This story contains some violence and language, but it is minimal and towards the end. It is a follow up to "Violets in Bloom" though it might not seem like it.
I am the North Wind and all its Eccentricities
“I am the North Wind and all its eccentricities.”
A tarmac hell of inscribed potholes and fissures of the ungodly black substance battered the chaise of the jeep as it fumbled along, the men inside looking stoically forward at the hazy horizon-line. Rich sat shotgun, a rifle nestled on his lap and his hand thumbing the pillar, bobbing and grooving to the monotonic beats of the emergency broadcast system, static bursts providing an erratic and occasionally melodic off set to the baseline of nothing. Next to him was Holland, worriedly checking the GPS every few minutes, despite it having given out almost two hours ago. His wristwatch, a clockwork relic of the ante-bellum north and that much more reliable for its age, read a little after noon, and he checked it every few minutes, assuring himself of their relative earliness.
Rich turned a quarter over in his gloved fingers, gazing lazily at the brilliant luster of its surface, the photons of light reflecting off into the oblivion of empty space. He looked to Holland, placing the coin in his back pocket. “Do you know the general philosophy of Bronislava Mihailov?” Rich checked the gun’s bolt, the smooth motion a caress of the steel, moving out languid as if through custard, then a sharp thrust back into the wooden sheaf of the mechanical death, eliciting a dimwitted echo on the steep cliffs rising to their left.
“Huh? Who’s that?” Holland attempted to tune the radio, and quit when he received only more static, finally turning it off. “That’s the outpost?” He pointed to a speck of blue on the horizon, a speck hanging dead in the thick air.
Rich checked his nails. Holland put a hand to his brow and scanned the outpost, coming into a dissident focus, as uncaring about the two men as it was for the boiling sun. The bunker-tight material gave no glisten in the sun, the flag pole painted a slightly off-colored white had none of that lusty power of its silver contemporaries, more of a period than an exclamation mark, spelling out the simple word ours for the whole of the wastes. The site was formally designated by the Emergency Council as UHH 2, built on the ruins of one of the first towns obliterated when the Crisis began. Four residents of the town had still been alive when the Emergency Council did a sweep over. Holland shivered as he remembered the sight, a young man with his skin peeling off in the baking sun, reaching out for the helicopter as he wailed at them. “Help us you fuckers!” He screamed. One of the soldiers had initiated him into the red mist club, a plume of blood erupting from his head as the bullet hit, which certainly stopped his gnashing teeth, though not his flailing limbs. Holland had heard from EC workers on the second sweep that the young man’s body was still contorting on the baked earth. “About ten miles, and we’re” he checked his watch “right on time. So, what was that thing you were trying to tell?”
“It doesn’t matter just now.” Rich adjusted his breather. “Wouldn’t a smoke be great right now?” He grinned, although Holland couldn’t make that out, their masks obscuring one another, the obfuscation of the modern era, a shortage of information about your companions, but an abundance of facts.
Rich had gone to an impressive school back east, the kind where even the bedrooms are glutted with ivy and gilded expense, attended private schools as far back as the any record of him would show. Graduated in the upper middle of his class, he was undistinguished in the ways that garnered the top tier of jobs in the current administration, and had made his way out here in jumps and starts, small victories and a precipitous decline only given vague hints. But Holland had barely spent fifteen minutes in conversation with him before the trip, the smiling man with the up market breather, a sleek affair of white plastic, its breathing tube the spine of some hideous terror, the vertebrae of plastic moving like those of an expert contortionist as he shifted and leaned hither and fro, the mask little more than a mouth covering and goggles barely reached by the regulation 5 containment suits.
Holland took a sharp left, jerking them about, and steered them towards their descent.
The water hit them cold. They’d stripped down in the first containment area to boxers, then stepped into the rinsing area, Holland shivering slightly, his mind focused ahead to the liquid. The substance, known in the trade as IoxyPlutoral 281, was standard issue for every UHH outpost and several of the more at risk UHH areas, up to zone 318, noted most for the blue residue concentrated amounts left on the skin (a side affect that neither the government, Malonik, and even the Emergency Council would not admit to), which some of the townspeople claimed was poisonous.
