Cloud Country

Saru awoke in a crater, with her skin gently glowing gold, fading on and off, like a child’s nightlight. Drops of rain tickled down on her face, and she held her mouth open, aching with such thirst that the acid burn of the water tasted sweet and fresh. Memories nagged her consciousness, a laugh, and a scream, and the shriek of wind in her ears as she fell through empty air, and then an explosion of pain and light as she struck the ground like a meteor. She picked herself up and flopped onto hands and knees, and crawled from the crater onto the cracked and broken asphalt of a parking lot. Her knees and shins scraped, a joyous, heavy wet of blood. Alive! I am alive! She rose to a totter, bare feet cutting on the broken glass and trash—the carpet of America—and stutter-stepped away.

She came to a gas station, with a dazed teller staring at a wall-mounted screen. The screen showed fire and death, corpses charred and flaked, melted cars and buildings and streets merged together in fornicating shapes. A glossy reporter yammered updates:
Terrorist attack. Philadelphia. Thousands dead. Hathaway Security declares state of emergency.
Bodies ran from the flames to fizzle in stillness, and the camera quickly panned away, showing the flames piling into the night sky, flames beyond the mastery of human intervention, that would go only when they had eaten their fill.

Saru watched in disbelief, her brain struggling with all its might to disconnect her own actions from the death and destruction on the screen. It’s not my fault. It was an accident. I was doing the right thing! Standing with Ria, floating above the city like a Goddess, their actions had seemed so right, so
righteous
. The UausuaU was evil, it must be destroyed, and any who stood in the way of that goal were justifiable collateral damage. But now, on the ground, in the human world, it was clear that the people caught in that fire had nothing to do with the UausuaU, and were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or had the bad luck to rent an apartment over the cathedral of an alien death God.

The teller’s gaze swung over to Saru, taking in the mud, the blood, and the nakedness, and he ran over and draped his coat over her shoulders. He sat her on a hard plastic bench, and gave her food and coffee, but the flames laughed their accusations from the screen, and Saru could keep nothing down. She showered in the hose and then looted the bare shelves for clothes—baggy trucker jeans, work boots with nylon socks, an XXXL shirt with a bikini-clad woman, and a knife that she tied around her waist with a length of rope. The teller watched Saru as she stole and Saru glared back, and the teller did nothing, returning his gaze to the screen with the burning city. Saru walked out and started down the road, a road, any road leading away from the fire and her guilt.

Faded billboards leered advertisements for obsolete products, their voices whispered and robotic. Antique signs tilted from the roadside, pointing to the ruins of Atlantic City, and the other mythical ghettos of New Jersey. Saru walked for seven years or days, or an hour, maybe, a red glow and the billow of black clouds at her back, the fires of the burning city forming a false dawn until the real sun peaked over the horizon. In the haze her road came clear, a threadbare, ill-treated double band of asphalt, with beards of grass poking from the cracks. A smell was in the air, a chemical tang, grating against the vessels in her nose and lungs. Was it the natural smell of New Jersey? Or the smell of a city and all its woman-made ores and oils burned to dust? Philly was close—close enough to smell?

There were trees on either side of the road, but she couldn’t call them nature—white, pale, scraggly things with limbs like snaking spears. Blood pines, she recalled from the feeds, and they earned their name, oozing blood-red sap, a sweet, stinking scent that fought with the chemical wash for first place in the wind. They had evolved or been engineered as traps for the elzi, who came to lick at the lyingly nutritious sap and found themselves impaled on the sharp white limbs, their thrashes sliding the limbs further into their flesh, catching more scraps on more limbs, so that their moisture and minerals dripped into the soil and fed the tree. Saru saw that bones hung from many of the limbs, bones white from age or still brown and black, and some with full flesh being ripped by flocks of crows that cawed and flapped and flew in masses like living shadows from pine to pine. Silver crowns hung from the branches, implants robbed of their hosts, flashing at scattered catches of light, beckoning like fairies.

