by Tom Kratman
This had not stopped him, after the manner of the Druze, from pretending to be a Moslem. Neither had it stopped him from smuggling in arms, ammunition, and some other equipment by the ton. Virtually every rifle and machine gun used, and virtually every round fired, in this town and half a dozen others had been brought in by Khalid from freighters anchored off the coasts and in the southern ports of Sachsen. Where the freighters had acquired the arms he couldn’t be sure, but the designs were Volgan. He suspected that his boss, Fernandez’s, boss, Carrera, had ordered them from one or more of the factories in Volga in which he had a controlling interest.
But with those two, you never really know. These things could have come from Sumer, or from any of two dozen other places that make Volgan-designed arms. Be funny if they came from the Zhong, though, all things considered. And that’s not impossible; the Zhong will sell anything to anyone.
The rising had come early and, apparently, spontaneously with the news that the Tauran Union expeditionary force to Balboa had b een defeated and destroyed, while the smaller one in Santa Josefina, east of Balboa, was fleeing for its life to the farthest corner of that country. On the whole, Khalid thought, I doubt it will make any difference. Carrera pretty obviously—well, to me it seems obvious—wanted the uprising to completely destroy the Tauran Union once the armed forces of its member states were destroyed or captured.
He stopped his progress to turn back to the rows of strangled, dangling, darkened-face corpses. I would guess that “completely destroyed” means something like that; the ruling class of the Tauran Union lynched. He looked up again at the sky, glowing with the reflection of the many fires burning below. And collateral damage just isn’t something that would much deter him . . . or them. Both Carrera and my chief, Fernandez, are wicked, wicked men.
He resumed his long walk home, path lit by that same reflected fire.
As am I, come to think of it, since I—
Hmmph, what was that?
Khalid stopped walking and waited, ears straining for a repeat of the sound. He thought it might have come from a human being but, if so, it was neither quite masculine nor quite feminine. Rather, something in be . . .
He heard it again, head snapping in the direction from which he thought it had come. There was a thin slit in the rows of buildings. Yes, there it is again. Maybe it’s a little more female than male, after all. Even so . . .
The next sound was laughter, from at least one man, though Khalid thought two more likely.
Slipping the rifle off his shoulder, Khalid advanced cautiously. What had seemed a thin slit widened as he neared into the opening to an alley, perhaps half a dozen feet across. From its opening came more laughter, and definitely masculine, as well as a more or less feminine voice saying over and over, “I will not cry out. I will not cry out. I will not . . .”
Though the alley was open to the sky, the pattern of light reflecting from above mostly missed it. It was much darker than the broad boulevard.
What is happening in that alley is none of my business, Khalid tried to convince himself. It was a doomed effort; he felt his thumb flicking the safety off the rifle even as he brought it up to his shoulder.
Well, fuck, the woman is probably near the ground, whether on her back or on all fours. So I go low—he crouched down—and aim somewhat high.
As quietly as he could, aided by typically smooth Sachsen paving and tennis shoes on his feet, Khalid advanced toward the alley’s mouth. As he did, shapes began to form outlines inside. Four, he thought, plus one I cannot see who’s probably fucking the girl. But this is still none of my business.
On the other hand, I detest Moslems, so . . .
“I will not cry out. I will not cry out. I will not cry . . .”
It was the laughter, actually, that caused Khalid’s finger to depress the trigger. Bad enough to rape. Worse to gang rape. But to laugh at the girl at the same time is just too much. He closed one eye.
His first burst ruined his night vision in his open eye, even as it lit up the alley as if by a strobe light. He shifted left and fired again, going on nothing but the memory of target placement as he’d seen it in the muzzle flash.
Shift . . . squeeze . . . bababang. Shift . . . squeeze . . . bababang. Shift . . . squeeze . . .
He stopped then, for a moment. He thought he’d seen all the standing targets go down like ninepins. But one remained, he thought, and that one was on both knees, still behind the girl, frozen stiff with fright. If he’d been stroking he had apparently stopped with the shock.
Of all the horrors of a night like this, a woman feeling someone die while he’s inside her is just that one step too much.
Khalid arose from his crouch, padded forward and delivered a butt stroke to the right side of the head of the last rapist. That one, apparently frozen in terror at the earlier firing, was thrown to his left, head bouncing off first the wall of the alley, and then the ground. Khalid reached down, took a good grasp of the hair, and began dragging him out of the alley.
They trend skinny but this one weighs next to nothing.
Once out in the glow of the firelight, he tossed the rapist to the ground. He was surprised—Though I shouldn’t have been—that it was only a boy of thirteen or fourteen at the most. He returned the rifle to his shoulder but hesitated for just a moment. That was long enough for the victim to say, “No, wait. Please let me.”
Khalid risked a quick glance. She was tall, slender, blonde.
And apparently not a natural blonde. Not bad looking, but maybe just a little touch horse-faced.
“That seems fair,” Khalid replied, stepping to one side and handing her the rifle. “Do you know . . . ?”
“Only in general terms,” she answered.
“That’s probably good enough.”
“Should it bother me that he’s only a boy?” she asked. “It doesn’t; not a bit.”