Holland was a skeptic, having found most of these people to be relying on spurious of un-confirmable accounts likely dreamed up or heard as second hand gossip during the town swaps. Hardly credible. Yet, he always shied away from prolonged contact with the stuff. He tensed before the spray hit him, curling himself up, his back crumpling and shoulders sagging in, his head at a 90 degree angle to the floor. His lips were tightly closed eyes shut. Rich, meanwhile held himself open, his palms out and head back, spine arched, a nearly Masonic figure of the straight lace variety. When the substance hit him, he seemed to purr, expanding himself, as though to say, I am vast, I contain multitudes. Do you contradict yourself? He spread himself out, his roots firmly planted, branches spread out as the moisture soaked into him, engulfed him, drowned him in the loveliness of its condition and his state, until he became undistinguishable from it. And when the taps shut off, he breathed in a sigh of deepest exaltation. Holland grabbed a towel from the stack by the door, and handed one to Rich.
“My thanks.” He smiled, yet seemed loathed to dry himself. Holland shook his head at Rich, then went into the bunker.
Inside was the full Monty of post-event survival. Stainless steel counter tops below cabinets and shelves that contained the accoutrements of survival, bandages next to morphine, iodine tablets liberally littering the available real estate, canned food stacked to perfection, nestled in obscene necessity beside the survival guides covered in obsolescent dust. Below the counters were the containment suits and spare breathers, bottom of the bin variety with oxygen tanks that must have numbered in the hours instead of the days or even months, cheap plastic of the happy-meal type. On the far wall were an assortment of rifles and shotguns, first issued when there were residents who were “beyond any hope of recovery” out in the wastes. They were still in working order, Holland had checked the last time he’d been down, after he restocked the testing gear with its vaunted place in the back room.
Holland grabbed a first aid kit, removing the useless objects, antidotes to snake venom and the like, pre-event bric-a-brac of little relevance now. Rich, following in after Holland, was heading to the back. “You know what we need?” Rich flashed him a grin, “Of course. Just the reader, a few trackers, right?” Holland nodded, then turned to the shelves. From the cabinets with medical supplies he plundered, shoveling iodine pills and extra gauss into the first aid kit. Rich returned shortly, a black duffle bag on his shoulder, and flopped it on the table. Idly, Rich went to the gun rack. Deliberate in his motion, he examined each of them, a caustic mixture of ease and uneasiness whirling about his actions.
Holland threw the first aid kit in the duffle bag, hearing the melt clattering against the trackers. He hoisted it up and began heading out, looking back to see Rich focusing down the double barrel of a shotgun. On his face was a notched smile, a calm sea about to erupt into a carnal, tidal explosion of violent force, which sent a shiver down the back of Holland. “You coming?”
“Yeah.” Rich cocked the gun, his unnerving smile widening as the sound ricocheted through the bunker, dying out slowly in the reinforced concrete of the out walls. “I’ll be right there.”
The car idled as Holland lined the tracker up with the car tracks, roughly a line to the bunker, minus whatever minor swerving Holland had done to avoid the occasional debris in the field. In the suit, he felt like he was swimming, the sun ripping down through layers of atmosphere to beat him bloody with its cosmic brutality, sweat not so much beading but flowing down from his forehead. He raised the hammer brought it down, driving the tracker down into the earth, breaking the dry and brittle soil. The trackers were a last minute solution, after the event knocked out GPS signals in the UHH zones, and so this high-tech trail of bread crumbs had cooked up by the Emergency Council and the Japanese government, a short hand system to avoid getting lost in the wastes as they expanded and swallowed up the nation.
Holland raised the hammer again, bringing it down hard, feeling the tracker slide easier into the earth, then slammed it again and again. When it was biting down hard into the ground, Holland gave the sharp kick to the tracker, nodding as it lightly hummed, vibrating back and forth then subsiding into the stillness of a coma. He clambered back into the car, slamming the door shut and exalting in the cold refreshment of the air conditioning. He put the hammer in the center consol, then looked over at Rich, who lay almost supine in his seat, eyes half-closed. His fingers tapped the butt of the rifle.
