Terra Nova- the Wars of Liberation

by Tom Kratman

  Stirring the coals unnecessarily again, she stole a glance at the one that didn’t look at her chest, but held her gaze instead. And it was not in that don’t-look-at-her-chest sort of way, but in an I-see-you sort of way. The Balboa Colony was not known for its tall men, which wouldn’t matter much to anyone but a tall woman like herself. This Juan Alvarez was probably taller than Father, who remained the tallest Balboan she’d ever seen.

  He was smart too, saying just the right thing to get her mother to give them a chance. Despite all that’d been done to their people, even her mother wasn’t ready to kill the gringos for no reason, but she had been ready to force them back onto the boat. And she had been ready to wound one of them to make her point.

  Well, Mother said “wound,” but how do you wound with a shotgun?

  Mitzi pulled the fish from the fire. She placed several bundles on a piece of flat driftwood and walked the offering to the gringos.

  Juan’s smile was spectacular; his thanks, profuse.

  “It’s just fish,” she said more curtly than she’d intended and declined their invitation to partake in the packaged foods they’d brought.

  She walked away, cheeks warming with guilt for her rudeness, resenting how this war had eroded her people’s customs and culture. To think that once, her people had been known for their hospitality.

  It had taken the better part of the morning for Juan and his friends to get the crates loaded onto the mules that Mitzi’s mother had brought back. The rest of the day had been spent traveling under the jungle’s soaring triple canopy, negotiating well-worn but twisting mud paths and traversing small streams.

  Twice, the sky had released torrents of rain that stopped as suddenly as they’d started, as if the clouds had changed their mind. Juan went from being soaked in sweat to just being soaked, but mostly he didn’t mind.

  Mitzi walked ahead of him, distracting him from the way his backpack dug into his shoulders and strained his back, a reminder that he wasn’t as well prepared as he’d believed. The way that belt hugged her hips as they swayed also softened the somber realization that they were, for the first time, truly on their own.

  Did these Cocheans have the means to communicate with the outside world, or were they going to have to walk across the Balboan isthmus towards whatever passed for civilization?

  How would Elder Rogers get word of their success?

  Or their failure?

  They emerged into a valley with forgiving slopes and a dozen or so huts with conical thatch roofs. Some of the huts were on stilts and had no walls. Others were walled with discarded sheets of metal. Some were made of adobe.

  Monkeys called, their howls oddly welcoming. One of the mules made an odd sound in response, something that was neither bray nor whinny.

  A dozen or so kids, some mere toddlers, hurried across cleared ground, swarming the returning women. A dozen conversations, some in English, others Spanish, raced around him.

  “Wait there,” Mitzi said, pointing to a central hut, much larger than the others.

  At least a dozen handmade tables and benches sat under the oversized roof. She followed her mother up a slope and into one of the stilted huts set up against a hill.

  Older boys took possession of the bell mare. The mules followed her without prompting, taking the guns and ammunition with them. They disappeared into the village, along curving paths.

  Juan and his friends trudged to the shelter of the open-walled hut just in time to avoid another downpour. They dropped their packs and sank onto the benches with grateful huffs.

  “Think we got the right people?” Carr asked.

  “Gotta be,” Joe answered.

  “Why’s that?” Letham asked.

  “No men. Not fighting men, anyway,” Joe explained. “Best way to make sure they don’t bring the UN down on their families is to keep away from them.”

  “Best way not to get caught,” Juan added.

  “That too. Spread out. Stay out of sight.” Joe took a long drink of water and then sprinkled the remainder over his downy head. “Juan, you think you can get some answers out of that girl?”

  “Besides her name,” Carr said.

  “Actually, her family name would be useful,” Joe said, scrubbing at the whiskers on his face.

  With no time to shave this morning they all looked scruffy. The things itched like crazy in the moist heat. Going native had seemed like a grand adventure, but the pit stains and the fact that he could actually smell himself—

  “Juan’s only interested in her first name,” Carr said, his shit-eating grin on full blast. “Plans on pinning his family name on her and wants to see how it fits.”

