Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground Read Online Free PDF Page A

too much, too soon, with the flesh dying all around her, Jamie’s eyes closed to slits.
    Balzac wondered if what he saw was not just a carnie trick, if beneath the flesh lived nothing more than an endless spliced loop, a circuit that said his name and tried to seduce him with the lie that Jamie lived, long enough for it to drive him mad. Jamie had died. He knew that; if he saw her now, she was ghost cloaked in flesh, as dead as the city of powdering bones. The same war that had given the city a false heart – a burning, soul-consuming furnace of a heart – had resurrected Jamie. Yet he must assume that she was more than a shadowy wisp of memory, because he could not prove her ghostliness, her otherness. What cruelty for him to abandon her should she be aware. And trapped.
    Jamie had died on the front lines a week before, then and now separated by a second and a century. His recollections were filtered through a veil of smoke and screams, the dark pulsating with frantic commands. Particular moments stood out: the irritation of sand grit in his shoes; a lone blade of grass caught just so between yellow and green; an ant crawling across an empty boot, its red body translucent in the laser glow; the reflection of an explosion, the burnt umber flames melting across the muzzle of his rifle; the slick feel of Jamie’s grime-smeared hand in his, her pulse beating against him through the tips of her fingers.
    Crowded together in long trenches, they had been only two among several thousand, waiting. They did not talk, but only touched.
    The flesh dogs appeared promptly at twilight, bringing silence with them in a black wave. They wore the masks of friends, the guise of family. They jogged and cantered across the fires: fueled by a singleness of purpose, pounding on shadow muscles, ripping swathes of darkness from the night so as to reimagine themselves in night’s image. Eyes like tiny dead violets. An almost-silent ballet of death.
    Then, on cue, they halted, forming a solid, uniform line. They stood so still it would have been easy to think they were a row of ancient statues built on the order of a brilliantly deranged despot.
    In the lull, Balzac hugged Jamie, taking comfort in the feel and scent of her body.
    Above, dirigibles coughed and grunted with the effort of discharging missiles, flashes of light catching ground combatants in freeze frame.
    As the flesh dogs came into range, in such numbers that the ground reverberated with the thunder of their passage, the defenders of the trench opened fire: the spitting sparks of lasers and the rhythmic phutt-phutt of rifles entwined in an orgasm of recoil and recharge. It took immense discipline to stand in the teeth of such a charge. The rifle in Balzac’s hands seemed heavy, difficult – it wanted its head, and in the heat of battle it was all he could do to keep it aimed and firing, his finger awkward on the trigger.
    In reply to the defenders’ barrage: a chorus of bone-thin voices attached to alien bodies, a thousand ghosts wailing across the ruins in the timbre of old friends pleading for their lives, calling out to the living by name.
    It brought madness bubbling to the surface, so that the defenders shot and recharged with incredible speed, shouting back their own hatred to block out the voices, obliterating the present that it might not obliterate the past.
    As the wave broke over them, the tableau dissolved in confusion. Mostly, Balzac remembered the stench of gunpowder as he loaded and reloaded – but more slowly now, mesmerized by the carnage – and the fleeting images through the smoke . . . Huge bodies flung without reason or care . . . a dark blue-black wall of flesh . . . the swiftness of them, almost as fast as a dirigible, so that a blink could cost a life . . . Sinuous muscles, caricatures of human faces as wincing passengers . . . The bright black slickness of spilled oil . . . Throats ripped from bodies . . . bodies fallen, whirling and dancing in the jaws