Starfist - 12 - Firestorm

by Dan Cragg

  At that moment the Confederation Raptors attacked.

  The next thing Lilly Lee knew, someone was dragging her from under a section of the depot roof. She had no idea how she got there. The last thing she remembered was being dragged along by her grandfather and then waking up under the rubble. She had some scratches and bruises, but she was not seriously hurt. “Grandpa?” she whimpered, looking up at the man who’d rescued her.

  “Are you hurt?” the man asked. She had never seen him before. “I heard you screaming. Quick, quick, we have to get out of here!” He pulled Lilly, still clutching Hardee, to her feet and dragged her along the platform.

  Everywhere fires raged and people screamed in fear and agony and staggered about calling the names of their loved ones. The man’s eyes were wild and the right side of his face was covered in blood. He muttered curses as he dragged Lilly along at his side and for the first time she began to feel terror.

  “I want my grandpa,” Lilly whimpered.

  “All gone, all gone,” the man said and groaned.

  Lilly Lee’s grandfather had always been the anchor in her life, a solid, dependable presence, always there with a kind word and a helping hand; now, in extremis, it was him she called for, not her parents, her older sister, or her brother. She sensed, vaguely, that at times her father resented the old man’s influence over his younger daughter and she had learned how to exploit this when her father or mother wished to deny her something she wanted. Grandpa would always acquiesce and overrule. She had learned at a very early age what the word “spoiled” meant and she realized that she loved being “spoiled” and that Grandpa Lee loved spoiling her.

  People and parts of people lay everywhere. The aircraft had struck the depot with devastating effect. Lilly glimpsed what looked like dolls lying scattered among the wreckage and flames, thin, sticklike dolls all black, arms flexed, parchmentlike black skin stretched tightly over their faces, teeth grinning weirdly. They had no hair on their heads and no lips. “Don’t look!” the man screamed and ran faster.

  Just as the sun cleared the horizon, they found their way into a grove of trees some distance from the destruction. The man fell down and began crying and beating his fists on the ground. Lilly lay in the grass and leaves and went to sleep. When she awoke it was dark and the man was gone.

  Lilly got stiffly to her feet. It was cold and dark. She grasped Hardee ever closer for warmth. She was hungry and thirsty and had never felt more alone and frightened in her life. In one instant her great adventure had turned into hell. She cried out desperately for her grandfather.

  “Whozzat?” someone shouted from above where Lilly was sitting. It was a man’s voice.

  “Grandpa!” she yelled, suddenly energized with hope, and scrambled up a slight embankment. In the light of the depot which still burned behind her, she saw that she was on a road crowded with people stumbling along away from the fires. No grandfather, only strangers. With no other alternative, Lilly fell in beside some people and walked along with them. She heard a woman say they were headed for the river, and once they got across they’d be all right. Lilly knew that south of Ashburtonville there was a river called the White River but she had never been there and she had no idea how far it was from the city.

  All along the road Lilly constantly called for her grandfather, her father, her mother, even Justus, her twelve-year-old brother. She accosted people plodding along wearily, thinking they were her family, but always they turned out to be strangers who looked at her coldly and turned away. She was lost in a vast sea of desperate strangers who had other things on their mind than caring for someone else’s seven-year-old girl.

  At dawn, when the vast, bedraggled crowd at last reached the river, they found the bridge had been blown up. The White River raged swift and deep between its banks, and a stiff wind from the east was whipping the surface into whitecaps. Watching the foam from her perch high on the bank, Lilly reasoned that was probably why they called it the White River. A fleet of small boats was attempting to ferry people across one load at a time. One capsized as Lilly watched, the black heads of the people in the water visible for an instant as they were swept downstream with the current then disappeared beneath it. She wondered idly what had happened to them. “We don’t want to get wet again,” she told Hardee and shivered. The mishap did not stop anyone else from clambering aboard other dangerously overloaded boats.

