Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (25 page)

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I knew that
Sunrise had a pair of small water trucks with two thousand-gallon tanks—for out-of-town homesteads with poor wells that stored the water in tanks of their own. Each truck carried forty feet of three-inch canvas hose for off-loading. The trucks had off-load pumps too in them, that could put out a powerful stream.

In the Yard we were just upslope enough to see, under the smoke pouring up, licks of flame rising up into sight here and there.

We filled the truck’s tank from a secondary tank in the yard fed by the water tower. It was agony, waiting to take on that load. At last I drove out with it, leaving Ricky to fill the second truck.

My vehicle was unwieldy, wallowing dreadfully on the downslope curves of the maintenance road.

Wrestling it down to the south end of town now, swinging onto Glacier …

Great, snarling stripes of fire, both sides of the street. Blocks of fire! Huge cinders of burnt gel littered the pavement.

“Help here!” I shouted. “Man my pump!”

The street had two hydrants. People were already clustered at both of them, and others were hurrying from the Majestic, carrying the hoses kept stored there. The gel had acted as an accelerant, was all but shriveled already, but had gotten the wood fiercely started.

I took up the hose, climbed on top of the tank, and got one guy to drive me up onto the sidewalk and close to the nearest wall. Then got another to start up the pump. We drove the truck down along the sidewalk, drenching flames and sending black smoke and white geysering up at the moon.

There was Ricky now, pulling up into the street’s far end. The squads got their hoses hooked up, and water was snarling and hissing as it bit into fire. Everywhere people formed relays for buckets of water from the houses. Steam and smoke were everywhere, our shouts drowning out the roar of flames.

Until at last came the moment when we saw that all along the street the fire was lessening. Saw it raged only here and there, its smoke climbing in thicker and thicker columns.

And then we knew. We had won. That hissing noise of drenched flames sounded like a sigh, a huge sigh of relief that the whole town was breathing. The assault on Sunrise had been repelled. Sunrise had survived.

It struck me then—and not me alone—that all of our dead friends and loved ones had fought with us and helped us to the very end. They had all entered the monster’s flesh and weakened it. They had turned it to fuel for our flames. All our dear dead had risen again to fight at our sides.

We had conquered at great cost. Some building-fronts’ siding had been half-consumed, the charred, naked studs showing through. Shingle roofs had been more than half consumed, their charred joists like the bones of carnage. But Sunrise was still standing.

I went up to one of the big gel cinders and stood looking at it. I wasn’t the only one doing this, dreamlike, standing in the steamy, puddled street, thinking of all the lost friends entombed in there. Glittery-wet with our firefighting streams, they were studded and spiked with the shapes they’d contained, or engulfed. Half-melted heads with charred eye-globes joined to human skulls, shrunken arms and legs protruding, a foot, sole skyward as if the rest of its owner had dived into oblivion. One profiled face, its eye a moon-aimed onyx, cupped water like its dying tears.

We looked at one another. Down the whole length of Glacier, people stood talking in pairs and trios, or just stood holding each other, the taller heads tenderly laid on the lower—not as if after a battle, but with the air of drowsy lovers ready for rest, sharing quiet thoughts. Our words rose in a murmur, as if the silence of all our dead had muted us as well.

Then heads began turning toward the boulevard’s midpoint. A faint disk of light had appeared on the pavement, a light more golden than the moon’s, and growing stronger. A shaft of this light was beaming down from above.

A raft up there was beaming it. The street went mute. From the raft a bulky shadow sank toward us on a cable that, released in the spotlight, proved to be a bale of something in shiny shrink-wrap.

The cable was retracted as the raft slid to the west side of the street and tilted its bow slightly downward to show us Val Margolian, seated behind his console. He smiled. One side of his head was bandaged. His voice came at a mellow amplification that reached the whole street.

“Your payout is three hundred million, three hundred thousand, three hundred dollars. We’ve rounded it up a bit, just for the symmetry of the number.

“We now most sincerely salute you all for the heroic defense you’ve waged. We are pleased to tell you that Panoply has brokered your full pardon from the State, though the ratio of capital punishments you’ve actually suffered tallies far below the mandate of your sentence.”

I only realized how amazing it was when it had continued for several heartbeats: our perfect universal silence, every one of us standing there mute, looking up at him.

This silence seemed to tell him something that he had not expected, something that made his pleasant expression become a shade more thoughtful.

“It’s with the deepest respect that I tell you you’ve been the most courageous opponents we have ever faced. Opponents, we were of cruel necessity. We could not change the fate that had befallen you, but together, you and Panoply have fashioned something from that fate that will never be forgotten.

“Not one of your deaths will end the life it took. All those lives’ endings will be woven into a tapestry that will be studied, that will be relived by whole generations to come.”

Margolian had begun this statement gravely, earnestly, but the unbroken silence below him, all our eyes coldly studying him, changed his tone as he spoke till it grew almost strident by the time he finished.

Sheriff Smalls and some helpers had approached the bale and razored off its wrappings, and—still in silence—stood counting packets of bills for some moments. Margolian sat up there watching us all, as if we were a vid that was turning out stranger than he had expected.

At length, Smalls straightened up, and spoke the only answer Sunrise had for him that night:

“The amount seems in order. We’ll make use of this.”

XXVIII

FORTRESS HOLLYWOOD

Later that year,
just after our second snowstorm, I was watching Jool nursing Lyla. This was delightful to me—I couldn’t stop grinning—to watch our avid little pap-sucker, her tiny brow knitted with concentration as she worked on Jool’s breast. But Jool and I were also having a bit of an argument.