“Can’t imagine why it should?”
She hesitated. “I’d like him awake to see me kill him. How do I . . . ?”
Wordlessly, Khalid walked over and delivered a vicious kick to the boy’s kidney. He screamed and then sat bolt upright.
“There you go,” Khalid said, stepping back.
“Look here, boy,” the woman said in German. Once she saw his eyes widen much more than the width of the muzzle, she said, “Ah, good, you do speak the language. So tell me, was it worth it?”
Tears started to flow from the boy’s eyes. He shook his head frantically, opening his mouth as if to say something. No words came forth.
“You want to apologize, don’t you boy?” she asked, in a sympathetic tone. “You want to convince me that it was the others who put you up to it, don’t you? That it wasn’t really your fault?”
The boys head became almost a blur, so quickly and repeatedly did he nod.
“Tough shit. Apology not accepted.” She gave him just enough time to realize she meant to kill him before squeezing the trigger and sending at least several of the remaining nine or ten rounds into the boy’s body. The rest careened across the boulevard, striking pavement, stone, and brick.
“Motherfucker!” she concluded.
“Here’s your rifle,” she told Khalid, handing it back. “And thank you, whoever you are. You can bill me for the ammunition, if you like.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Khalid assured her. “But my manners; they call me, ‘Khalid.’ And you are?”
“Alix Speidel, at your—but please don’t take this the way they would have—at your service.”
Something about that name. Khalid looked more closely. The name, he face: “Alix . . . hmmm . . . Alix Spei—I know who you are! Member of the Reichstag. Most prominent voice in Sachsen for closed borders and a return to tradition.”
“A lot of people know who I am,” she agreed. “And, yes. I think the events of the last day argue more eloquently for closed borders than I ever have.” She pointed with her chin at the alley where the cooling bo
dies lay in pools of mixed blood. “If these had known who I was, they’d have burnt me alive. After raping me.”
“If any of the others should catch you and find out, they’ll burn you alive.” Khalid hesitated a moment before adding, “You’re a much cooler customer than I expected, based on what I heard you repeating over and over.”
“‘I will not cry out’? Yes, well, the boy was fucking me in the ass without lubrication,” she said, matter-of-factly. “It hurt like the devil. What was I supposed to say?”
“You need a safe house,” Khalid announced without even thinking about answering the question. “Mine will do. And you will be safe there, even from me.”
“Good,” she said, “because I far prefer girls.”
“Yes, I remember. But we’ll need . . .” He began looking from one street-level window to another. “. . . a disguise. Aha; there.”
Walking to one window, Khalid used the butt of his rifle to smash it in. Once he had the glass out of the way, he reached in and pulled out a long section of very dark drapery. “Wrap this like a burka. Then walk two or three steps behind me. No one will question us.”
“Wait.” She walked back into the alley to retrieve her torn skirt. Seeing it would not stay up short of a trip to the tailor she let it fall back to the alley’s bloody pavement. “Burka, it is.” She noticed Khalid’s armband. “Wait; aren’t you a Mo—”
“No, I’m not,” he answered. “My people detest Moslems more than you do, but we’re not above faking it to survive and get our way.”
“After this, my way,” she said, “is likely to involve some very large gas chambers.” She began to wrap herself in the length of dark cloth. “And so I, too, shall fake it. For now.”
She remembered, if only just, to grab the purse that had been cast to one side when she’d been taken.
On their half an hour’s walk to safety at Khalid’s rented safe house, they saw horror aplenty, from gang rapes, to lynchings to apartment buildings being burned with their inhabitant still inside. Twice Khalid had to show his trilingual pass from the imam and twice he and the woman were allowed to pass. Three times she’d had to squeeze his arm to prevent him from intervening.
“What does that thing say?” Alix had asked, after the second such stop.
“I’ll tell you later,” he’d replied.
***
“You’ll want to shower,” Khalid said, pointing Alix in the right direction. The apartment was dark, but enough light filtered through the windows for her to see where he meant. Looking her up and down, he added, “I’ll find you some of my clothes. We’re close enough in size, if you’re willing to make a few compromises. I suggest you hurry with the shower; the water heater is electric and it will probably be some days before power is restored, if it ever is.”
“I will want to shower,” she agreed, “but first I need to take a shit. That boy wasn’t the first one to mount me.”
“Sure. Ummm . . .”
“Yes?”
“We need to find you a doctor. There’s no need to inform the police, since justice has already been done, but you might have . . .”
“Caught a venereal disease?”
He nodded, a little ashamed of his sex.
“There are two possibilities. I have or I haven’t. If I haven’t, there is no problem. If I have there are also two possibilities. It is either curable or incurable. If it is curable there’s plenty of time. If it’s not, it hardly matters when I see a doctor.”
“You are—and I say this in a spirit of deep admiration—one cold and hard and very tough bitch.”
“All my life,” she replied, “all my life.”
While Alix was in the bathroom, he felt his way to a flashlight he kept in the kitchen, under the sink. Once he had that on, he went to his own bedroom and rummaged through the closet for some clothes that would fit her.
