by Jeff Long
Shacks with flickering candles and lanterns bordered the rail. Electric City had no electricity. The sounds of revelry and of the never-ending rig faded.
Farther along the tracks, a footpath led up. Rebecca turned her light on low red and followed the path, cleaning her mind out, grateful for the solitude. Wherever she was, this was how Ali was doing it, Rebecca imagined, striking off nice and portable, carried along by her abilities.
The trail dipped and climbed, snaking around big rocks. Rebecca started going faster. The weight of all those men fell away. Her lungs worked.
A rock clattered uphill. Rebecca stopped and sliced at the blackness with her light, but the boulders were empty. Gravity was shuffling things around, nothing more.
She thought about heading back. This was hadal country, or had been, and the animal population was rebounding. That reminded her of Joe’s meat platter. Who knew what might be running around out here? More cautiously, she continued up, her light switching here and there.
She came to the first of the sticks. They lay scattered among the talus like white driftwood. A slight question: you needed trees to have sticks, didn’t you? But there they were. Mystified, she continued a little higher.
Then her light showed a spine. Rebecca stopped. It lay half curled on the path, like a fat white snake caught crossing a road.
The vertebrae were still held together by sinew. She was no expert, but it looked human, like the plastic spine models you see at a chiropractor’s office. And it was not so very large. Her light quivered. The spine was about the size of a small human’s.
The children.
That was her first thought. It nearly crippled her. Rebecca didn’t move.
Slowly reason took over. The fact was, this spine, though smallish, was too robust to be a child’s. She began to doubt it was even human.
Her heartbeat calmed. The light steadied. The thing belonged to some kind of animal. Hadn’t Neil’s father just talked about teams going out to forage on the land?
Thank God she hadn’t screamed. Ever since Beckwith had shown up with the Barbie doll scratched with HELP, her fears had been galloping wild. A shoelace in the dirt, scratch marks on a wall, a fleeting reflection in a window: each triggered the most gruesome thoughts, only to give way to perfectly mundane explanations. She was supposed to be leading an army, not crying wolf at every bend.
She looked around, and it became clear. The sticks were bones. Animals must have dragged them from some dumping ground. The logic revived her. Rebecca went on, determined to confront her fears and apprehensions altogether. Courage was something you could learn, that was her hope.
Cresting the hill, she came to a slough where two big slabs had collapsed against each other. In between them, a crevice vented dry heat from the depths. A rope hung from a rock. Someone had left his hacksaw.
Now she got the picture. This was a hunter’s camp. Here they brought their wild game—bush meat, in Neil’s words—to hang and butcher. The crevice was perfect for dumping the offal and drying hams and racks of meat. Animals had dragged away the leftover bones. End of mystery.
Rebecca was proud of herself. She had seen the ugliness through to its rational answer. Bit by bit, whittling down her nerves and foolishness, she could do this thing. She could meet the night head-on.
The heat from the crevice got her sweating. It stung her eyes. She wiped it away.
There was a hand down there.
It was stuck partway down the vent. This time there was no reasoning it away. They had sawed it just above the wrist and thrown it away. A human hand.
It was a hunter’s camp, all right. They butchered prey here, but the prey was not animal.
Us.
Them.
Her mind tumbled. Hadals. She spun around, whipping her light at the night. Were they here? Or was this old? How old? She backed against one of the big slabs.
That was when she saw the skull jammed to one side. It had buckteeth and a shelflike brow. Her first hadal.
The hacksaw had been used to open a big notch in the top.
Bush meat.
Could it be? The settlers of Electric City had taken to eating hadal flesh? She had eaten it, too. They had fed it to her. The local treats. The cave provides.
Rebecca stood there, staring up at the ransacked skull. The heat was making her dizzy. She felt sick.
She saw the platter of meats all over again. Technically it wasn’t cannibalism, was it, not if you weren’t preying on your own kind? And it meant the colonists were hunting down her enemy and killing them, the same as she was going to do. Right? But those were justifications. They dodged the truth, whatever the truth was. She had no idea what was going on in this shadow world.
Everything was at risk suddenly. Because if humans were no better than hadals, or more to the point, if hadals were no worse than humans, then it was all equivalent. Sam’s abduction lost all force. She became just a morsel of food in an ancient cycle of mutual predation, them on us, us on them, hardly worth a war.
Her sweat speckled the rock. A slight noise broke her thoughts. She stabbed at the darkness.
A girl stood in her light beam. She wore the rags and caked hair of a Third World urchin. Rebecca’s heart leaped.
Was this one of her children? Had she escaped or been released? Where was Sam? “Hello, darling, who are you?”
She had memorized all of the children’s names and faces for precisely such a moment. But this face didn’t ring a bell. Sam, too, would probably look like a wild dog until she got a washing.
The girl didn’t answer.
Rebecca wanted to yell for Sam and gather the rest of them, wherever they were hiding. But the psychologists had advised a measure of serenity. The children would be traumatized from their experience. First contact could be terrifying for them.
