The Exterminators
The two angels came to Sodom in the evening; they saw you coming up the boulevard.
The last day we rode out together dawned the same as any of the others. Low morning mist clung to the plains, made to yield beneath the rattling and hissing wheels of our buggy. From time to time I would fancy that were mariners, and that the mist was the sea given to parting at the blade of our prow, as we set forth towards an unknown horizon. Arnault sat pilot as always, a studied picture of relaxation, a postcard of a carefree driver from some winding coastal road with his shades on and the wind in his hair. I knew that the eyes behind those shades were not relaxed. The coast was far away.
We had been granted rumour of some Class Is that had breached surface out there, in the patchwork where met the old fields and old industry. We pulled up on three of them near a drainage ditch and ratty chainlink fence that ran parallel to the pitted road. Smith and Grailowicz raised rifles and raked muzzles lazily across them and they spattered and fell, limbs tangled together and claws and weapons unused. I tensed, scanning around and peering into the bush beyond the fenceline. I waited, a three-count that stretched into eternity. Nothing.
Smith and Grailowicz relaxed back into their seats amidships of the buggy and Arnault pulled away nice and smooth. It was a clean start to the day which took some tension out of the air; it was theoretically light work but we were superstitious as any. Nobody had panicked, only two of six had fired, we did not allow them to move or react. It was never ideal when they moved.
We left them where they fell. We were licensed and back then that meant that our word was good enough on eliminations. No souvenirs needed, and we were long past wanting any.
I leaned back and slapped Grailowicz on the thigh. “Portentious!” I declared. The sun was beginning to melt the low mist away, sending it Heavenward to steam us. It is perhaps the done thing amongst those of us who have ridden out to declare that you could feel when something wasn’t right, or when the day was going to shit, but I must admit that I had no prefiguring then.
“Ones,” he said, but he was pleased. His was not a face built to be reticent.
“Portents,” I said, and turned to Smith. “Clean work.”
She nodded once. “Sure, sir.”
“Another clean day!” I announced to the buggy at large.
Grailowicz sheathed his rifle into the berth beside his seat and pulled the barrel of his heavy into his lap. The bulk of the gun sat on the seat beside him like a patient dog. It was an Idolator model 9 recoilless and the barrel that he caressed was half the width and length of one of his meaty legs. Engraved into the barrel by his own design in ornate script was THE RIPSNORTER.
“I could not use you for such as they,” he crooned to it. “They were beneath your prowess.”
“It’s but a tool, you great heathen,” said Matheson. He was our scout; he was leafing through his stack of rumours on a clipboard and didn’t look up to say this. “It doesn’t care about riding bench.”
This was an old play; Grailowicz bristled on cue. “She is our companion and shield against greater darkness. When in the stricken depths, who else could light our way?”
“And nobody needs a companion more than you, buddy,” Smith said.
Grailowicz assumed a face that he thought very sly. “Would that an honest warrior such as myself could find a suitable one.”
Smith laughed aloud, infectious and alive in the warming air. Creskin, who was our rover, smirked on her perch in the rear nest of the buggy. We all wore an irregular’s clutch of different fatigues and assorted pieces of armour to our own preference, and she wore lighter than most. Long and lean like a whip, she reclined nonchalantly and kept her gaze aloof of us to the horizon.
Matheson reeled off a couple more likely rumours from his stack and I in turn dictated them as orders to Arnault to drive us there. We rode to them in good spirits after our clean start. Matheson, Smith and Grailowicz even sang a road hymn together, Grailowicz bellowing his part into the sky while Smith broke and laughed again.
The rumours were busts. No breaches nor sign at all, just the thickening trees and bush as we bashed further north. We had to go dragoon, dismounting and pushing on by foot. The rising heat made this a brutal task to cut through denser and denser bush and brush and to no consummation or reward. At some point on these hunts you could feel the bust before you confirmed it, and it made going through with the clearance feel pointless. An unscratchable itch somewhere between the eyes. You had to stick it out while you felt like you would rather be anywhere else. The crew picked at one another with friendly insults to relieve the tension, thrust and retort, needle and sometimes a brittle laugh.
