After the Revolution, page 42
But still, the guilt was there. Perhaps what she felt was a betrayal of her past self. Or maybe she was just dumb. Sasha shook it off. She tried to focus on the carnage. It was horrible, she knew that in a detached academic sense. She couldn’t quite feel the horror, though. It was as if shooting Darryl had opened up a great, gnawing hole inside her heart and that hole had spread, like a black film, over her entire body. All her feelings seemed so distant now.
She wanted to cry about Darryl. She wanted to cry about this. She wanted to cry for Susannah and Anne, left alone in that living hell of a Kingdom. She wanted to cry for herself, too. But she couldn’t. And so she didn’t. Instead, she sat and watched as the warrior gods of this strange city helped the Martyrs earn their title.
Sasha looked out at the citizens of Rolling Fuck. Most of the people she could see were crying, and even those who weren’t looked shaken, horrified. The perpetual party atmosphere she’d come to associate with the City of Wheels was gone. It had been suspended to allow for pain. Sasha wanted to hurt with them.
But instead she thought about the offer that man Jim had made. She thought about the squicking sound of the razor blade flipping out of Roland’s forearm. She’d seen the way he fought. She longed for the high that had come with the violence in the clinic, but she couldn’t stand more of the guilt that killing Darryl had brought her. I could be a medic, Sasha thought, Jim said so.
She looked up to the screens again, at the parade of death. She wasn’t sure if any of the dead had been Rolling Fuck’s soldiers. It didn’t look like it. But as she settled back in to watch, something glitched on the screens. The stream of faces sped up, well past the point where she could focus on any of them. Then the flow stopped, sputtered, the picture glitched out and then righted itself.
Whatever algorithm handled the show eventually stabilized, and the individual images on each screen shrank to accommodate many, many more people, a flood of the dead and moments from their lives. The nature of their deaths changed, too. Most of the first wave seemed to come from a sudden burst of explosive detonations. But the explosions stopped and the dying continued, and whatever was killing the Martyrs now moved too fast to be clearly seen.
“What’s happening?” she heard Manny ask. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” the old man said. “That’s Roland.”
Roland.
Forty-five seconds after his feet hit the dirt, Roland had run out of ammo. He’d managed to do a tremendous amount of damage in that short span of time, decimating their mortar batteries with cluster rockets and clearing the Martyrs away from their field guns with a mix of gas and fragmentation grenades. He’d emptied his machine gun in three long bursts, mostly aimed at the infantry who’d been clustered behind the APC barricades when he landed. Then he’d taken to scavenging rifles from the dead and emptying those into targets of opportunity.
By the one-minute mark, Roland’s hindbrain estimated he’d killed or wounded close to a thousand men. The sheer ferocity of his initial assault sent the Kingdom’s forces reeling and cleared a roughly two-hundred meter circle around him. Roland finished gunning down the crew of a Patriot battery and ran for an abandoned anti-tank rifle lying next to a pile of bodies.
Bullets smacked into him from all sides: diversionary fire, meant to distract him from the up-armored Mattis APC that suddenly gunned its engine and barreled toward him. They think they can run me over, Roland realized with something like glee. So he slowed down, reducing his sprint to something like a normal human running speed while the vehicle closed the gap between them.
He jumped at the last moment, landed on the APC’s roof, and punched a hole through the top armor with both of his fists. Then he gripped the ragged metal at the sides of the hole and tore the APC open–
–the smell of fear hit his nose as he tore through the concrete wall. The room held a dozen men, a mix of guards and officers. One man in the middle wore the stars of a general in the United States Army. Some of the soldiers screamed. A few opened fire. But the general just stood there while Roland killed. He didn’t even blink. No fear poured off him.
“It’s our fault,” the general said, once they were the only men left alive in the room. “This is all our fault, Roland. I’m–”
A bullet hit his face and Roland snapped back to reality. The men in the APC below him were dead; it looked as if he’d shredded them with his bare hands. But while he’d been lost in a memory, two more APCs had roared up and disgorged a dozen power-armored soldiers.
