by Jeff Long
Rebecca didn’t waste the nervous energy. In seventh grade, every Texan is required to take a course in Texas history. Thanks to Miss Crooks’s lessons on the Alamo, Rebecca felt like she had a leg up on the others. For her, a siege was as natural as heat in August. While the others were still floundering with their predicament, she was already reckoning how to beat the odds.
She found the three men who had made it back alive from the pyramids. One man was holding together a long wound in his thigh. It was already showing signs of infection from the marsh decay. She went through the motions of nursing the leg, and asked her questions. “What did you see over there?”
“Pyramids, statues, and bones,” he said. “And gold. It’s everywhere.” Indeed it was. His shirt bulged with loot.
“What bones?”
“There are skeletons still shackled to the floor. Slaves in gold chains! And bones and skulls, scattered at the foot of a giant statue. It’s a man with a bull’s head, a Minotaur plated with gold.”
“What about the children?”
“Children?” he said.
Rebecca looked at him. Her heart did not grow colder toward the man, only a little sadder. After all this distance, their crusade had become just a shoplifting spree.
“I need a medic,” the man said.
“The medic’s gone,” she said. “He was sent to guard the base camp. The camp is gone. He’s dead.”
“Medicine then,” the man said. “Penicillin. And sulfa powder. And a stitch kit. And something for the pain.”
“I’ll talk to the captain.”
“Also I need a gun.” He had thrown his away. They both knew it. He pulled out a golden chalice and thrust it at her. “This should do. For the captain. Or keep it for yourself.”
“Rest.”
He saw her disgust. “Don’t give up on me, Rebecca. I came this far, didn’t I?”
She went over to the other two men. Neither had seen any children. With hangdog faces they asked for a little food and some weaponry. “You need every man who can pull a trigger,” one said.
Hunter snorted when she approached with their requests. He listed the medicines and supplies still remaining. Their food would last two days. There were enough rounds for ten clips each. He had three more rocket-propelled Willie Petes, with their white phosphorous charges. “What we’ve got left belongs to my unit, not mutts like them. They wanted an adventure. They got one.”
She gave him the golden chalice. “He’ll die without something for that wound.”
“Those assholes probably killed us, Rebecca.”
“I thought you came to protect them.”
“And I thought they came to find the children. Have they found the children?”
“Is that your answer then?”
He tossed the chalice away. “Take some meds. I’ll have a gun issued to each man. Is there anything else you want from us?”
She looked at the soldier, and would have touched his head or his shoulder, something to close the gap between them. He needed her as much as she needed him, but it would insult him to have it said, and so she just shook her head no and they went their own ways.
The siege would have seasons. She knew that from the Alamo. Once they got settled into this melting plug of a fortress, the men would hope and pray for rescue. When it didn’t come, they would despair. Finally they would get right with God, lay out their bullets, and fight to the last man.
But every massacre has a survivor, or at least the Alamo had. If there was only going be one survivor out of this scrape, Rebecca meant to be the one. It was not that she felt entitled or had a special fear of dying. But Sam was near. Whatever it took, Rebecca was going to find her. It was as simple as that.
She climbed a ramp and trained her binoculars on the island again. Nothing stirred over there. Then she spied an infrared pixel up in the air and homed in on it. It was that climber still sitting on top of his pyramid. She had forgotten all about him.
His lonesome vigil tugged at her. It inspired her. His game was working, at least for the time being. He was hiding in plain sight, right in their midst. Maybe the hadals weren’t so superhuman after all. Maybe there was a limit to their power. Maybe she could learn how to be invisible, too.
Below her, the marsh lapped at the stone shore. Frogs took up their chorus. It reminded her of something Clemens had once told her, that there was peace to be had in the abyss, but that first you had to go through hell to find it.