  Somewhere along the way, someone had given Lilly a candy bar. She was so ravenous she ate some of the wrapper. She fell asleep again and when she awoke it was almost dark. She could no longer remember how long it had been since the Lee family had left their beautiful home in Ashburtonville. She wondered if she would ever see her people again. It was quiet all around her. She concluded from the silence that most of the people had gotten across while she slept or they had gone swimming. She felt vaguely annoyed at that. She had slept away most of the day. Otherwise she’d be across the river and safe, like that woman had promised the night before. She wondered what had happened to the bridge, the remains of which lay partially submerged in the water where vast eddies swirled around the crumpled fragments. Cautiously in the gathering dark, Lilly made her way down to a tiny wharf at the water’s edge. Some people were standing there arguing with a man in a boat.

  “No more fucking room!” the boatman yelled when he saw Lilly approaching out of the dusk.

  “I think she’s alone,” a woman said. “Where are your parents?” she asked gently. She bent down and looked searchingly into Lilly’s face and smiled. She brushed the hair out of Lilly’s eyes. “Are you alone, child? Where is your mother, your father?”

  “Gone,” Lilly squeaked in a voice that did not sound like her own.

  The woman turned and said to the boatman, “She’s going with us. Okay, Charles?” Charles was obviously her husband, standing with three smaller figures, their own children.

  “Here,” Charles gave the boatman something. “This is all we have. Take us and this orphan child across the river and it’s all yours.”

  “You should be shot for taking our money like this, exploiting our predicament!” the lady shouted.

  “Aw, fuck you, lady,” the boatman replied laconically. “I ain’t riskin’ my life or my boat for you goddamned people lessen I get paid for it. Swim, if you don’t like it. Hah hah!” His laugh was cruel and piercing above the rush of the water.

  “All right,” the man called Charles said. “Get on board.” He ushered his children into the boat.

  “Hurry it up! The wind’s risin’ and it’s a good two kilometers to the other shore. It’s gonna be a rough crossing, if we even make it!” the boatman shouted as he began casting off the lines.

  “Hey, don’t you have life preservers or something? I know the law. You’re supposed to have that kind of equipment,” the mother said.

  The boatman shot her a look in the gathering darkness that clearly said he thought she was out of her mind to ask such a question. He laughed that mean laugh again and said, “Fuck no, lady! You think this is a luxury liner? We go over and you go into the fuckin’ water, hold yer breath as long as ya kin.” He laughed nastily again. “There ain’t no fuckin’ law no more lady. Yer on yer own and either you kin sink or you kin swim, all the same to me,” he said, and spit over the side of his boat.

  The family’s name was Kincaid, Charles and Betty with their children, Arnold, thirteen, Daniel, nine, and Shannon, seven. Charles Kincaid claimed to have met Lilly’s father once and said he thought highly of Brad Lee but had no idea what might have happened to the him or the rest of Lilly’s family. “So many were…” He let the sentence trail off.

  “Killed,” Lilly finished the sentence for him. “I had a dog named Raymond,” she volunteered, “and when he died we put him in a hole behind our house. Do you think my daddy’s in a hole?”

  “You are part of our family now,” Betty Kincaid said quickly. They had long since reached the far side of the river and were well on their way south. “What is
that you’re carrying there?” She wanted to change that subject as quickly as possible.

  “Hardee,” Lilly answered in a tiny voice, afraid Betty would demand she throw Hardee away. No adult thought much of Hardee, who had by then become quite ragged and dirty. But when Betty reached down Lilly let her touch the doll.

  Betty shook her head and smiled, “Well, child, we need all the help we can get, so tell Hardee he’s welcome to come along with us.”

  Daniel Kincaid and Lilly became friends instantly, mainly because they were of almost the same age, and he successfully humored her by saying he respected Hardee.

  The Kincaids had relatives, Charles’s brother and his family, in a small town about one hundred kilometers southwest of Ashburtonville, and that was where they were headed. On the second night after crossing the White River they camped in a grove beside a farmer’s recently harvested potato field. None of them had had much to eat that day or the days before. After the adults shared what little food Charles had been able to barter for along the way, Arnold whispered, “Let’s go into the field. Maybe there’s some potatoes left in the ground.”

