The Fabulist

[Table of Contents]

Jimmy Deschutes was six years old, living in a Baptist compound near Boise when, as his father had said, “The shit gone down.”

The 3V had flickered in the living room. It was like watching a movie, the special effects were that good. But of course it was real — the massive funeral pyres, the crying faces and streaming blood and infected wounds widening before their very eyes. The whole city had been quarantined. Interstate traffic shut down, supplies air-dropped like it was some African refugee camp. Mommy had been weeping, and little Jimmy had been too. But he remembered Daddy’s eyes seemed aglow.

“Marjorie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you know I am. But we told ‘em, they shoulda known better. They shoulda known. We asked ‘em out here, over and over we asked. They made their choices and so did we. And now we know, we did the right thing. And now we gotta carry on. For them. And for Jimmy. Right?”

And Jimmy looked up and Daddy was wiping tears off Mommy’s cheeks, and she was sniffling and nodding.

“Thank the Lord we got outta there,” she said.

“Thank the Lord,” Daddy agreed, nodding. “Thank the Lord we got away.”

He looked down and smiled, and Mommy smiled too, a trembling delicate smile that brimmed over with tears and made Jimmy’s heart open up with an unnamable gaping emotion, an abyss of sorrow and gladness.

“Thank the Lord,” Jimmy whispered.

Years later, during the long hours of the night watch on Gideon Station, Corporal Deschutes would walk the empty corridors, checking the security circuits and safety-sealed dormitory entryways, and thinking about that dim period of his childhood. They had escaped the city, and Famine, and Pestilence. But War followed them all the way to the backwoods of Idaho.

“The what?” Daddy had asked. He stared in disbelief.

“The Sons of Wotan,” Mommy replied. She seemed calm, but Jimmy remembered how she drew her breath, long and quavery, then held it, and bit her lip. “They’re heathens, Daniel. They’re racist pagans. One of their women was there, she trailed me all around the general store, Dan, you wouldn’t believe the things she was saying.”

“Try me.”

Mommy took another breath. “She asked me what kind of right-thinking white woman would let herself get knocked up by a dirt-bag nigra.”

His father was silent.
“She said that I’m a traitor to my race, and that the one thing the world doesn’t need more of is another goddamn half-breed jigaboo.”

There was a lot of shouting, after that. He remembered his father leaping up from his chair, the cords and tendons in his neck and arms coiling, flexing. The sheriff visited several times, and the voices were always strained.

“So my tax money isn’t good enough? Are you telling me I have to pay you off to get some security out here? All you have to do is drive that fancy-ass Humvee by once or twice a week, this is my family we’re talking about!”

“Dan, please, listen to me, it’s not the money, I’m understaffed.”

And so Jimmy awoke one night to choking fumes, and flames licking at the windows and doors. The heat was unbearable, he grew dizzy from the smoke. But Daddy busted through the front door like a smoldering, rampaging bull, and they fled the compound amid shouts and gunshots. Into forests looming cold and impenetrably black.

They ran all night, and for many nights thereafter camped without a fire. Afraid they’d be found again. He’d lie awake between his parents, the darkness full of sighs and rustling leaves, and Jimmy was sure he could hear voices further off. Hissing. Whispering.

But his mother would listen and say it’s only the wind.

“Or maybe an owl!” his father exclaimed. “Now that would be something. A great horned owl. All God’s creatures got a place on Earth.”

“Amen!” Jimmy said. And his mother smiled and kissed his cheek, and he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was morning.

They followed a rumor of a trail for weeks, stuffing their bellies on prayer, and at last found a refuge, and then a home, with the Family of Christ. A small, fortified community nestled in a shallow vale a quarter-mile from Lake Coeur D’Alene, ringed by scraggly pine trees and framed by jutting, bare hilltops. He lived there into his teens, through broiling summers and fleeting springtime and there had even been snowfall two winters running, though it had been a while back.

He used to go fishing with the daughter of the camp manager. Suzanne. She wore blue and white dresses, and her hair was always pulled back into a ponytail. Her father would say all the time how the lake was bigger once–and the fish, too.