The screams began a few hours later, skipping across the water like pebbles, so faint that the frogs all but drowned them out. After witnessing the slaughter of men on the island and bridge, the thought of prisoners had not entered her mind. Hunter threw a rock in the marsh, and the frogs fell silent. For the sake of morale it would have been better to let them sing.
Rebecca had never heard such pain. The pitch kept changing, as if musical instruments were being tuned. “What are they doing to those men?” said a man.
“Taking their time,” said another.
“Get back to your posts,” said Hunter. But wherever they went, the miniature screams followed. A symphony of mosquitoes.
You couldn’t sleep for all the crabs in motion.
On the second day of the siege they heard a slight rattling noise, like raindrops against a window. “Kitty litter,” laughed their chain gunner, “they’re throwing fucking kitty litter at us.” He held up a handful and let the dusty gravel sift through his fingers.
A few hours later the chain gunner developed a cough.
Like nocturnal insects, the various sentinels watched through their NODS and sniper scopes. One team scanned with a radar array. Chemical sticks lit the inner chambers with eerie greens and oranges.
In their self-imposed dusk, imaginations ran amok. Men sensed things that weren’t there, and ignored things that were. Ghosts and vampires plagued them, only to be revealed as rocks or flags of drifting mist. Someone detonated a claymore on a hapless statue. “Higgins, you just killed a garden gnome, you idiot.” It was getting easier and easier to believe they had nothing to fear but fear itself.
It was a strange siege, almost imaginary. They were surrounded, not by barbarian hordes with catapults, but by degrees of darkness and quiet. By frogs and shadows and medieval demons. It seemed so empty out there that one of the action heroes, seeking to redeem himself, volunteered to go explore. “Maybe they’ve gone away. Maybe we can go home.”
“Good idea,” said a DZ boy.
He climbed down through a window and faded into the blackness. That was the last they ever saw of him. His memorial service was short and blunt. “Dumb ass,” someone said.
The action hero with the slash wound died that night.
Now that the fight was on them, it became desperately clear how little Rebecca had to contribute. She knew nothing of battle tactics, couldn’t handle a gun, and her so-called leadership was at an end. They had followed her smack into a dead end.
She made herself useful with small chores. Hunter put her in charge of rationing the food and delivering it to the various stations. Also she compiled a list of the dead, as best the men could remember any other names. Mostly people had just vanished and taken their identities with them. The only one she could recollect with any confidence was Clemens. Created by two worlds, estranged from both, the monster had finally found peace in this giant stone dungeon.
Rebecca had just finished delivering the last of the meal bars to the radar team when she heard a puff of air. One of the men at the window slapped at his neck. “Bugs,” he said.
A minute later his partner scratched his scalp and discovered three woody needles, smaller than a cactus spine, hanging from the outermost layer of his skin. More of the little needles were stuck, helter-skelter, in their clothing.
On day three of the siege the two radar men came down with high fevers.
The food ran out.
The chain gunner with the cough died. Cause of death: kitty litter.
Around 0400 h
ours, a hadal came sprinting straight at them from the blackness. The sentry dropped him with a single shot through the head. Instantly flares went up. But there was no one else out there.
Rebecca joined Hunter by the front barricade. The body lay a few scant yards from the entrance, naked as an ape, more naked than an ape, not a hair on him. He was well muscled, with paper-thin skin. There was no fat of the land down here. He had painted himself with ochre and charcoal stripes before making a run at them.
“I don’t see a weapon, not even a rock to throw,” Hunter said. “He wasn’t a sapper or a suicide bomber.”
“What was he thinking of?” Rebecca asked. “Why throw himself away like that?”
“Maybe he was probing our line. Maybe he just wanted to count coup.”
He had horns and very long fingers, and was circumcised. That was an interesting bit of trivia. They cropped their genitals. They groomed themselves.
A wave of revulsion hit her. What if this thing had touched Sam?
“Shoot him again,” she said.
“No need. Look at him.”
“I’ve heard things about them,” she said. “They don’t just die.”