  There were potatoes out there! Eagerly, the four children scrambled about the field, pulling the tubers out of the wet ground and stuffing them into their pockets. Occasionally one would stop, brush off the mud clinging to a potato, and bite into it. In the wild hunt for the tubers, they rapidly forgot where they were and what had happened to them.

  Suddenly Arnold felt himself grabbed by the scruff of his neck and a hand slammed into the side of his head. Stars appeared before the boy’s eyes and he shouted out in pain and fear.

  “Goddamnit, boy,” Arnold’s father shouted, “put those potatoes back into the ground!” He was breathing hard. He shoved his son to the ground. “Do it, Arnold, put ’em back.” He turned to the other children, “Go ahead, put those spuds back!”

  Lilly stood there, open mouth full of potato. Charles came over to her. “Lilly, we Kincaids are not thieves. We will never take anything that doesn’t belong to us. That’s a rule we have in this family. Now put those potatoes back, go over to your mother”—he paused, realizing he’d forgotten himself and then smiled—“go over to your mother and clean off your face. Tomorrow I’ll find the farmer who owns this field and ask him to let us have some of these potatoes.”

  In the morning boiled potatoes never tasted better to Lilly Lee, and all the rest of her life she would love them.

  In later years Lilly was not sure how much of her ordeal she remembered accurately and how much of it she had imagined or dreamed, but the memories stayed with her the rest of her life. In the years to follow, the faces of her own family would fade into vague images and at times she would wonder if she ever had another family besides the Kincaids.

  Later that morning beside the farmer’s field, when they picked up their things and prepared to continue their trek, Lilly clutched Daniel’s hand and held on to it confidently the rest of the way. In time Lilly would marry Daniel Kincaid, move far, far away from Ashburtonville, and raise her own family.

  That morning beside the potato field was a turning point in Lilly Lee’s life. She’d become too old to play with dolls anymore. She left Hardee behind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  While the Marines of the three FISTs were in transit from landing zones to their initial objectives, the Essays that had brought them returned to Bataan, via suborbital flights. This time, the Essays made combat landings in the Confederation base, rather than beyond the horizon. The thinking was that the Coalition would mistakenly believe that the Confederation was landing more reinforcements, probably in preparation for a fresh breakout attempt. The Coalition commanders would then likely rush reinforcements to the forces holding the line, and be slow to move forces to the northeast, to rebuff the Marine raids at the 7th Independent Military Police Battalion’s camp, and at Cranston. Which also implied that the 4th Division at Phelps would likely not be further reinforced before the 27th Division, flanked by the 34th and 29th FISTs, attacked.

  The Essays, loaded with troops and equipment from the 27th Division, launched straight up, and then went suborbital to a staging area ten kilometers northeast of 34th FIST and the completely demoralized 7th MPs. That first wave of Essays arrived shortly before dawn. Two of the first elements off the Essays were a military police platoon and a medical unit from the 27th Division. The MPs were there to take charge of the Marines’ captives, and the medical unit to care for the freed POWs.

  As fast as the Essays landed the elements of the 27th Division, Major General Koval got them into their route order. Only half of his men and equipment had arrived at the landing zone when the first elements began moving toward Phelps and the 4th Composite Division. The two FISTS covering the division’s flanks had moved out as soon as 34th FIST handed its prisoners over to the army MPs. Thirty-fourth FIST had the right flank, the direction from which fresh reinforcements were most likely to come.

  Second squad had the FIST’s point, two hundred meters ahead of the rest of the column. Second fire team, not much to Corporal Claypoole’s pleasure, had the squad’s point. But Claypoole had known that would be the case even before any orders were given—Lance Corporal Schultz wouldn’t accept anybody but himself in the position most likely to make initial contact with the enemy, so Claypoole was resigned to being the second-most exposed man in the entire FIST. FIST nothing, he was the second-most exposed man in the entire task force! He’d like to convince Sergeant Kerr or somebody else to give Schultz to a different fire team. But he had to, in the ancient expression, bite the bullet, and continue to trust Schultz’s instincts, because neither Kerr nor anybody above him in the company seemed in the least inclined to reshuffle the fire teams so that Claypoole no longer had Schultz. At least Schultz was preternaturally astute at finding danger before it found him, no matter how exposed his position, regardless of the occasional wound he suffered. So there was nothing Claypoole could do except keep all his senses alert…

  Yes there was.

