[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  Slowly, black Jack opens the holey Buick door, feeling God it’s so horrible to be alive. He blows chunks on the meaningless asphalt. The two strange men in the Cadillac give off the scent of antilife evil, a taint buried deep in the bone marrow, like strontium 90 in mother’s milk. Bent down wiping his mouth and stealing an outlaw look at them, Jack flashes that these new guys have picked up their heavy death-aura from association with the very earth-frying, retina-blasting all-bomb that he and Neal are being ineluctably drawn to by cosmic forces that Jack can see, as a matter of fact, ziggy lines sketched out against the sky as clear as any peyote mandala.

  “Everyone hates me but Jesus,” says Neal, walking over to the Cadillac, spinning the empty Thompson around his callused thumb. “Everyone is Jesus but me.”

  “Hi,” says Lernmore, “I’m sorry we wrecked your car.”

  Leda rises up from the floor between von Neumann’s legs, a fact not lost on Neal.

  “We’re on our way to the bomb test,” croaks Jack, lurching over.

  “Ve helped invent the bomb,” says von Neumann. “Ve’re rich and important men. Of course ye vill pay reparations and additionally offer you a ride to the test, ezpecially since you didn’t kill us.”

  The Cadillac is obediently idling in park, its robot-brain having retracted the jacks and gone into standby mode after the oil-panscraping collision. Neal mimes a wide-mouthed blow job of the hot tip of the Thompson, flashes Leda an easy smile, slings the gun out into the desert, and then he and shuddery Jack clamber into the Cad’s front seat. Leda, with her trademark practicality, climbs into the front seat with them and gives them a bottle of champagne. She’s got the feeling these two brawny drifters can take her faster farther than science can.

  Von Neumann flicks the RESET cyberswitch in the rear seat control panel, and the Cad rockets forward, pressing them all back into the deep cushioned seats. Neal fiddles with the steering wheel, fishtailing the Cad this way and that, then observes, “Seems like this tough short’s got a mind of its own.”

  “Zis car’s brobably as smart as you are,” von Neumann can’t help observing. Neal lets it slide: 7:49.

  The Cad makes a hard squealing right turn onto the White Sands access road. There’s a checkpoint farther on; but the soldiers recognize von Neumann’s wheels and wave them right on through.

  Neal fires up a last reefer and begins beating out a rhythm on the dash with his hands, grooving to the pulse of the planet, his planet awaiting its savior. Smoke trickles out of his mouth; he shotguns Leda, breathing the smoke into her mouth, wearing the glazed eyes of a mundane gnostic messiah, hip to a revelation of the righteous road to salvation. Jack’s plugged in, too, sucking his last champagne, telepathy-rapping with Neal. It’s almost time, and Doctor Miracle and Little Richard are too confused to stop it.

  A tower rears on the horizon off to the left, and all at once the smart Cad veers off the empty two lane road and rams its way through a chain-link fence. Nerve-shattering scraping and lumbering thumps.

  “Blease step on za gas a bit,” says von Neumann, unsurprised. He programmed this shortcut in. “I still vant to go under za tower, but is only three minutes remaining. Za program is undercompensating for our unfortunate lost time.” It is indeed 7:57.

  Neal drapes himself over the wheel now, stone committed to this last holy folly. Feeling a wave of serene, yet exultant resignation, Jack says, “Go.” It’s almost all over now, he thinks, the endless roving and raging, brawling and fucking, the mad flights back and forth across and up and down the continent, the urge to get it all down on paper, every last feeling and vision in master-sketch detail, because we’re all gonna die one day, man, all of us—

  The Caddy, its sides raked of paint by the torn fence, hurtles on like God’s own thunderbolt messenger, over pebbles and weeds, across the desert and the sloping glass craters of past tests. The tower is ahead: 7:58.

  “Get ready, Uncle Sam,” whispers Neal. “We’re coming to cut your balls off. Hold the boys down, Jack.”

  Jack body-rolls over the seat back into the laps of Lernmore and von Neumann. Can’t have those mad scientists fiddle with the controls while Neal’s pulling his cool automotive move!