“Those are fairy tales, Rebecca. He’s dead. Save the bullet.”
“Kill him again.”
Hunter was staring at her. “Take him off at the neck,” he finally said.
The rifle cracked once. “Done,” said the shooter.
Rebecca went up to the roof with her binoculars. The lone hadal was a harbinger. The final assault was nearing. She wasn’t ready. She still had no hiding place picked out, no secret tunnels in or out. Playing dead probably wouldn’t work.
She glassed the pyramids, looking for her pal sitting on his summit. She needed a boost. If he could outlast the violence, then she could, too. This time, though, the pinnacle of the pyramid was empty. His luck had run out.
On the fourth morning of the siege, she woke from a dream about ham and turkey and Sam in her Thanksgiving Pilgrim costume. She opened her eyes, and strangely, the smell of meat did not go away. Following her nose, she found five men searing long slivers of meat over a gas cooker. A bottle of Tabasco sauce sat to the side.
A poncho covered the body of the hadal that had rushed them yesterday. Crouched around their little blue flame, they looked up at her without the slightest guilt.
“Want some?” one offered.
It smelled delicious. Her stomach rumbled. “You boys eat,” she said. There was no sense getting holy about the cannibalism.
“There’s plenty,” a man said.
“Another time,” she said. And she meant it.
It was not as if the taboo still loomed before her. Thanks to the hot-rock drillers in Electric City, she knew exactly what the meat would taste like. Soon enough, she was going to have to partake, if only to stay strong for Sam. But for the moment, with the body lying right there, it was a little too raw for her.
She visited the radar men. Hunter had quarantined them, sort of, mostly to keep their condition from general view. Both were unconscious. Their spittle was foamy. Plainly the cactus needles had poisoned them. Hunter guessed they were blow darts. He warned his men to be careful with what they touched and breathed, a tall order in the dark.
Other than a little cannibalism and biowarfare, the siege remained a humdrum affair. Nothing moved out there. The frogs sang on. That mosquito drone of tortured men never quit. She was beginning to wonder if the hadals meant to just let them go quietly crazy in here and die of antique diseases.
Then Clemens returned from the dead.
His voice hailed them from the darkness. “Don’t shoot, lads,” he said. “It’s me, a friend. I’m coming in.”
Four days after disappearing among the pyramids, battered and cut, he emerged from the night. They let him through the gateway choked with boulders. It was like the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Everyone gathered around. They made him sit. They gave him water. The same men who had ridiculed him as a leper now gave him a hero’s welcome. Somehow Clemens had outfoxed the enemy and kept healthy. He could have just left them to their fate, but he’d risked everything to return to them. It could mean only one thing. He knew the secret to their survival.
“Food,” shouted a soldier, “give the man some food.”
A plate of meat slivers got handed to the front. Clemens took a smell and put it aside. “Waste not, want not,” someone said. “Chow down, brother.”
Clemens turned his amphibian eyes to Rebecca. “Have you eaten this?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“Good,” he said.
In a rush, Rebecca realized he had come to save her. This wreck of a man, this casualty, still wanted to be her white knight.
“What did you see?” Hunter asked. “How many are there? What’s their weaponry? Who’s in charge of them?”
“They want to know the same thing about you,” Clemens said.
Hunter’s scowl sharpened. “And what did you tell them?”
“I didn’t have to tell them anything,” Clemens said. “The prisoners are singing. You haven’t heard them?”
“What have you been doing over there, Clemens?”
“Dealing,” Clemens said.
Rebecca spoke. “What about the children?”
A veil seemed to fall over Clemens’s eyes. He sat there bleeding through his shirt. They had spared him their worst savagery this time around, no broken bones, no prehistoric plastic surgery. The cuts and bruises looked fresh and minimal.
“How did you escape?” someone asked. They wanted to learn his secrets.
“I didn’t. I was sent,” Clemens said. “I’m here with an offer. Call it an amnesty.”