“Hey,” I said, “you’ll be nursing her at least another year! You can’t be part of it! You have to sit this one out.”

“Forget that. I’m her model, Curtis. I’m her mother figure! And she’s gonna know that her momma fought back.”

“You’ve already fought through two shoots! She’ll know you fought back. She’ll see it on-screen whenever she wants.”

“I don’t want her seeing either one of those fucking vids!”

“Well, which is it? You want her to know you fought back or not?”

“I want her to know I paid those fuckers back for what they did to us. I don’t want her seeing any Live Action, and anyway there won’t be any vid of what we do to those fuckers, but I want her to know I helped do it to ’em.”

I pretended to chew on that for a while because I wasn’t going to budge her now anyway, and I had till next spring to convince her. But I couldn’t help answering. “What are you saying? There won’t be any vid of what we do to them? They won’t shoot it? We won’t? Kate Harlow’s working on it as we speak.”

“Just because I let you get me pregnant doesn’t mean you can keep me out of the fight.”

“We got you pregnant, hon, come on! I just think—”

“Just go away, Curtis. Leave us alone. You’re disturbing her lunchtime!”

“I’m not disturbing her! Look how she’s scarfing away!”

But seeing Jool’s glower, I grabbed my coat and got scarce.

I gave a whistle and Chance—we hadn’t changed his name—came wagging along.

I stood out there thinking I might take our little snowcat down into town—all the rolling slopes white, the dark trees in fur coats of powder.… Then thought I was being a wuss, and decided to hike down. Crunch and slog through the drifts—be one with the planet.

I started well, but slipping became an issue on the steeper slopes. I left a number of skid-marks and butt-prints behind me. Anyone who wanted to track me would have no problem, if they could stop laughing. Snow looks so dry somehow, at least to a novice. It’s amazing how wet it can get you, and amazing how cold you can get when you’re wet.

But somehow, just after my hands and my feet had gone totally numb, I did feel at one with the planet. Nothing smarmy about it either, that feeling. These peaks here I was crossing the flanks of, stuck straight up into the universe. At night, there was nothing but space between them and the stars.

And I couldn’t help thinking the game that I and my friends were preparing to play was a Ghoul’s Dance to perform for our neighbors, the galaxies. Yet it was our dance to do, and do it we would with all of our strength.…

Ten minutes later I had Sunrise in sight below me. Our town had a bigger profile now. Up behind the industrial zone there were two big new warehouse structures—one of them the hangar that housed our growing fleet of anti-gravs, and the other an armory-
cum
weapons plant.

I went straight down into town to the Cuppa Joe, where I found Japh and Chops and Ricky Dawes slumped comfortably at the coffee bar with steaming mugs in front of them. I took the stool beside Japh.

“Suzy, my sylph,” I said, “a cup of the same for me, please.”

Suzy was my height, and a pretty tough customer. “Not till you tell me what a sylph is,” she said.

“A woodland spirit.”

“That and two-fifty will do it.”

After a warming gulp, I asked my friends, “So. How’s our box-office boys?”

Worn though the joke was, it always made us laugh.
Assault on Sunrise Uncut
had hit the market a whole month before
Assault on Sunrise
itself. Margolian’s third of a billion was far less than half of Sunrise Incorporated’s total wealth now, and the torrent of revenues just kept rushing in.

But it happened, with the wintry light coming in the windows, that our laughter at that moment had an after-echo. A silence fell, and in it we heard faraway echos of voices we would never hear again. We didn’t fight the feeling. The silence drew out, and we let it.

I noticed Ricky’s eyes were wet. He wiped them. “I always thought I had a bad memory,” he said, and cleared his throat. “But I can remember all their faces so sharp, remember things they said. We were, like, robbed of them!”

“We’re gonna rob those fuckers back, Ricky,” Chops said. “It’s not enough, but it’s something.”

“I’ve been reading about Hitler,” Japh told us quietly. “About his
Festung Europa
once he’d conquered his neighbors and barricaded his borders. Fortress Europe, he called it.”

I cleared my throat. “And maybe you were also thinking … of Fortress Hollywood?”

“Indeed I was, Curtis, indeed I was.”

“Whaddaya mean, Fortress Europe?” Ricky asked.

“Europe, you know,” Japh said. “All those countries across the Atlantic Ocean? Hitler had ’em barricaded against his enemies, who were basically us and England. And by the time we were through with him, his fortress was, like, smoking rubble.”

“You mean like, all exploded?” he asked in a rusty voice.

“That’s what I mean.” Japh told him.

“Fortress Hollywood,” Ricky mused. “Smoking rubble. Man, that would be something!”

BOOKS BY MICHAEL SHEA

A Quest for Simbilis

Nifft the Lean

The Color Out of Time

In Yana, the Touch of Undying

Fat Face

I, Said the Fly

Polyphemus

The Mines of Behemoth

The Incompleat Nifft

The A’Rak

The Extra
*

Assault on Sunrise
*

Fortress Hollywood
(
forthcoming
)
*

The Autopsy and Other Tales

Copping Squid and Other Mythos Tales

*
A Tom Doherty Associates Book

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
ICHAEL
S
HEA
is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of
Nifft the Lean
and other novels. He has written many short stories for major fantasy and science fiction magazines. He lives in Northern California.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ASSAULT ON SUNRISE

Copyright © 2013 by Michael Shea

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Stephan Martiniere