Inside Straight Read online

  “You are seeing the pattern here, I hope. Your power is formidable, but you would do well to stay away from the Righteous Djinn, unless you mean to armor him in ghost steel.”

  Klaus stared at her. “How could you know all this?”

  “I had my own encounter with the Righteous Djinn. After that…let us say I took an interest in him. Never go to battle blind, mein Ritter. It pays to do your homework.” She slipped her arms through his and laid her head against his chest. “Come away with me, Klaus. I know a lovely castle on the Rhine. A roaring fire, a canopy bed, and me. What more could you desire?”

  “Nothing,” said Klaus. “When this is done.”

  “Now. This moment. Kiss me, and I’ll take you there.”

  He wanted her as badly as he had ever wanted a woman. Yet, instead of taking her in his arms, Klaus stepped away from her and said, “Take me…how could you take me there?”

  The half-smile returned, teasing. “I have my ways.”

  Suddenly he understood. “You are an ace.”

  “I abhor that word. So crass, so common, so American. I prefer to call myself a woman of mystery, thank you very much.”

  The world shifted under his feet. Lili of the lamplight, he thought, our beautiful chance meeting, the night we spent making love and talking. All of it suddenly seemed unreal. He could feel it dissolving, melting away like his ghost steel after a battle. An ace, and here in Egypt. “What powers?”

  “That would be telling. A gentleman never asks a lady her age, her weight, or whether she can fly. There are some who call me the Queen of the Night. Do you know your Mozart, love? The Magic Flute? No, you are more of a Wagner man, I think. The Ride of the Valkyries, ja? Let me be your valkyrie. I can promise you a ride that you will never forget.”

  Klaus had wanted more than a ride. Klaus had wanted all of it, all of her. Now he was not sure. “When this is done—that will be the time for us. Not now. It is like our song, like Lili Marlene. He wants to be with her, the soldier, she is all he thinks about, but he must go to war, he must do his duty. His honor demands it. It is the same for me.”

  “You’re wrong. This is not your country. This is not your fight. Go home, Lohengrin. You won’t find your grail in Egypt. Only your grave.” Lili stepped away from him. “I see I am wasting my breath. It is written on that stubborn German face of yours. Auf Wiedersehen, Klaus. I wish you well, truly…though, if I were you, I would start sleeping in my ghost steel. The next time Bahir comes for you, he may be in earnest.”

  “Wait,” Klaus called out. “How can I reach you? Where do you live? Your name—is your name even Lili?”

  “Close enough, darling. Try Lilith.” And she slipped into the shadows and was gone.

  The noisy, crowded, festering camp that had sprung up around the Colossi of Memnon had blown away in less than three days. Only trash and night soil remained to show where thousands had lived, loved, and starved for weeks on end. Klaus would not have been surprised to see the colossi themselves rise from their ruined thrones and stride off toward the south.

  “‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’” said Jonathan, as the two of them paused for a last look. “Lord Byron, man. I think he wrote it about these two guys. Bad boy Byron. He was like the Drummer Boy of the romantic poets.”

  The Pharaoh had departed two days ago, carrying Taweret, most of the other gods, and almost all the priests. She was a large and luxurious boat, rated at five stars by the ministry of tourism, so the Living Gods had found room on her to take abroad five hundred of their followers. They would have taken Jonathan as well, but he did not turn up to board. “I overslept,” Hive kept insisting. “What, am I the first guy who ever missed a boat?” He blamed his cell phone. “Fucking alarm never went off. If I get killed, someone needs to sue Sprint.”

  Yesterday Sobek had departed, accompanied by Red Anubis, Min, Unut, Thoth, and several others. The crocodile god had managed to piece together a convoy of seventeen large vehicles: moving vans, semis, school buses, cattle trucks, flatbeds, dump-trucks, and the like. Somehow he’d struck a deal with General Yusuf and obtained petrol enough to get them down to Aswan, two hundred kilometers to the south. Then he crammed them full with children, as many as each vehicle could carry. In some cases he had to tear them from a mother’s arms, but most parents were eager to find their sons and daughters a place on one of Sobek’s trucks.