  “I thought it was only girls that tried on names,” Letham said without cracking a smile. He was, by far, the more serious of the brothers.

  “Not around here,” Joe said. “They mix and match. Maybe Juan can try on her name, instead.”

  Juan tipped his head toward the old man standing at the edge of the clearing under a tree that provided no cover from the rain. He didn’t seem to mind. Or even notice.

  “How far do you think he’ll let me get?” Juan asked.

  An ancient looking gun, far older than anything Juan had ever seen, hung off the old man’s shoulder. Come to think of it, that was the most ancient man he’d ever seen too.

  “What’s the plan, then?” Carr asked.

  “Find out if they can point us to Belisario Carrera and his men or get us in touch with someone who can. Deliver the guns. See what else they need. Get word to Desperation Bay. Stay and fight if they’ll let us.”

  “You think she’s just going to pull out a map, give us the mules, and send us on our way?” Letham asked, giving the stilted hut a skeptical look. “What’s to keep them from shooting us with our own guns?”

  “Nothing. Which is why, if they wanted us dead, they’d have killed us already.” Joe rocked forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and frowned. “Besides, if they want more guns, and they will, they can’t kill us.”

  He stood as Mitzi emerged from the stilted hut and crossed the clearing. She ducked into the open hut and plucked the hat off her head. Her gaze swept each of them in turn.

  “How many men have you killed?” she asked no one in particular.

  Joe cleared his throat. “We haven’t killed anyone.”

  She titled her head. “No one? Ever?”

  They shook their heads.

  “You’re not trained soldiers either, I take it.”

  She grabbed Joe’s hand and turned it over. She did the same to Carr and Letham, passing judgment with a heavy sigh and a drop of her shoulders.

  A spark flew along Juan’s fingers as she grabbed his hand and caressed its softness. Even the recent work they’d done on the caravel—it and its crew had sprinted away as fast as the winds could carry them—hadn’t been enough to erase years of easy living. Easy at least in terms of what she probably knew as everyday life.

  “You should’ve gone home,” she whispered, thumb lingering in a sweep across his palm. Those beautiful dark eyes met his. “You can still go home.”

  “No.” He wet his lips. “I—We can’t.”

  She let go of his hand and turned to Joe. “Do you ride?”

  The crank on the radio had broken months ago, but someone had “repaired” it by attaching a wooden spoon with a length of ribbon. Its color and pattern—yellow with a rainbow of happy polka dots—meant that it had probably once belonged to one of the younger girls, perhaps even to Mitzi’s younger sister, Esmeralda.

  With a surge of anger, Mitzi worked the crank, causing the radio to rev up just enough for a screech and something that could have been a human voice. The radio gave up in a burst of static and the ribbon slipped, releasing the wood.

  She threw them both across the hut. They raced to the floor, the ribbon settling gently atop the rug, the spoon sliding under a table and out of sight. Static hissed back at her for a moment, then faded as the radio died.

  From
across the hut, Mitzi’s mother cast her a sideways glance. Her mother was leaning over a large table littered with maps. They made a makeshift, layered tablecloth, some of them spilling halfway to the floor. Others curled around the broken remnants of their lives—a keepsake box, a picture frame, a wind-up clock that no longer worked.

  Her mother had been studying the maps for answers, trying to guess the most likely place Father would be. She’d been doing this for days, waiting out the rain.

  “Maybe it’ll be sunny enough tomorrow to charge the battery,” her mother said.

  Maybe pigs will fly.

  Mitzi crossed the dark, tiny room to stand on the other side of the table. She nudged one of the lamps aside to get a better view. The lamp oil sloshed, then settled in a swirl as the light flared, sending shadows dancing.