  Leda still thinks she’s on a joyride and cozies up to Neal’s biceps, and for a second it’s just the way it’s supposed to be, handsome hard-rapping Neal at the wheel of big old bomb with a luscious brunette squeezed up against him like gum.

  And now, before the guys in back can do much of anything, Neal’s clipped through the tower’s southern leg. As the tower starts to collapse, Neal, flying utterly on extrasensory instincts, slows just enough to pick up the bomb, which has been jarred prematurely off its release hook.

  No Fat Boy, this gadget represents the ultimate to date in miniaturization: it’s only about as big as a fifty-gallon oil drum, and about as weighty. It crunches down onto the Caddy’s roof, bulging bent metal in just far enough to brush the heads of the riders.

  And no, it doesn’t go off. Not yet: 7:59.

  Neal aims the mighty Cad at the squat concrete bunker half a mile off. This is an important test, the last step before the H-bomb, and all the key assholes are in there, every atomic brain in the free world, not to mention dignitaries and politicians aplenty, all come to witness this proof of American military superiority, all those shit-nasty fuckheads ready to kill the future.

  King Neal floors it and does a cowboy yodel, Jack is laughing and elbowing the scientists, Leda’s screaming luridly, Dickie is talking too fast to understand, and Johnny is-8:00.

  They impact the bunker at eighty mph, folding up accordian-style, but not feeling it, as the mushroom blooms, and the atoms of them and the assembled bigwigs commingle in the quantum instability of the reaction event. Time forks.

  Somewhere, somewhen, there now exists an Earth where there are no nuclear arsenals, where nations do not waste their substance on missiles and bombs, where no one wakes up thinking each morning might be the world’s last—an Earth where two high, gone wigged cats wailed and grooved and ate up the road and Holy Goofed the world off its course.

  For you and me.

  NO SPOT OF GROUND

  Walter Jon Williams

  The dead girl came as a shock to him. He had limped into the Starker house from the firelit military camp outside, from a cacophony of wagons rattling, men driving tent pegs, provost marshals setting up the perimeter, a battalion of Ewell’s Napoleon guns rolling past, their wheels lifting dust from the old farm road, dust that drifted over the camp, turning the firelight red and the scene into a pictured outpost of Hell….

  And here, to his surprise, was a dead girl in the parlor. She was perhaps sixteen, with dark hair, translucent skin, and cheeks with high spots of phthisis red. Her slim form was dressed in white. She lay in her coffin with candles at her head and feet, and her long-faced relatives sat in a semicircle of chairs under portraits of ancestors and Jefferson Davis.

  A gangly man, probably the dead girl’s father, rose awkwardly to welcome the surprised stranger, who had wandered into the parlor in hopes of asking for a glass of lemonade.

  The intruder straightened in surprise. He took off his soft white hat and held it over his heart. The little gold knots on the ends of the hat cord rattled on the brim like muffled mourning drums.

  “I am sorry to intrude on your grief,” he said.

  The father halted in what he was going to say, nodded, and dropped back into his chair. His wife, a heavy woman in dark silk, reached blindly toward him, and took his hand.

  The intruder stood for a long moment out of respect, his eyes fixed on the corpse, before he turned and put on his hat and limped out of the house. Once he had thought this sight the saddest of all; once he had written poems about it.

  What surprised him now was that it still happened, that people still died this way.

  He had forgotten, amid all this unnatural slaughter, that a natural death was possible.

  That morning he had brought his four brigad
es north into Richmond, marching from the Petersburg and Weldon depot south of the James break-step across the long bridge to the Virginia Central depot in the capital. Until two days ago he’d commanded only a single brigade in the defense of Petersburg; but poor George Pickett had suffered a collapse after days of nerve-wrenching warfare in his attempt to keep the city safe from Beast Butler’s Army of the James; and Pickett’s senior brigadier was, perforce, promoted to command of the whole division.

  The new commander was fifty-five years old, and even if he was only a division commander till Pickett came back, he was still the oldest in the army.