  Gamel and Tut were among the last to climb aboard. “We stay with Lohengrin,” Gamel insisted. “Watch motorbike. One euro.” Klaus slammed the gate shut on his protests, and slapped the truck to send it off. The smaller children were weeping when the convoy finally began to roll. Jonathan took pictures of their tear-streaked faces with his cell phone.

  The congestion was horrendous, both lanes thick with old cars, bikes, motor scooters, rusted vans and panel trucks, even taxicabs. Some drove along the shoulders, while others straddled the center line, advancing with fits and starts, bumping people out of the way. Abandoned vehicles sat rusting on both sides of the road, a few squarely in the middle. The ones that had not been abandoned quite yet were all honking angrily at the tangle of foot traffic, like a flock of huge steel geese. Klaus had become convinced that every car in Egypt had its horn wired to its brake pedal, so any stop or slowdown produced a blast of noise.

  They saw four women and a boy trying to pull a horse wagon of the sort his father used to carry tourists up the mountain. Jonathan took a picture with his cell phone. They saw a mother with three infants on her back, and a man with a wrinkled old woman slung across his shoulders. Jonathan snapped them both. They even saw a thin young girl pushing a wire grocery cart as tall as she was. Inside it was a squalling infant with a missing leg, on a bed of rags. “A poignant image of displacement,” said Jonathan, as he took the picture. Hundreds clutched backpacks, suitcases, and bundles, and all of them were shoving, stumbling into one another in their haste to get away. Some appeared to be near the point of collapse. Klaus had seldom felt so angry or so helpless as he did watching the human river flow past him. He wondered how many would live long enough to see Lake Nasser.

  “It’s time.” John Fortune was mounted on a l ong-necked Arabian mare, a lean red horse bred for the desert sands.

  Klaus mounted up beside him on an Arab mare as black as the Egyptian night, while Jonathan climbed gingerly onto an old dun-colored gelding. Hive had his legs today, but under his keffiyeh both his ears were missing, along with his pinkies, ring fingers, and two toes off each foot. Klaus had not inquired about his genitals, although it struck him that Jonathan had sent out more wasps than could be accounted for with just some toes and fingers.

  The horses were a parting gift from Sobek. “They will not run out of gasoline, at least,” the crocodile god had told them. John Fortune turned out to be a skilled rider. He’d gotten a pony for his seventh birthday, he told Klaus, and had taken riding lessons all through his teenage years. “Never rode without a helmet, though. Mom was afraid that if I fell it would trigger my wild card and turn me into a bowling ball with tentacles.”

  Or a fire-breathing lion. Klaus was good with horses too, though these spirited Arabians were more temperamental than his father’s huge German plow pullers.

  Sobek had seen to their clothing, too, providing them with Bedouin garb better suited to the red lands than denim cutoffs and American Hero T-shirts. “Hey, cool, Lawrence of Arabia,” Jonathan had enthused when the three of them donned their Arab clothing for the first time. In his blog he wrote that John Fortune made a good Omar Sharif and Lohengrin could pass for Peter O’Toole on steroids, but “Anthony Quinn I’m not, though I did like him in that Zorro the Greek flick.”

  The whole world was moving south, but the three of them rode north. Jonathan’s wasps had seen detachments from the Egyptian Third Army moving rapidly down the Nile. They had guns and tanks and planes, just as Sobek had foreseen. Wherever they encountered jokers they shot them out of hand. With them came the jackals of Ikhlas al-Din, flying the flag
of the caliphate.

  “We cannot hope to win this fight,” John Fortune told them, when they stopped for a drink of cool water late that afternoon. “There are too many of them, and only three of us. All we can hope to do is confuse them, delay them, and buy some time for our own people. We need to dart in, sting them, then turn and fly away to sting again somewhere else, like Jonathan’s wasps.”

  “Ja,” said Klaus. “Sting and run. I understand.”

  “Righto,” said Jonathan. “But you know, sometimes when you sting someone they swat at you. Just thought I’d mention that. Sometimes all the wasps don’t make it back.”

