Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (29 page)

“Is this why you retired?”

“It’s part of it, yes. I was tired of the uphill battle
against the politicians, the people holding the purse strings. I
forced myself to become more commercial, so that I could amass enough
money to ride things out when those same people eventually destroyed
us. I fancied I would become a new Johnny Appleseed of learning,
walking the land after the collapse, restoring peace and reason.”
Her laugh was brittle, a breath of madness in the undercurrent.

I watched the churning sea. My bladder threatened to empty when I
realized the same creature was still passing us by, after all this
time. It would have to be miles long.

“I grew old and feeble, waiting for what I thought was
inevitable. It seems I don’t get to play post-apocalyptic
savior after all,” Gran said, leaning against my back,
supporting herself on my rigid frame.

I finally tore my eyes away from the sight outside.

“What was the other part?” I said, dreading her answer.

Gran sighed. “I was an astronomer, one of the oldest sciences
there is. There are certain texts, old things, that we generally
consider it best that no-one else see. Mostly, they’re just
curiosities from all over. A fragment from a Mayan temple, parchments
found in Iraqi ruins, things like that. Old, old star-charts that
show a sky different from ours. We used to think it was the
equivalent of prehistoric science fiction. Until I started finding
correlations.

“I thought I was slipping, so I started the process to retire.
The last thing I wanted was to be remembered as a once-great
scientist reduced to appearing at crackpot conventions. A graduate
student of mine found my observations and replicated them. He sent
them to several of my colleagues, and they found the same things.”

I felt a cold weight settle in my chest. Beyond the thick glass, the
snow started to fall in earnest.

“The stars were
moving
. I mean,
quickly
.
Light-years in a day, that sort of thing.
Shifting
. It meant a
fundamental change in the constants of space-time; space itself would
have to warp and buckle to make the shifts we were seeing.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No, what’s crazy is that we
know
so
little
!
We can’t even leave our little playground here, to see what’s
happening in the here and now. We’re dealing with fossilized
light. Any warnings we might get would come far, far too late. That’s
exactly what happened! If we’d somehow known things were
changing on such a fundamental level maybe we could have … ”

She sighed and her fingers left my shoulders as she stepped around to
my side, to press her nose to the frigid black glass.

“I’m sorry, no, nothing could have been done. We waited
too long, stayed in our basket until it was far too late. We waited
until the stars were
right
, again, until they could return.”

“I don’t understand,” I said feebly. Beyond, in the
black sea, there was no sign of the impossible thing I’d seen
earlier.

“Neither do I; not really. We didn’t produce another
Einstein in time; maybe he could have explained this, eventually. The
nature of time and space have changed, or are changing. I think
things that simply couldn’t happen before, now can. Maybe the
speed of light is going up, or down. We can’t know. Anyone who
could have told us is probably dead by now.”

“Your friends and colleagues, they knew about this, too?”

“Some of them. Most didn’t want to believe it and found
ways to ignore it. Some killed themselves, others just changed their
focus. I thought I could run to my poor man’s bunker and wait
it out. I want to think that some of them are in their mountaintop
and desert labs, watching everything play out, witnessing it for the
rest of us.”

She was silent for a long time.

“I told you it wasn’t a dust cloud, didn’t I?”

My stomach knotted. “You did.”

“The news never got out. The panic started and everything just
went to Hell all at once. Not that the truth was any comfort, at
all.”

“What is it?”

She was silent for so long I didn’t think she heard me. Beyond
the glass, the snow had stopped for a time and I could barely make
out the trees to either side of us swaying gently in the wind.

“The old manuscripts referred to a time before and to come,
when the stars were
right
. No more sense than that, really.
They didn’t have the words to even approximate what really
happened. They didn’t understand quantum foam or underlying
layers of reality or colliding branes or how spatial density can
fluctuate. They just knew something changed, and that it brought
terror and death.

I think … I think we’ve drifted into a region of space
that has a lower spatial density. It’s … thin, here.
Time and light flow faster. So, it’s used by higher order
beings like a highway.”

