Notes from the Future: Iron Rachel III

Thousands howl back at me, enraged.

In the little silence that follows just before I crash through the windows of the ranch house comes a solitary, plaintive howl, far, far away.

I hear You, it says. I'm coming. You good stay! You good stay! I am Max, I come when you call! 

If there is a second howl, I do not hear it above my own. 

I land, rolling, and come up in a room littered with bodies that are struggling to their feet, each one with a snarl-faced beastling pushing its way out of whatever wound felled the person now huffing and grunting as they tear and eat pieces of their own flesh. I snap the leg from an overturned table and impale the two nearest hosts to the wall, then turn to see an approaching host whose beastling is nearly out of the hole in the back of her head. Its arms are wrapped around her skull, its claws digging into her forehead, snapping and snarling and pointing at me as she lurches in my direction with the slack grin of a teenager on shrooms. I lift her in the air and slam her onto the broken stump of the table leg I've just broken.

Snapping two more legs from the table, I impale two more lurching hosts and throw another two onto the jagged stumps. All of this has happened in about ten seconds, and the forces of Her Ladyship are coming in through the windows and doors behind me.

"Break furniture!" I shout, pointing, then bound through the back door and into the night, realizing that what I just said was very silly and laughing again, smelling -- tasting -- the fire come over the hill behind us to my left, hearing every sizzle (trapped rabbit struggling, too late, yum), every snap (this oak tree will brown but live, that eucalyptus is about to explode) and whoosh as a stand of dry brush goes up. 

I'm leaping along a low hillside behind the ranch house, the barn ahead and to my right; it's a very traditional barn, probably painted red with a white border, once. Now it's all faded wood, exactly the kind of place I'd have liked for our wedding. Only without crazed hosts stumbling toward Her Ladyship's forces as they approach en masse, Henrietta herself leading the charge. I am there in an instant, landing to her right and slamming two hosts into one another and so happy when Boggs impales them with a broken pitchfork, then spins them and uses the fork to impale a third to the wall right of the barn door. 

I am about to head off to my left, to the south, toward where I know he revels in devouring the helpless, when I see that several feet inside the barn, a group of hosts have knocked down a soldier and are tearing at his clothes. Not his flesh, right away, but his clothes. I am among them, knocking them aside as quickly as I can, but they seem to have gained some kind of strength. And something in here smells very strongly of ... sex. Wow. Following my nose, I grab the soldier from the floor -- his eyes glazed over, his jaw slack, he looks stoned -- and head around a pile of haybales.

There on the floor is the source of the smell. A Rachel of the Prophet, apparently free of wounds, on her hands and knees, being taken doggy-style by one of the beastlings. His claws are tearing at her hips and buttocks, but she looks and sounds like she loves it. The smell of sex is overpowering, the smell of something rotten that has been set on fire. It's not unpleasant, but it's ... very strong. Very ... wow ... I feel kind of good.

There's a thump to my left and the soldier is nude, his belt the last thing to hit the floor as, behind him, the hosts I didn't deal with have dragged another three soldiers to the floor and are tearing their clothes off. A fourth soldier is already nude, and I realize what is going to happen to them before I see a very attractive host girl take the first bite of the fourth soldier. As he begins to scream, I draw my pistol and shoot him through the head. No man wants to live with his cock bitten off. Then I shoot the rutting Rachel, turning and dragging the recently nude -- and impressively equipped -- soldier with me. Oak and Bay saplings have sprouted in the barn and their amber light is confusing the hosts and beastlings. Soaking up all the blood in the floor, the trees are growing very quickly, a small forest in seconds; the smell of Bay is cutting through the intoxicating sex perfume and the soldiers are fighting the hosts and beastlings. I throw one host against a support beam, impaling her on a hook where she hangs, weeping and begging to be killed. I leave her there and, still pulling the soldier with me, run out into the night.

The Oak that Iron Rachel mounted is glowing brightly an eighth of a mile to my left. The soldier is shaking, his erection beginning to droop, as he sees the thousands of beastlings overrunning our forces from the back. A rending of wood and the shattering of glass herald the first branches breaking through the roof of the ranch house as those trees are nourished by the blood of whatever has happened in there during the minute or less since I left. I turn the soldier and look into his eyes.

