Warlord: Dervish (31 page)

Some of the African boys stopped at the door, banging on it between bursts from their AKs, begging for entry, and then a tall, filmy, swirling pillar was within their ranks, spewing rifles and limbs from its whirling mass, several of the children running away, firing without effect at the dervish unwinding in the street. The thing in the sand did not pause, spiraling sinuously after them.

Again he waited patiently, watching the street, watching the house Areya had gone in, waiting for the child to come out, waiting for someone or something else to reveal itself. The empty Mech stood its lonely vigil behind him. After awhile, Jason stepped from behind the wall, into the road, intent on following the sounds of battle to their source, in the process stepping into the immediate path of a man in a white lab coat. He bounced off Jason and landed unceremoniously on his rump.

Jason turned on him, the fire in his eyes flaring in anger.

“
You
.” Words failed him. Emotions washed over him: anger, hatred, rage.

“Look into the sky, Jason!” Cowering on the ground, the other drew one hand close to his torso, cradling it with his other as though wounded. “The starlight we see with our naked eyes—streams of photons traveling towards us for years.
Years
, Jason! Some a few, some thousands of years!”

This man had sat across from Jason when he was bound, helpless. He had aimed a revolver at Jason’s head and pulled the trigger.

“Look into that sky and look into the past, Jason! Do you understand?”

He had tortured Jason, forced him to secret himself away amid the inner recesses of his mind.

“Imagine it: four hundred million of these cosmic microwave protons streaming through each cubic meter of space.”

He’d had a picture of Jason as a kid, a kid in high school for God’s sake.

“It staggers the mind, does it not—”

Amid the molecules rotating and vibrating, amid the neurons and synapses firing, something clicked and Jason found a name for this sniveling being at his feet.

“Kaku!”

The other was visibly startled. “How do you know that name?”

A rush of memories flooded him at once. What Bronson had said—Kaku—
I’m an astrophysicist
—Doctor—Kaku—Coo-coo—
The fickle nature of time
—Get out of my head.

Jason took a menacing step closer.

“No, wait!” Kaku implored, reaching into an inner pocket of his dirtied lab coat, “I have it here,” retrieving an envelope, waving it at Jason. “Do you know how long I have carried this around with me? See—look, signed ‘Dr. Kaku’ on the back. Is this who you think I am?”

Kaku tore the envelope open and struggled, his fingers trembling, to extract the folded sheet of paper.

Are you feeling anything yet
—Kaku—Coo-coo—
Tsk-tsk-tsk
—Get—

“I do not recall how or when I received it…” the doctor unfolded the paper“…but it seems as if I have always had it in my possession…”

—out of my head—Get out of my—

“Let me tell you what it says.” Jason glowered down on him.

“Dear Dr. Kaku—” the doctor read and Jason recited from memory. “Jason says he is going to kill you.” The man on the ground trembled, the paper dropping from his grasp. “Sincerely, myself. Dear god.”

Consider me the Grand Inquisitor
—he’s coo-coo—Don’t let him get in—

“Do you know—”

Tell me, Jason

Get out

“—what quantum mechanics—”

what is your greatest fear?

Out of

“—ultimately allowed us to understand?”

Are you going to visit upon me

Out of my

“That science is often—”

my greatest fear?

Out of my head!

“—stranger than science fiction!”

Jason snapped back to attention, ready to kill the man, to end his existence here on whatever this plane of reality, in whichever universe they now found themselves, but Kaku was up and running away, screeching like some rodent escaped from its cage.

“
Get out
—” Jason gave chase “—
of my
—” screaming at him “—
fucking head!
” his words giving to a guttural, primitive roar.

He passed an open door within which something stirred and he fired the AK, driving whatever was inside deeper into the building, focused on the man ahead of him, Kaku turning the corner, the din of battle welling.

He caught up to Kaku effortlessly. The doctor had come up short amid the pandemonium of a street battle. Men and boys took cover behind chunks of toppled obelisk, a fallen totem. They sent out a torrent of fire, the staccato beat of AKs, a man with a horseshoe mustache speed firing one pistol until it locked open, extending his second hand and speed firing another. Insurgents a street over poured rounds back, their bullets whining past, zipping off solid surfaces, puffs of dust. Beyond the insurgents, the ground whipping up in dense clouds of sand.

Muzzle flashes winking from seemingly every window of one building. Drooper on a knee, firing a thermobaric warhead towards the structure. An African boy solider caught in the backblast shrieked as he was knocked out of the way. Sections of the building bulged, the structure buckling, flames erupting from windows, burning bodies flailing to the street.

An oversized spider fought a gang of boys, the kids clinging to its back, stabbing it with spears and machetes. Ash continued to fall, showering each and all, the blackened sky reddening, the sand storm building.

“We are leaving!” Fleegle roared, emptying his pistols.

Kaku knelt in the street, his hand pressed to his stomach, a stray round having taken out his leg. Jason approached him, oblivious to the rounds walking the street around them.

A mechanized whirring as a Mech stepped into view, its autocannon dispensing thousands of rounds, the face of a house peeling off.

Kaku stared up into the face of the thing that meant to kill him.

Concussive explosions reverberated through the circle.

The doctor was talking to Jason, desperation in his voice. “What you fail to see—”

Kaku held out the hand he’d kept close to his body, spreading his fingers, exposing the mathematical formula scrawled on his palm in marker.

“—you fail to see the rules of quantum mechanics are indeterministic!”

Jason fired his AK from the hip, one round, Kaku’s head snapping back, the doctor keeling over.

Pings and whines as bullets impacted the metallic thing to no effect.

Kaku’s leg twitched. Jason stepped in to put another round through his head—“NO!”—when a cry sounded behind him, clear above the din. He had turned to confront its source when the heat seared his stomach, erupting out his side, a spray of red. He foundered and folded, sinking down, next to Kaku.

Around his fallen form…the tumult, bodies flung into the air, limbs raining down. The dust and sand lifting off the ground, drawn as if by a magnet into the sky. Fleegle with Drooper slung over his shoulders, limping away into the smoke and sand.

Sometimes you just gotta let go

He was fully Jason still, conscious of his self, the pain in his lower torso all too real. He’d been shot. It’d gone in his belly and come out between his ribs. It was hard to breath. Propping himself up on an elbow, he rolled close to a felled section of column. He’d seen the guy who’d shot him, watched the rifle recoil slightly against the man’s shoulder.
Fuck
.
That was me
…

A Mech waltzed past on the other side of the column, chasing African boys. It chucked one into the air and blasted him with its auto cannon like skeet. Blood was draining out of Kaku’s head, but the doctor still moved, his legs digging furroughs in the sand. Jason looked and saw a rifle, his rifle, out of reach. As he stared, the weapon rose and floated into the sky, drawn towards the spiraling whorl unfolding above.

A shadow fell across him and the chunk of obelisk he sheltered behind was lifted, tons of concrete inscribed with arcane mathematics shrugged aside. A Mech stood over Jason, arms at its sides, steam rising from the barrel of its mini-gun.

“Get up Jay-main.”

He stared in disbelief at the thing. “How the…”

“Get up, Jay.” He could see Bronson through the tinted cockpit windshield, could hear him over the P.A. His friend appeared unscathed. “You need to get me into this thing.”

“You’re already…” Jason stopped. He knew what Bronson meant. He meant Jason had to help him get in the mech
then
.

“I’m fucked…” Jason pulled his legs up to his chest and managed to get on his knees. Bodies around him were rising from the ground, drawn into the air. “…I’m bleeding out here…”

“You can do this Jay.” Conviction over the P.A.

He stood unsteadily, noticing that the pain was subsiding. “How do I…?”

“Go back where we began, Jay main.”