When I was young, I believe eight years of age, my mother set me into the wilds - or so this quest to me felt then - around our cottage to hunt for rabbits for our dinner before my father returned home. I felt as though a mighty geas was laid upon me with this task, for all that I had already shewn some aptitude for navigation and craft in the forest; I laid out my tools and rations on a traveler’s roll and said a prayer over them as solemn as a knight preparing to leave for war. I snared a young rabbit with ease, my craft demonstrated, and I felt a surge of pride at this. They found me hours later, long into evening, with the rabbit still a-snare before me as I had not been able to strike, but neither release it. My father slew the rabbit, a blow to the head that left it ragged, and escorted me home in a high temper.
We cleared the site of the rumour and we returned to the buggy in our own much fouler humour, sweating and chafed. The sun was well stood to attention by then, pressing down on us as we loosened various pieces of armour and kit. Nobody said anything and I wondered if I needed to.
The last shred of the morning ebbed away as we scouted the fourth rumour of the day. We had cut west, inland, and were forced to dismount once more, endlessly circling in and around a mangrove swamp as a unit, our tempers rising along with the heat and humidity. We could not find a single trace. I called this hunt off when the threats to one another rose beyond needling and began to take on a feverish edge. This one was maybe not a textbook clearance.
I ordered a water break outside of the wet confines and grasping fist of the swamp, so that we could cool off in both senses before launching our next drive. Nobody said much of anything there.
Our spirits revived again, somewhat, on the road. Grailowicz said a prayer for our “quest” which was met with derision that was more or less well-natured, and he bristled in return in the same spirit.
The fifth rumour was was busted the other way: a single Class II, slewn well before we arrived, face down in a pool of standing water in the tarmac outside of a disused aircraft hangar. They decomped fast but even so it had been dead since probably the day before. This was a long way out to come for a bust; we had come deep west from the mangroves.
I had us dismount and go through the hangar and surrounds anyway, and go through the motions of checking the II to confirm the kill. This pissed everyone off. I knew it was a waste of time and they knew it was licencing protocol. We went in pairs around empty shells of the buildings, clearing corners, making our shouts and gestures to one another. I felt ridiculous, like a child playing at guns, dressed in my father’s clothing.
We regrouped near the buggy and the corpse.
“Bad fuckin rumours today,” said Smith, and she spat into the pool.
I shot a glance at Matheson, worried that he would rise to this, but he was staring at the slowly melting shoulders of the creature in the pool and at least affecting not to hear her.
“Fuck up, Smiddy,” said Creskin, more or less neutrally. “It happens.”
“Leave off her! She’s just frustrated,” Matheson snapped then. “We all are. I’m sorry, ok. It’s not perfect.”
“Though we plant well, storms may come,” quoted Arnault, apparently serene behind his shades.
I looked between all of them, wondering whether to intervene. There was a moment of perfect tension then, the surface of water not quite overflowing the glass. Creskin was ignoring Arnault and looking at Matheson and Smith and smirking in that way of hers. My head felt hot in that moment. I hadn’t worn a helmet for quite some time by then, but I felt it then, as though it was grasping on my skull.
It was Grailowicz who broke the silence, horking from deep within his chest a huge wad of phlegm and spitting it into the pool, an obscene sacrament for our dead enemy to join Smith’s from earlier.
“We are out here to kill, and to kill righteously,” he said quietly, a low rumble in his throat. “I will stand beside any of you and kill our enemy. There is no need to face inward at each other so.”
“We should mount back up,” said Matheson, staring into the pool.
“That’s - that’s right,” I said. I stepped forward to take control of the little circle forming. My command. “Form up. Remount.” Mold them.
Nobody said anything for another long moment. I fought the urge to scan the perimeter for threats.
There was just us and the corpse and the ruins.
Then, I still felt as though this was just one bad morning, a bad morning that had started well and then gone bust on us. We were out of credible rumours and only had rumour of a Class III gone to ground in the ruins of an old factory or refinery somewhere to the south. Matheson had been excited to be granted this rumour from the Oracle station but Grailowicz and I had both laughed and told him there was no such thing.
