real, Mr. Mackerel George, or you’re goin’ skinny-dippin’ with sharks.”
As if a dam of tension had burst, Okie’s threat brought forth braying laughter, whistles, hoots and applause.
The Padre islanders had good cause to be on edge. According to stories that had recently filtered up the Gulf shore, seafaring invaders were ransacking the villes to the south. Known as the Matachìn, they were animalistic butchers and murderers, pirate scum. If the tales were accurate, they had already raided the remnants of the biggest coastal cities of eastern Mexico, towns that had fared much better postnukeday than those in the American Southwest. According to rumor, Veracruz, Tampico and Cancun still existed, albeit much diminished in size and population. The Fire Talker claimed to have come from that direction, and to have eye-witnessed the recent pillaging; that’s the only reason they had ferried him across the water, that’s why they had fed and liquored him up at their own expense.
Okie and the others weren’t concerned about raiders from the north. The flooded, nuked-out wasteland that was the Texas shore served as a barrier to the East Coast barons’ desire for expansion. And the barons had enough trouble, anyway, defending the territory they already controlled. Armies sent off to new conquests left homelands unprotected. There were no navies worthy of the name, just a handful of intrepid traders working out of small, wind-powered boats.
The Fire Talker flashed Okie a big, pearly toothed grin and said, “The Matachìn attacked Browns ville and Matamoros ville nine days ago.”
This news was met with gasps and groans.
Browns ville was just 160 miles to the south.
“They came in a fleet of tugboats, half a dozen at least,” the storyteller went on. “Motored top speed right up the mouth of the Grandee.”
“They were under engine power?” Okie said in disbelief.
An assault like that called for diesel in the tens of thousands of gallons. An unheard-of, even mythic quantity of fuel.
“Engine and Viking power,” the Fire Talker replied. “Stacks pumping out dark brown smoke in broad daylight, horns wailing, firing cannons mounted fore and aft. Their allies, the Vikings, manipulated the virtual time continuum along the meridian lines, the power grids of Earth’s magnetic core, and turned the sky black and the sea red. Just imagine the ville folks’ fear. Imagine their horror when the darkness and death fell upon them.
“The Matachìn shelled the perimeter defenses with high explosive. Browns ville folk only had small arms and a few homie bombs. They couldn’t make a dent in the attackers, couldn’t turn them back. After cannon shells breached the berm, the pirates started lobbing explosives into the ville proper. Fires started up and spread, flames leaping high into that awful black sky. The smart folks ran north, left behind everything they had. They got out before the Matachìn landing parties hit the beach. The pirates wore special suits and helmets manufactured on Mars and given to them by the Vikings. Even bullets fired at close range can’t penetrate the overlapping plates of armor. When the gates of the ville came down, then came the slaughterfest and the sacking.”
Okie looked around the ring and saw doubting, distrustful, angry faces. He and his fellow Nuevo-Texicans were a hard-bitten, realist crew. Habitually cautious. Naturally suspicious. Even though they lived in a garbage dump, they could tell when something didn’t smell right. Only the handful of droolies among them wore eager grins; the droolies were eating it up.
“So you’re saying the Vikings are trying to take over Deathlands because of this time dohickey?” one of the men asked archly.
“No, they are servants of the Martian hordes,” the storyteller said. “Vikings are just ancient barbarians who were allowed access to deep space technology, or DST, as I already explained. Do you want me to explain it again, in more detail?”
The offer was met by a booming negative chorus.
Okie joined in the boos. As a Fire Talker, Mackerel George was a flop. If he had any pertinent information, it was buried under tons of indecipherable bullshit. His story had no characters. No great battles. No romance. No titillating sex. It was just dry, boring history. So-and-so did this, then so-and-so did that. One loony idea spiraling off into the next, heading in five directions at once, and complicated by big-word double-talk and constant self-corrections. Okie had seen the handwriting on the wall the first time he mentioned the “celery people.”
A smiling, oblivious Mackerel George was going over that furrowed ground again, despite the audience’s complaints, connecting the existence of a race of walking vegetables to the machinations of superintelligent beings on another planet. As he spoke, skeeters landed on him and fed at will, raising overlapping circular weals on his face, arms and legs.
The islanders had had enough. Adults and children started pushing up from their plastic lawn chairs.
Only a handful sat listening with rapt attention, Okie noted. They weren’t called droolies for nothing. Long, swaying strands of their saliva reflected in dancing firelight. They didn’t bother to wipe it off their chins. Some of them habitually crapped their pants, as well, too stupid and slow to lower their drawers in time.
That sorry respite was all that stood between the Fire Talker and a fatal swim.
The non-droolie audience, Okie included, slipped away from the fire ring, heading for the claustrophobic comfort of their respective hovels, grumbling out loud about the waste of time and the pointless expenditure.
DANIEL DESIPIO PRESSED a palm against the gritty roof of an overturned cargo container, bracing himself, his homemade BDU shorts down around his duct-taped boot tops. The can of predark pork and beans the islanders had rewarded him with had tasted like sweetened red chalk, washed down with a half cup of harsh joy juice he was still belching, and now the pièce de résistance, an oral servicing by a toothless hag of a gaudy slut. Looking down at her bobbing gray-haired head, Daniel decided it wasn’t dark enough out, not by half. He tightly closed his eyes and tried to imagine a hot young MTV star of his own era, but the calluses on her tongue and the insides of her cheeks kept intruding on and deconstructing his fantasy.
In the midst of this joyless congress, he caught himself replaying the evening’s events. A familiar unfolding: helplessly watching an audience lose interest in his narrative, fielding their angry questions and challenges, watching them melt into the darkness. It was his former life all over again.
Almost.
The Big Wheel of Karma had turned, but not in the way he or Creedence Clearwater Revival had anticipated. This time, there was payback. Unimaginable payback.
Daniel didn’t swat the bugs that landed ever so lightly on his face and arms. The welts raised by their bites camouflaged the tiny red whorls that dotted the surface of his skin—freezer burn from a century spent in the narrow confines of a cryotank. He let the skeeters have a good, deep taste of his tainted blood, then gently fanned them away. He didn’t want the bugs to get too full. After wetting their stabbers on him, they attacked the kneeling slut. His disgruntled audience had gone back to their shacks and lean-tos with clouds of similarly infected mosquitos hovering over their heads and shoulders.
Daniel had no feelings of remorse, no pangs of conscience over what he had done to them. In fact, he gloried in it. The Big Wheel had remade him; it had given him a destiny worthy of his talent for the epic and the tragic. He was Satan’s Sword, cleaving the multitudes. A transformation that gave new meaning to the twentieth–century catch phrase, “knocked ’em dead.”
After