Well, that will cover her at least; fit will depend on a lot of rolling of legs and sleeves and a lot of cinching of her belt. He thought about offering her some of his own underwear but decided, under the circumstances, that she’d probably feel better in her own skin, alone, under the too big clothing.
He thought for a moment he heard sobbing through the door to the bathroom. Understandable, if so, but better not to mention it.
Once he heard the toilet flush and then the shower running, Khalid went to the spare bedroom, the one he used as an office of sorts. In that room he kept a small computer with a very large battery capacity. A wire ran from it, out the window, and up to a satellite dish mounted on the roof. He turned the computer on, signed in, and checked messages and then the news.
There was only one message, sitting encoded in a draft folder that served as a message drop. Once he decoded it from a book sitting in a bookcase affixed to the wall, he read that he was to stay put in Sachsen and await further orders. Fuck.
The GlobalNet news gave him more useful information. It seemed that Balboa was willing to return all the Tauran prisoners of war, but only for a price. He read the price and whistled. I guess that’s how you pay for a war; you win and then present the bill to the enemy. But two million legionary drachma, roughly four million FSD, in silver and gold, per prisoner? That’s got to be unprecedented, at least on this scale. And we claim to have over two hundred thousand POWs in varying stages of health. That should pay for a good deal of the war, even all of it and then some, given how we fought it mostly on the cheap.
Shutting down the computer he gathered up the flashlight and the clothes he’d sorted out for her and went to the bedroom. There he dropped the clothing on the bed. From there he went back to the living room to wait. She was a Sachsen; long showers were inefficient and therefore out. And, if she took a little longer than most Sachsens?
Washing the memory away, I imagine, or at least trying to.
She came out wrapped in a towel. “I suppose it’s silly, since there’s not much of me you haven’t seen . . .”
“Not silly at all. I’ll sleep on the couch.” He flicked on the flashlight and pointed it at the bedroom door. “You can take the bed.”
“You are very kind. I have no . . .”
“Just get a good night’s sleep.”
Khalid was up with the sun. He was hesitant to even open the refrigerator, since the electricity wasn’t on and food would begin to decompose more or less rapidly once he opened the door and let the heat in. Instead, he took a few rolls from the breadbox, some jam and marmalade from the pantry closet, and Hordalander butter that hadn’t needed refrigeration, anyway.
These he placed on the now well-lit kitchen table, along with a couple of plates, spread knives, and two room-temperature beers. Then he went and knocked gently on the bedroom door. “Are you up for breakfast?”
“I could eat something,” came the answer muffled through the door. “Give me a moment to dress, please.”
“Sure; it’s no real hurry.”
When she emerged from the bedroom her eyes were red and puffy. Khalid affected not to notice. He led her to the kitchen and held a chair for her. Then he prised the tops off the beers and poured them into tall glasses, setting one down in front of her and the other on the opposite side of the small table.
“I checked the international news,” he said to her. “It seems that Balboa has defeated the Tauran Union . . .”
At the mention of that last Alix stopped buttering a half a roll and spat. “Filthy fucking TU; they’re at the root of all our problems.”
He shrugged. “Be that as it may, it looks like the armies of the TU are destroyed, killed or captured almost to a man. They’re offering to give them back for . . . well . . . a lot of money . . . or a lot of gold and silver, actually.”
“I suppose that was at the heart of this Moslem rebellion,” she said.
“That would be my guess,” he agreed, more than a little disingenuously.
“We have no troops anymore,” she said. “We had two and about a half divisions and sent them all to Balboa under the command
of that damned frog.”
“You still have people fighting, I think.”
“We used to be a ‘nation in arms,’ with a huge slice of reservists ready to form up and fight at the call.” Alix sighed, wistfully. “A lot of them had legal weapons and a lot of them had inherited weapons secreted during and after the Great Global War by their grandfathers and great grandfathers. On the face of it, we’re nearly disarmed, with only one firearm for every four people. In fact, we have three times that many illegal arms hidden away.
“But conscription didn’t touch the cities so much; young men there preferred an alternative to military service and were given it by a weak government and vote-chasing politicians. Most of our potential power remained out in the villages. We could have an army again, though it might be a little long in the tooth, if we had a cadre to rally around.”
“All dead or prisoners, I read,” said Khalid. “And how would you get them back anyway? Who knows who has control over Sachsen’s gold reserves.”
“Oh, that one’s easy,” she answered. “Whoever may have control over the gold reserves here, most of our gold is deep in a vault in First Landing, in the Federated States. It might be hard to assemble a quorum to vote on moving it, but if we could, then we could get it to the Balboans and get our troops back.”
“‘A quorum,’ you say. How many would that be?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied, shaking her head slightly. She let herself become lost in thought for a few minutes, then added, “Actually, I think it would work if we had a quorum of either the finance committee, or the minister of finance, Herr Olaf Kubier-Schmidt, acting alone. I think.”
“Excuse me,” Khalid said, rising. “I need to check my mail.”
He hurried to his office and fired up the small computer. Encoding a message he sent it to headquarters, back in Balboa. In less than fifteen minutes—A remarkable show of speed, really—the message came back. Decoded, it read:
