Under a Cloven Moon: The Satanta Run

By Andy Decker

Three hundred years, give or take a few decades... that's how long the United States A-Contingency under the mountains near Fort Huachuca slept after the Game Changer struck the moon. The world has changed. Against probability, at least one earth-orbiting satellite is still throwing data and what they see is that other facilities may have also survived. With limited resources, a team is sent to uncover pre-internet communications equipment buried somewhere in Kansas. Only, it's not really Kansas anymore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Decker
• Release date: Jul 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301297719

Andy Decker

Andy Decker is a Pastor of a small church in central Illinois. Additionally, he teaches different levels of English Composition and introductory literature courses at Illinois Central College. When he is not busy at these two endeavours and when his teenage daughters are at either green or yellow levels of threat potential, he likes to write, eat, and stare off at nothing in particular. Please visit his blog for more information.

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CHAPTER ONE

The cigar-shaped meteor was officially named Y 791207 135 by the United Nation’s Deep-Space Observation and Threat Analysis Survey (D-SOTAS). A blogger coined it, ‘Game Changer’, a national magazine plagiarized, and that was that. Game Changer stretched two-thirds the length of Manhattan Island and one fourth the island’s breadth. First detected by the Hubble 2 space telescope a decade prior to impact, Game Changer was kept secret from the public for as long as possible. And even when, six years later, amateur astronomers reported something big in the sky that did not belong, government officials dismissed their findings as internet chatter and spun the images as a hoax.

Denial did not halt the sliver of pig-iron, ice, and rare-earth elements from drawing inexorably closer and, eventually, even the most dilettante astronomers saw it for themselves. Soon enough, kids in backyards with their dads peeked into hobby-store telescopes and glimpsed the new light in the sky. The kids tended towards excitement; only a few of the dads were nervous.

The truth dripped slowly into the public consciousness like sodium pentothal though an IV. The powers that be administered information via innocuous, though reliable sources: guests on morning and afternoon talk-shows and quick snips in those daily papers filled with giant pie-charts and entertainment sections. Twelve-second blurbs were read on evening news casts in well-scripted nonchalance, accompanied with a stock photo of some stars. The info-weaving built until later acknowledgments eventually bypassed earlier denials. In a post-Orwellian manner, they expected the population to never remember how it first learned about the end of the world.

Vegas odds-makers offered realistic assessments. Money, after all, was at stake. The gambling started at somewhere in the billions to one, and as the months passed, narrowed through the millions, the hundreds of thousands, and, on the day before impact, when the bookies shut the windows, a wisp of inside information stopped the betting at something like 23,000 to one against an earth-strike.

Those not paying attention to the odds-makers, and the reassurances from Washington and the United Nations, tracked Game Changer's approach with a tilt towards nihilism. The day-to-day world worried itself to a crescendo of self-inflicted chaos until, during the final week, no government held control over its citizens. Though, of course, pockets of preparation and calm did exist, mostly unknown and secreted away from the prying eyes of the citizen journalists.

People sensed an end was near and partook a frantic holiday. Each man, woman, and child enacted the question, What would you do with only a month to live? The Western Hemisphere's live life to the fullest smashed head first into reality. Too few of earth’s twelve-billion humans remembered the golden rule. The necessary counterpart, live and-let-live, went missing.

But, Vegas called it. Game Changer did not strike the earth. A seventy-three hour reprieve was granted, as though by benign providence. Very early, when only a handful of scientists and heads of state knew of the meteor, computer models showed it to be at a slight tilt, like a surf board in the process of upending. Its trajectory led to a lunar impact. Algorithms run with variables removed, and new ones added, peer-reviewed and analyzed to an exponential degree, verified the projections. Game Changer would hit the moon.

Two years prior to impact, the members of the United Nations Security Council knew this. Eighteen months later they released the information, but years of obfuscation concerning even the most trivial of matters had eroded public trust. People approached government explanations like they approached a washed-out bridge. They were long immune to the declarations of legislators and presidents intent mostly on self-preservation. The breakdown of society became as inevitable as the impact of the meteor.