They shot him with big guns, weapons meant to hurt monsters. He avoided some of their rounds, but not most. Roland lost the better part of his right hand, a chunk of his skull, and his left knee. It hurt, but that didn’t stop him. He leapt off the Mattis and soon he was among them, ripping off armored plates and shattering bones with his bare hands.
The battle drugs poured into his brain and lit his synapses up like the New York skyline. Roland let out a terrible whooping cry that was half laugh and half scream and he tore into the men as they tried, in vain, to do him real harm.
It took nineteen seconds to eliminate them all. As the last man dropped, Roland realized with some surprise that he could hear Jim’s voice, distant but getting closer. His old friend was charging, screaming out war whoops, and firing those big dumb pistols. Then he heard the familiar crack of a Dragunov sniper rifle—Topaz’s rifle! He remembered it now. The sound was as familiar to him as the voice of his own mother.
Holy shit! Roland realized that, for the first time in years, he could remember the sound of his mother’s voice. Her name and face were still lost in memory, but all this violence was clearly knocking things loose. He took a step back, behind one of the intact APCs, to avoid a spray of heavy machine-gun fire and take stock of the situation. Now that he focused, he could feel the hoof beats of Rolling Fuck’s cavalry. He could sense that many of the city’s infantry had charged out from their positions in Rock Creek to meet the Martyrs in hand-to-hand combat.
The Heavenly Kingdom was not in flight, not yet. But they would break soon. Roland knew it. He could smell it in the air. Time to stop now. Time to let Skullfucker Mike, Topaz, and the others finish the fight. He’d done enough, he knew he’d done enough. And yet…
The drugs. Even after just a few seconds out of direct combat, the high was starting to fade. And Roland wanted more. He thought about cracking another skull and his hand itched. He heard one of the Martyrs open up with an automatic grenade launcher, and thought about how good that gun would feel, bucking against the meat of his shoulder. The man with the grenade launcher was close. Roland could close the distance between them in two, maybe three seconds.
No. You don’t need to do this. Stop. Fewer people will die if you just–
Roland charged.
Manny.
Manny had seen nine people killed by bullets or bombs. He’d seen a good deal more fresh corpses, in the aftermath of firefights. He had a strong stomach and he was not easily distressed by gore. The opening stages of this battle, and the war ritual, had been unsettling, but not because of the violence.
That changed soon after Roland landed.
“He’s just tearing people apart…” Manny said, without really meaning to say anything at all. Donald Farris replied with a grim nod.
“It’s hard to watch,” Nana Yazzie admitted, as another dozen lives ended messily on the screens before them. “It’ll be over soon, though. They can’t take much more of this.”
“I haven’t seen any of your people die yet,” Sasha said. “Is that abnormal?”
“No,” Donald’s voice was grim. “There’ll be a lot of injuries, but I don’t expect Rolling Fuck will lose a single warrior.”
“Good,” Sasha said.
“Is it?” Donald asked.
“Of course it’s good, you silly fuck,” Nana Yazzie snapped. That was the first time Manny could recall hearing her angry.
“I disagree,” the old man grumbled. “We’re on a precipice here, the edge of a deep cliff. Every time this happens we get a little closer to falling off.”
“What do you mean?” Manny asked.
“He means,” Nana Yazzie replied with a bit of drunken slur to her voice, “that he doesn’t trust the people of this city. He thinks they’ll get a taste for war and this whole experiment will turn into a nightmare.”
“You can’t trust the dark,” Donald Farris insisted, “and we’re in the dark here.” He waved out at the field and the hundreds of people, in tearful silence, watching the faces of the dead. “Right now we’ve managed to lash together a chain of rituals that keep them peaceful. How long can that last?”
Nana Yazzie glared at him, and then shifted her gaze to Manny. She pointed a finger at Donald.
“He thinks we should have let your people die,” she said. “I think we have a responsibility to intervene.”
