Read Online Guardian of Night by Tony Daniel - Free Book Online

battered kitchen table in Oklahoma City, the table’s plasticized wood-grain surface pockmarked with cigarette burns from the older man’s endless train of Marlboro Reds.
    “I was having a little thing with this woman, Lenka Justinova—well, she was my Czech teacher at the intelligence station, to tell the truth—this was before your maw maw and me got married—and Lenka lived way up inside one of those gigantic concrete monsters the comms threw up all over Eastern Europe. Called ’em panelaks in Czech. Twenty thousand poor suckers in a cluster of ’em, if you can believe it. Made ’em out of this inferior concrete with too much sand that started to degrade the moment it set. It was nice having a little thing on the side with Lenka, but let me tell you, I’d always go see her with a set of tools and spend half my time fixing her toilet or working on her sink instead of, you know, having fun .”
    Except for the mysterious Lenka, his great-grandfather could’ve been talking about modern-day Dallas, Coalbridge thought. All the old buildings were torn to bits and pieces, and all the new stuff was cheap-ass, thrown together with whatever could be easily manufactured or salvaged.
    The centers of the downtown streets had become the only reliably clear thoroughfares, and were used by auto, bus, and foot traffic. Rubble lined the sidewalks and filled the gutters—rubble coated with the gray-white denuded sceeve curd, so that the entire city looked like it had received a thin shellacking with primer and was awaiting a paint job.
    There was also sparkle. A fine glass—the grain-sized shards of shattered windows, Coalbridge figured—paved the center of the streets and remained exposed due to steady traffic. The stuff wasn’t sharp. It had long ago been ground to a sand-like fineness, and the roadway glittered like diamonds when the sun shone.
    Lining the streets, or overturned on the rubble where there had once been sidewalks, were the battered and rusted remains of cars, trucks, and minivans: Fords, Sonys, Apples, Quicks. And for color, here and there some brave soul had attempted a bit of civic improvement. Along Field Street, a line of the burned-out hulks of cars still parallel-parked in the places their owners had left them twelve years ago had been coated on the roof of each car with a layer of potting soil. The soil was, in turn, sprinkled with a hardy strain of nanotech protectant and fertilizer—one of the new varieties of crunch that DARPA and some of the private firms had developed, Coalbridge figured.
    Growing on the car roofs of Field Street—flowers. Daffodils, geraniums, chrysanthemums. All were in full bloom. Either nobody had programmed into the crunch the idea of winter, or perhaps whoever engineered this display had thought blossoms made the place look more Christmassy and had turned them on for the month.
    They looked like zombie daffodils, Coalbridge thought. Undead mums and nasturtiums. Not allowed by the crunch to rest, to wilt, to die off, to proceed through the natural cycle of birth, death, and resurrection. Held in stasis by Frankenstein bugs and the human desire to find some way to spruce up even a hellhole of a place.
    One car, an Apple Rhombi minivan, was completely roofed in poinsettias. Maybe his Christmas theory had been right. But the Rhombi didn’t really look Christmassy.
    Looks like a grave is what, Coalbridge thought. They all do. Like a country graveyard on Decoration Day.
    For a moment, Coalbridge considered how many graves, how many pulverized home sites, how many dunes of human-charnel curd, he’d have to visit to properly honor his dead on Decoration Day.
    Have to be magic like Santa Claus. Need some flying reindeer, too.
    The thought of one day retiring to become a stockman with a herd of flying reindeer made Coalbridge smile. He’d long ago found ways to ward off the crushing weight that came from knowing that everyone—every last one of his relatives—was gone.
    The