He started the car, and Rich didn’t readjust his seat or even acknowledge the renewed motion of the car. Holland stared intently at the trip counter, waiting for the ten-mile mark to click by. Out here, even the static was beginning to peter out, not even a trace of signal left in this post-event state of malaise. A general wearing away of even the signs of life, the skeletal frames of houses and cars that littered the landscape of the outer rings in the wasted lands. Over the land, its shroud: the sky its in pallor, an ironclad abyss that held the land like a jealous lover.
As the minutes passed, uneasiness settled upon Holland, as the badlands rolled by, meeting his gaze with a perceptive madness that crept through the veneer of his sanity. Holland gripped the wheel, the sweat returning. Cold. The tiled floors, tasting of illness, the restraints as they dug into his flesh, Holland would scream until his throat was buggered, and then would mouth uselessly. Holland closed his eyes, counted to ten. He thought about the mantra. I am the earth. I am the fire. I am the wind. I am the north wind. He looked over to Rich. He still tapped, the tempo now increased. Holland licked his lips. “What were you saying? Earlier?”
“Oh. That.” Rich smiled. “Something from a philosophy class. Nineteenth century Russian philosphes and their particulars, or something. Bronislava Mihailov was a favorite is all.”
“What’s his deal?”
“It’s…odd. You see, it all revolves around this idea he had, which was that the persistent state of man was one of pain with a particular attention to the physical aspects of such suffering. Bronislava Mihailov thought the best way to expedite the misery of existence was to increase it exponentially, until the point when society would simply boil over and destroy itself. Ironically the theorem was developed years before the common Russian nihilist movement, and though Marx, more then Mihailov influenced many of those writers, they freely stole from his methods. The end point for Mihailov was not a worker’s paradise, but rather a point of implosion, where weak were tossed aside in favor of those strong enough to wreck the society they were to rule over. Of course,” he smiled. “There were good reasons for his views sinking into obscurity.”
“Yeah, I suppose there were.” Holland looked down as the trip reader ticked over to ten miles. He stopped and grabbed a tracker and the hammer. Only eight more, after this one. Only eight.
I am the earth. I am the fire. I am the wind. I am the north wind.
Say one thing for the event, the cataclysm, the decimator, say that it altered the world it had left behind, shaped it with the malformed hands of a monsoon cripple, brokered power and combined armaments that blasted the land. It twisted it from the familiar to the alien as it had done on this rock ridge, shooting up from the ground in a roar, a cave rising from the baked land, its stalagmites and stalactites becoming the rows of the orchestra, just as the odd rocky carapace was the crescendo. On the cobbled maps of the Internal Investigation Service, the formation was known as the lion’s head. Cracks above the gapped maw below resembled eyes, squinted at the sun above with undeclared suspicion. The earthbound structure was visible from almost forty miles away, one of the few raised plinths of exceptionality in the wastes. Holland always was excited by it, a speck of interest, in a desert of nothing. He’d make an extra stop after the fifth tracker to examine the beast. I am the earth.
Holland stopped the car short, Rich jerking forward. He laughed and slapped the butt of the gun. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Holland climbed out of the car. Slowly he picked his way to the mouth of the cavern, gazing into the velveteen blackness with a certain sense of awe. He called out inhumanely, hoping for a response in kind, forgetting Rich sitting in the car, but receiving only the callow echo from the lion’s bowels. Holland sat a particularly worn down stalagmite, wetness squelching on the plastic of the radiation suit. He closed his eyes, feeling even through the radiation suit a chill breeze wafting from the recesses of the cave. He breathed in. I am the wind. I am the north wind and-
“It’s real nice here.” Holland tore himself from the darkness, glancing round to find Rich looking outwards to the expanse of the wastes, his arms on his hips, and the gun strapped across his back. He breathed in, seeming to inhale the world and all its intoxicating poison. His breather sighed as it cleaned the air. “Real nice.”
“Yeah. It-“
“This was once a river. A lake. A sea, an ocean, a never ending cascade of azure brilliance stretching from one end of the earth to the other.” Rich turned to face Holland, shadows overtaking the lion’s share.
