Taste of Wrath by Matt Wallace

Author:Matt Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

AS ELOQUENT AS A RATTLESNAKE’S TAIL

They’re rolling up Forty-third Avenue, a procession of half a dozen armored, matte-black vehicles. Most of them are troop carriers, squat and ugly conveyances with bulging steel plates designed to pack in as many soldiers as possible for safe delivery to the battlefield. The lead vehicle, however, is the kind a SWAT team would use to take down entire walls. It’s a six-ton tank with a fourteen-foot battering ram instead of a barrel. The manhole cover–sized steel plate on the end of the ram has been scrawled with the words WON’T YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

White Horse walks up the center line of an eerily deserted Long Island City street. The only sound that can be heard for blocks in every direction is the hard soles of his boots clacking against the pavement. He wonders if they cleared these streets using mystical means, or whether they did what their kind has been doing in this country ever since enough of them piled off a leaky, shit-smelling boat: bully people from their path, destroying anything that could not or refused to move. Neither means would surprise him.

He stops walking when he reaches the middle of the intersection of Forty-third Avenue and Twenty-first Street. White Horse expected his sour guts to be churning like butter mixed with gasoline by now; for all his bold words and courageous sentiment back at the dinner table, he was actually terrified down to his core. A large part of him, the aspect of indifference and cynicism and borderline nihilism he’d spent many decades perfecting, balked as he’d stood up to proclaim he’d head the enemy off at the pass. That part shrieked a torrent of curses so vile, he didn’t know he retained those words and phrases in his brain.

In this moment, however, he feels only a warm sense of calm, something almost serene in its composure.

As the battering ram approaches Twenty-first Street, White Horse wonders if they’ll attempt to simply roll over him, or even veer and ignore the lone, withered figure barring their path. He begins summoning that thing deep inside him, the portal he was born with that allowed him to call between worlds, to speak to what has gone beyond and seek its aid and wisdom (although, facing the perpetual twilight, White Horse suddenly wishes he’d spent more time harnessing that wisdom and less time simply demanding aid for his own purposes).

To his surprise, when the battering ram enters the intersection, the hulking machine grinds to a stop, the rest of the procession halting behind it. The end of the ram is close enough for White Horse to see the chips in the painted letters.

“I am White Horse!” he cries at the armored monstrosity. “The Earth sung its deepest secrets to my people while yours were cornholing goats and speaking in low grunts! And you’re standing between me and my last chance not to fuck everything up! That’s a bad place to be!”

In response, the top hatch of the vehicle springs open and a partially cloaked head peers above it.

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