“Sweetheart?” she said. “Can you tell me where the others are?”
The girl studied her.
“Your mommy sent me,” Rebecca said. In fact, many of the mommies fought to the death. “Can you tell me your mommy’s name?” Get them talking if possible. Be prepared for silence and hostility. Some might fight you.
The girl just stood there.
Rebecca went a little closer and got down on one knee. The ground was warm. She was soaked with sweat. “Come let me give you a hug.”
The girl brought her hand around and threw a rock as hard as she could. It clipped Rebecca’s head. Rebecca dropped her light.
“No trespassing,” said a voice.
Rebecca jerked. She grabbed her light. Two boys were crouched on top of the higher slab. She recognized one. “Neil?” she said.
She remembered the noise along the trail. They had followed her out of the town. They were local children. Rebecca’s heart sank. No Sam.
She kept the boy lit. “What are you doing, Neil?” She was angry.
Neil didn’t answer. His eyes sparkled. This was fun. He was making a game of her. “Go away,” she said.
Rocks softly clicked behind her. She swung her light around, and four more children stood there.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
No one spoke. More footsteps sounded. They were surrounding her.
“Go home,” she said. But they were home.
She shined her light at the top of the slab. She knew who Neil’s father was. She would tell. But Neil wasn’t up there anymore. She ran the light around in a circle, counting them. Neil appeared in front of her. That made it nine.
Now she saw the knives and hammers and screwdrivers. Each child had his favorite. The tools looked enormous in their small hands. The tools took on a life of their own, as if they were brandishing the children and not the other way around. Rebecca tried to back away, but that only tightened the circle.
Hunters. It came to her. This wasn’t their first time. They started edging her sideways toward a drop-off. They take the lame and the strays. The hadal skull, could that be their doing?
They worked her to the
edge. “Jump,” one said.
“No,” she said.
A hammer sailed past her head. Someone darted in from behind and gave a push, a childish push, nothing with any strength to it. But Rebecca was on the edge. She caught her balance and thrust her light at them, thinking to blind them. Useless. She made a club of the light and swung it broadly, but also carefully. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. They were only children.
Abruptly the children backed away. Without a word among them, they melted into the penumbra. Rebecca looked around. She cried out even as she recognized the creature surfacing from the depths as Clemens. In the wag of her beam, his face was more ghastly than ever.
He helped her away from the ledge. “Sit down.”
“What are they doing?” She couldn’t quit shaking.
Clemens kept touching her. He smoothed her hair. He straightened her blouse. He neatened what was messy, and made her pretty again. His fingers lighted on her like flies.
He sat on his haunches in front of her. “You have a gun,” he said. “Why didn’t you use it?”
She noticed it strapped to her thigh, far away, Jake’s pistol. “It’s not loaded,” she said.
“What are you carrying it for?”
“I wouldn’t have used it anyway.”
“They were going to kill you,” he said.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“What is wrong with them?” she whispered.
“You threatened them.”
“I went for a walk,” she said.
His amphibian stare pried at her. “Why up here?”
“The trail was lying there. I wanted some privacy.”
“You weren’t looking for your soldier?”
“What are you talking about?”
He could have just told her. But it was lesson time. He went to the ledge. “Come over here.”
Rebecca had to hold his hand. “Yes?”
“Your light. Shine it down.”
A man was lying at the bottom where they had tried to push her.
One leg was missing. Knowing what she now knew, thinking the worst of them, it was possible to guess. They had lured him up here and pushed him over. And she had surprised them in their butchery.
“You didn’t know he was here?”
“I had no idea he was missing.”
“This is what I keep trying to tell you, Rebecca. We’re not in Kansas anymore. Things are very different in the cave.”
She turned her head away.
“Now the question is, what to do about this?” said Clemens. “There has been a murder. And cannibalism. And an assault on you, the head of an army. Clearly the entire town is guilty. It’s going to have to be punished. These people won’t understand anything less. The children have to pay for their consequences, and their parents, too.”
“Punished?” Rebecca’s head was swimming. She wanted to lie down.
“It won’t be pleasant, but I know how to do this.”
“The children?”
“Don’t feel sorry for them, Rebecca. Look down there at what the little angels did. Nearly got you, too. You’re in shock. Leave this to me.”
It would have been so simple to give Clemens the authority. But then what? She had raised this army with her husband’s blood and her child’s name, and if it slipped from her grasp for even an instant she sensed it was gone. Her only hope—Sam’s only hope—was for her to hold the reins even tighter.
She let go of Clemens’s hand. She defied him. “There will be no punishment,” she said.
“That’s a mistake, Rebecca.”
“We will do nothing,” she said.
“It’s not just the town that needs a lesson. If we let this go, every jackal between here and Travis Station will be taking a piece of us. We have to send a message that will be heard up and down the line. Touch one hair of us and your dream is over. We won’t be safe until they run away at our approach.”