There was no way he should be feeling this well. He’d just been gut shot. It was the sand, something to do with the sand, with the wound he’d incurred earlier, how long ago? What did time mean any more? “And you?” he asked his friend, encased in the mech.

“I’m a ride this Lambo to Tora Bora, see a motherfucka bout some payback.”

Jason grinned. “Ridin’ twenty-foes, huh?”

“Yeah, twenty-foes. But you the guy gonna stop all this from happenin’. I know.”

“How you know that?”

“What’d I tell you ‘fore, Jay main? Real nigga vision.”

Jets of flame burst from the nacelle mounted on its back and the Mech lifted from the ground, into the sky, a sky that had come alive, whirl pooling, vacuuming everything into it. Kaku’s body floated away from him, the doctor’s eyes blinking. Jason reached out and grabbed an AK before it could disappear into the atmosphere and the black hole above. He slung the AKs across his torso and found the thermobaric launcher.

As he walked, the molecules of his feet merged with the sand and the dirt of the road and swirled about him, mixing with the detritus being sucked into the air. Turning a corner, he found himself on a street as yet untouched by the unfolding singularity. Dozens of men converged on the road, calling out to one another from windows and roof tops, their attention shifting from the black hole to the red-eyed thing that had presented itself to them. They fanned out in the street, hunkering down, roofs and windows bristling with rifles and rocket launchers, head dresses and flip flops, holy warriors drawn from the Middle East and eastern Europe, from Africa and east Asia, all answering the call, all come to fight and kill and die for their religion, for their god, to fall at the hands of something they could never comprehend.

The sand man growled. “Yeah.”

A blur of motion, the dervish revolving, their rifles opening fire, a curtain of lead, rounds absorbed into the whirlwind shooting back out. Its onslaught took it up insurgent alley, spiraling, crisscrossing the street, a blazing AK in either hand, men buckling and dropping, keening and screaming, blood jetting. They fired rocket propelled grenades at the dervish, which easily side stepped, batting warheads aside into the buildings within which they hid. The ground around its roiling mass erupted, geysers of sand from RPGs showering harmlessly about it. When its AKs emptied it triggered the thermobaric launcher, the wall of a building bulging outwards before its second and third stories sandwiched on top of the first, burying the men within.

Inside his own dervish, calm within the storm, Jason felt as if he were the only one really moving. It was as though he moved at normal speed, while all around him were in slow motion. Insurgents in front of him swam in molasses, the glittering parabola of their shell casings clear in his sight, rifle discharges reaching his ears long moments after muzzles flashed. Behind him, men staggered back through mists of blood, their faces shocked and confused, dying and dead, others draped out of window sills. As he fired out assault rifles, Jason reached out with his being, apprehending others to replace those emptied, never stopping to reload, exhausting his latest acquisitions and acquiring more.

His vision burned intensely, vivid, brilliant, like high dynamic range photography. As he ran, his being spiraled, unfolding gyroscopically this way and that. Their bullets were sucked into his whirling mass, incapable of harming him, never able to touch him because he had transcended form to disembodied matter, pure energy, their projectiles spinning around before launching out in totally new directions.

The dervish came, unstoppable, and still they tried to halt its advance, men in kaffiyehs and kurta pajamas placing themselves directly in its path, sucked into its phantasmal windings, the leg severed from a man, another halved, blood flowering from their torsos and chests as it fired on them and they faltered and fell.

It killed everyone in its path, and still more came, festooned with explosives on their bodies, blowing themselves and others like them up. The dervish spun turbulently, pin-balling from insurgent to insurgent, men coming apart as if thrust into a tree chopper, felled by this otherworldly dynamo. And when there was no one left to kill the spinning slowed, the being’s corporeal form recomposed, atoms cohered and something that resembled a man stood alone, a man once named Jason, his intense red eyes aglow. Behind him a street of death, dismembered bodies and viscera, misshapen hardware, all of it beginning to lift off the ground and into the sky, drawn to the black hole.