“Sergeant,” Trick said, “let’s get these people on the ground. But not here.”
“Where, sir?” Pusher asked. She reached over and tapped the fuel gauge for emphasis. “It’ll have to be somewhere close.”
“Bedrock?” suggested Hatch. “What’s left of it must be in better shape than this island.”
“I don’t know what kind of weapons Transport used in their assault,” said Trick. “It could be irradiated, poisoned—”
“The Amish Zone,” said Stug to Pusher, ignoring the debate of his superiors. “Get us to the AZ.”
Pusher took one last look at the devastation below and pulled her eyes away, heading east.
They landed in a barnyard. The loud boosters and the anti-gravs, both working at less than peak efficiency, created chaos among the homestead’s chickens and goats. Amish men and women stepped onto the porch of a modest house or stood up from the fields where they’d been working. They all stopped to watch the airbus. Pockmarked and streaked with carbon residue, it landed with a mechanical sigh.
As the doors opened and the landing ramp descended, one older man dressed in the familiar clothes of his people—broadfall pants, suspenders, a plain shirt, and a straw hat—approached.
Trick descended the ramp first, with Stug and Hatch flanking him. The old man recognized Trick and seemed to relax a little, though he maintained a wary expression.
“Elder Noffsinger,” said Trick. “Good to see you again. I wish it weren’t under these circumstances.”
The old man walked closer, extending a hand of greeting. “And what circumstances would those be … Lieutenant Mason, I believe?”
“Captain now,” said Stug under his breath.
Paul Noffsinger regarded the big man briefly, then returned his attention to Trick. “Captain, then. What’s the meaning of this? Why is this airbus in my barnyard?” His tone was cordial but firm with the history of his people. And despite his piety, it carried an impatience for the imposition of anyone carrying firearms on his land.
Before Trick could answer, a low thump and puff erupted to the northwest. Everyone turned to see, then immediately shaded their eyes and jerked them away, an instinct against tragedy.
The muted thump became a grumble of thunder, then a roar of wind. The chickens and goats and family dog began to yip and call and cackle their terror. Elder Noffsinger pulled his hat down over his forehead, a man who knows the weather readying himself for a stiff breeze.
Blackened air climbed into the sky with a dark growl. Highlights of blue and purple, the signature of an okcillium blast, swirled within the rising shadow. The initial blast now past, they watched the mushroom cloud blossom into the once-pristine October sky of New Pennsylvania like a fast-growing tree of death and destruction.
“Lord in Heaven,” breathed Noffsinger. “What in the world?”
Hatch stared hard at what they were all seeing. “Transport,” he said, as if that one word explained the entirety of evil in the world. The destruction of Columbia. The senseless waste of life. Mary’s death.
The petulance of a child with an okcillium bomb at his disposal.
“What?” Noffsinger was disbelieving. “Surely not. Surely not! Not even Transport—”
Anne appeared at the door of the airbus. The explosion had rocked the craft as well, but now the distant thunder of air and matter being disrupted and fused sounded like nothing more than an angry storm on the horizon. Noffsinger watched the little girl as she walked down the ramp. Behind her, another Wild One appeared at the door and began to descend. Then another. Tattered clothes. Bloody rags wrapped around weeping wounds. Shocked, overwhelmed expressions of hopelessness on face after face. Those already on the ground were gazing toward Columbia with disbelief. Like what their eyes were showing them simply shouldn’t be seen.
“My Lord, what’s happened to these people?” Noffsinger moved forward, ready to help Anne off the ramp.
Hatch didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He’d already laid the name of the guilty at the elder’s feet.
More of the Wild Ones came down the ramp, one after another, brought forth by the boom and lingering roil of shaking air. There were a dozen of them now, striding down toward the comfort of good soil and good people. Noffsinger helped each one off the ramp, clasping in his own the hand of each person in turn. Others of the Amish community were coming forward to help and offer solace as well. One woman rushed from the house dipping a white cloth into a bucket of water.