“Aliens, then?”

“Not little gray men, no,” she sighed. “No flying
saucers lit up like Christmas trees. No, I’m sorry;
highway
has too many modern connotations. It’s more like … a
migratory route.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

Gran smiled and turned away from the glass, her smile wistful.
“Things that can move in space. Live there, wandering from star
to star. Did I ever tell you about the passenger pigeons?”

Most other people would have blinked at what they would have assumed
was a
non sequitur.
It made me weak in the knees, and I
staggered back to fall into a chair. She had told me about the
passenger pigeons, something her great-grandmother had written about.
Birds, now extinct, that were so numerous their flocks darkened the
sky. Blotted out the sun.

“We saw them coming months ago and carefully kept the major
telescopes turned away from that section of the sky. No need to
stretch out the panic longer than needed, we thought. Trillions of
them, trillions of trillions, more numerous than any amount of dust.
We’d found life, at last, but it wasn’t life that was
going to cure cancer or lift us up to the stars. We were the mouse
caught by a tide of army ants. I think they move from sun to sun,
just like elephants move from waterhole to waterhole.”

I listened to her, my head in my hands, but when I looked up
something was different.

I could see the ocean clearly, the soft swells blossoming with dim
color—grays and greens.

There was light.

Soft, pearly, like it was filtered through silk. Dim, yes, but still
light.

Light.

I fell from the chair and crawled to the window. I pounded my head
against the thick tempered glass, sobbing hysterically. “They’ve
left, oh Gran, they’ve left,” I sobbed. “We might …
we might … ”

Gran grasped my shaking shoulder and sank down beside me, held me
like Mama used to.

“Oh, sweetie, they haven’t gone anywhere. They’ve
just finally noticed us, is all. I’m guessing they need to feed
on more than hard radiation at some point.”

She tilted my head up, to see the titanic things now briefly visible;
some were still streaming water from their dip in the sea where
they’d been grazing on volatile matter. Hundreds of times
bigger than any blue whale, and cigar-shaped, they did not merely
float or fly—they
defied
gravity, serenely uncaring.
Ragged manipulators twined and writhed at their lower end.
Delicate-looking membranes waved at their sides, meant to propel them
from star to star. Sunlight all too briefly blazed on their
multicolored ripples before the press of the herd headed for our
blue and green pastures and once again blotted out the light, this time
forever.

I blinked back tears. “They do look like angels,” I said
softly.

“My little brothers, your moment has come.”

Andreas gave a start at Herr Volkard’s whispered words,
apprehension worming its way through his gut.

The veteran soldier crouched amongst the half-dozen attentive youths
who surrounded him, the perfection of his tall, muscular frame
emphasized by his black uniform and heavy leather greatcoat. The
Scharführer’s battle-scarred face turned briefly toward
Andreas, his calm, knowing gaze causing feelings of equal amounts
admiration and intimidation in the teenager.

“My men have a suitable target: an officer, wandering behind
the lines in perceived safety.” The Scharführer smiled,
pale blue eyes flashing like sunlight off winter ice. “Your
mission is simple: Kill him and bring me his possessions—”

A soft whistle cut Volkard off. The sentry, hidden behind the chimney
of the abandoned bookstore across the street, stepped into view. He
held up a single finger before pointing downward.

“Go, prove yourselves in the name of the Führer!”
said Volkard.

Lukas, his freckled face lit by a fierce grin, punched Andreas in the
shoulder. Andreas smiled back queasily.

He moved to look over the edge of the shattered roof, eyes scanning
the ruins of the street below, trying to pierce the perpetual gray
haze, which coated the outer suburbs of Berlin since the arrival of
the Red Army. It felt like a lifetime since he had seen blue sky,
coated as it was in a thick pall of artillery smoke and billowing
clouds of smog from burning buildings.