The troops jumped at that. Their eyes lit with hope.
“We need to talk,” he said to Rebecca and Hunter.
Hunter ordered the men back to their stations. He faced Clemens. “Talk.” His hostility was thick as the night.
“The children are alive,” he said.
Rebecca stared at him.
He opened his shirt and fumbled a string from around his neck. He handed it to her. Her mother’s crucifix hung there, the same one Rebecca had given her Sam one scary night. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think.
“I saw them,” he said. “I spoke with Samantha.”
A cage door flew open in her chest. A great, wracking sob escaped. She almost fell.
“They’re alive?” said Hunter. He spoke it with surprise, but also irritation.
Rebecca grabbed Clemens’s hand. “Tell me.” That was all she could manage to get out.
“I won’t lie,” said Clemens. “They’re a mess.”
How bad could it be? Bad, Rebecca knew. “Yes?”
“They’re exhausted. Injured, some of them. Traumatized.” He saw her dread. “Don’t worry, none has been reworked. That comes later.”
Reworked? That was how he dealt with the horror in his mirror.
“Give me the terms of this amnesty,” Hunter said.
“This is difficult,” Clemens said.
“The terms,” said Hunter.
“You came for the children. They know that.”
Rebecca could barely see. Her tears were hot. “Yes?” she said.
Clemens eyed Hunter’s rifle. “I’m just the messenger,” he said.
“Give me the terms, Clemens.”
“They’ll trade you.”
“For what?” said Rebecca. What was left of them that had the slightest value?
“Speak,” said Hunter.
“It’s a straight swap,” said Clemens, “one child for one man.”
“What?” Rebecca whispered.
“Utter fucking bullshit,” said Hunter.
Rebecca struggled to find some silver lining. Her granny said there was always a silver lining. “It’s just a proposal. Now we counter it.”
“I already did,” said Clemens. “They started out asking three for one. This is as good as it gets.”
/> Hunter’s steely face told her everything. There would be no trade. No volunteers. No nothing. Even though they had come for the children, even though they were willing to fight to the death, not one man would give himself over. They would all just fight and die here.
“No,” she declared. “You go back to them. You tell them…” Her voice faded. “Tell them, me. I’ll go. In exchange for all the children.”
Who would love Sam the way she did? Who would know to tuck in her baby toes at night? Who would ever guess to sing “Greensleeves” to her? And years from now, when this was all past, would Sam even remember her? But it was the only way. Before her courage failed, Rebecca said, “Go tell them.”
Bared to the world, Clemens’s lidless eyes looked ancient and young, corrupt and innocent. Was that a scar or a smile? “I already did,” he said. “I knew what they’d say. I knew what you’d say. I told them. They could have you. And me.”
Her heart filled. “You would do that?”
“Enough,” said Hunter. “You’re not going anywhere. And neither is he.”
“But the children…”
Hunter aimed his rifle at Clemens. “He lied, Rebecca,” he said. “There are no children anymore.”
37
“America,” breathed the angel.
“Yes, America,” said Ali. It was another day. She still could not stand. “Why steal our children? Why not take them from the settlements that are closer, or from some tropical island no one has ever heard of?”
“Because of you, Alexandra.” He had begun calling her that. Gregorio’s soul had quit wandering, it seemed. Perhaps gravity had drawn him to this lower keep, or he’d gotten lonely or was hoping to protect her. Whatever the explanation, she was once again Alexandra, not Ali. “Would you have come if the children were from Timbuktu or Kathmandu? No, there was only one way to pry you out of your little haven in the sun.”
“You stole them to lure me down?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
By this point, she no longer doubted who he was. He was the Grand Inquisitor, the caged tiger and the encyclopedist. Long ago, when this place had been covered with water, he was the ancient mariner, and after it dried he was Job, the hermit. He was the trickster, the goat, and the noble revolutionary. He was the puppeteer using dead souls as strings for his puppets. He was a monster.