The mushroom cloud grew in the distance.
“An entire city,” breathed Noffsinger. “My Lord. My Lord God.”
Anne stood and stared at the black tree of death rising from the City. She fell to her knees and began to cry, as if this final act of cruelty and murder by Transport had broken her spirit. Stug moved forward to comfort her.
“What happened to her?” asked Noffsinger.
“These are her people,” said Trick. “They were massacred by Transport. These are all that’s left of their community.”
Noffsinger’s expression saddened, if that were possible. “I am truly sorry for this young girl,” he said. “But I meant your captain. You said you’re captain now.” He turned to Hatch. “Where is Mary Brenneman?”
Hatch’s eyes spoke for him.
“I am …” Noffsinger faltered. Beneath the sound of his voice, the air around the dying city thrummed like the hoofbeats of a hundred horses. “I am overwhelmed.”
“We won’t stay long,” said Trick reassuringly, mistaking the reason for the elder’s words. There were a hundred people here now. A hundred refugees. A hundred hungry mouths to feed. “We just need to rest, recover. Then we’ll be on our way. Our home was … it was destroyed too. We need to find out what happened to it.”
Noffsinger turned to him. “You may stay as long as you need,” he said, forthright and generous even as tears slipped unchecked down his cheeks. “Anyone who survived that …” His voice trailed off, weighed down by the impact of the horses pounding the air of the distant, dead city.
“Are you okay?” asked Stug, kneeling beside Anne. His hands rested on her shoulders. “Anne, are you—”
She whispered something in response.
“What, sweetie?”
“I want to learn to fight,” she said. Her voice was steel, cooling and fresh from the forge. It cut through the roiling air like a knife.
She stood up and turned to Stug. “I want to learn to fight, Joseph. I want to learn to fight just like her.”
Stug looked up at her, meeting the cold black of her eyes with his own soft resolve. His reply stopped in his throat. He remembered when he’d come to this moment himself. When he’d turned his back on the pacifism of the Amish and taken up the gun on their behalf.
He turned to Hatch, who stared at the two of them, his gaze hard and unblinking. He’d heard Anne’s words too—and in them, her decision to choose her own destiny. Hatch nodded to his friend.
“Then I’ll teach you,” said Stug, tenderly pushing the hair over one ear with his thick warrior’s fingers. “And we’ll kill all those Transport bastards together.”
Anne nodded absently, her gaze looking through the big man, beyond him. Her face became flat, though tears coursed down her cheeks. As if they were supposed to be there. Expected.
Tears for Mary.
For the City.
Then the girl’s eyes reabsorbed the last of their grief, like she’d made the conscious decision to simply stop crying. The corners of her lips swept upward into a feral smile of determination, an expression reflecting her iron desire to direct the course of her fate by strength of will alone.
“Yes. All of them,” Anne said. “Every last one.”
Afterword
So, here we are: the end of the line for the heroes of Bestimmung Company. At least for now.
Columbia completes a story arc that sort of generated itself, actually. Back in the spring of 2014, I approached Michael Bunker about an anthology of short stories s
et in his world of Pennsylvania. He was enthusiastic, and we recruited some top-flight writers, both established and new, from the independent fiction world. That anthology became Tales from Pennsylvania.
My contribution was a story called “Gelassenheit,” a tale of one Amish family trying to work their land how they see fit, while dealing with the long shadow Transport casts over their lives. One unintended consequence of the story when I wrote it was that it became the origin story for one of our heroes—heroine, actually: Mary Brenneman. “Gelassenheit” was supposed to be a one-off short story for the collection. But Mary’s twelve-year-old character kept demanding more stage time from me. So I decided to write about who she might have become twenty-five years later: a true believer in TRACE’s cause. That story became Gettysburg, and here we are, three novellas later.