Saru walked, and the blur of sun spun overhead and then down again, sinking, leaving only the false dawn of the inferno at her back, seemingly undiminished by the distance of her shuffling feet. Overhead flew planes, blues and whites drawing quick vapor trails across the sky. She jerked her head away, let it loll dumbly to the ground where there was only bitumen and rocks and tufts of weeds, and the scrape of her stolen boots. She shared this view until the darkness lifted and the slightly less dimness of dawn came again, more haze over more smoke and smog.

She tripped and fell flat, not even bringing her hands up to slow her fall. There was a moment of suspense, and then a prickly, concave agony, and then nothing.

Hands, grasping, shaking her, rattling the blood sponge in her head. Hands, grasping too hard, nails into her skin, pain dueling the pain in her head, brutal whip master of survival: wake, wake up, you bitch, you’ll not die on my watch! Eyes drawing in the light, the rays of the false dawn, night again, and a darker splotch filling her vision, the head of an enemy pinning her to the ground.

A screech (her own) and the familiar rage, hot, frothing, liquid joy thundering through her veins, and the coming-along strength. Saru thrust and flipped over her attacker, sending it sprawling, and then she whirl-dragged herself to her feet to squat in a fighting crouch. Her attacker squatted too, mimicking her stance, and they circled one another.

“Tampons! Half off!” her attacker screamed, and lunged forward. Saru took the force of the hit, dumbstruck by the battle cry, and almost fell onto her back. She wrestled against the attacker, who was grappling and squeezing her in a bear hug.

“Tampons! Half. Off,” the attacker gasped, and then her grip loosened and she wandered away and began to limp in circles. “Tampons. Half off? Pads too. Fifty percent. Only until Friday. Tampons. Half off.” She repeated the mantra, pitch and tone changing like an absent-minded professor pondering some far-flung theory. “Tampons. Fifty percent. Friday.”

Saru’s eyes drew in more light, adjusting to the dark, and she saw the implants jutting from the other woman’s face, what looked like parts ripped from a hair dryer hammered into her skull, the bizarre mess of electronics that marked an elzi. But the elzi spoke! And her eyes were open and seemed to see, at least the one eye not ruined with rot, and that one eye stared at Saru as the elzi paced and muttered about tampons.

“What?” Saru’s voice was a croak, the word choked out like a pill stuck in her throat, like passing a kidney stone through her lungs. It felt like she had never spoken before, and never wanted to go through it again. “What do you want?” she asked the elzi.

“Tampons!” The elzi screamed, charging Saru again, and grasping her arms. She looked up, one eye crazy, pleading, begging. “Tampons, half off?” A whisper, a desperate sound that said “Help! Help me! Help me please!” And then she let go and sprinted off the road, charging into the forest. The elzi slammed into a blood pine, branches bursting redly through her back. She shuddered, and twitched, and the twitching slowed, and she hung still.

Saru reached a wall, a massive white smoothness cutting right through the road and towering above the blood pines to her left and right. There was no gate or opening. She staggered forward and placed a hand on the wall; it was cool. Her reason pulled itself up and got to work: wall, wall, wall in the road, what did it mean? She looked up the wall and found herself staring right at the bright blur of a noon sun, and she closed her eyes and let herself slide down the wall until she was crumpled in a scrap of shade, a pile of sticks and bones. The road was private; it led nowhere anymore except to the wall, the boundaries of an estate, a latifundium like on the feeds, with pretty porcelain men and women in clothes that cost more than her life, and an army of interns to serve them. It was a senator’s estate, or a tech estate, or maybe the summer cottage of some Hathaway exec. With implants she could check the map, sneak into the Wekba and poach the files, discover who lived here and how to get through their giant privacy wall. But she had no feeds—all her implants had burned away in the light of the Blue God—and she was tired. She looked back down the road the way she had come, and knew it was impossible to go back, that she could sooner scale the wall than turn around.

