Turn and Face the Strange, Chapter Sixteen (THE FINAL CHAPTER)
Here it is. The last chapter. The big finish went a little farther than I originally intended it to, but I won't pretend it wasn't extremely cathartic. DIE, ANGSTY DYSTOPIA WITH A RIDICULOUSLY COMPLEX AND SYMBOLIC LAYOUT! DIE!
Chapter Sixteen
Everybody's raised in blindness; everybody knows it's true.
Everybody feels that everything is real,
Anybody's point of view.
Nobody can break their bondage; everyone can feel their chains.
But even in my life I knew you found your sight,
And nothing would be quite the same.
Please help me…
Who can I be, now you’ve found me?
Can I be held apart, you found me?
Now can I be, now you found me,
Now can I be real?
Can I be real?
- “Who Can I Be Now,” David Bowie
It is late afternoon before Halloween Jack and the other Diamond Dogs give up on Joe showing up.
“We have to do this without him,” Halloween Jack growls. “I don’t know where he is, but the longer we have this hand car up on the train track, the more of a chance we give some Bewlay car to come along and find us here, and that would blow the whole thing. Do you think you can get it functional without Joe’s help?” This last to one of the Diamond Dogs who had been fixing the rails the day before. The Dog nods, and sets to work on the car, making sure it will roll smoothly and that the propelling mechanism is firmly bolted and smoothly operational. Halloween Jack turns to the two men on his other side, Tony and Brendan, the two Dogs whose daughter and sister had been killed. They are pale, but grim faced and determined.
“Tony,” he says. “Brendan. Are you ready to do this?”
You know we are, sir,” says Tony.
“Brendan?”
“Must you really ask me, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Jack. I’m ready. I’ve never been more ready for anything in my life.”
“That’s my men,” says Jack gruffly. He turns back to the car. “How’s it going over there? Everything in place? Ready to go?”
“I’d feel much easier about getting everything in place and ready to go if this stuff wasn’t already loaded on here,” says the man working on straightening the metal wheels.
“Bill tells me that it’s perfectly safe. Unless straightening out those wheels requires flipping that switch, you should be just fine. Just hurry it up. I want Tony and Brendan to be out of here by the time the sun touches the top of the bank building. Do you think we can do that?”
“We can try, Jack.”
“I don’t want try,” he snaps. “I want to know if we can do that.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we can do it.”
They all sit around waiting, increasingly tense, as the man straightens the wheels and tests the car, calling one of the men up every now and then to help him pump the car back and forth along a short stretch of track. Finally, a little before the sun touches the top of the Earthling’s now vacant bank building, he meets Halloween Jack’s eyes, takes a deep breath, and nods.
“Tony,” says Jack. “Brendan.” He keeps saying their names every time he speaks to them, over and over, as though in premature memorial. They stand from where they have been sitting in the dead grass, and come to stand in front of him. He offers his hand to each of them in turn, and in turn each of them shake it.
“Good luck, men,” says Halloween Jack. They nod back at him, and then together, they salute.
“Goodbye, Jack,” says Tony.
“It’s been an honor, sir,” says Brendan. They both climb up onto the hand car, and the mechanic and his partner climb down. There are no further words of farewell or instruction. They merely each take a handle of the powering mechanism, surrounded by piles of little boxes wrapped in brown paper, all glued and wired to one another and strapped down to the bed of the car. The pumping is slow at first, but as it crawls away from the small pack of Diamond Dogs standing by the track, it goes faster and faster. Soon enough, the men on the cart cannot even see the Dogs they have left behind, who have already started running after it into town, to prepare themselves for the battle that they are sure will come afterward.
The cart speeds into the west side of town, past club after club, and several blocks north of the Diamond Tower. It speeds right across Crooked Street, and then runs parallel to it for almost half the town. A band of street people painted up in berry colors and coming home from a party have to stop to let it pass. A wild dog barely gets off of the tracks in time before it rumbles over the rails.
It goes past Aladdin’s abandoned scrap yard with its electrified fence, and passes a few blocks south of the Earthling’s abandoned bank building, and as it turns the corner and crosses Crooked Street again, it has to slow to pass a squat building with no broken glass in its windows and curtains fluttering. Out of a second story window, on a strut probably used to hang potted plants back in the days when green things lived in cities, a rope is tied, and from that rope, by a noose about her neck, hangs a naked woman in colorful, smeary body paint, swaying in the slight afternoon breeze. The car gains speed again and passes on.
It is in Bewlay territory by now, and there are even a couple Bewlays on the street as it rushes by. But those who do not just assume it is one of theirs, who actually look up at it as it goes by and sees the two men in full Diamond Dog hunter regalia pumping the handles, have no way to stop it and hardly even any time to say anything other than “Hey!” before it is gone again.