  His new man, Lance Corporal Ymenez. Not only was Ymenez on his first combat operation with the platoon, he was so new Claypoole and Schultz hadn’t even had a chance to get acquainted with him. Not that Schultz ever expressed an interest in knowing anything more about a new man than that he was a Marine. As far as Schultz was concerned, every Marine had potential, but remained suspect until proven.

  But Claypoole wasn’t like Schultz; he had to know his new man, and the new man had to know what to expect of the other men in the fire team.

  “Ymenez,” Claypoole said into the fire team circuit.

  “Yo,” Ymenez answered distractedly. Claypoole heard nervousness in his voice. Understandable, Claypoole thought. After all, he was the third man in the FIST’s column, headed toward unknown danger.

  “There’s something you need to know,” Claypoole said. “We aren’t out here in front of everybody else because somebody thinks we’re expendable. We have the point because the Hammer is the best Marine in the entire FIST”—he paused because he knew Schultz was listening, and wanted to consider what he was about to say—“hell, the best man in the entire Marine Corps at knowing when there’s trouble up ahead or to the flank. The fire team Schultz is in is always on the most exposed part of the formation.”

  Claypoole barely heard Ymenez’s murmured, “Buddha’s fuzzy blue shit. And I’m in this fire team?”

  But Claypoole did hear the murmur, so he said, “Thanks to the Hammer, we’re probably in the safest place in the FIST. Except for the pogues sitting back at Bataan.”

  The problem with talking to Ymenez on the fire team circuit was that there was no way to keep Schultz out of the circuit unless he had an equipment malfunction. Schultz grunted something that might have been, “Shut up so I can focus.” At least that’s how Claypoole interpreted the grunt, so he shut up so Schultz could focus on whatever or whomever might be waiting in front of them.

  Sergeant Kerr trailed fifty meters behind second fire team,
twenty meters in front of his third fire team—Corporal Doyle’s. He wanted to talk to the man privately, but couldn’t while they were on the move; the closest he could come to a private conversation was on the fire team leader’s circuit or on the fire team circuit. He didn’t feel like having Corporals Chan and Claypoole listening in, but Lance Corporal Quick and PFC Summers were different—after all, they’d been there when Doyle did what Kerr wanted to talk about.

  “Doyle,” he said into the fire team circuit.

  “Y-Yes?” A hitch in Doyle’s voice made Kerr think the corporal had jumped at unexpectedly being spoken to by his squad leader.

  “How did you do that? Rescue that woman back there, I mean.”

  “Ah, uh, I s-saw what that, that officer was doing and, uh, I j-just jumped in and m-made him s-stop. That’s all.”

  Kerr shook his head; no, that wasn’t all, and he knew it.

  “You had to have gone directly to the room the woman was held in,” Kerr said. “Did you enter the building before the command came through?”

  “N-No, Sergeant Kerr.”

  “You had to have, you couldn’t have searched the other rooms before you reached that one if you hadn’t already been searching before ‘go.’”

  “Tell him,” Lance Corporal Quick said.

  Doyle’s sigh came over the comm. “A-All right,” he said dully. “After y-you l-left us, I-I made a circuit of the building, looking in the windows to see if any of the rooms were occupied.” His voice was becoming stronger. “I saw that officer with the woman, and what he was going to do to her. So after I made sure all the other rooms were empty, I went back and took my men inside. We set up outside the room so we could break in as soon as we got the ‘go’ command.”

  “You know, that building was supposed to be unoccupied. And there weren’t any lights visible when I positioned you.”