Holland put his hand over the clear plastic of his radiation suit. “Um…wha-“
“Bronislava Mihailov predicted that the water would engulf us, that the natural state of man might be suffering, but I don’t agree. It’s peace. The peace of the drowned. Silent and calm. At rest in the embrace of the ocean’s current-less depths. You see, Holland. I am the water.”
Rich took the gun from his back and began to load it. Holland raised his hands “What are you doing?”
“This land will be washed away, its salt expunged by blood. I will bring a flood upon these planes such as has never before been seen. I am the water, Holland. And what are you?” He raised the gun smiling now. “What. Are. You?”
He fired A small hole appeared in Holland’s forehead followed seconds later by explosive expansion from the back of his head, spraying his blood and brains across the stone of Lion’s head. And all Holland could think, even as the bullet ripped through his synapses was I am the North Wind and all its eccentricities.
Rich lowered the rifle slow, stepping forward to get a closer look at the carnage of his first expedition into the strange. “I am the water” he whispered. He dipped hid index and middle fingers into the man’s blood, licking it off as he gazed into the man’s face, wondering what he had been. He knew the purge must begin with him, had known since they’d been assigned to work together, and most likely, he told himself, had known before that even, on that level of his mind that was the water, that was the tempest and swells.
From the car he took the trackers that Holland was to erect and brought them to the Lion’s mouth. He stood in half shrouded darkness, a mania encircling his mind as the cool breeze whistled up from the depths. A violent shudder overtook him, and Rich writhed, his left hand knocking against a stalagmite. He looked down at the back of his hand, a torrent rushing through and upwards from the craggy etched markings of this chasm. Rich reversed his hand, watched as the blood began forming droplets on from his skin, before falling with a terrific temerity onto the perched earth. He grinned and raised the trackers and dashed them into the black spaces. The trackers clattered on the stone, as faint as whispers in a cinema, just before the film commences. Rich smiled to himself, and turned away from the chasm, hand still watering the ground.
The car purred, Rich looked back at the rocks, and cackled. “I am the water, the great purifier of these damned lands.” He drove off directionless, unsure of where he was going and certain there was no way back. In the distance, the wind howled a cry known to a thousand orphaned wolves and injured beasts. And to the cacophony of loss, Rich added his own subtle lilting.
The wind was emotionless, the howling and whispers just its movement and the imaginative flourish of men. It was no more moved by the man’s death as it had been by the hundreds and thousands of others it had seen on this spot-or was it some other? For to the wind all places are one place, a construct of unknowable depths and laughable heights, broken by neither ocean or river. It was all places, all times, never quite dying, but rather receding, or simply skipping out of town for an hour or a day. It had no shape, no conscious, no thought even, yet, as it blew through the brittle hair of the dead man, through the hole in the back of his head. And suddenly the wind changed, and grew, and became something other than itself, as thoughts began fly through the air.
In the plains he ran through grass, immaterial and all too corporeal, fingers trailing in the sickly golden sheen. For a brief moment it almost looked edible, the contamination not readily apparent as he knew it would be on closer inspection. And so, he did not inspect but only ran, forever onward, to that unreachable place where the tall grass gave way to nothingness. Full-tilt, he galloped and whooped, a heaviness he’d never noticed till it had lifted. He gazed down upon the waste, and saw-
A rabbit with six feet hobbling. Wind swept nothingness. Mountains. Poised lakes. A medley of images and stew of sounds that made him gnash his teeth and cry only to discover his voice was a low howl of anguish, cast across untold miles. He was over wire lines in North Dakota, turning tremulously into canyons, flicking the hair of a woman lunching outside, beyond the contamination zone, her skin beautifully lively and breath soft and unnoticeable. He was everywhere and nowhere, and all the time unaware of his body crumpled in the mouth of the lion, too busy trying to escape the new state of his existence.
But there was no point in running, for he was everywhere and all things, and soon he stopped and stayed perfectly still, but was in perfect motion. He had no form, no hands or mouth, no feet. Gradually, over the rocky mountains, and rocking a swing of some empty yard, he realized what had occurred. Stretching himself out, over the land, and the rivers, over the plains and the peaks, he spoke with that new voice.
“I am the North Wind, and all its eccentricities.”
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