When they are almost to the Station, when Tony can see it over Brendan’s shoulder and Brendan can feel its approach like one might feel the approach of a cliff at ones back, Tony and Brendan meet eyes over the pump handles and nod to each other.
Inside the Station, the White Duke’s brother bursts into his leader’s office. “Sir! There’s a train car, it’s not ours, it’s coming!” That is all the warning that Duke Bewlay, or anyone else in the enormous old train station, get of what is about to happen. The hand car screeches into the Station, and both Tony and Brendan step forward and put a hand on the switch to the side of the pump. Together they pull it firmly downward.
The pulling of the lever instantly ignites about three and a half times as much explosive as is necessary to utterly demolish the old train station. The blaze is even brighter than the afternoon sun, as shrouded as it is in dark chemical clouds. It is white hot, and impossibly bright, and it makes such a sound as has not been heard in the streets of Hunger City for fifteen years.
The sound bursts all the windows in all the buildings in a two block radius, and the sound makes bricks fall from the sides of buildings in a six block radius, and the sound echoes echoes rumbles rumbles down the streets of the City. There is nowhere where the sound cannot be heard, the sound of an entire family of pale, blonde haired violent men immolating and their home of glass and steel and brick evaporating like mist.
All of the thin girls with the long hair in the gossamer gowns hear it. The suppliers peddling their wares hear it. Molly and Arthur, in their flat in the south of town, wake and hear it. The daytime band back at the Web hears it. The band in the Tangle hears it. Halloween Jack and his pack of Dogs running through the center of town on their way to east side hears it. The squat house on Crooked Street hears it. The bank building hears it, and the scrapyard hears it, and the Diamond Tower hears it, and the forge behind the tower hears it, and the blood soaked car hears it.
And the mountain hears it.
Even after the rumble of the explosion clears, there is still a sound of rumbling. Those who have dropped what they were doing to hear the amazing sound shake their heads and wiggle their fingers in their ears, thinking that it is just a ringing brought on by the colossal noise. But it doesn’t go away. And then it gets louder. Clay cups on club tables and glass shards stuck in window frames start to rattle. The rattling gets louder. The rumbling gets louder. More bricks fall off of buildings, and more glass falls out of windows. People with their wits about them get under tables and stand in doorways. It doesn’t help.
The great, looming mountain called Freecloud starts to crumble.
First it is only very small rocks, but very soon it is very large ones. They tumble down the face of the mountain and bounce along the rocky landscape. Nobody has ever noticed how very enormous the mountain is, or how very close the mountain is to the city until now, but they have ample ability to appreciate it as it dumps itself on what was once the residential north section. It becomes part of the mountain, and the mountain continues to crumble.
The vibrations of Freecloud’s slow death cause the other mountains to break down, and then for the ground itself to buckle. Tall buildings crumble like houses made of cards. The Earthling’s bank building rooftop scatters itself over the crumpled sidewalk. A fissure opens in the earth and swallows half of Crooked Street. Taller buildings fall over on their side onto smaller buildings, and smaller buildings collapse into craters. The fragile structure of the Diamond Tower twists and wrinkles and is a pile of rubble in moments. The shoreline along the east and south sides of the city slides over itself like slippery layers of stacked satin, and a third of the city crumbles and slithers into the sea.
It is a very long time before quiet resumes, and at the same time it is not very long at all. Hunger City is gone. All that remains of Freecloud is its foot, a relatively modest heap of solid granite. There has never been such silence, such calm and perfect quiet.
From a cave in the base of this heap, a rag-wrapped foot steps out into the sunlight.
Hermione Once Called Wonder stands on a stone once called Freecloud Mountain and looks down at the remains of a town once called Hunger City. Now all it looks like is acres of rocky beach. Her eyes are fever bright and painfully dry. She looks down for a long, long time.
At last, as the sun begins to set, Hermione reaches up and unbuckles the tight, painted breastplate, first on one strap, and then on the other. When it is unbuckled, she takes it off and lays it gently on the stone beside her. Then she picks apart the knot on a dirty, frayed rag wrapped around her forearm, unwinds the rag from her arm, then folds the rag and sets it next to the breastplate. She picks out the knot from the rag on her other arm and does the same thing-unwinds it, folds it, lays it gently down. Off comes the rags around her breasts, and her feet as well, and finally the filthy loincloth, which gets the wrinkles smoothed out of it before it is folded and set next to the fifth binding rag.
Hermione turns around, and with her back to the ruined city, walks out into the dusk, wearing only her own blood and the immense quiet, to figure out what it is the world needs next most of all.