  “The roads here”—she tapped the map—“and here will probably be washed out. I still think this is the best route.” She traced the longer route with a dirty finger, smudging the recently inked markings for semi-permanent UN encampments. They’d been arguing about an unnecessarily long route that snaked through the jungle toward an uncertain destination, abandoning the idea only to reconsider it.

  When the radio worked they could get reports about rebel attacks and UN deaths and get an idea of where Father was and what he was doing. But they’d heard nothing lately. Either Father was no longer engaging the enemy because he was out of things to fight with. Or he was dead.

  The UN had reported defeating him on several occasions, even officially announced his death, only to be proven wrong. They could no longer count on UN braggadocio for news. Besides, her mother would never believe it.

  And she’d never stop fighting. Never.

  “I’d rather you avoided the Gurkhas and the Sikhs,” her mother said, pointing out the areas for which those two groups were responsible.

  While part of the UN contingent, both the Gurkhas and Sikhs showed little interest in coming to the OAU’s aid. Attacking either the Gurkhas or the Sikhs, however, brought the other. Not that Mitzi planned on attacking anyone. Not with the soft, untried young men who insisted on coming along because they lacked good sense.

  Mitzi nodded. “It’ll take even longer. We’ll need more supplies.” The map lacked contour lines, but Mitzi didn’t need them to know that the trails they’d have to take were steep. “The mules, donkey, and horses will tire fast. We’ll lose some of them. Need reserves.”

  “Which means more supplies.” Her mother rubbed her face and swept her hands through her hair.

  “Cutting down on people will help,” Mitzi suggested again. “You have no one else to spare anyway.”

  Which was the real reason the gringos had to come. Mitzi alone, or even with a few of the cholo boys, would make too tempting a target. The gringos mere presence should be a deterrent to most of the maricones looking for easy prey, at least as long as no one looked too close.

  Her mother nodded. Unspoken between them was the knowledge that every day they waited pushed them toward taking the shorter, more obvious, and dangerous route. And every day they waited meant Father and his men had to fight with bows and arrows, flintlocks and muzzle-loaders.

  Her mother grabbed her escopeta from its place against the wall and presented it to a wide-eyed Mitzi.

  The escopeta was lighter than she remembered. She’d shot it before, under her mother’s careful tutelage, but the antique twenty-gauge breech-loader with its faded engravings was her mother’s constant companion and a very special piece—one that no one was allowed to touch, much less carry.

  She checked the side-by-side chambers as she’d been taught and snapped the action shut. Her mother blinked like she had something in her eyes and pushed a drawstring satchel into Mitzi’s hand.

  “Don’t spare the shells,” her mother said. “If you don’t get through this, it won’t matter anyway.”

  Juan knelt on a pillow-shaped rock a mere step off the bank and thrust both hands into the waterfall-fed stream. The cooling water stung only for a second as it washed blood and grime off oozing blisters earned from handling the mules. Latham was indulging in similar relief just a few feet upstream. Their molly mules—called Baja and Seda—stood between them, dipping their soft, downy noses into the gentle current.

  Downstream, the bell mare whinnied—a distinctively happy and grateful sound—as Mitzi led her to the stream.

  Joe helped the two old Indios line up the rest of their animal train along the sandier part of the stream’s southern bank. His rag-wrapped hands smoothed the mare’s crest as Carr brought up the rear, dragging Terra Nova’s most stubborn donkey behind him. Apparently you could lead a horse to water, but not a donkey. At least not this donkey—some sort of equine guard dog, his job was to stand and fight, and he took his role very seriously, fighting and standing up to everyone and everything, whether it made sense to or not.

  “We’ll make camp here,” Mitzi, their very own bell mare, announced.

  That image—of Mitzi leading her men, they instinctively following—had struck him somewhere along the endless, muddy road and he couldn’t get it out of his head. Depending on his mood, the thought wandered into darkness—when had they become such mindless drones, operating on instinct? It’s not as if she were their mother.