“I’m not saying we don’t,” Donald Farris insisted. “I’m just saying, I’ve seen how this story ends. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
“Pithy,” Nana Yazzie said, “but– Oh!”
She stopped mid-sentence and stared out into the screens. Manny looked back just in time to watch the flow of dead faces speed up again. The screens jerked and shuddered to accommodate the new flow. Once they adjusted, Manny was shocked again at the violence on display. He saw men run through with lances, gutted by scimitars, burnt by napalm, and trampled under the spiked hooves of Quadrophracts.
“Oh god,” he moaned.
“Ah yes,” Nana Yazzie sighed, “that would be the cavalry. It won’t be much longer now. They’re here to finish the job.”
Roland.
The Knights of Rolling Fuck were a sight to see, truly. It wasn’t often that Roland came across something that registered as completely new to the deep, battered banks of his memory. But there was no déjà vu here, no sense that he’d watched anything like it before. Rolling Fuck’s riders worked in two- and three-person squads, mostly using a mix of hand-grenades, small arms, flamethrowers, and melée weapons for shock value.
Their timing was exquisite. One-hundred riders hit the Martyrs at the same time. They didn’t seem to have specific targets, or goals beyond causing mayhem. But they did this expertly, spiking armored vehicles and field guns with white phosphorus charges and scattering any clusters of Martyrs they could find.
The woman, Kishori, rode past him, her face skinned and weeping blood, as she lobbed a hand grenade toward a group of Martyrs hunkered behind the shattered remains of a public restroom. She pulled a macuahuitl, with an iron trunk and gleaming obsidian blades, free from her belt as her steed leapt over the burning wreckage of a jeep and bounded toward the survivors. Roland followed her, tearing a piece of rebar free from some rubble as he charged.
The restrooms were at one end of what had once been a giant playground in a public park. It had been derelict for more than a decade, but the corpses of swing sets and remnants of slides were still visible. Several hundred of the Martyrs had fallen back to this position trying to create some kind of defensive line. Panic and mass death had robbed them of a lot of cohesion, but they still managed to pour a lot of fire into Roland and Kishori as they charged.
A rocket-propelled grenade hit the chest of her quadrophract and burst, ripping off one of the machine’s legs and sending the chromed woman tumbling to the ground, gravel and rubble embedding itself into the red musculature of her bleeding face. Roland didn’t stop for her. He charged ahead, absorbed a few dozen rounds of small-arms fire and dodged a handful of rocket-propelled grenades.
He hit a group of twenty-three men, hunkered behind a long Stihl-glass barricade and several heavy, metal crates. These Martyrs had been trying to get a trio of anti-tank guns back into the fight. They gave up on that once Roland closed to about twenty feet. One of them, an older man with a spine, shouted words of encouragement and charged forward, firing, with a dozen of his men.
These soldiers weren’t wearing powered armor. They weren’t good enough to hit more than one in twenty shots. They wore old upcycled body armor. Only a few of them had bayonets. They presented no real threat. Twenty seconds and I can put every one of these fuckers down for the rest of the fight. No one needs to die. His hand twitched. The river of dopamine in his synapses shrank to a babbling brook. Roland felt a craving rise. Maybe just a few more.
He was among them. Roland found that brave old fucker, picked him up by the skull and used him as a flail until the bones of his face came loose in Roland’s hands. He deployed the razor in his wrist and started slicing off hands and ears. He moved on to slashing tendons and muscles and, eventually, just hacked at his enemies like a drunken butcher. One boy dropped his gun, tried to back away and fell on his ass as Roland stalked toward him–
–the protesters screamed and screamed. They swung sticks and tried to bash him with their shields and he knocked their clumsy strikes aside and waded into the mass. Roland didn’t even consider drawing a gun. He tore. Every fistful of human flesh sent a wash of orgiastic glee bubbling through his brain. A young woman screamed and tried to run. He grabbed her hair and pulled, and the sound of her neck snapping almost made him shriek with joy–
“Please–” said a different man, before Roland shattered his skull against the pavement and leapt up to chase down a trio of fleeing Martyrs.