She didn’t care. All that mattered was Sam. “We will do nothing,” she repeated. “And the men don’t need to know anything. If one word of this gets out, they’ll take revenge on the villagers. That gets us nowhere. These settlers are not our enemies.”
“But they are, Rebecca.”
“In the morning we will put this place behind us.”
“And him?” Clemens pointed down at the body. “What happens in the morning when he is missed?”
“In this commotion?” she said. “Men are coming and going like ants. No one knows who is where, or whether they’re even still with us.”
“So we just forget about him? He died in your cause.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No.”
She surprised herself. “Then what is there to forget?”
Something like a smile pulled at Clemens’s face. He nodded his approval. “I’m going down,” she said.
She descended the path with Clemens ranging through the talus to make sure the children were gone. Back in town, the revelry went on all night.
Tired as she was, Rebecca could not stand to be alone with her thoughts, and so she sat on a mound of rocks and watched the men dance and bray and sing their own praises. Hour after hour, they came to her with gifts: sleeping pads to soften her seat, blankets to warm her, drinks, food, pictures of their families or cars or motorcycles, oaths of deathless loyalty. One drunken man even kneeled.
The town children were nowhere to be seen. Before long the adults left, too, whispering and throwing frightened looks at Rebecca. The rig fell silent.
In the morning, Rebecca led her army out from the now deserted town.
It did not occur to her for days after to wonder what Clemens had been doing up on the hill when he had rescued her.
ARTIFACTS
NIGHT WARRIOR HANDBOOK
Second Battalion, Fifth Marines
How to Operate in the Dark, part four
11. Defecate
Procedure. Select a low site with good earth and good ground cover. Put tissue paper in blouse pocket. Keep weapon and equipment at arm’s length. Dig a hole. Straddle the hole and squat with trousers pulled forward. Put used tissue paper in the hole. Cover hole with earth. Replace ground cover to camouflage. Wash hands.
Techniques
Excrement is a reflection of diet. U.S. excrement smells different from the enemy’s. Minimize smell by burying all excrement immediately.
Use an antidiarrheal to avoid having to defecate. This is NOT recommended by doctors, but can be used in certain missions.
Carry excrement in plastic bags out of area of operations. Certain missions may require this to avoid evidence of activity.
24
FIRST WEEK OF JANUARY
As they cast themselves across the lake, Ali reached back with her light. She hoped for a glimpse of the receding shore, but there was not even a suggestion of land. It took her breath, this all-encompassing night.
Gregorio had made a chain of three rafts, one behind the other. The last two were filled with fuel and supplies. Scavenging the villages had taken time, but had also given them time. They could last for months now, and still feed the children if they found them, and ferry everyone back across the lake to Port Dylan.
Hour after hour, they plowed across the black waters. Ali shrank into herself. Despite the NASA map and legends of the lake’s immensity, no one knew Emperor Lake’s actual size. The other side might lie a day, or even weeks, away. Part of her wished they had gone on hugging the shore. But their caution would have come at the children’s expense, and so they had settled on this direct passage, or diretissima as Gregorio called it.
Gregorio refused to show fear, of course. But it was there in his constant vigilance. No sooner did he set down the night binoculars than he picked them up again and made another sweep. His beautiful dark eyes grew darker. If the raft had been larger, he would have paced. Instead he ran one fingertip in circles on the rubber hull. The miles passed by with them squeaking like mice.
The far
ther they traveled from shore, the more Ali’s old terror of oceans grew. She stayed deep inside the walls of the Zodiac, as far from the water as possible. She didn’t need the captain’s sea serpent to picture all sorts of creatures swimming rampant beneath the skin of the lake.
Then there were the noises. It was as if the water were whispering to her. As if Maggie were the water. Mommy, she heard.
They continued purifying their drinking water, which they dipped from the lake. Ali hated leaning over the hull with the quart bottle. Once upon a time she had looked into her daughter’s cold eye and it had been as bottomless as this.
Gregorio measured their progress in gallons of fuel.
Ali measured it by minutes.
She could not seem to take a full breath of air. The blackness lay on her. She struggled to be good company, or at least not bad company.
On the second day, she saw the hump of a monstrous beast sliding just beneath the surface. Gregorio insisted it was only the ripples of their wake. “Alexandra.” Her name, so delicious on his tongue. “There is nothing to see, only the shapes of the water.”
A little later, she lit another silky black swell. “What do you call that?”
“Ah, that,” he said, reaching over to stroke the water. “She is my pet, Nessie.”
She stared at him.
“You read too many airport books,” he said. It was a joke. Light reading for her was Linguistics Anima.
“Nothing so big could exist in a place so isolated,” he said. “Forget the settlers’ fairy tales. Evolution is against it. Animals confined to lakes and islands become dwarves. It has to do with the food supply. Think of the hobbits on Florensis in Indonesia. Little people hunting little elephants.”
“Oh, you mean dwarves,” she said, “like the Komodo dragons on Java.”
“There are always exceptions.”
“Like here.” She threw her light left in time to see another swell lift and sink.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “it is the water, nothing more.”