One year, the Family’s white cabins and big cookhouse burned in a swift, terrifying blaze. Suzanne and her father were killed. And all the livestock, most of the dogs and horses. The sweet-acrid smoke followed them for miles, for months. Eventually they caught an arsonist and sent him to the Lord on a cross, gagged with a wad of balled-up deer hide.

“Just a little warmup for this piece of shit-sin trash,” someone said, cackling. The arsonist was weeping in terror, mouth stuffed like a dinner ham, and father’s voice had grown louder, wild-toned: “This is ungodly, Marcus, this is the Devil’s work!”

But several of them shouted back, and Jimmy was hustled away and mother held his hand, tight, pulling him along so quickly his arm hurt, and even with the crest of the hill behind them he could hear the gusting flames. He knew exactly the sounds the man had made. Muffled, squealing. Could see in his mind’s eye the skin blistering, peeling, blackening.

The visions were hideous and plagued his dreams and waking moments. Drove him to swear and disrespect his parents, to run away and fight and consort with older teens from the uncouth, ungodly neighborhoods of their new hometown of Moscow. A scabbed-over place of pestilent flies and bare, dying trees, of posturing street hoods and a gangster capo who demanded extravagant tolls for the privilege of buying sacks of wrinkled potatoes and gallon jugs of oily water at the dusty central market.

They lived on the outskirts of town, a little enclave of Christian families.

Jimmy’s father and a few of the other men began holding meetings to set up a new, more pious marketplace, and not long after their minister was hanged from an abandoned lamppost. Cross upside-down around his neck, eyes torn from their sockets.

When at last the Jurists came, and secured Moscow for Christendom, Jimmy found himself in juvenile corrections, and there he discovered anew his sacred path.

He was not bound to be a scholar, nor a doctor. His seminary school was the deep woods. His medical education was in the field, binding wounds on the run. He knew silence and stealth and how to hold a rifle steady as a heathen caravan passed below.

He was a soldier, natural-born, and he joined the Guardsmen. Trained by day in the merciless heat of summer and fall. In the fitful mud and blustery chill of winter and spring. At night he was visited by Suzanne, her soft smile and golden hair drifting like smoke.

Mornings he awoke hard and furious, haunted by the stink of the arsonist’s burning flesh, the man’s agony a focal point, the tip of a knife, a hurtling bullet that could cut into the soft bodies of the Sons of Wotan, and the anarchists, the white supremacists, the heretic factionalists and everyday, drunken, brawling survivalists. As if the sin was its own atonement.

“Just never forget,” the chaplain had said, on that very first night of basic training. “Killing is the Devil’s work, but justice belongs to Jesus Christ. Never be cruel. Be quick. In honest, mortal combat, the way God made us, and the way He means it to be done.”

Compared to those days, walking the beat on Gideon was among the most peaceful times of his life. As if he was on the lake again, canoeing with Suzanne, casting their lines out for bony little sunfish. He felt light, his face and shoulders brushed by a cool breeze, his dreams placid and unreflective.

Like shoreline waters in the morning. The brutal sun muted by a low, motionless haze. No ambushes. No boobytraps.

And up in orbit none of the floods, the droughts, the blasted, fused plains were truly visible. Only rarely had he ever been able to see any of the burn scars on the East Coast — the ruins of Boston, Washington and New York City.

“S’posed to glow at night,” the sergeant, Gibson, had said. It was this past Easter eve, not long after Santa Fe, the vessel silent but humming with worship and prayer. “Kayda packed the briefcases with some isotope, a hot one, they say. Just so we wouldn’t forget, even from up here.”

Deschutes had stared until his eyes hurt, but all he had seen was the twinkling lights of Raleigh, Richmond, Philly and Hartford, separated by plunging gaps of darkness. Same as tonight. He was glad there wasn’t a glow, actually. That would mean the bad guys really were winning.

In fact, the planet was exquisite. God’s creation. The day merging into night, the clouds in spirals and cascading fronts. Embedded in starry velvet.