–he was back in Incirlik, bloody and injured and almost snow blind from the battle drugs. Roland shoved his way through the door and into the air raid shelter. He’d already pulled a grenade free from his harness when he found himself face-to-face with a room of women and children, old men and young boys; civilians. Unarmed.
And, with sudden shock, Roland realized he didn’t care about that last part. His synapses screamed for more. Roland obliged them.
“My God stop, STOP!”
He came back to himself and realized he was on the ground and locked into a pretty darn good half nelson. It took him a moment to realize that woman, Kishori, was the one holding him.
“Oh,” he said.
“What the FUCK, man?”
Roland looked around. None of the Martyrs near him were still standing. It was hard, even for his hindbrain, to identify how many people had fallen around him. He guessed south of a hundred, but not far south. The number was shocking, it implied a longer blackout than any others. What was scarier was the sheer violence evident in these men’s death. Most of them were in more than two pieces.
“Are you gonna flip out if I let go?”
Roland shook his head, and Kishori released him. He turned around, still seated, and looked at the young woman. She was filthy with grime and blood, some of it her own. Her skinless face wept red but, even so, he could still see the judgement in her eyes.
“That was not fucking necessary,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I…”
“Roland!”
It was Skullfucker Mike. Topaz trailed behind him at a sizable distance, sweeping the field with a rifle. Roland tried to catch his eye. Topaz avoided Roland’s gaze for a second or two but then they connected and–
–she stared at him with those big, brown, tear-stained eyes.
“This isn’t what I wanted, Roland. This isn’t what we said we were fighting for. This is just butchery.”
He felt anger at her, blind rage that warred with his love.
“Of course it’s butchery!” he screamed. “The world is built by butchers!”–
“Dude!” Kishori slapped him, hard, and Roland came back to himself. Skullfucker Mike was closer now. Roland looked for Topaz, and found him. He was closer too, and looked worried, but he didn’t say anything.
“Is Roland alright?” Mike asked Kishori. “Was he hit?”
“Sure, but that’s not the problem. He just went bugfuck on, like, a company of those guys. Ripped them apart with his bare hands.”
“It’s a fuckin’ relapse,” said Skullfucker Mike. He knelt down in front of Roland and put a hand on his shoulder. “Buddy,” he said, “it’s done. They’re starting to run. Whole army will be routed in a few minutes. You just sit here and catch your breath and–”
Routed? Roland looked down and realized his hands were shaking. He felt a vast, throbbing emptiness in his synapses. He realized that the emptiness was always there, and had been for as long as he could remember. Most days he hid it under a haze of narcotics but now that he’d had it filled—for just a minute!—its emptiness hurt like an amputated limb.
He looked out and saw that, yes, Skullfucker Mike was correct. Several pockets of Martyrs still held out, but the bulk of the vanguard was either dead or fleeing for the line of transports and technicals that stretched back to the Brazos. It felt like the rest of the army had started the slow process of halting, and reversing its advance. The Kingdom had decided to pull back.
Are you done or not, Roland? asked an evil voice in the back of his skull. If you’re not done, if you want more, you’d better go get it.
Roland leaned back. He looked from Skullfucker Mike, to Kishori, and finally to Topaz. Then he reached behind him, grabbed a busted rifle he could use as a club, and stood up.
“Roland, no–” Skullfucker Mike started to say. Roland didn’t hear the rest. He bolted off, as fast as he could run, in the direction of the fleeing Martyrs.
Sasha.
It was amazing how much she could tell about the course of the battle just from watching the faces of its casualties. The pace of the killing had escalated to a certain level, and then started to slowly fall. More and more of the men died with their backs to the enemy, running. Sasha guessed that meant the army, or at least a lot of it, had started to break. The pace of death slowed to a trickle.
“Well then,” Donald Farris grumbled, “it seems like that’s more or less settled. I’m going to get us another round. I think we’ve all eaten enough guilt for the–”