  Not my call. And that grated. He wanted it to be his call.

  And if it was, would it matter? Because Joe’s decisions weren’t based on feelings. He wasn’t panting after her, stealing glances, wondering if . . . Heavenly Father.

  Another type of darkness surfaced. The kind that wanted to show her that he was not some mindless drone operating on instinct. That he would never, ever, in a million years, see her as his mother. His instincts were of a different kind and he wanted to free them. Share them. Be appreciated for them.

  He groaned.

  “Put some antibiotic ointment on those hands,” Latham said.

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  An antiseptic for his thoughts would be better. Too bad no one had invented it yet. Hands dripping, Juan rose and reached for his own supplies. He fumbled with his saddlebag, favoring his fingers, as Seda drank, her steady, gentle breathing breaking the water’s surface.

  It took the remaining daylight to set up camp and relieve the mules of their burdens. Some of the rifles they’d brought had been partially disassembled, the parts sewn into scraps of cloth, and hidden inside all manner of chorley-seed sacks. False barrel bottoms filled with dry foodstuffs hid loose ammunition. They’d done all they could to give the impression of just simple villagers returning home with supplies from the seaports.

  According to Helen-of-the-double-barrels, as long as they stuck to their route they’d avoid the UN patrols. Bribes had been set aside just in case—alcohol and tobacco and a few of the so-called luxury items he and his friends had bought along, everyday items in his world, like batteries and sharp, long-lasting razor blades. An itch reminded him that his beard was still very much a work in progress.

  One of their Indio guides, a man called Miro, returned from the jungle with a wild turkey across his stooped shoulders. He dropped the bird by the fire and Felix set to plucking it clean and gutting it.

  The meal passed with quiet conversation, the two groups sitting across the fire from each other, words only occasionally crossing between them, and even those focused on the order of the watch—one gringo and one Balboan per shift.

  Somehow he ended up with first watch and Mitzi with the last, much to his disappointment. A mostly uninterrupted night of sleep was a blessing. He should think of it as such.

  At least the heat made it easy to sleep in the open and he could enjoy the sight of Mitzi at rest, even if she turned her back as soon as her head hit the saddle cum pillow. What did that exquisite face look like in gentle slumber?

  His curiosity did not go unnoticed. Miro, who had drawn the first shift as well, watched him with a wary eye. He put himself between Juan and Mitzi, warning vibes oozing off him like body odor mixed with blood.


  It was an impressive intimidation given that Miro was armed only with a bow and knife while Juan hefted a fully loaded rifle. Not that he’d use it. Not in that way. The dark part of him smiled at the implication that at least one person didn’t see him as a mindless drone. It didn’t take long to figure out the distance he was expected to keep, or the direction in which he was expected to keep watch.

  He gave Miro a cursory nod—message received.

  The night settled, cloaking them in moonless sky, and an almost eerie, lulling silence. Occasionally logs hissed and cracked as the fading light drew in the darkness.

  He caught himself nodding off and stood, shifting the rifle on his shoulder. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep. He checked on the dozing animals and envied their ability to sleep while standing, then settled in, propped up and mostly upright, between a few boulders that let him keep an eye on his designated part of the camp and the surrounding jungle.

  The hand that slapped him on the shoulder some time later startled the hell out of him. He jumped up and swallowed a yelp.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Joe said.

  Heart still thumping, Juan curled sweaty, trembling hands around the rifle. “Don’t do that.”

  Joe stifled a yawn. “I need to go water a tree.”

  He disappeared into the jungle, the beam of his flashlight slicing through the understory.

  Juan checked his watch. It was almost a couple hours past midnight. No wonder he’d dozed off.

  An ill wind swept past him, brushing his shoulder with an obsidian wingtip. The creature manifested merely as deeper, mottled darkness as it circled the clearing without sound. Juan knew the shape. Moonbat. A big one. Much bigger than any he’d seen at home.

  They really got that big?