Mudhead

Chapter 19 of Microcosmia

Microcosmia

Chapter Nineteen

Mudhead

Vane tentatively opened an eye.

The first thing he saw was Mudhead’s expectedly glum, yet strangely distorted countenance--the whole face was extended like a muzzle and covered by a heavy red veil. Vane rolled the eye carefully. Someone, without a trace of taste or consideration, had up-and painted every gill in his Domo a dull crimson. It took Vane a whole minute to realize the air itself was red.

Mudhead’s muzzle continued to project, the black lips rolling round and round. “How Bossman feel?” The voice was miles away.

Vane weighed his impressions. Oddest of all, his thoughts seemed to be swimming in his mouth. It wasn’t all that unpleasant. Someone behind him replied, “Weird. How should I feel?”

Mudhead nodded. “Weird.” Leaning forward in his chair, he showed Vane a small vial and syringe. “Present from past.”

Vane nodded back, but his head didn’t move. “What happened to me, man?”

“Bossman hero.” Mudhead touched a finger to his own right ear. “Take bullet. Dead for sure.” He heaved a sigh, placed his hands on his thighs and pushed himself back. The face flattened to normal. “Sorry all out purple heart.”

The red room blushed deeper as Vane tentatively directed a hand to his ear. His head was completely bound up in gauze. “A bullet got my ear?”

“Direct hit.”

“How…how bad?”

“Whole ear gone.” Mudhead tilted his head. “Now you lopside.”

“What? You’re lying! Show me!” He started to sit up, and was immediately knocked down by a stomping nausea. An odd pain--dull with a sharp core--projected into his brain like a tentacle, fragmented, and passed.

Mudhead groaned and pushed himself out of view, reappearing a minute later with a shaving mirror. Vane gaped at his reflection. His head was a huge mass of cloth scraps wound up in half a mile of gauze. An area the size of a saucer was brown with dried blood. His eyes were puffy crimson caves, his face a pale, haggard mask. He tried different angles and various expressions. Slowly a smile cut the reflection in two.

“Bossman lucky. Can grow pretty blond lock.”

“What? Where’s my turban?”

Mudhead shook his head sadly, and Vane went paler still. He was just sitting up in protest when the room punched him in the face. Vane’s fingers dug into the sheets. “What…” he sobbed, “man…what happened after I got hit? I seem to remember us…kicking a*s…royally.”

Mudhead now recounted the events succeeding Vane’s triumphant exit from consciousness. He was patient; enunciating as best he could, repeating sentences carefully whenever his logy one-man audience lost contact.

To all appearances, the rout of field commander Sai-erin’s regiments had been astonishingly thorough. The Afar not only embarrassed and butchered their attackers, they dispossessed them of their weapons and transportation. Having chased the survivors deep into the desert, the chanting victors tramped back to commandeer jeeps and transports, picking up fallen comrades and every usable weapon they could find. The Eritrean dead--and there were so very many--were left for the Danakil to do with as it would.

Four hundred and thirteen Afar had died, most picked off in that initial blind rush across the open space separating Outer Slopes and the first ring of waiting soldiers. Some were but children.

It was difficult to estimate the number of dead Eritreans. From the top of any Bulwark they, along with the ugly kites of swirling vultures, were all one could see. Vane’s heroes drove every navigable vehicle around to Onramp. Those disabled vehicles worthy of salvage to any returning army were doused with their own petrol and set aflame. A dozen empty transports were then driven to the dynamited space and rolled in, one on top of the other. The indefatigable Afar, revisiting the constructive zeal they’d applied in the building of Mamuset, packed the space with boulders and loose earth until a perfectly serviceable bridge was created. Over this bridge the long line of trucks were paraded through Sectors to Utility Squares.

But first the community’s fallen master was carried ceremoniously up East Outer Slope on his camel, somberly attended in a massive procession up Bisecting Way, and reverently delivered to Mudhead at Vane’s Domo. After dressing the wound and administering the pain killer, Mudhead sat back to await the resurrection.

Vane proved a tough patient, hard to keep down. He wanted to see the battlefield, wanted accurate tallies, wanted to congratulate the victors. His exuberance and intoxication would eject him from bed like a Pop Tart, but his injury and attendant illness would knock him right back down. Mudhead fed him beer and Percodan, hoping he’d burn himself to sleep. Still, the African was worn out long before his boss.