  At school he had been an athlete. Once he swam six miles down the James River, fighting against the tide the whole way, in order to outdo Byron’s swim across the Hellespont. Now he was too tired and ill to ride a horse except in an emergency, so he moved through the streets of Richmond in a two-wheel buggy driven by Sextus Pompeiius, his personal darky.

  He was dressed elegantly, a spotless gray uniform with the wreathed stars of a brigadier on his collar and bright gold braid on the arms, English riding boots, black doeskin gloves. His new white wide-brimmed hat, a replacement for the one shot off his head at Port Walthall Junction twenty days ago, was tilted back atop his high forehead. Even when he was young and couldn’t afford anything but old and mended clothes, he had always dressed well, with the taste and style of a gentleman. Sextus had trimmed his grizzled mustache that morning, back in camp along the Petersburg and Weldon, and snipped at the long gray curls that hung over the back of his collar. A fine white-socked thoroughbred gelding, the one he was too ill to ride, followed the buggy on a lead. When he had gone south in 1861 he had come with twelve hundred dollars in gold and silver, and with that and his army pay he had managed to keep himself in modest style for the last three years.

  As he rode past the neat brick houses he remembered when it was otherwise. Memories still burned in his mind: the sneers of Virginia planters’ sons when they learned of his background, of his parents in the theater and stepfather in commerce; his mounting debts when his stepfather Mr. Allan had twice sent him to college, first to the University of Virginia and then to West Point, and then not given him the means to remain; the moment Allan had permitted the household slaves to insult him to his face; and those countless times he wandered the Richmond streets in black despondent reverie, when he couldn’t help gazing with suspicion upon the young people he met, never knowing how many of them might be living insults to his stepmother, another of Mr. Allan’s plentiful get of bastards….

  The brigadier looked up as the buggy rattled over rusting iron tracks, and there it was: Ellis & Allan, General Merchants, the new warehouse of bright red brick lying along a Virginia Central siding, its loading dock choked with barrels of army pork. The war that had so devastated the Confederate nation had been kind only to two classes: carrion crows and merchants. The prosperous Ellis & Allan was run by his stepbrothers now, he presumed, possibly in partnership with an assortment of Mr. Allan’s bastards—in that family, who could say? The brute Allan, penny-pinching as a Jew with the morals of a nigger, might well have given part of the business to his illegitimate spawn, if for no other reason than to spite his foster son. Such was the behavior of the commercial classes that infected this city.

  Richmond, he thought violently. Why in the name of heaven are we defending the place? Let the Yanks have it, and let them serve it as Rome served Carthage, burned to the foundations and the scorched plain sown with salt. There are other parts of the South better worth dying for.

  Sextus Pompeiius pulled the mare to a halt, and the general limped out of the buggy and leaned on his stick. The Virginia Central yards were filled with trains, the cars shabby, the engines worn. Sad as they were, they would serve to get the division to where it was going, another fifteen miles up the line to the North Anna River, and save shoe leather while doing it.

  The detestable Walter Whitman, the general remembered suddenly, wrote of steam engines in his poems. Whitman surely had not been thinking of engines like these, worn and ancient, leaking steam and oil as they dragged from front to front the soldiers as worn and tattered as the engines. Not trains, but ghosts of trains, carrying a ghost division, itself raised more than once from the dead.

  The lead formation, the general’s old Virginia brigade, was marching up behind the buggy, their colors and band to the front. The bandsmen were playing “Bonnie Blue Flag.” The general winced—brass and percussion made his taut nerves shriek, and he could really tolerate only the soft song of stringed instruments. Pain crackled through his temples.

  Among the stands of brigade and regimental colors was another stand, or rather a perch, with a pair of black birds sitting quizzically atop: Hugin and Munin, named after the ravens of Wotan. The brigade called themselves the Ravens, a compliment to their commander.

  The general stood on the siding and watched the brigade as it came to a halt and broke ranks. A few smiling bandsmen helped the general load his horses and buggy on a flatcar, then jumped with their instruments aboard their assigned transport. The ravens were taken from their perch and put in cages in the back of the general’s carriage.