On the day of, Game Changer slid through space like an expertly cast javelin and silently crumbled against the earth's oldest satellite. It broke into shrapnel and the shrapnel careened in directions impossible to predict. The collision took not quite an hour. Live satellite feeds recorded everything and real-time transmissions displayed the disaster on every working internet device on the planet.

When finished, a quarter of the moon had been deeply gouged by what the Pope called the devil's spear; a dire warning and a call for a closer walk with the church. He asked for a renewal of faith and unity, and spoke of the need to live spiritual lives in a material world.

Shadows gave the wounded moon a cloven look, yet the old satellite maintained orbit. At sunset, people stared into the night sky and saw a carving that resembled the hoof of a pig. They celebrated beneath its glow with a strange commingling of looting and thanksgiving; another night of lawlessness wouldn't hurt a thing.

The next morning, network television displayed simple-Simon animations showing how, each month thereafter, the moon would shrink and then grow, resembling at the wane what it had once been. Then it would swell and reform into the hoof; eternal commemoration appearing once every twenty-eight days.

Social order began reemerging, for the seventy-three remaining hours. Celebration replaced the self-inflicted carnage of those who so recently thought only of doom. Television returned to regularly scheduled programming and ratings-hungry commentators resumed their usual interviewing and pitting one expert guest against another. Tides and time looked to roll on as before with the governments of the planet strangely silent.

Few noticed, but the convoys of national guardsmen bringing blankets, water, and foodstuffs seemed small, almost token in scope. It was a detail easy to overlook, considering every city had transformed itself to a looter's paradise. Months might pass before the local police, with military support, could impose anything resembling normal.

Starting early on the fourth morning, many thousands of small, and some not so small, meteors began striking the earth. During the next six days, waves of fist-sized stones, like the blasts of a shotgun, punched through the sky. At least two dozen Tunguska magnitude events hammered the globe. After that, it no longer mattered. Enough satellites had been lost and the electronic atmosphere became so scrambled that no one could keep track.

Ok, back from break. Final segment! If you're just joining, we're talking with Congressman Bill Deline from the fifth district of Ohio, and Mark Emory, head of FEMA's newly appointed Rejoinder Commission. We've been talking about rebuilding in the midst of a looming House investigation of this administration. Gentlemen, we have just a few minutes left. I want to ask the Congressman first, what's next? Where does the country go from here?

Well Bill, I think it's obvious, things were done wrong. If you look at the facts and the time-line, at the way in which the buildup, the preparation was handled, they just don't add up. Tomorrow, Congress is going to vote to appoint a special investigator to look into how this administration handled the Game Changer.

Bill?

And I think, what we're going to find….

Bill, the last thing…

I'm talking….I'm talking about years of cover-ups.

The last thing…

The country deserves answers.

Ok, fair enough Congressman. Mark I'll turn to you. Last word, what do you think is going to happen? Is anything going to come of this investigation?

Thank you. The last thing the country needs right now is for the administration to be bogged down and distracted from its most important task, which is rebuilding and repairing the damage across the country. Both FEMA and the President have done everything humanly possible, and to think we're somehow in collusion with the meteor, that's ridiculous. There's too much work to be done…

The American people deserve…

The American people deserve the full attention…

Mark, the American people deserve to know why more wasn't done…

Gentlemen, we're out of time. I wish you both the best of luck. No matter how you look at it, the future is going to be interesting. Thank you both for being here.

Thank you Bill.

Thank you.

Folks, tomorrow night, we'll be talking with Sandy Kofel, the lead organizer for the 'Healing Bands', an unprecedented organization of rock, country, hip-hop, and alternative musicians, planning a tour of our country to help raise money for the rebuilding efforts. Until then, you've been watching the Bill O'Malley show. Thanks for watching!

On the fifth day after the moon had been stricken, a boulder the size of a small mountain exploded 573 kilometers north-east of Ile St. Paul. Its velocity buried it into the bed of the Indian Ocean. That string of islands once known as Indonesia, the Koreas, and much of southern India ceased. Madagascar drowned beneath the waves to reemerge a decade later as a new archipelago. The west coasts of Australia and the east third of Africa were wiped clean of human life for nearly a half-century. Billion-gallon tsunamis of salt water and ocean-floor sediment remolded the gulfs of Aden and Oman, making them eternally non-navigable.