By late afternoon the beer and high-strung behavior had caught up with Vane. He curled up on his left side and closed his eyes. He looked dead. Solomon snuck up to the bed and very gently climbed on, knowing his master forbade it, and watched Vane sleeping until his own eyes grew heavy. Shadows crossed the floor. The room grew dim. Mudhead transferred his butt to Vane’s favorite padded chair and let his eyelids kiss. His old bones were sore and his neck stiff, but the padding was generous, and for one guilty moment there he thought he might actually have dozed.

When he reopened his eyes the room was black, and Vane nowhere to be found. Mudhead creaked to his feet, loped outside, looked around the Yard. Worthless was missing from her pad. He flapped across Stage Street and labored up the Steps to the Mat, his old heart flapping right along. Mudhead bent over until his tarboosh brushed the Mat, withered palms resting on shaking knees. After a minute he grabbed a walkie-talkie and depressed the transmit button.

“Bossman?”

“Mudhead!”

“Bossman stay bed!” Mudhead gasped. “Play general tomorrow!”

“What? Come on up to North Rim and join the fun.”

Mudhead slumped against the motherboard. “Fun day over,” he wheezed.

“That’s too bad. It’s a nice bright night. You can still see all the bodies left out in the…wait!”

Mudhead waited. “What matter?”

“What?” There was a lull. “It looks like we’ve got company.”

“What,” Mudhead whispered, “company?”

No answer.

“Bossman?”

“There are lights on the northern horizon, Mudhead. In the air. Hang on for a minute while I get a bead.”

Mudhead repeatedly paced the Mat. Finally he walked over to Top Step and searched the northern sky. Nothing but a billion stars.

“It’s helicopters again. Guess they’re gonna try that dumb trick one more time. Remember the Red Sea? Well, I sure as heck do! What? This time we’ll have every rifle in the house on ’em.” Mudhead sat gently, holding the walkie-talkie tightly against his ear. “Six or seven in a line. They’re coming fast.”

There was a break in which Mudhead tried several times to call. When he picked up Vane’s voice again it was muted and accompanied by static. It sounded worried this time, and a whole lot soberer. “They’ll probably try strafing runs. God, they’re big. I’m gonna get everybody down off the Rim under cover of the trees.”

Slowly, dreamily, the sirens wound up along North Rim.

“Get below ground, Mudhead! What? They may be bombing. Get to Cellar or Basement and stay there until I come for you.”

“Ten-four, Bossman!” Mudhead tucked the radio under his robes. He stood high on his toes, staring over the canopy of treetops. Now he could see a broken ribbon of lights approaching between the stars. Mudhead hoisted his robes and puffed down the Steps just as fast as his feet would carry him. He hurried to his left around the Mount and fell up against Warehouse, looking back over his shoulder. A column of light was burning through the night. Mudhead dashed to Cellar, hauled up the right hand door and tumbled into pitch. In his left hand the radio came alive with an enormous clatter of rotors. Finally Vane’s voice sounded, “Mudhead!” There was a long wedge of silence. The hard thumping of air came again, much louder this time.

“They’re in!”

* * *

The black rabbit darted tree to tree and Yard to Yard, not daring to trust the narrow plains of crisscrossing Streets. Occasionally he was startled by a singed camel or cow bursting out of the murk and stamping past. Occasionally, too, he caught the gray silhouette of a masked soldier treading cautiously through the noxious smoke. The stuff was everywhere, drifting in slow motion--diagonally as suspended leaning pillars, horizontally as thinning and fatting wisps. It tended to roll on the roofs of Domos, like an unctuous substance, before oozing off and gathering in depressions. All around these smoke-matted Domos, weird flames were clinging surreally to trees; metastasizing, popping and sighing, trickling down trunks and dripping to the ground.

Mudhead nearly collapsed at a Square’s hedged boundary, his head swimming with fumes. Through streaming eyes he caught a commotion in the haze: down the Street came that same nightmarish mob, that same reeling wave of heads and arms that had pursued him halfway across the Sector. For a tense minute the wave was lost in drifting reek, and when it reappeared it was almost on him. Mudhead gasped enormously. He clutched his chest, turned, and staggered across the Square with his white robes trailing.