Saru stood and her stomach growled. With one hand on the wall she steadied herself, and then, keeping her fingers tracing against the stone, she walked into the forest. The branches of the blood pines scraped at the wall and at her skin, and she found herself ducking and hacking with the knife, and sometimes just stumbling by, leaving rips in her shirt and jeans, and fresh cuts in her thighs and arms to sting and force herself into a semblance of alertness. The elzi dead were thicker here, some trees covered and dripping with dead so they looked like bloody ice-cream sundaes. The buzzing of flies and the cawing of crows was louder too, and also the grunts and mutterings and whimpers of the dying elzi.

“Amniospurt,” came a whisper in her ear, and Saru whirled to come face-to-face with a dying elzi, hung upside down, skin white and blood trickle-dried like paint on a clown. “It’s the only sports drink,” he whispered as though confessing a crime, “made with real amniotic fluid. Bacon fish tacos at Gibblies. Try our secret Mambo Sauce…” he trailed off into a gurgle and then died. Saru stared at his body, and then up at the tree, a tall, tall tree, with many hanging bodies, and a top just over the wall. She grabbed the dead elzi’s arm and tugged, and then yanked, and the crows fled in a great cawing and flapping, and the body hung firm. Inch by inch, grasping for dear life, she pulled herself up onto the body and to the beginning part of the limb that was thick and not as sharp. With her knife she hacked away all the little branches threatening her throat and wrists and eyes, and then dared to stand and feel about for the next sturdy hanging corpse. Bones knocked together to form hollow-wood claps, and the branches scraped one another to form a rain of clicks, and the implants, hung and rusty, clinked against one another in high, sweet, metallic tones, and that was the music of her ascent.

At the top, hands stinging and bloody, forced to grip and slip and grip again at naked branches, she leaned and looked over the wall, and saw nothing but shimmering gray, like electrified fog. It could have meant many things, but there was no doubt in her mind it was a cloud shear, and on the other side of the gray there were no bloody trees with bodies, cracked roads and dead grass, and gray-black haze, and air that every breath you knew was one suck closer to early death.

Saru’s hand flopped and grasped about for a means to lower herself over the wall, but there were none, which she had already known. She felt herself slipping, grip breaking again on the thin, sharp branches, feet tottering, and she let herself fall, slumping forward. Her stomach landed on the top of the wall, and forced out her breath with a
clack,
as her teeth cracked against one another. She swung her legs over and mounted the wall like a dragon she was trying to fuck, and there she lay and caught her breath, and maybe took a nap, folding her palms under her belly to staunch the flow of blood. Now inside the electric grayness she caught snatches of blue sky and green fields, like she was a ghost caught between worlds. When the blood on her hands had crusted into a crunchy glove, she began the process of lowering herself over the other side of the wall, to eventually hang by her fingers and then drop. For almost a second (one Mississipp—) she fell, cartwheeling, chest scraping against the wall, and then landed with a thud.

Saru lay for a while, trying to figure out if she was dead or not. The ground was soft and appeared to be carpeted, and then she realized it was grass—thick, green lushness tickling up at her and not unpleasant, like the grass in the Gaesporan forest. It was so different from the sidewalk and “park” grass of Philadelphia—no bits of broken glass, no condoms or needles or cigarette butts or miscellaneous dead animal, with no elzi grazing on them. It would be dangerous to lie so still so long in the grass she knew, unthinkable.

After a while she tried to move her head—staring at the grass was losing its charm—and found that she could at the price of unhurried pains traveling down her spinal cord. More welcome news. She turned her head to the side and saw color, color as far as she could see—hazy reds and blues and yellows in lines against the green, like a quilt. She realized the lines of color were flowers, more flowers than she had ever seen or could imagine would exist, and they hurt her eyes to look at. Turning more she saw blue above, unmarred except for the clouds, which were a pure, perfect white, like rich-people toilets or Hollywood teeth.

And the chirping and buzzing of birds and bees and all those weird animals, she remembered now what that sound was. And shouting, a human sound, that she knew all too well, she was herself a champion shouter. From her sideways, tilted-world angle she saw men running towards her, heavenly angel men in white shirts and pants that just looked so soft, and they were all taut-muscled and tanned. She imagined their tans had come from the sun itself, their skin drunk and blushed on natural light, and then she wondered if maybe she was dead after all.

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