“It’s no problem, sir,” said Smith, and she turned to the buggy to remount. The others trailed her one after the other in silence. I took a long pull off my water flask and I was surprised to find that I had near exhausted my day’s ration. It must have been hotter than I thought.
In the wake of this we decided that we would complete our mission to Homestead. Homestead was a farm some distance away from our city, where the two Sisters Marguerite and Abigail took in children who had been bereft of their parents. We would visit on occasion as though it was a working farm, it did not produce all that the sisters or the children needed, and so we would bring them supplies and textiles from the city to supplement their needs. The children greeted us down the road a ways from the main drive up to the house, having espied us at distance, and Arnault slowed the buggy so that they could run alongside us, cheering as Grailowicz preened and flexed for them. Arnault goosed the accelerator on and off which delighted them, but when we pulled into their front yard and dismounted and began to greet them all, Arnault stood off to the side, a touch awkward in how he stood and held his hands. He was always somewhat standoffish with the children, which I never understood. He was the only one of us who had kids.
“We do so appreciate your visits,” Abigail told me, as Marguerite was supervising the children about unloading our supplies and setting them about their minor chores that we had interrupted.
“It is but our duty,” I said, looking for a stentorious tone. “Form the Aegis below as it is set above you,” I quoted.
She made survey around herself, to see if any children were close, I surmised, for she leaned in closer and lowered her voice to say, “If only other crews were so scrupulous as yours.”
“What, what do you mean?”
“We had another crew here recently. Contractors they were, but they requested… favours… in return.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve heard of such. Terrible, to be sure. You are all well?”
“We are!” She spoke now in an urgent and fierce whisper. “We told them that we were already blessed with the friendship and protection of a crew - you and yours.” Her face glowed in mingled triumph and appreciation.
My head ran hot and I felt the beat of my heart in my temples, but regained my face and I pushed my fury down.
“Surely, I misunderstand you, Sister,” I said. “You invoked our name as protection against another crew?”
Her face fell and I saw fear crease it then, in a flash, before she reassembled her expression neutrally.
“If we… If I presumed, too much upon… I am sorry. I only thought that you would… you have always been decent to us, and us to you.”
“Do not use our name. We cannot afford strife with another crew. You can report them as you would normally, or us if we were to transgress.”
She assented, her eyes to the ground, and moved away to assist Marguerite and the children. Though I was still angry I was glad she had brought it up so that I could address it and appropriately cut it off.
Creskin was urged into a game with the children, and she made a show of resisting it before being carried to it as sure as any river ever pulled a boat downstream. She stuffed a couple of bandages into her hip pockets so that they dangled out and then she took off running around the dusty front yard, the children chasing her and trying to claim the bandages as they streamed from her pockets. She baited them in before dodging to the sides or accelerating away, laughing as they scrabbled and flailed at her banners, laughing with the children as they laughed with her.
When I was young, I don’t know how young, my father kept chickens at the cottage. He let them roam in a yard much like this one, save that he had wire up over the thick palings and rails. He would always insist that I be present when he slew one, and that this was owed to them. A life spent in service and taken in a single burst of blood, but eyes to witness meant a debt repaid, by his lights. I have seen much blood since and borne this witness, mostly to creatures but some men and women too.
Creskin allowed the children to corral her into a corner, acting winded and stymied. She shed some of that aloof armour she wore with us when it came to the children. She allowed them to swarm up and over her and bear her to the dust, so that no one or two children claimed the bandages but that they triumphed over her in their numbers. They shouted to acclaim themselves victors and laughed as they pulled them from her and held them aloft in the afternoon sun, a pair of dirty crumpled bandages as glorious a flag that ever flew over ramparts or battlefield.
After this game we gathered for lunch together, rabbit stew, served from a gigantic old pot in the middle of the long roughhewn farmhouse table. There was even a new potato each, carefully brought to tenderness in the stew. Grailowicz was moved near to tears at the revelation of the potato and he begged the Sisters that he might be allowed to say the Grace. We each held hands and so encircled that table while Grailowicz made his thanks to the golden light above and prayed that we should all have many a potato in the days to come. Marguerite and some of the children laughed at this, but not unkindly to my ear. It was cooler in there than outside, despite the fire and the hot stew, and the golden rays of the sun cut into that cool and calm old stone house. My heart was glad there.
After our repast, the children cheered once more when Matheson gathered them for a fable, and they weren’t even particularly unruly in sitting and becoming the audience, because they loved to share in a story together. Here is what he told them as best I recall, an old favourite.
—
The Fable of the Crossing Ape, mostly as told by Licensed Contractor Mel Matheson to the semi-orphaned Children of the Homestead, with Interruptions Elided
When the world was young there was a great Ape. He was dutiful, obedient and a pleasant fellow to be around. When he came of age he was to assume dominion over the lands of his family and so he was raised to be wise. He roamed to each corner of their lands and made pact with their subjects, the lesser monkeys, the beasts of burden, and the bees. He was well received in his pacts and he was beloved of the lands.
Of course, as any Ape was taught, he knew that the borders of the lands were not to be passed. To the north, the lands were cut by the mighty river. To the east, the forest turned to thick brambles which were impossible to cut through. To the south, the plains became foreboding and uncrossable mountains. To the west, the land dropped away in sheer cliffs.
One day the Ape felt a great hunger in his feet and he went a-roaming, but in this roaming he was not making pact but simply roaming for its own sake. He fair ignored his future subjects which was most unlike him. He went to the thick brambles of the east and he studied them, and he saw how with the right blade, precisely wielded, he could make a path through them. “This can be done,” he said, and he left.
He visited the mountains of the south and he admired their majesty. He saw how normal climbing of these mountains would be certain death. He devised a plan that would see teams of Apes work together and help each other scale the mountains in stages and caches. He saw this all in his mind at once. “This can be done,” he said, and he ambled away, satisfied.
He beheld the drop of the west, where the river widened and became the glorious waterfall, and the sheer cliffs either side of the falls framed it. He smiled knowingly to himself because he saw the birds in flight around the falls, above and below, and he saw how the glide of their wings carried them, and he saw how the same would be fashionable from craft, and how Apes could glide safely down from any height. “This can be done!”
But then… he ventured north to the river, and he was stumped there. By the golden light of the aegis above he was stumped!
There was a great bridge there, firmly embanked on both sides of the river. There was traffic from both ends as the beasts went about their business, chattering amongst themselves and crossing the river freely to and fro. Why, the river may as well have not been there to them!
A Monkey rode up, driving a tinker’s cart all packed and a-dangle with many clever gadgets. Pulling the cart was a pair of magnificent hounds, proud in their harnesses.
“Ho, Ape!” cried the Monkey from his driver’s perch. “It is good to see you by my river.”
The Ape bestirred himself from his ponderings and admired the Monkey’s cart. “Well met, clever Monkey,” said the Ape. “I happened here by chance and I am pondering its Mystery.”
Monkey laughed in his friendly way. “But there is no Mystery here,” he said. “You may simply cross. I myself intend to cross and see what I will see on the other side, and who may buy or trade my goods.”
“That’s as may be for Monkeys,” said the Ape with his most diplomatic voice, “but for me it is not permitted.”
“You have your ways,” said Monkey. He laughed again! “I am sure that you know best.” Monkey bid farewell and hied his beautiful hounds on and across the bridge.
Still the Ape sat and he pondered. He could cross this bridge as surely as he could stroll anywhere in his kingdom-to-be. But it was not permitted to leave those borders, and he had not made the bridge. What was he to do? Time passed there as he sat and thought.
Many beasts passed him during this time but the next beast to hail him was a Rabbit, circling around the Ape from the path in its cautious way. “Hail, O Ape!” called the Rabbit. “It is not usual to see you here, though you are welcome.”
The Ape greeted the Rabbit in turn. “I am pondering the Mystery of this bridge, that is all. Say now, do you cross it? What will you do on the far bank?”
“I will cross,” said the Rabbit, “and I will follow the Monkey; I will seek my fortune and encircle him where he goes.”
“Is that all?”