The flickering shadows cast by the smoke-shrouded moon made it
impossible for Andreas to make out much detail, but he could see a
figure loping steadily along the detritus-strewn street.

The target was thrown into stark relief as he walked past the fire
flickering in the doorway of the old bakery, the windows boarded up,
massive ovens long since appropriated by the army. Andreas
realized the figure was huge, as large a man as he had ever seen. The
light cast by the flames showed glimpses of the uniform of a Soviet
officer, shrouded beneath a hooded cloak, face hidden behind a
gasmask.

Andreas stalked along the rooftops with the other five youths of his
squad. Lukas had moved ahead, superior stealth-craft making him the
perfect vanguard. Lanky Oswald was next, skin covered in crude
camouflage paint, flanked closely by squat, square-faced Dolf. Their
old shotguns were grasped in white-knuckled grips, hard against their
chests. Andreas was perversely pleased to see that he was not the
only nervous one.

Fabian and Gregor moved on either side of Andreas, the former almost
eighteen, tall and raw-boned. He walked with a pronounced limp, the
result of a fall at the munitions factory where he had worked since
the start of the war, and the sole reason he had not already been
conscripted into the Wehrmacht.

They formed a staggered line with Andreas, as their instructors in
the Hitler Youth had trained them. Each scanned a different direction
as they moved. Andreas held his rifle—a battered K98 looted
from one of their own dead—in a loose, one-handed grip away
from the body, his other hand needed to pick his way over the
artillery-shattered rooftops.

With an unexpected suddenness, the target turned into a wide laneway,
pace quickening. Andreas froze as Lukas signaled for a halt, fist
clenched. Their victim hurried toward a factory at the end of a
rundown avenue, abandoned well before the rise of the Third
Reich. Perhaps he was not here to inflict greater misery upon
the citizens of Berlin. Perhaps, instead, he was here to meet with a
traitor? It would make sense, and would explain why Herr Volkard
wanted the Russian’s possessions.

Andreas stared at the brown-brick building. It brooded at the end of
the street, crouched amongst the surrounding buildings like a spider.
It remained untouched by the Soviet shelling, and yet was still as
dark and decrepit as any war-time ruin.

It was quiet and difficult to approach from the street without being
detected; perfect for a clandestine meeting.

It was also perfect for murder.

Lukas came to a halt and turned back to the rest of the squad, a
thumbs-up accompanying his familiar grin as their target effectively
isolated himself from any chance of rescue.

Andreas’ return smile was more of a grimace. Nothing was ever
this easy.

The squad dropped as silently as possible to street level, running
across and moving into the alley behind the old barber shop, which
had belonged to Gregor’s father.

Andreas allowed the other boy a moment to stare wistfully at the
ruins of his inheritance before gently dragging him away. Gregor
shook off his melancholy and pushed the ladder into place, allowing
Lukas to lead the way to the rooftops.

They hurried silently to the factory wall, leaping the small gaps
between the tightly packed houses. Andreas watched as Lukas
forced one of the second-story windows, the glass making an almost
imperceptible squeal. With great care, the red-headed teenager
slipped through the narrow opening and onto a mesh catwalk, making
not a sound.

Where?
Oswald signaled once they were all clustered together
inside.

Andreas’ eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness inside the
factory that it was no longer a pitch-black void. Instead, it was
filled with the deeper shadows of chemical vats and assembly lines,
punctuated by hulking presses and other cluttered machinery.

The victim was nowhere to be seen.

Spread, pairs,
Lukas signed, completely serious now that they
neared their target.

Andreas partnered up with Dolf and moved carefully along the ancient,
rail-less catwalk toward the eastern wall of the building, trying not
to think about what it would mean to fall.

The old vats clustered on that side of the factory would make a
perfect ambush point if the target realized he was being followed,
and Andreas was in no mood to take risks. He watched as Oswald and
Fabian headed toward the offices along the north wall. Lukas and
Gregor slid down the nearest ladder, moving to investigate the
scattered hiding places on the floor.