M. Bennardo - A Chromepunk Anthology

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2024-12-23 0 0 553.8KB 6 页 5.9玖币

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A Chromepunk Anthology

By M. Bennardo, illustration by Linus Persson

4/7/03

1. Ignition

Three times in one day, Ford Grundling had spat blood. Never, never, never had he imagined

that the Kaiser could be so hard to kill. They'd been naive, he supposed, the whole American

lot of them, to think that the Teutonic discipline of death and waste-laying was anything less

than a birthright. God, those men could kill -- and kill by the tens of thousands.

Above the trenches, starbursts of artillery lit the sky, dissolving into green and red and orange

streaks. Grundling's ears were full of whistling from the soaring shells -- or his right ear was

full of whistling, anyway. His left ear was full of water from when he had slipped in the sludge

at the bottom of a blast crater during his last charge. He had lost his bayonet and he had

come close to drowning as he floundered in the hole. He would probably get pneumonia now,

or at least an ear infection.

Somebody needed to do something to bust the stalemate soon. It seemed to Grundling that

there had to be a limit to the number of men who could die for a single piece of earth. With

every detonating shell, the ground itself seemed ready to stand up and give itself over to

whichever side happened to be closest at the moment. It wasn't even worth the fight

anymore -- now they were only buying a morass of blood.

In the distance, Grundling heard a new sound. It wasn't the rat-a-tat of the machine guns,

nor the dull shocks of the artillery. It curled through the air, wheedling and guttural like the

sound of a snake coiling around and around a metal lamppost. "What is it?" Grundling asked.

Leaning forward, he lifted his field glasses.

A shell erupted overhead, spraying no-man's-land with color and light, and Grundling saw what

the sound was. Two hundred yards out in the cratered wilderness, a pack of chrome wolves

jumped up and down, preceded by their great spinning mouths. At the next moment of

illumination, Grundling got a better look. He could see now they were motorized bicycles with

enormous tires in the front and back. Earnest men in spiked German helmets crouched behind

their thick handlebars, riding up and over the broken terrain like ships bucking coastal waves.

They were coming on fast, and there were a lot of them.

The heavy-caliber machine guns all around leapt to life. Grundling swung his own gun around

toward no-man's-land as well, but absolute darkness had returned. In the blackness, the

banshee roar of a thousand combustion engines Dopplered louder and closer with every

passing heartbeat.

It seemed only two breaths until the sky was lit again, but already the line of wolves was

suicidally close, lunging at the bewildered machine gunners. The earth in front of Grundling

was alive with dancing chrome tracers of reflected light. He wanted to fire, but by the time he

was able to command his wits, he was already among them -- smelling their sharp gasoline

breath and falling down underneath thick treads that stamped a tattoo of blood and grease

across his mutilated body.

2. Combustion

For three solid seconds Ram was aware of nothing except the ground rushing past and the

blue-flame sting of combustion, pure exhilaration like a shot of whiskey suddenly bombed down

his throat. It opened his eyes, it cleared his sinuses, and it rocked him hard from his thighs to

his shoulder blades. Good God, it hurt -- it hurt like a hundred rock hammers tapping at his

spine. It hurt, but it was a pain he could get used to. It was a pain he could grow to enjoy, a

pain he could get addicted to.

"Oh, yeah." Ram's belly cooled as the combustion dwindled to a slow burn, and he wiggled a

moment in light-headed vertigo. His eyes glazed, he opened his mouth, and his skin erupted in

big round beads of cold sweat. It felt as good as vomiting.

Bat ran up to Ram, holding his hat tight on his head, coat flapping in the electrified and

fume-sweetened air. "Good God," he whooped. "Ninety-seven miles an hour in three seconds."

Ram constricted his lungs and belched out a balloon of carbon dioxide. "I want to do it again."

Out of the corner of his eye, Ram saw the metal tubes gleaming and quivering all through his

body. Bat reached out to touch them. "You're a beautiful man," whispered Bat. "A beautiful

machine." After the war, Ram hadn't thought that anybody would ever call him beautiful again.

The bombs and the gangrene had made him only half a man -- but Bat had reversed all that.

Now he was more than a man, a perfect primitive god carved in chrome. "We're going to

change the world together," said Bat. "We'll make those highways sing."

Ram slid away from Bat's hand -- a reflex -- but the other kept pace, holding him tight. Ram

turned over his engine three times, six times, nine times, feeling the hot gasoline roar in his

veins and his belly again leap into flame. He arched his chassis and spread his axles, chrome

glinting everywhere under the sun. Ram never wanted to taste morphine again -- he only

needed premium gasoline and a flat desert to incinerate.

Ram shifted gears in a heartbeat -- in a revolution -- and suddenly his tires gripped the sand

tightly. "Good God?" he said, the taste of rust and lubricant on his tongue. "I am your God

now, man."

Bat fell back from Ram's coughing body, startled, and Ram exploded across the desert, chrome

trimmings shining like molten velocity in the heavy air. In five seconds, Bat had all but

vanished in the heat haze, and Ram's back rattled out two simultaneous melodies of pain and

life. Rising over a dune, his wheels left earth for an instant and he hung stately and

weightless, big tires spinning lazily and slicing the air, until he smashed down again with a

hatred for stillness and silence, and a fever of one hundred and thirty miles an hour.

3. Clutch

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AChromepunkAnthologyByM.Bennardo,illustrationbyLinusPersson4/7/031.IgnitionThreetimesinoneday,FordGrundlinghadspatblood.Never,never,neverhadheimaginedthattheKaisercouldbesohardtokill.They'dbeennaive,hesupposed,thewholeAmericanlotofthem,tothinkthattheTeutonicdisciplineofdeathandwaste-layingwasanythin...

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