“The water must follow its course,” said the Rabbit, and he went forth, and he was followed by first few then many of his fellows.
At last, as the sun began to slip from the sky, there came one last beast to hail the Ape. This was a great old Elephant and he rumbled a greeting to the Ape that shook his very bones in his chest.
“I always say,” said the Elephant, “that before the sun sets each day even the oldest beast will always see something new. And here I see the great Ape sitting by the bridge.”
“Ho, Elephant,” said the Ape. “I am pondering the Mystery of this bridge.”
The wise old Elephant watched the Ape closely.
“I see that you are a beast of Language,” said the Elephant. “My people are as yours. We have a story that we tell to each other, of a sparrow that flies through the night, and the night is lorn and dark and cold; then the sparrow finds itself flying into a dwelling. The dwelling is well lit, warm, full of life and laughter; the sparrow sees this all blur past it in a rush as it flies in a window and out the front door, back into the night again, into the dark, never to see that house again.
“Have a care,” the Elephant said gravely, and his wise old eyes were kind as he watched the Ape, “where your clever mind of Language leads you.”
While the Ape pondered the truth of this, the Elephant bade him farewell and crossed the bridge with the last of the sun.
And so the Ape sat at the bridge and he pondered its Mystery and the Mystery of all else; he spent many years there and one day he sprouted into a great Tree, and all who came to the bridge spoke with the wise old Tree whose limbs and leaves did shade the bridge under his mighty shield, and whose wisdom was always sought before crossing or not crossing the bridge. And this was how the great Ape learned another way to serve his people, with patience, wisdom and preservation.
—
We broke from Homestead soon after the fable, with warm farewells and promises to return and not-sures on our return date. I saw that Abigail was speaking quietly to Marguerite as they both watched me climb aboard. Marguerite’s eyes narrowed at me. Good, I thought. It would not do to have any confusion. The children ran alongside us as long as they could before falling behind us.
The old refinery dominated the sky on our approach, rendered rampant in jet black sable against the gold-orange-pink of the sunset, a stark rampart cut from the tesselated feathers of the clouds. We came to it via a wide cut bush boulevard that must once have been its main road, driven by many trucks, and beheld it so, athwart our path. I felt then in the air the luring beat emanating from it, a call gone into the air and so enweaved with it as to feel a part of our breaths. Did I then, at the last, have any prefiguring as to what would befall us? Still the answer was no: I felt a certain indeterminate pang and a rush of excitement, I felt as though we were knights in a fable, come down the hard road to a castle to slay the dragon a-nest there.
We dismounted at the remnants of what must have been the main gate, leaving our faithful steed in safety, Arnault patted it as he dismounted, as though it had a flank to pat.
When Matheson told the children the fable he (of course) told them the modern one. The one I had learned from my grandfather, frail though he was, ended with the Ape rising and striding across the bridge, when the sun was gone from the sky. Go, then, and see. I could feel it pushing harder, the pulse in the air meeting the pulse of my heart. The beat of the blooddrums in my head. That drive. Come then. Stand up and see.
We cleared the surface structures, one rusty shell after another, the air in each one stale and the dying shafts of light from our breaches illuminating the dust in newly swirling columns from our passage. Banks of consoles and levers and messes of gears and pipes. You could have believed this was another bust, just another haunted house at the edge of our world, but by the pulse in the air and my head I knew better.
At first there were none, and then there were many. Drawn to us perhaps, or guided, I didn’t know then or now. Class Is for the most part, rushing us in their groups of two and three, shrieking, swiping, sometimes firing. We took them to pieces. We moved well together, as well as we ever had, covering each other’s angles, annihilating all before us in our controlled fury. I barely had to lift a finger or a muzzle and I felt a surge of pride, my crew, sweeping all before them, moving point to point on some intuitive and unplanned diagram. O how the pulse of my head beat then in harmony with my heart and the air. And then suddenly we were in trouble, out in the open but still in a cavernous old structure and a II swooping down from the steel rafters on ragged and diseased-looking wings. This must be how the rabbit feels when it thinks itself safe in a barn and then discovers the hidden owl above. It crashed into Matheson, entangling him and slamming him into the ground. Its wings pulsed up and around it like a cocoon, cutting us off from him as we rushed in around it.
