I'm really not.
I wanted death. I wanted revenge. I wanted to make widows of these soldiers' wives and orphans of their children. I wanted them to fucking suffer.
The fragments of the Temptation stirred on the floor. A thick greenish fog swirled at ankle level, coiling and rising. Groans and screams echoed, as if coming from some vast subterranean well. The sights and sounds made Sher swing his muzzle away from Kafka. The kid's eyes widened at what was coming from that fog, rising with it as if striding up from the depths.
The kid screamed.
He held the trigger down, a long and noisy burst.
A hand reached from the fog and snatched at the barrel even as Sher was firing. The hand flipped the rifle, reversing it, and then the weapon fired again.
Sher's body danced backward in a ballet of death, moving to the jittery music of the bullets slamming into his body. He screamed wordlessly, but I could hear his thoughts, and I didn't care. It was my hand that had taken the weapon from the kid, even though the hand that had come from the fog had been clawed and green and scaly. It had been my hand--because I'd made it move. I'd ordered its actions, and it had responded.
Sher was dead long before the body stopped twitching and fell to the floor. His squad was staring, momentarily stunned.
It took only that instant of hesitation for them to die as well. A tropical hurricane wind roaring from below shredded the fog, and I took each tendril and made it a thing, a creature of Bosch.
A joker. A demon.
They poured out, shrieking and vengeful: the stag-headed man; a merman in full medieval armor riding a flying, metalscaled fish; a featherless bird with teeth stolen from a Tyrannosaurus; a claw-legged, man-size toad; a cat-demon; a ferocious winged fish bearing a unicorn's horn; flying devils of all descriptions ...
Tey tore the guns away from the soldiers and threw them back to us. The soldiers went down under a clot of swarming attackers.
My demons tore the limbs from their living, writhing victims. They died slowly and horribly, and I ...
I relished every last instant of their pain. The floor literally ran red with blood.
I laughed. I howled. I chuckled.
My jokers celebrated with me. "Out!" I cried to them, and my fantasy multitude echoed the word with their shrill inhuman voices. "Drive them all away! Kill any of them you can!"
Flowing like a massive black cloud, . my troops were gone. My will went with them. I sent them hurtling against the intruders. With their power, I ripped the choppers from the sky and tore the hulls open on their boats. They killed, they maimed, they destroyed.
More of my cavalry swooped down from the sky. Some were jokers riding armored flying fish and armed with (if I could believe the eyes of the Rox) swordfish lances. At their flanks, hags and beasts and creatures of all descriptions plummeted down from the false dawn glow, ablaze in their own infernal light. The apparitions were incandescent, painful to look upon.
The demons landed and tore the guns from the hands of the nats even as the soldiers fired on them. The joker riders flushed out the hidden troops and drove them into the open. The shining, awful hordes whooped and howled and dove at them; the riders impaled them on their strange lances. The soldiers fled before them. In a very few minutes, the attack was broken. The troops were fleeing the Rox any way they could, and my army-my dream army-pursued them. Briefly, anyway.
I was tiring rapidly. With my exhaustion, the summoned creatures of my mind lost strength as well. Those soldiers who made it to their boats or to their choppers I let go as the images of Bosch turned again to wisps of fog and faded away. That night, I'm told, less than half the troops returned to their bases. The rest the bodies-were thrown into the Rox sewage system to rot. There was no place on the Rox to bury them, even if we'd wanted to.
So in essence, I suppose, I eventually ate them.
You know what? I didn't care. In fact, I rather enjoyed the thought.
It wasn't until hours later that I started shaking.
Lovers
VI
There was a storm over Ellis Island. Strange green-black clouds roiled, and occasionally a sullen flicker of lightning would play in their leprous depths. Suddenly a long funnel cloud dropped from the parent mass and with its end whipping like a