Those living through the anticipatory carnage and hysteria, those who saw first-hand the column of ice and iron shatter into the moon, soon wished they hadn’t.

CHAPTER TWO

Byrun was a competent horseman and the first runner of the garrison at Red Cloud, though now his running days were over. His true value had been that he could cover a three-mile in half an hour, afoot. Once, not quite a year prior, early winter rains and snow melt washed out a bridge on the north border some distance from Hamblin. This left a column of forty horsemen trapped on the wrong side of a swollen river. Captain Ellis, not wanting to be called down for delays, asked Byrun to get a message across to the city.

Byrun not only swam the floodwaters, but after he clawed his way up the muddy bank, he ran the forty-miles to Hamblin in a day. That was damn good time. After that, the officers all thought Byrun a handy man to have around. Thereafter, they always included a runner on patrols and supply trains.

But now, Byrun’s lidless eyes saw only white light from gypsum and silicon, sand and the reflection of the sun. He had crawled on black, raw knees across desert brighter than snow and stared into a constant glare like the hot coals at the bottom of a fire. The soles of his feet, along with his eyelids, had been cut away with flint knives.

Earlier, when the white grew black he knew it was night and that he had crawled one whole day. The cold numbed his hands and legs and thirst mingled with memories of what had happened and there were times when no thoughts at all could break the pain and shock. But yet he crawled. And when the sun broke the line of the earth, when his arms warmed and he once again felt the ground beneath him and after the sun turned his vision back to white, he decided he could crawl no further. Then he sat and hoped to die.

A line of eight mounted troopers, on their way from Two-Mule to Red Cloud, discovered Byrun. They carried a bundled leather satchel of messages, and a wood chest of silver coins. The troopers found the man atop a wide concrete platform. It was of that ancient grey stone, pocked by thousands of tiny bowl-shaped indentions, testimony of wind and sand and acidic rains. The scout saw something slumped against the remaining decagon shaped leg of what had once been a communications antenna, a steel-aluminum alloy tower reaching more than a hundred yards to the heavens.

At the top of this tower a few streaks of red paint were yet visible, like the end of a bloody spear. The last person who knew what it had been died two-hundred and fifty seven years prior. A strand of support cable, thick as a man's wrist, hung down nearly sixty yards from the top. It slapped against the metal in the wind with a strange sound and perhaps that is what called Byrun to its side; the broken harp-string of a forgotten past careening alien music across plains barren with wild grass and sand.

The tower told the troopers they had another half-day's ride to Red Cloud. Some thought the landmark a sign of the cataclysm. In childhood stories they were told the spear had been cast aside by the great beast that left its hoof print in the night sky and that it had landed with its tip pointing to the heavens; that the red upon it meant the hog had torn his foot and that is why he kicked the moon. Two of the riders signed themselves as they approached, running the fingers of their right hands in a half-circle from their foreheads to their sternums.

Unlike his superstitious men, the sergeant knew it to be man-made, though how or why was beyond him. He saw the design as indelible and not of creation nor of anything beyond man's crafting. Certain of nothing more than an ancient mystery he shrugged at its presence and worried over more immediate concerns.

He hadn't liked it when the scout held up his hand to halt their progress. There was never anything out of the ordinary on this stretch of the trail. The riders stared in dull interest at the scout's back as he slowly rode forward and disappeared over the rise. He returned at a gallop. Man up there sir, don't look too good.

Now who in the hell is that, the Sergeant wondered. He motioned his small command forward.

The scout, atop a rise and some fifty yards ahead of the others, first spotted Byrun slumped against the metal pole. He thought it might be a large muslin sack or an oddly shaped piece of wood. As he approached, he held up a hand to signal the column behind him. He kicked his horse forwards to the platform, close enough to verify whoever it was yet lived. Byrun breathed deeply and his lungs held the death crackle, like those with the burkyoolosis. The rider yanked the reigns to the side and he delivered the news.

Byrun sat naked but for the rag of breeches tied around his waist with a hemp belt. Those who cut away his eyelids left him that much, but only after debating on whether or not to geld him so they could watch their last captive bleed out. The leg of the tower leaned him slightly forward, exaggerating the slumped angle of the tortured man. His tongue swelled and dried in his throat and he breathed only by great effort.

Byrun’s father raised rabbits and the boy had a steady supply of protein so that he grew tall for that age, six feet and two inches. His head was pushed forward so that his chin rested on his chest. His blond and blood-blackened hair hung in his face in knots and coils. His thin, long legs splayed out in front of him. A clot of flies already formed on his feet and around his eyes, forming a crawling, shiny blue mask. The flies vied for position and feasted against the hash-marked mats of his broken and stripped skin.

The last of the three captives to be tortured, Byrun had listened to what they did to the other two. The screams of their agony would pierce his sleep for the remainder of his days. After the other two men died, the raiders drank the wine and beer they’d found in the supply wagons and then, for sport, went to Byrun, cutting him with their knives. Then they stood him up and let him free in a gory variation of blind-man’s bluff. By then, the short, dark-skinned men were dizzy with the rare spirits.

The fighting earlier in the day and the ride from the road had tired them. This, mixed with the liquor, made them want to sleep, so they left him standing on the bleeding soles of his feet. They walked back to the captured wagons and gathered around the final terra-cotta wine jar. They did not return to finish their game. The Luqman's body would be there in the morning.

For some time Byrun did not move. He heard them over by the wagons and was unsure of what he should do. He felt as though the motion of the earth turned upon him; as though he were a brittle spoke soon to snap with the burdens placed upon his shoulders. The sun set, dimming the glare in his eyes and the cold night air set upon him like a blanket. When his captors quieted, Byrun began walking. His steps were painful and raw. He counted his strides, focusing on them as runners sometimes do, as he had done many times to keep pace and track distances. After two-hundred and seventeen paces he could no longer stand. He dropped to his knees and crawled on all fours, knowing only he had to get away.

Correcaminos lay in the landscape between sleep and truth. In dream, he sat on the ground in the deep, pine-covered foothills, at the base of a great range of mountains. He was long-legged and knobby-kneed. He did not know what to do with his arms and so rested them atop his legs. His skin was brown, yet never as brown as the people who lived some days east, with whom his village traded and offered protection.

With him were three other children much like himself. Two of them were boys and one a girl. She had a rare plumage of auburn hair that caught the sun and was pulled back in a long wrist-thick strand. The boys' hair, uniformly black, had been close cropped and resembled chunks of shining coal. They each wore firm moccasins, deer-hide pants, and soft shirts like the color of rain on a fall day.

Because the children had turned eleven the previous year, they were in the same class. This was their first day of training that would allow them to earn their coins and, eventually, become true Fantasma Cuervo. In time, they would ride in different directions and learn of the world. Some day they might return, as had the boy's father.

The other two other boys would ride west together, over the mountains. The girl would travel north. Correcaminos, the child whose father stood before them, would go east.

The old Cuervo looked down at them. They turned their gazes to the ground as they had been taught. The man stepped towards them and the first thing he told them was this, War is waged to kill one's enemies. Wounding your enemy and leaving him behind does not rid you of your enemy. Choose your enemies carefully.

The boy believed every word of this and it became more a part of him than anything else he learned that day, or many days thereafter.

After this memory passed, the grey-eyed war-chief truly woke. His eyes snapped open with a sudden glare, much like those of a bird. His throat was dry and his head thrummed in the late-morning sun. He walked to the wagons and scooped handfuls of water on his head from one of the barrels. He drank deep and put fingers to the horizon, measuring the time.

The previous day, the nuevos hombre they had nicknamed Naranja, who had been with them during the raid, had ridden ahead with most of the others when they started torturing their captives. Those who stayed yet slept and Correcaminos knew they were late and he shoved at the ribs of the other raiders with his feet. He cursed them and insisted they mount their new-won horses and head back to the low ground where the main body of warriors awaited. He did not know when the assault on the Luqman village would begin and he did not want to miss it.

