

The machete strikes the Gurkha sword with a dry, sharp noise like a detonation. Under the violence of the blow, Yuri’s weapon drops. Belfond is a determined brute. He is also a good combatant. He knows how to wield his machete. Yuri is forced into a defensive position, Belfond constantly on the offensive, a wide grin on his face.

Territory techniques, thinks Yuri during one of the rare pauses between attacks. Campbell’s techniques.
Mixed martial arts techniques
.

They are the one solution—the only solution—offered by the Law of Bronze.

To succeed in the first place, it is not the enemy who must be eliminated, but his weapon.

Yuri knows now that his Nepalese sword will protect him for quite a while, but in the end it will succumb. Same strength ratio goes for Chrysler, with his submarine combat knife against an axe. So the very last of all wars must be taken back to its initial stage, the most elementary of all.

They will have to kill the enemy with their bare hands.

Only the purple crow knows, probably. Only the Territory crow can guess the point where the two lines will diverge absolutely and permanently.
It can already see them reconfiguring themselves to their own polarities.

Even as he parries Belfond’s thrusts, Yuri catches several glimpses of what is going on twenty meters away, where Campbell is battling the gladiatrix from the strip.

Chrysler evades an attack and takes advantage of the opportunity to strike out, cutting deeply as he does—and Wanda Walker’s forearm is now nothing but a cascade of blood gushing onto her fireman’s axe.

Yuri recoils to avoid a sharp blow from Belfond. He tries a counterattack in his turn, but comes perilously close to having the enemy’s blade cleave his head in two; only a reflex from the deepest recesses of his training permits him to save his own skin.

Wanda Walker attacks again, managing this time to slam her axe heavily into Chrysler’s knife, which flies out of his hand like an arrow, but Campbell responds with a pure Thai boxing maneuver, a circular kick that directly strikes the wounded arm of the gladiatrix, who slowly lets her weapon drop. Campbell follows up with a nasty high kick to the temple; the woman, stunned, sways and falls on one knee in front of him, her head slumping forward. It is the perfect position for a
vale tudo–
type penalty kick—a fast kick in the jaw with a recoil of several meters, as if sending a soccer ball deep into the net.

The woman falls backward and rolls to one side. It is Campbell’s moment now. He is already on her, crouched over her body, holding her down with his knees. He is unleashing his full fury on her, raining blows on her face at two per second, left-right jabs, as if attacking a punching bag.

Belfond’s attack is vicious; Yuri does not notice him pick up a handful of dirt and gravel, but suddenly his eyes are full of the blinding mixture. Too late, he remembers one of Campbell’s first lessons:
In person-to-person combat, the only thing you should focus on is your opponent
. He manages to avoid the next thrust by throwing himself to the ground in a controlled jiujitsu roll.

The purple crow could help him, of course, but that is not its role. A Territory animal, part of the aerial force of Grand Junction, it is there to observe, to report to the dead what happens in the world of the living, always watching, never even trying to understand.

*   *   *

Yuri is not aware of the full extent to which the Territory has synchronized them, him and Campbell; only the purple crow knows it.

The gladiatrix’s formidable body mass and bull-like energy allow her to reverse the situation in her favor several times—or, at least, to wriggle out of Campbell’s traps.

For example, the Kimura key he patiently executes in his crouched position above her body: his right hand seizes her right wrist, keeping her arm bent like a chicken wing, elbow pointed upward, fist downward; then he slides his left arm between her bicep and her forearm, trapped at a right angle, so that his left hand and right fist can, with an ultraquick lateral rotation, flip the enemy joint skyward while her forearm is immovably bent outward. But, screaming in pain, using all her own weight, striking with all her strength, the gladiatrix manages to wrench herself away from him. Pain is an indicator of impairment; when he stands, he can see in the girl’s contorted face that he has torn numerous muscles, perhaps dislocated others. Campbell applies rule number one of mixed martial arts:
Above all, knock your enemy to the ground
. Again and again his heel flies up in a violent kick to the gladiatrix’s face, which rapidly turns purple with bruising. When she does manage to rise, a roundhouse kick sends her staggering. Campbell attacks again, using a front kick to knock her off balance again, but the girl easily outweighs his hundred kilos; the blow to her solar plexus causes her to gasp and scream out in pain, but it does not fell her. She gathers herself again, and her tactic is obvious: make Campbell fall as fast as she can, and then overwhelm him with her sheer body mass. A series of direct blows, and then she pounces on him and his defensive knee thrusts do nothing to prevent her from pummeling him brutally into the ground.