In each of the afterwords to the B Company tales, I’ve talked a little about the historical inspiration for each story. Although there was no direct antecedent for Columbia—I was working with events established by Michael in Pennsylvania, which culminate in the destruction of the City—I did have history in the back of my mind while writing. The sieges of Petersburg and Vicksburg during the Civil War. The destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in World War II. Present-day roadside bombs, 9/11, and public beheadings by terrorist groups across the globe. In short, the human toll of warfare exacted on civilians (who never signed up for a fight and are just trying to live through it) became a primary theme. In the fictional Columbia, as with its historical precedents, one side grows so desperate to win that it throws out the rules of warfare—if there even are any, beyond our own need to embrace a somewhat naïve chivalric code—to achieve victory.
In the historical cases, one could argue that the ends justified the means. Take Grant’s siege of Vicksburg, for example. Mississippians in the city were reduced to living in hillside caves and eating pets and draft animals during the constant bombardment of the city proper by federal troops. Many were killed by the forty-eight days of siege guns pounding the city, a strategy—like Sherman’s in Georgia—specifically designed to break the civilian population’s will to resist (and thereby apply pressure to the political arm of the Confederacy to capitulate). From the Union’s perspective, such measures were necessary in the case of Vicksburg—both to make sure the British didn’t intervene on behalf of the Confederacy and prolong the war, and to strangle the Confederacy’s ability to move men and materiel up the Mississippi to prosecute the war.
A similar justification for dropping the A-bomb was in President Truman’s mind when he approved its use against Japan in World War II—not just once, but twice. When the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima didn’t convince Emperor Hirohito of the hopelessness of Japan’s position, a second was dropped three days later on Nagasaki. Within a week, the Japanese surrendered.
Is Transport’s use of the O-bomb in Columbia and Pennsylvania any less justified? Most would answer yes, I think. Hatch and Stug would say that for sure, especially given their characterization of Transport as a “petulant child with massive weaponry at his disposal.” But is it nothing more than our perception of “who’s the good guy” and “who’s the bad guy” that makes that rationalization hold water? It’s perhaps easier to accept that Truman acted without malice when he made the decision to drop two A-bombs because, many believe, he was trying to avoid an even costlier means of ending the war; means that would’ve required invading Japan itself. The United States’ experience with fighting Japanese forces entrenched in island strongholds in the Pacific certainly provided evidence that Truman’s fears were well-founded. From his perspective, dropping the A-bombs really was the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, ask a Georgian or Mississippian today about the necessity of Union scorched-earth tactics during the Civil War and—even now, 150 years after that bitter conflict’s end—you’re likely to get a less than sympathetic response.
Since Transport is cast in the role of villain in the Pennsylvania universe, the wanton—and unnecessary, from our perspective—destruction of the City and its inhabitants is hard to see as anything short of evil. But I wonder how a historian writing Transport’s side of the Second War for Pennsylvanian Independence might characterize the destruction of the City. Or, even, if that scribe would call it “the Second War for Pennsylvanian Independence”; perhaps their name for the war might reflect more sympathy for the Authority’s cause such as “the War to Unify New Pennsylvania” or some such noble sentiment. While we don’t have that moral quandary—Transport, as we know, is a totalitarian state, the epitome of evil in Michael Bunker’s New Pennsylvania—it’s interesting to ponder the perspective of the other side, isn’t it?
Speaking in 1862 to his “Old War Horse,” James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee is famously quoted as having said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” After the Battle of Waterloo, Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington—who managed to defeat Napoleon by the skin of his teeth—surveyed the blood-soaked cornfields of Belgium and wrote in a letter, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.” No one, it seems, appreciates/laments the cost of warfare more than the soldiers themselves. Sometimes, however, it’s the civilians—without the choice to “muster out” of the fight—who pay the highest price. In Columbia, we see that encapsulated in Elder Noffsinger’s reaction: “An entire city. My Lord. My Lord God.”
Yet the war with Transport isn’t over, and its cost continues to grow. The QB, Mary Brenneman, is dead. Many of the inhabitants of Little Gibraltar have apparently been killed too. Yet some of our heroes remain, and new ones, like Anne, have joined the fight. The good guys live to fight another day.