"Petherbridge!" I say, then can't help myself, taking another eyeful of his impressive junk. He tries to cover up with one hand, which isn't enough. I smile at him. "Get some clothes on," I say. "And stay out of barns that smell like sex!" He mumbles something and tries to salute, then slaps his hand back down over his man parts. Men are silly and oddly-shaped. But I have no time, I hear Henrietta calling me and I am off to my right, toward my goal, leaping over the saplings that have sprung up since we got out of the barn.

I reach her in seconds, about a half mile south. She is running toward a smaller structure, a dairy barn full of screams and crying and death. This is the place. I stumble. I fall. I am completely empty.

"I am going to have to cut you again, it's for your own good, lie still," Lady Henrietta is breathing in my hear and I feel a slice in my right palm and something metallic near the cut, then cloth pressed into the wound. The sound of a cap being screwed onto something metal and I am drifting ...

Tad and I were in the car. Driving up Mines Road, south of Livermore. 

"Look behind us on the next turn," he said. "You can see Trevarno City Hall and Diogenes Park." I turned and there they were, City Hall and the lovely park surrounding it. I'd never seen them before. Nobody I know except Tad has ever made it into -- and back out of -- the Township of Trevarno. 

Something flashed to the left and with a groaning roar I saw Mt. Diablo explode upward in lava and smoke.

"Oh my God," we said at once, and Tad pulled the car over in the slight turnout on our right, a steep drop of about a thousand feet to the dry canyon below. I took Max with me out the passenger side door and Tad opened the driver's door and got out and we both just stood there, silent, as the world we knew changed forever. I realized in that moment how right he was, and relief washed over me.

"I'm really glad we came this way," I said. "You were right. I'm sorry it took so long for us to get out of the house." 

"That's okay," he said, and his voice was tight with emotion the way it gets when he speaks at a funeral or a wedding. "We should keep going, though, because every canyon is a potential fault line and ..."

Something rumbled near us, a deep groan like a twenty-three wheeler grinding its gears on a steep uphill. Turning toward the source, we saw a fissure open in the wall of the canyon across from us, about two miles away. 

Into the car with Max and buckled up and driving up the steep, winding road again was accomplished in seconds. We were silent for a long, long time. No music, we had agreed, so that we could hear anything happening out there. In case. 

"No stopping again," I said. "Until we get there."

I glanced at him. He nodded, grim, and switched on the headlights ...

... something cold at my lips and a voice whispers to drink and I do, swallowing something that tastes like something I had earlier but also tastes like me, like copper, like I am awake and standing and stronger than before, stronger than Oak, strong as Iron but nothing like Iron Rachel.

And I am all of those things. Seconds have passed. The bulk of Henrietta's forces are grouped at our backs, in formation, ready. They step aside for the Oak and Bay saplings that are growing and glowing all around us. I understand that what I saw in those moments of unconsciousness is a glimpse of what wasn't, what isn't, what could have been and maybe should have been. I accept it, now, and wonder, regardless of how much better it would be to be with Tad and Max at the cabin with his family, if this was my fate all along. It feels so right to stand here in the burning night with a small army behind us and certain doom even now leaping at us from the back as fire or beastlings.

Henrietta herself has bled into the flask and taken a healthy swig from it. I watch as she gasps, shakes her head, and her body transforms: taller, more muscular, sprains and broken bones crackling lightly as they heal, ligaments and tendons growing strong, skin shedding old cells, her hair regrowing in a quiet whsshh, even on her legs and sex. She looks at me and I know, we know, that this moment has been a long time in the making. I can sense her age, her experience. Henrietta is very, very old, in spite of her apparent youth and vigor. I feel something turn inside me, deep in my core -- something twisted slightly seems to adjust itself and shift, like a bud ready to bloom. A sense of wholeness, rightness and time settles into me. All is as it should be. No other paths matter. My time is here and now, may all the Gods he prattles on about bless and protect Tad whenever and wherever he is.

This is my battle. Not his.

I think about saying as much to Henrietta, but then a child's voice cuts through the night, "Mama!" -- and we surge forward, a roar in our throats.