There was a hard change in the pursuing voices. The crowd halted abruptly, and a second later was pouring through the Yard after the slow flapping ghost. Mudhead burst retching onto a Street so dense with smoke it appeared fogbound. Overcome by fumes, he threw out his arms just as the howling mob came down on him. He was hauled to his feet. Mudhead promptly collapsed on his knees, was again pulled upright, and again collapsed. The shouting crowd scooped him up and roughly propelled him down the Street. Swooning, Mudhead was borne supine by his limbs; first as a limp bit of dragging backside, then as a cruciform slab high on the shoulders of the roaring tide. Burning leaves and branches rushed by above and on both sides, interlaced by shifting cords of smoke, as he was washed down a dark acrid tunnel to his doom. The blood beating in his head made that tunnel dilate and contract, made the mob’s cries seesaw in his ears.

It didn’t take long to reach the Mount, though to Mudhead it seemed the ride would never end. At Bottom Step he was set firmly on his feet and pressed upward, gasping and shaking. He managed three Steps and dropped. Mudhead was straightened back up and forced to climb, and by the time he reached the Stage he was wheezing desperately. Yet when he collapsed on the Mat it was not from exhaustion; the scene before him knocked him flat on his knees.

Vane’s twitching body lay surrounded by his dead dog, comatose camel, and a variety of charred personal belongings. He was so badly burned his skin looked like red bubble wrap. His robes had been scorched away, along with his hair, toes, and eyelids.

Mudhead’s hands trembled above Vane’s chest. “Boss…” he tried. He could barely breathe. “Boss…”

Vane’s hand shot off the Mat and seized Mudhead’s right wrist. Mudhead watched the lipless mouth writhe for a few seconds, then carefully brought down his ear. Finally Vane hissed, “Oh, Jesus.” His eyes rolled up. “Not like…dear God, not like this.” The hand dropped to the Mat.

The African rocked back on his haunches, adjusted his robes, and reclined onto his rear. He sat there like a man of stone while voices of the Afar pattered around him. Once his mind had cleared, his thoughts automatically converted to Saho. The Afar were confused and breaking up; some were heavy with grief, others full of fury. They had no one to follow, nowhere to turn. From the gist of their plaints, Mudahid Asafu-Adjaye realized that the monster was now in his lap. He pounded a fist, and in Saho snapped, “The thing is done!”

That quieted them.

An elderly man responded, gently, “They will come for him.”

There was a disapproving murmur.

Another said, “They will find him here.”

Mudahid snapped, “They will not!” and chilled them with his expression. He looked back down, leaned forward, and held a steady hand over Vane’s eyes.

“Mudhead know place.”

* * *

Every aspect of Vane’s consciousness revolved around pain.

He’d stopped screaming when his body went into deep shock, but each time a bearer stumbled his head would jerk back, his mouth fly open, and his fried lungs emit a short hissing squeal. He watched himself stiffen and relax, stiffen and relax, from the viewpoint of a hovering observer. It was like having a video recorder, attached to a kite just above, transmitting an image back to its arching, silently screaming subject.

Vane was having an out-of-body experience. He’d been enduring it, with varying degrees of intensity, ever since Sol’s first spear burned the top off the Danakil Alps and transformed the brilliant black night into a burning blue diamond. Throughout the whole morning he’d watched his body carried on a makeshift stretcher by rotating groups of burned dying people, all struggling to shade, fan, and otherwise comfort him.

Why wouldn’t they let him die? How long could that pathetic creature continue to jerk and clench, arch and settle? Vane’s detached awareness watched his body go through its motions over and over, until the horror of the thing became matter-of-fact. The afternoon sun bit into his welling skin like acid, made it cringe, crawl, and burst anew. And so he went on screaming without really screaming, jerking and clenching, out of his mind with agony. Just beneath him, the bearers lurched in and out of the imaginary camera’s lens, forcing themselves up a rough path that wound round an isolated rocky table. As the weakest fell trying to climb, the strongest worked double time taking up the slack. With a terrible lunge, the remaining carriers began a sickening left-handed ascent that ended in a wild ride over a flat baking shelf. The spinning sun blew outward, swelling until it took the entire sky. Then it was merely the central bright pinprick in an insane kaleidoscope filled with distorted, collapsing faces. A dark fist closed about Vane. He shook up and down, up and down, convulsing like a drowning rat as his wretched red husk was sucked into Hell.