  A lance of pain drove through the general’s thigh as he swung himself aboard. He found himself a seat among the divisional staff. Sextus Pompeiius put the general’s bags in the rack over his head, then went rearward to sit in his proper place behind the car, in the open between the carriages.

  A steam whistle cried like a woman in pain. The tired old train began to move.

  Poe’s Division, formerly Pickett’s, began its journey north to fight the Yanks somewhere on the North Anna River. When, the general thought, would these young men see Richmond again?

  One of the ravens croaked as it had been taught: “Nevermore!” Men laughed. They thought it a good omen.

  General Poe stepped out of the mourning Starker house, the pale dead girl still touching his mind. When had he changed? he wondered. When had his heart stopped throbbing in sad, harmonic sympathy at the thought of dead young girls? When had he last wept?

  He knew when. He knew precisely when his heart had broken for the last time, when he had ceased at last to mourn Virginia Clemm, when the last ounce of poetry had poured from him like a river of dark veinous blood….

  When the Ravens had gone for that cemetery, the tombstones hidden in dust and smoke.

  When General Edgar A. Poe, CSA, had watched them go, that brilliant summer day, while the bands played “Bonnie Blue Flag” under the trees and the tombstones waited, marking the factories of a billion happy worms…

  Poe stood before the Starker house and watched the dark form of his fourth and last brigade, the new North Carolina outfit that had shown their mettle at Port Walthall Junction, now come rising up from the old farm road like an insubstantial battalion of mournful shades. Riding at the head came its commander, Thomas Clingman. Clingman saw Poe standing on Starker’s front porch, halted his column, rode toward the house, and saluted.

  “Where in hell do I put my men, General? One of your provost guards said up this way, but—”

  Poe shook his head. Annoyance snapped like lightning in his mind. No one had given him any orders at all. “You’re on the right of General Corse, out there.” Poe waved in the general direction of Hanover Junction, the little town whose lights shone clearly just a quarter mile to the east. “You should have gone straight up the Richmond and Fredericksburg tracks from the Junction, not the Virginia Central.”

  Clingman’s veinous face reddened. “They told me wrong, then. Ain’t anybody been over the ground, Edgar?”

  “No one from this division. Ewell pulled out soon’s he heard we were coming, but that was just after dark and when we came up, we had no idea what to do. There was just some staff creature with some written orders, and he galloped away before I could ask him what they meant.”

  No proper instruction, Poe thought. His division was part of Anderson’s corps, but he hadn’t heard from Anderson and
didn’t know where the command post was. If he was supposed to report to Lee, he didn’t know where Lee was either. He was entirely in the dark.

  Contempt and anger snarled in him. Poe had been ignored again. No one had thought to consult him; no one had remembered him; but if he failed, everyone would blame him. Just like the Seven Days’.

  Clingman snorted through his bushy mustache. “Confound it anyway.”

  Poe banged his stick into the ground in annoyance. “Turn your men around, Thomas. It’s only another half mile or so. Find an empty line of entrenchments and put your people in. We’ll sort everyone out come first light.”

  “Lord above, Edgar.”

  “Fitz Lee’s supposed to be on your right. Don’t let’s have any of your people shooting at him by mistake.”

  Clingman spat in annoyance, then saluted and started the process of getting his brigade turned around. Poe stared after him and bit back his own anger. Orders would come. Surely his division hadn’t been forgotten.

  “Massa Poe?”

  Poe gave a start. With all the noise of marching feet and shouted orders, he hadn’t heard Sextus Pompeiius creeping up toward him. He looked at his servant and grinned.

  “You gave me a scare, Sextus. Strike me if you ain’t invisible in the dark.”

  Sextus chuckled at his master’s wit. “I found that cider, Massa Poe.”

  Poe scowled. If his soft cider hadn’t got lost, he wouldn’t have had to interrupt the Starkers’ wake in search of lemonade. He began limping toward his headquarters tent, his cane sinking in the soft ground.