He smiled like the Angel of Death. And swept downward like a scythe.
Noisily Simone barfed over the side of the Land Rover.
Around them smoldered the ruins of a murdered town. The stench was as thick as the flies. The flies were thick as monsoon rain.
“There must be hundreds dead here,” John Fortune said. He wasn’t feeling so good himself.
The Lama floated by the car. “One thousand,” he said.
A reserve Simba column had routed the Nigerians raiding the base camp where the Lama’s body had sat in lotus while his spirit did its astral scout thing. Without Butcher Dagon to back them they didn’t put up much fight. Another Wolf and some intact Brazilian peacekeepers had been found. They drove the Lama up with Brave Hawk flying top cover to pick up their comrades.
The team followed Tom Weathers’s wake of massacre. To his crowning horror.
Simone had quit puking. Now she sobbed. “How could he do this?”
“His power,” John Fortune said. He shook his head. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Like nothing I could’ve imagined.”
“I didn’t mean that,” the young woman said. “I meant, how could he do so horrible a thing? It’s worse than what happened in that village. A hundred times worse.”
John could only shake his head some more. He had no words. In the seat behind him Buford muttered under his breath. John could only make out the words “terrible bad.”
“Why the long faces, children?”
They all looked up. The taunting voice came from ahead and above.
Tom Weathers hung thirty feet in the air. He descended slowly to stand before them with hands on jeans-clad hips.
Anger boiled up inside John. “What the hell did you think you were doing here?” he shouted.
“I told you. Dealing out revolutionary justice.”
“But these poor villagers,” Simone said. “You killed them. You killed civilians.”
He shrugged. “They were collaborators anyway. They had it coming.”
John almost released Sekhmet again. But he was held together by duct tape as it was. And more than for himself, he feared that if he let the Destroyer out now, she’d prove no more discriminating than Tom Weathers had. “You’re a war criminal, Weathers,” he said. “That’s the only way to say it.”
“What? When colonialists bomb or shell neighborhoods full of indigenous people you call it ‘collateral damage.’ What makes this worse?”
“Just because others do it doesn’t make it right,” Simone said.
“I cannot believe what a bunch of posers you are!” Weathers yelled. “Bourgeois phonies. You come here saying, ‘Long live the Revolution,’ all that dorm-room shit. But when it comes down to hitting the barricades, man, when it all gets real, you can’t fucking take it.”
“This wasn’t revolution,” Simone told her fallen idol. There was no heat in her voice. No life at all. Verbal flatline. “It was murder.”
Weathers sneered. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Buford gripped John’s arm. “It’s all over here, Mr. Fortune,” he said. “This is a bad place. Let’s go home.”
“Yeah,” John said. “It is over. We’re not part of this.”
“Yeah!” Tom flared at them with wild hateful laughter. “Your work here is done, right? And I did it for you. Now you want to run on home. Run, then.
“You’re all fucking fascists. Just like the rest of them.”
Standing amid the devastation he had created, the Radical watched them drive away. His chest pumped like bellows. His stomach was a surging chaos of nausea. He had spent himself unimaginably. Soon his body would pay the price.
He gave it no thought. What he thought was, There, Meadows, you simpering hippie fuck. That’s what I think of your peace-and-love horse shit.
“This is all for you, man,” he said aloud. “All for you.
“I hope you fucking like it.”
“Why are we here?” Chen asked. He clutched his heavy camera to his chest like a teddy bear.
“No idea.”
Hei-lian glanced around the helipad next to the palace. A crowd had gathered. Wide-eyed, Sprout stuck close to her. She had panicked when Leopard Men came to escort them brusquely here.
So had Hei-lian, almost.
“Look,” Hong said. “It’s Nshombo. And his sister.”
“Are they going to shoot us?” Chen asked in Mandarin.
“I don’t think they’d have had you bring your gear,” Hei-lian said. “Since they did, you’d best start shooting. Something’s going on.”
“Hei-lian?” Sprout asked in a small voice.
Quick headshake. “No idea, honey,” she said. “Just stay close.”
She saw the young healer-ace, Dolores. She stood between Nshombo and Alicia, dressed in gleaming white. Her face shone as if with inner radiance.
Someone shouted. Pointed to the sky. Everyone looked up.
A hundred voices gasped. A pale-skinned, golden-haired man floated above their heads. He raised a fist.
“Vive la Révolution!” shouted Tom Weathers. “Vive Dr. Kitengi Nshombo!”
“Long live Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” roared a claque of Leopard Men.
To mad cheering, Tom descended from the sky. Palace guards in powder-blue uniforms held the mob at bay as he swapped handshakes with Nshombo and an embrace with his sister.
Sprout hit him at a run. He laughed and kissed away her tears.
He turned to give Hei-lian a big grin as she approached. She was too stunned to talk for the benefit of the microphone she’d clipped to her shirt collar moments before.
“Sorry to scare you like that,” he said. “But we had to keep things secret. We wanted to spring a little surprise on the imperialists.”
She flung arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. Then she stepped back.
“Why are you still alive?”
Dolores was suddenly by his side. Still holding Sprout in one arm he slipped the other around the Congolese girl.
“She healed me,” he said. “She’s the real heroine.”
He turned and kissed her on the forehead as camera flashes flickered.
Hei-lian wondered why she felt so hollow.
Double Helix
UNTIL THE DAYBREAK, AND
THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY
Melinda M. Snodgrass
SHADOWS ARE STRETCHING AND dancing on the plaster walls of the old cottage as Niobe clears the battered table. The air is redolent with the smell of beef stew. After delivering them here I teleported to Kirkwall for supplies.
We’re using oil lanterns for light, saving the generator to heat water for baths. Drake’s face is rosy from the heat of the fire and a large meal. He is nodding, then suddenly jerking back awake. Niobe ruffles his hair.
“Go to bed, kiddo.”
“Can I have some more pudding?”
She smiles indulgently. The soft golden light and the shadows hide the worst of her acne. Drake spoons more chocolate pudding into his bowl and shuffles out. A few moments later I hear the springs on the old bed-stead creak.
“Why here?” she asks me as she starts to wash the dishes. I fill the chipped glass with more wine.
“Because there are seventy islands in the Orkneys and only seventeen of them are inhabited. If he loses control nothing but gulls and rabbits will die.”