“Motherfuck,” said Arnault, meditatively. He raised up a shotgun and began to pump shells into it. It was as though he was firing into a deep pool of oil. Grailowicz ran up, firing his rifle as he went, firing it dry looking for its head somewhere in that roiling mass. He threw his gun aside as it spent on him and pulled a massive knife from his hip and began to hack at it instead. Smith’s face had become a rictus and I watched as she circled it, firing and silently screaming. She ran dry too and as she fumbled for a new magazine she caught my eye and found her voice, yelling at me to do something, do anything.
It was Creskin who saved him. She had somehow scrabbled her hands in under the wings and found its hand in turn. Suddenly the wings pulsed outwards and it made a sound halfway between a shriek and a gasp. The wings collapsed inwards, melting in patches, and then I could see that she had snapped a dampener cuff around its wrist. Matheson lay under the collapsing form, his rifle thrust out in front of him as a shield, ripped and corroded under its jaws and very touch. His eyes were wild but he himself was unscathed save for any bruises sustained in the initial crash. He repeated wildly over and over “I have seen the maw. I have seen the maw.” Smith and Grailowicz pulled him from under the dissolving former bulk of the II and Grailowicz pulled him into a bear’s hug. Creskin, her rescue complete, moved away ahead, scouting.
We found the entrance to the burrow, many times the size of a rabbit hole, and torn much more roughly from the earth. We gathered to it and Grailowicz had us all go to one knee in a circle around it and he lead us in a final prayer together, an appeal to the Aegis above to safeguard us, we who would enter into such dark. I think then that we all looked suitably determined, and if Matheson quavered, he kept it to himself and lidded away.
We entered that burrow and the burrow became a chamber and in that chamber everything became undone. I can feel it now, all too easily, if my eyes close or my attention wanders away from my leash. Or if I want to. The pulse in the air becomes a rhythmic thunder, a physical pressure around us, as though the air itself will take us apart.
There it is before us, no Class III. We were right, there is no such thing. She is Herself. It stands at rest, shoulders slumped backwards, pelvis forward, splayed black hands like twin spiders a-dangle below its hips. Its head snaps up and to us each in turn, and this glare is like a weight. It raises long arms up, palms upward, welcoming, beatific. It is at least seven feet tall and sometimes I think it is glowing and sometimes I can barely see it. The span of its arms engulfs the room like wings. She smiles at us now.
Grailowicz begins to laugh and the laughing becomes a great keening, an involuntary prayer, he shrieks it like he is crying. He brings up the barrel of his Ripsnorter, his beautiful muse, and he beseeches her. The thunder of the Idolator becomes but another pulse in that thick air.
Creskin has not panicked. She darts off left and runs on a wide curve towards it. She unhooks the dampener cuffs from her belt and winds them up to leash it, to bring this thing to our heel by its wrist. She moves like she always has, like a flashing knife, like a lake bird skimming the water towards the sunset. The stream of fire from the Idolator near cuts her in half as Grailowicz pans it across her. She was close; her blood gouts forth and it snaps and hisses against its skin where it hits, immediately burnt and boiled away. The stench of it is incredible; electric and feral.
There is a song in the air, weaving in and out of the beat of that bloody pulse, beautiful and unknowable; I try to grasp it and it pours through my fingers and away like greasy smoke.
I realise that my gun is hanging loose from its strap around my neck and shoulder. I make survey of my crew - it’s my job and I’m proud to do it. I turn my head left though it will rend apart from the effort. Smith and Matheson are fucking on the fetid floor of this place; they are fucking like feral dogs, fucking like they will die before they stop. Casualties. How long have we been here? Report. Grailowicz has now brought his weapon to bear. The slugs slam into it over and over, dozens per second, inexorable, the apex of precisely violent engineering honed to this point and for this purpose. It does not flinch.
I see Arnault now, right flank, shotgun. He has made pilgrimage towards it and is dropping to one knee and aiming.