  John Fortune nodded thoughtfully. “Jonathan, it was brave of you to stay, but—”

  “I overslept,” said Bugsy. “That’s all it was. I missed the bloody boat, so what the hell. Missus Hive’s little bug is in. Fucker tried to cut my head off!” He scratched under his keffiyeh. “I’m thinking tanks. If I can find some way to get inside, twenty, thirty wasps could really mess up a crew. Sting their hands, their arms, their faces. Crawl inside their pants and sting their dicks. I’ll lose some bugs, but there’s more where they came from. You think if I fly down that big cannon on the turret, I’d pop out inside the motherfucker, or what?”

  “Try it. Let us know.” John smiled. “Too bad Rustbelt isn’t with us. He’s the guy you really want for tanks.”

  As the sun was sinking in the west, Jonathan reported that the advance units of the Third Army had left the river. “Where the road makes its big loop, they’re cutting straight across the desert. Armored cars, tanks, infantry. Apaches, too. Fuck it, I hate helicopers. The backwash blows my bugs to hell and gone.”

  The three of them undressed in silence, and stowed their Bedouin garb in their saddle rolls. Klaus stripped down to shorts, T-shirt, and sandals. John and Jonathan got naked. By then they could see the dust of the advancing column with their own eyes. “This is really stupid,” said Hive. “Did I mention that? Fucking cell phone.” Then he vanished, and in his place a venomous green cloud uncoiled in the air like some huge, smoky python. John was gone as well. The horses whickered in fear when the lioness appeared, but she did not linger long. Across the sands she ran, bounding toward the foe. The swarm followed.

  Klaus was the last. Against the red of the setting sun, the white of his ghost steel shone as pure as hope. On his left arm a shield appeared, in his right hand a gleaming sword. Before the light was gone, he meant to carve up half a dozen tanks.

  “Deus Volt,” Lohengrin cried, as he strode into the red lands, following the lioness and the wasps. He was no hollow hero. None of them were hollow heroes. And this night, if God willed it, they would teach the foe that the shortcut was a mistake.

  Jonathan Hive

  Real People, Really Dying Posted Today 11:42 pm

  GENOCIDE, EGYPT | FREAKED | “OCCASIONAL GUNFIRE”

  —THE EGYPTIAN ARMY

  Good news, faithful reader. I’m not dead yet.

  Okay, that was it. Good news now officially over.

  I’ve seen some of the comments in the last few posts suggesting I might not be the least racist person you know. Let me take a moment to make something clear. I think there’s a lot of really great Muslim folks out there. Lots of them. There’s a guy here with the head of a crocodile who was pretty devout for a long time. He’s a nice fella. Cat Stevens? Love him. Rumi? That guy’s poetry got me laid in college, and I shall be grateful forever.

  Okay, I suck. I don’t know any Muslims, okay? I didn’t know any Egyptians before I came here. But it’s not because I’ve got anything against them. Allah doesn’t seem any weirder to me than the version of Jesus that the Pentecostals are all fired up about. I don’t cross the street anytime I see a woman in a head scarf. I’ve never secretly toilet-papered a mosque. I’m a fucking liberal, okay? We love everyone but Newt Gingrich.

  There’s only one kind of Muslim I really fucking hate—the kind that’s trying to kill me. And if they converted on the battlefield, became Episcopalians? I’d still fucking hate ’em.

  The New Temple in Karnak fell a week ago. We put it off as long as we could, me and Fortune and Lohengrin. We even stopped the armored division for a while. We had some help at the end from a local ace who could summon up scorpions. Battle of the Bugs, we called it.

  She’s dead now.

  They came in force. I don’t know how many. Hundreds, thousands. The Living Gods who’d stayed behind to defend their homes and their temple were slaughtered. Lohengrin would probably have died there, too, given the chance. A lot of people went when they lit the New Temple itself on fire. His armor is pretty kick-ass, but I don’t see it stopping him from crisping up. The way they did.

  Horus. Nice guy. Wings, but can’t fly. In New York, he’d be just another schulb in Jokertown looking for work. In Egypt, he was a god. And now he’s dead. One of the last things I saw there before I pulled the last of my wasps in was his body being paraded around on a stick. Lohengrin still thinks we should have stayed. Fortune says it was better to move on. To live long enough to protect the people we still can.