I’ll be honest: I don’t have plans—at this moment—to write more B Company tales. But I didn’t plan Gettysburg, either. Young Mary in “Gelassenheit” demanded more life from me. Perhaps Young Anne will start calling to me from the wings as well. We’ll see. In the meantime, be on the lookout for The B Company Omnibus, which will include all three B Company stories and “Gelassenheit.” It’s coming very soon and will feature a foreword by The Man Himself, Michael Bunker.
Chris Pourteau
May 2015
Acknowledgments
As he has with the first two B Company tales, Dave Monk Fraser Adams designed Columbia’s cover. His knack for modern “coolness” mixed with classic sci-fi stylings really captures my own authorial intentions in the stories. Thanks, Dave, for another classic cover!
Ben Adams also signed up again to create the interior illustrations. I really like his noir style, and it lent itself well to the circumstances in Columbia, especially the scene in Wainwright’s bar. Ben, thanks for again capturing these moments in my story in such a visceral, visually stunning way.
My Alpha Reader Extraordinaire and the first set of eyes to ever see anything I write is my wife, Alison. I always anxiously await her response, hoping it’s positive but wanting it to be honest. And she never fails to deliver, usually with both praise and a suggestion for improvement at the same time: “It’s great, but maybe …” Thanks, my best friend in life, for your unwavering support of my writing.
Beta readers help me make the story better for you, and I had some great feedback this time from David Bruns, Michael Bunker, and Catherine Violando. Harlow Fallon deserves special recognition for giving me significant comments and suggestions throughout the story (I counted 50+ comments in Word!). Having someone take that much time with a “rough draft” always feels special, because you know they’re trying to help you make it better for readers. Thanks, Harlow and everyone, for your time spent with Columbia.
As he has done for all the tales in the series, David Gatewood edited this installment. His improvements—sometimes sharply, if winkingly, barbed—always smooth things out and help me see a scene or sentence from a perspective I hadn’t considered it from before. He’s the best at what he does; it’s that simple. David, thanks for adding Columbia to your busy editor’s schedule and for h
elping me produce the best story I could.
And once again, I should thank Michael Bunker for allowing me to play in his Pennsylvania sandbox. I’ve really enjoyed creating these stories. Most importantly, Michael seems happy with them, and when the world’s creator is happy with my work, I ain’t got no room for complainin’.
And that brings me to you. I say this in every story I publish (that’s not me being lazy and redundant, it’s me being grateful)—I very much appreciate you, dear reader, and the time you spend reading my writing. I’m still blown away by the idea that people want to spend their time—a finite thing we all have, though none of us really know how much of it we have—reading my stuff. It feels like a great gift from you to me, every time. So thank you for that. I hope you enjoyed reading these stories and found them time well spent.
And again, also as usual, I’ll ask for one more favor. Please consider taking the time to review Columbia at the online store where you bought it, and also on Goodreads, if you’re a member. Having your feedback helps me know how to improve my craft the next time out. But it also helps other readers, like yourself, decide if they should spend their money—and more importantly, to me anyway, their time—on a written work. Providing a review is like publishing a public service announcement for your fellow readers, something you also benefit from when they do the same for you. Please recognize that in leaving a review, you’re making a real contribution to the world—and the quality—of independent publishing.
About the Author
Chris Pourteau has been a technical writer and editor for over twenty years. His first two tales in his series of stories set in Michael Bunker’s world of New Pennsylvania—Gettysburg and Susquehanna—have been praised by readers and other writers alike. In February 2015, he published one of the first five novels helping to build the core canon world of the Apocalypse Weird universe, The Serenity Strain, a book that has been well received by AW fans. Folks also seem to dig his short story Unconditional—a stand-alone tale about the zombie apocalypse from the perspective of the family dog. The Serenity Strain has garnered over 50 reviews and Unconditional has received more than 40, and each has achieved an average rating of 4.8 out of 5.0 stars.
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