She speaks to me. Her eyes lock with mine and her speech rolls across me like the tide. When she speaks she is the moon reflected in the roiling ocean that commands it to rise; she is the rip current below that hauls you down. I don’t understand a word of it; could I be expected to?
It takes one stride to Arnault, and though its limbs are long he is more than one stride of that limb away, surely? Surely. The distance covered is not the distance covered. Its enormous and spidery left hand cups his chin in tender benediction and he spasms violently once and collapses to the ground. His legs go on twitching. I think of the chickens. I haven’t raised my gun yet, but I’m sure I want to.
Grailowicz turns to look at me and his finger never leaves the trigger. Is he in there, somewhere, Grailowicz, my companion of many rides, behind the waxen mask I see now? There’s no reason to think elsewise, but I cannot see him. With all that I have seen I have to hope that the Books and the Lessons are true, that there is the animata within us that so brings our limbs and thoughts to life and is the truest essence of who we are. Believing there is such a thing, can you also believe that it can be shorn or cleaved away from a body yet living, and could such a thing return to nest within once more? Her song is a shriek in the air.
I raise my weapon and fire now; I don’t know why it works but it does. The single bullet drills through her face and it collapses, as any beast ever did when finally brought to bay. My head runs from hot to cold in a feverish rush. Grailowicz stops firing but I don’t know if it is intentional or if he has run dry. Arnault doesn’t move; why would he? Would he? I try not to look as Smith and Matheson untangle from each other and they look anywhere but at any of us. I inspect our conquest, to confirm
In animus it was terrible and vital and beautiful and in inanimata it is any other carcass, strewn to the earth, a heap of jumbled flesh. It is a wrack on the shores of the world, beached, somehow. Meat for the earth. I cannot make out the limbs and parts of its body that so recently flowed with such sharp grace. If it so possessed a spirit then it must have done more than puppet its limbs? We left that place, one after the other, in no harmony at all.
When Grailowicz leant down from the lip of the burrow and hauled me from the earth, I could see that the last vestige of sun had long since fled the sky. Stars wheeled above me in a giddy, dizzying dance as I regained my feet and the world felt vast and empty around me. I realised that while he pulled me up he had spoken to me and I asked him quite politely to repeat himself. Every syllable that exited my mouth felt like I was picking my barefoot way across a floor strewn with broken glass.
“I did not mean,” he said. “I did not mean - to - that fucking bitch.”
“Yeah, look, probably not,” I said to him.
I think that was the last thing any of us ever said to each other.
We returned to our buggy, sat silent in the entrance where we had left it. We took our accustomed berths, moving as sleepwalkers, before realising the problem; that Arnault was not in the pilot’s chair. We sat and we stared and I eventually moved there.
When I was younger, though I was already a man, I sat in a bar together with my crew, on the night before our last ride together, though I did not know this would be the last then. Smith’s face glowed in the warm light cast from a festoon of faerie lights, strung out above us in a zigzag across the imperfect tin beams of the place and she laughed in her inviting way, and the crew laughed with her, gathering to her without any physical leaning but by some ineffable attitude. I felt a bitter pang towards her, how she could inspire this easy and unspoken fealty, while I worked for it and found my fingers forever fallen just short of the grasping; I pushed this unworthy feeling down and away, we were gathered here as one in common cause, a crew, here making our lighted barrow against the dark void that surrounded us, nestled here at the edge of a mostly empty city that we pretended was full, we drank and laughed together and we sang a hymn, a hymn of the hard road to come and the dangers to be faced together.
I drove us home by the light and map of the stars, trying not to look at the moon, but sometimes I would feel a great wave of nausea upon me and the stars would whorl sickeningly around her up there in the unknowable vault, and I thought of the cottage of my mother and father, unreachable now as that firmament above.
I don’t remember if we ever reported it.
Where am I to go now? What does the sparrow do when it hits the darkness again, having seen the light?
On some days when awake I nearly understand what she said to me. On some days I nearly understand why my bullet struck. On some days I nearly understand a lot of things. Don’t you?
The Exterminators is extracted from HEAVE! and Seven Other Stories of Man at War Against the Natural World, to be published in August 2026 by Gollancz. Reprinted with permission.