At 12:47am, Corporal Deschutes followed his usual beat up Southwest Fire Stairwell #5, along the Secondary Administrative Command-and-Coordination deck (a 150-yard stretch of data interfaces and floating readout screens), up the Auxiliary Staff Transport Tube and into the Ladies’ Grand Promenade.

It was a broad corridor overlooking the huge transit hangar below, terminating with a fishbowl extrusion into the high-orbit vacuum. There were couches and low tables, a serene and understated refuge for the womenfolk to take their repose amid God’s glory.

All along the corridor were little prayer nooks and conversation alcoves, offset with the Judiciary’s stylized cruciform logo. Christ’s own burden, for all mankind.

“The Crucifix,” Commander Marchand had said in his midweek homily, “is a symbol of solace. It represents atonement. Sacrifice for the greater good, and thus freedom, by which I mean salvation. Never forget, it is not what Jesus would do, but what he has done. That is our inspiration, and our aspiration. He is an exemplar for all of us, no matter our station, no matter our calling, and for soldiers like you and I in particular. The bullets of the enemy are like the nails in the cross. They are a blessing, for they prove our devotion, they sanctify our pain and our loss, and open the way for our reward beyond this earth, beyond its burning star and satellites. There is no death for a Christian solider, but glory everlasting.”

Amen, a thousand times. He had been thinking about that speech all week long. The words dense and flavorful on his tongue. He repeated them quietly as he walked through the soft lights and muted corridors. In the heavy, sweet medium of night.

And at last he passed into the borderlands of a half-remembered dream, from childhood, before the troubles. Of a grand encampment of billowing white tents, amid his friends and family, and people he know only in passing.

Everyone wore gossamer robes, and moved with a floating grace, and he was intoxicated by that strange cocktail of sadness and gratitude.
Corporal Deschutes stopped then, shaken out of his reverie, and held his breath.

The nun appeared not to have noticed him. She was herself an almost invisible presence, dark habit and the shadows gathered in the corners of the corridor. She was leaning on the banister, a small black hymnal in her hands, but staring out the window through the hangar, late-shift crews still flitting about, at the looming Earthrise beyond.

Deschutes held his breath because he realized she wasn’t wearing her wimple, and her hair was a cascade of luxuriant red-brown, tumbling down her shoulders to almost the small of her back. He looked away for a moment, and then respectfully cleared his throat.

“It’s after curfew, mam,” he said apologetically, as she lurched upwards in surprise.

“Mary!” she swore, then closed her mouth and gazed at him with huge dark eyes.

She clutched at the hymnal, then tucked it hurriedly into her bosom.

Deschutes felt the blush burning at the tips of his ears, and silently gave thanks for the half-light. He bowed his head.

“I’m sorry mam, you know the rules.”

“Yes,” she said, and turned, eyes fixed on the floor.

“I’m not going to fill out an incident report,” he said as she left.

The dormitory access portal irised open and she stepped through, then hesitated, hair glossy in the dim light. The portal closed silently behind her, and Deschutes was alone again and on patrol.

The long corridor seemed to barely notice his passage. He felt strangely furtive, like an intruder, as if he was the mouse rather than the cat. He took a final look down the broad, dim passage, pools of light gathering in the alcoves, and caught his breath at a reddish luster by the window.

Was she a ghost? But it was just the refracting flash of a loading dock down in the hangar. A barge was lugging in a train of canisters, brightly decorated with radiation, biohazard and nanobot symbols.

He could see through the barge’s front window, could barely make out the suited pilot. He seemed an older man, dressed in a civilian orbital navigator’s uniform.

Deschutes waved, flashed a thumbs-up to his fellow late-night laborer. He thought he saw the pilot salute, but then the angle of the ship shifted and the man was lost from view.

“Sweet dreams,” he said to darkness, which did not reply.

Turning, he flashed his ident at the door, which obligingly shushed open, and then closed behind him, and the corridor was silent again.

Coming soon: The Separation — Chapter Five

copyright (c) by Josh Wilson