The men with him were Padjos. Their village was to the south, though they knew Correcaminos. He was a Fantasma Cuervo and belonged to no village they had ever seen. Another man they would have argued with, rolled over and gone back to sleep. But one did not bicker with a ghost crow over an hour's rest. They too awakened and splashed themselves with water from the barrels.

They stood and blinked in the direction of the hot sun, already an hour above the horizon. One of them asked about the captive. Correcaminos said the Luqman must have wandered into the desert and died. They had no time to search. They mounted their new horses and rode west. Others would be sent back for the wagons.

Oughta be dead, someone said. A leather boot pushed into Byrun's thigh.

Byrun curled into a ball and his head lolled in the direction of the friendly voice. He tried to say, Help me, but only mumbled. His tongue too thick and dry to shape the words. His mouth took the form of the death gasp.

What do you wanna do sergeant? asked a second voice.

Take him with, said the sergeant.

Byrun saw nothing, not even vague shapes. The voices were dream sounds from the glare of a white canvas. The knots on his head where they had struck him with their fists hammered with each pulse of his heart. He faded again into the blackness that had flirted with him for some hours. The blackness wanted to take him, quietly and forever. Byrun wished it would.

CHAPTER THREE

The supply train followed a dust-trail atop a ridge-line. The men were armed with short stabbing spears. They held them at the ready, propped in stirrup cups. They escorted three wagons, having been called from tedious garrison duty so that the village of Two-Mule might have such things as barrels of oil, satchels of wheat and corn, and jars of wine and beer.

The late summer beat down upon them, as would the cold night to come. They’d left the fields of wild-wheat the day prior and rode slowly among the dunes and rocks and prickly pear at the edge of the west desert. They were a day and a half from Red Cloud and on the main trail connecting the two towns. Byrun, like the others, loosened the clasps on his mail shirt and unpinned the cheek pieces of his leather cap to let air pass through; a common lapse of discipline. They were just another supply escort. Nothing ever happened on these trips. Every trooper knew that and thus ignored the regulations.

First they heard distant crow calls and thought nothing of it. Then a thin sleet of arrows descended upon them. They were brittle things, black shafts of pepper-trees and points of bone that clicked and splintered against their light chain shirts. These were small-game arrows and shot too far to penetrate anything but unprotected flesh. Byrun didn’t even know what they were in the first moments, until one of the big brown mules pulling the lead wagon screamed.

Several of the men saw the black-feathered shaft sticking from the animal’s neck. The mule thrashed and stomped and raised its long face, baring buck-teeth. It screamed and its yoke mate started stamping and pulling its head in odd contortions, close enough to the ridge that the wagon might spill. A trooper, Luther Dross, kicked his horse alongside the stricken mule and tried to calm it.

Everyone knew Luther, the fast-thinking and only black man on the trip. He was an inch taller than even Byrun, and much stockier than the men with whom he served. His people had cattle and he grew up eating beef and hadn’t suffered the protein deficiencies of his contemporaries. He had a reputation of being quick and mean, but fair. It only took that one time, when he broke a man’s face with a single punch, for everyone to know Luther didn’t have the patience to trade insults with a drunk.

Still astride his horse, he wrapped a long arm across the mule’s neck and held the harness line. Luther’s big hand clenched and lines of muscle strained to hold the mule’s head. With his other hand he reached under and patted the animal’s throat saying things like, Mon now, and whoa there, holding himself in the saddle with his legs.

The little rain of arrows continued and served their purpose of distracting and causing confusion. The soldiers didn’t notice the red-mud covered warriors creeping upon them from the shadowed side of the ridge.

That man kaint ride a horse, whada we do?

Make a litter, the Sergeant said, impatient with the lack of thought. It’ll slow us down, but we’ll still be home by night. And give him some water.

What happened to him? someone asked.

He don’t look like he’s of a mind to talk. Now give him some water and get goin’.

After the arrows, sling stones began zapping through the air and banging against the men’s chests, and old Mark’s face. Mark had been forty, the oldest of the guards. He drank most of his pay. Byrun heard the old fighter scream. He turned in his saddle and saw Mark’s hands cover his bearded mouth and chin. Bright blood seeped around gnarled fingers.

The men pulled at the reins on their skittish horses. The animals were not used to such things and by now three more had the