Free The General Zapped an Angel: New Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction by Howard Fast Page A

installation. At that point we didn’t wait, but took our chances with the radiation and raced down the desert hillside toward the hole and the mobile homes and the trucks—but not quickly enough. We came to a stop at the edge of a great lake of red oil.
    â€œIt’s not red oil,” someone said.
    â€œGoddamnit, it’s not oil!”
    â€œThe hell it’s not! It’s oil.”
    We were moving back as it spread and rose and covered the trucks and houses, and then it reached a gap in the valley and poured through and down across the desert, into the darkness of the shadows that the big rocks threw—flashing red in the sunset and later black in the darkness.
    Someone touched it and put a hand to his mouth.
    â€œIt’s blood.”
    Max was next to me. “He’s crazy,” Max said.
    Someone else said that it was blood.
    I put a finger into the red fluid and raised it to my nose. It was warm, almost hot, and there was no mistaking the smell of hot, fresh blood. I tasted it with the tip of my tongue.
    â€œWhat is it?” Max whispered.
    The others gathered around now—silent, with the red sun setting across the red lake and the red reflected on our faces, our eyes glinting with the red.
    â€œJesus God, what is it?” Max demanded.
    â€œIt’s blood,” I replied.
    â€œFrom where?”
    Then we were all silent.
    We spent the night on the top of the butte where the shelter had been built, and in the morning, all around us, as far as we could see, there was a hot, steaming sea of red blood, the smell so thick and heavy that we were all sick from it; and all of us vomited half a dozen times before the helicopters came for us and took us away.
    The day after I returned home, Martha and I were sitting in the living room, she with a book and I with the paper, where I had read about their trying to cap the thing, except that even with diving suits they could not get down to where it was; and she looked up from her book and said:
    â€œDo you remember that thing about the mother?”
    â€œWhat thing?”
    â€œA Very old thing. I think I heard once that it was half as old as time, or maybe a Greek fable or something of the sort—but anyway, the mother has one son, who is the joy of her heart and all the rest that a son could be to a mother, and then the son falls in love with or under the spell of a beautiful and wicked woman—very wicked and very beautiful. And he desires to please her, oh, he does indeed, and he says to her, ‘Whatever you desire, I will bring it to you’—”
    â€œWhich is nothing to say to any woman, but ever,” I put in.
    â€œI won’t quarrel with that,” Martha said mildly, “because when he does put it to her, she replies that what she desires most on this earth is the living heart of his mother, plucked from her breast. So what does this worthless and murderous idiot male do but race home to his mother, and then out with a knife, ripping her breast to belly and tearing the living heart out of her body—”
    â€œI don’t like your story.”
    â€œâ€”and with the heart in his hand, he blithely dashes back toward his ladylove. But on the way through the forest he catches his toe on a root, stumbles, and falls headlong, the mother’s heart knocked out of his hand. And as he pulls himself up and approaches the heart, it says to him, ‘Did you hurt yourself when you fell, my son?’”
    â€œLovely story. What does it prove?”
    â€œNothing, I suppose. Will they ever stop the bleeding? Will they close the wound?”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œThen will your mother bleed to death?”
    â€œMy mother?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œMy mother,” Martha said. “Will she bleed to death?”
    â€œI suppose so.”
    â€œThat’s all you can say—I suppose so?”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œSuppose you had