The Devil Delivered and Other Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

blood?”
    Suddenly embarrassed, he looked away. “Yeah. Sort of, I guess.”
    She was silent for a long moment; then she said, “Keep listening to it, Jim.”
    They both looked up at the sound of crying. Jim’s mother was in Grandpa’s arms. The stiffness was gone, and she looked almost childlike as she clutched Grandpa, her head buried against his shoulder.
    “Christ,” Jim gasped.
    “Go to her,” Ruth commanded. “Now, dammit. It’s not just her husband she’s leaving. Go on, Jim—you’ll never get another chance.”
    The scene blurring in front of him, Jim lurched into motion.
    Entry: American NW, July 1, A.C. 14, Midnight
    He lay in his tent.
    And these lizards have gone reflective. Crusty, muricated, a sleight of sunlight shunting elsewhere as they hug their own shadows. Wondering at what’s old about being new, the few generations of intense environmental pressures already forgotten except in the blood that threads their spines. And they hunt at night, amidst the hum and hiss of a thousand new species of insect in a hundred thousand iridescent colors reduced to gray beneath the moon.
    He hides in his tent, reflecting. His skin has billowed out and is geodesic and is now crawling with many-legged silhouettes. He sees the lizards leap against his taut skin, jaws snapping. Exoskeleton crunches softly in the darkness.
    Outside the lizards are feasting on Saint John’s bread, a mayhem banquet. And where is he, the one who giveth songs in the night?
    A few generations of intense environmental pressures.
    The Lakota hearths spread smoke haze across the plains. Seven generations lost in the wilderness, and now the eighth, rising once again, at last, rearing up and taking countenance of their ghost lands. The blood pumping from the ground has slowed, stopped. Somewhere vampires are screaming. The transport roads are barricaded now, the scattered small settlements isolated inside their rad domes; their skin taut and softly drumming to aborted intrusions from outside. Radio silence. The mute warnings of smoke signals unseen, unwitnessed.
    They remain this night in their secret places, the past sitting in their laps like a child long overdue weaning. The old ones flinch and caress innocent’s face, reluctant and angry at necessity’s harsh slap. The young ones, who no longer recognize innocence at all, are brash and abrupt in their dismissal. For the old, the past weeps. For the young, the past walks, a mindful shadow anchored to the earth but facing the sky. The old reach for an embrace. The young are driven to dance. For each, the past obeys, as shadows must. Anchored to the earth, but facing the sky. And those shadows that weep, they are reflective.
    “Read me, then, for I am like Braille, and in the changing of my skin, something shall rise and find the stars.”
    The borders are closed, the lizards are dancing, the young and the old have met and argued, the antelope dig burrows in the false dawn, and the quest is now begun. And here where home is hell, the devil delivers.
    Net
    CORBIE TWA: Oh my oh my. Possible? Accelerated genetic mutations in so little time?
    BOGQUEEN: There’s documentation to support it, especially among insects. As for the higher orders, who can say. The difficulty has to do with the sheer complexity of vertebrates. Speciation is rarer because so many more variables have to come in line for any major biological or behavioral traits to be expressed.
    CORBIE TWA: Who ordered a textbook? Look, our strange friend is talkin a maze. Has me wonderin if there’s anything there.
    JOHN JOHN: Watch the news, Corbie. The Lakota have shut everything down. NOAC’s politicos are having a stock-tumbling fit. A team of multiculture negotiators is being assembled to discuss grievances, only the Lakota haven’t voiced any. In fact, they’re not talking at all.
    CORBIE TWA: Multiculture negotiators? What the hell is that?
    BOGQUEEN: Has an insidious ring to it, don’t it?
    JOHN JOHN: Applied