The Armageddon Blues | Page 2

drag him the rest of the way to his feet. Georges stumbled a few steps over the ragged, shell-torn ground, before gaining his balance.
Georges could not think clearly; there was a vast pain in his neck that was only beginning to abate. The terrain about them seemed vaguely familiar. After nearly a kilometer, the retreat slowed, then stopped; they began digging in, grimly determined that the Germans would go no further.
Night descended like a raven. Soldiers were still stringing barbed wire on grimy, rotting wood posts, and the shattered fragments of shell-torn trees. They had to pull dead men off some of the trees before they could use them. Georges and the remains of his company--Henri--sat in the muddy trenches, trying to nurse a small fire, raised a few inches over the mud. They were having some success, more than anyone else, but still the flame was weak.
Georges had not spoken since awakening. When Henri spoke to him, he found himself unable to answer, having, uh, no vocal cords to speak of. They knitted as the night wore on; the scar on his neck began to fade. Near midnight, he whispered, in a voice like ground glass, "Henri? What happened to me?"
Henri was hunched over the small fire, trying to light a damp cigarette that was already half smoked. He finally produced a dim glow in the tip of the cigarette, and sat back against the trenchwall. "Don't know, Georges. German stuck you..." He hesitated. "It looked like your head came off. That's just what it looked like." He shrugged indifferently. "I shot the German. When I looked again your head was in place and there was a bleeding gash all around your neck."
Georges touched the skin above his collar. There was a thin ridge he could barely feel. He nodded. "I used to wonder if I could die."
"Georges?"
"This area looks familiar," whispered Georges. "I think this is where General Dumouriez stopped the Prussians, when they were trying to help King Louis restore the monarchy. The day after the battle ..." He shook his head, and winced at the faint ghost of pain. "That was September 20. In 1792. The next day the National Convention declared we were a Republic." Henri was staring at him, wide-eyed, across the fire. "In January," said Georges in a voice distant with memory, "we cut King Louis' head off."
Henri turned his face away from Georges, and drew his coat about himself. He clutched his rifle tightly. (In the morning he was gone, and that was the last time Georges saw him, because three days later, while Taking a Hill that nobody gave a damn about anyway, he became a Hero of the French Republic, his last thoughts being of Georges Mordreaux. Ironically, it was a German boy with a bayonet who got him too, although the resemblance stops there. The German boy--he was actually younger than Henri, and his name is unimportant, since like Henri he did not survive the war--this German boy put his bayonet in from behind, and the corporal did not resurrect. Ah, well.)
Georges spent the rest of the night trying to whistle. He did quite creditably.
Georges thought, with some irritation at himself, that there ought to be some point to be learned from having one's head cut off, and surviving the experience. He could not think of one, however, aside from the obvious. He was very glad to be alive.
In some ways, thought Georges Mordreaux, I am a very shallow fellow. Ah, well.
The author notes that in the year 1917, Georges Mordreaux was two hundred and five years old.
Perhaps he was a bit shallow, at that.
One of the definitions of the word "entropy," as given by Webster's Third New International Dictionary, is: "The degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity." Put more simply; "Things run down."
Georges never read dictionaries. He considered them, being as they were largely artificial attempts to impose order on the anarchistic languages of man, very much beneath him.
About order-imposers, as dictionary compilers; Georges was better at it.
Indeed, one might consider Georges Mordreaux "The Enemy of Entropy."
Georges liked to.
When the Fire came, and the superpowers decided to sterilize the face of the planet, the freeways survived.
(Vista: A thousand-and-one mushroom clouds dotting the face of a small planet. Terminal acne. Winding lazily among the mushrooms, strips of concrete, over-extended roads, observed the going-ons, and later, when the barbarians and the mutants came howling out of the radioactive Burns to trek the surface of the freeways among the dead shells of the automobiles, the freeways might have giggled to themselves. Eventually the cars were dragged from the freeways for use in making weapons, and the freeways were left alone to contemplate their freewayness.)
Dateline 711 A.T.F. (After the Fire).?
Ralesh caught her