  I’m not sure anymore who those are supposed to be. We’re on the road south to Aswan. The local folks are under the impression we might be safe there, but every day that hope looks more and more like a pipe dream. The attacks are coming daily now. Not full-on, we’retaking-you-out Götterdämmerung, but skirmishes. At a guess, we lost about a hundred people yesterday. We’ll lose that many more today. And the day after that. And the day after that.

  Think I’m making this up? Bug boy sounding a little histrionic? Well, I’ve still got my cell phone, and it’s still good for shooting video. It took all night to upload this—a 28.8 line from an abandoned trading post or convenience store or whatever that was—and now you can watch it here and here. Make your kids leave the room first. Seriously. Do it now.

  These are real people, folks. Children, dads, moms, husbands, wives. They’re the wrong shape, they think the wrong things, and they’re really dying. Some of them have guns. A few of them are aces. Lohengrin is doing what he can. Fortune and his new girlfriend Sekhmet are doing what they can. I help out. But we’re up against tanks and helicopters and guys who know how to use AK-47s. We’re fucking amateurs here.

  And here’s the other thing. Schistosomiasis. Ever heard of it? The Nile is so polluted, it’s become a breeding ground for something called bilharzia. I looked it up on-line. Liver flukes, or something. The upshot is, if you drink this water it will kill you, just not right away. Explain to an eight-year-old who’s burning from thirst that she can’t have a drink. The part where you tell her it’ll kill her really doesn’t have the same oomph you’d expect when she’s just watched her brothers get shot. Funny how that works.

  We’re low on food. We’re low on water. I can count the number of Westerners here trying to help out on one hand when I’m missing two fingers. And when you turn on your TV sets, are you seeing this? Are you thinking about it when you order your delivery pizza? Honest to God, people, are the things going on here really less important than the latest challenge on American Hero?

  Fuck.

  I gotta go. They’re coming.

  Back now. It’s about eight hours later. I forgot to hit the post button, so let me give you a little update. The army flew a helicopter over a bunch of refugees who were walking south at about three this afternoon, when I was writing that last part. The alleged human beings up in the copter dropped a couple dozen grenades on them and strafed the survivors when they ran. We lost twenty. Another ten will probably be dead by morning, and about that many are going to be too injured to travel. Which means leaving them here. Which is pretty much the same thing as dead.

  It’s still maybe a week before the first of us reach Aswan. Maybe another two days before the stragglers get in. Everyone’s looking to it like it’s the Promised Land or Oz or something. Me, I keep getting the feeling that the army’s herding us there. There was about twenty minutes when I was sure they were goi
ng to wait until we were all on Sehel Island and then blow the High Dam and kill us all. Fortune or maybe Sekhmet pointed out that blowing the Aswan High Dam would also kill everyone else in the country and wash Cairo into the sea, so I might be getting a little paranoid.

  Any way you cut it though, we’re in trouble here. I need to sleep. I’m afraid to sleep.

  If anyone out there knows someone in the Egyptian army or if you’re one of the folks in Ikhlas al-Din, listen for a minute, okay? This is the part where I beg.

  I know someone killed the Caliph, and I know that’s a very big, very bad thing. I know that someone attacked you, and you’re pissed. But please—please—stop this. Because I’m here on the road with the people you’re killing. I’ve talked to them. I’ve eaten with them. And here’s the thing. Killing the Caliph?

  They didn’t do it.

  2934 COMMENTS | POST COMMENT

  The Tin Man’s Lament

  Ian Tregillis

  …THEY DIDN’T DO IT.

  What’s worse than being hated for what people think you did?

  Wally Gunderson, aka Rustbelt, aka Toolbelt, aka You Stupid Tool, aka Hey You, aka Racist, sat in the darkness of his bedroom in the Discard Pile, scrolling through Bugsy’s blog. It chronicled cruel people doing senseless things to others. Harmless and undeserving others who hadn’t said or done anything wrong.

  The monitor cast a sickly hue across his cast-iron skin, tinting the midnight blue-black with green, like he was a nat mottled with half-healed bruises. It fit the ooky feelings that he’d carried in his gut since he got kicked off American Hero. Sadness. Confusion. Shame. Anger.

  The blog didn’t help matters any. As confusing as this Egypt thing was—Wally didn’t really understand the details—it was depressing, too. Innocent people were dying for no good reason; he got that much.