Mahlia peered back into the thickening smoke. “Mouse!”
She couldn’t make out a thing beyond a dozen meters. Where was he?
“Grind it.” She started back through the bog.
“You’ll die if you follow him,” the half-man said.
Mahlia realized that the monster had been watching her closely. “You knew he was running?” she demanded.
“I assumed that he had some purpose.” Tool’s ears twitched. “He only now has turned his path definitively away.”
“So can you tell where he is?” Mahlia asked. “You can track him?”
Tool listened for a moment. “A few hundred meters, perhaps. He moves quite quickly.”
Mahlia turned and shouted again. “Mouse!”
No response. Mahlia grimaced. “He’s good in the swamps. We gotta go catch him before he does something stupid.”
“He already has,” Tool said. “And he will die because of it. And you will die, too, if you follow him. There are patrols moving toward us now. Many ants marching.”
“But you’re fast,” Mahlia said. “Just go after him.”
“You remind me of General Caroa, in miniature. Always demanding more of your troops. You think it is easy for me to walk? Let alone run?” He hefted his makeshift staff. “You think I carry this for pleasure?”
Mahlia cursed Mouse. They were supposed to stick with this old war monster and it was going to get them away from the Drowned Cities for good. Not just living in the swamps, but all the way out. North. To those places like Seascape Boston and Beijing that weren’t swallowed by war. With the half-man, it was possible. He’d be able to sense the patrols, to work them through the battle lines. And now Mouse was turning around and going back to town?
Mahlia looked to the half-man. “You can tell where the soldier boys are, right? You can tell where the patrols are?”
Tool nodded slowly. “I can.”
“Then help me go get Mouse.”
Tool snorted. “I’m not so eager to die that I will walk into an enemy position with neither weapons nor support.”
“I saved you.”
“And I am grateful.”
“Why won’t you help?”
“Why should I throw my life away, when it has just been reclaimed?”
Mahlia wanted to scream at the brute monster. “Because I’m the one who saved you! Without me, you’d be dead already. Mahfouz and Mouse would have let you bleed and die. I gave you every med the doctor had to get you up and walking.”
“So you believe I owe you.”
“You do! You owe me big-time. And you know it.”
Tool slowly squatted, bringing them eye to eye. “Perhaps I do owe you. Perhaps my honor even demands that I pay you back in some way.
“But listen to me, girl. If you come with me now, you have a chance to survive and leave this place. I will take you with me, and I can help you escape.” He straightened. “Or you can return and try to save your friend from his own foolishness.”
“You can track him, right?”
The half-man’s lips drew back, showing teeth. “You still think I’m your dog?”
“No!” Fates, it was impossible to deal with the monster. Even soldier boys made more sense. The half-man seemed like a person, but then it would turn cold and she’d think it was about to tear her apart. “Can you help me? Please?”
“If I do, do you consider our debt settled?”
“Help me get Mouse.”
“What is he to you?”
“He’s my friend.”
“Friends are easy to find.”
“Not like him.”
“You’re willing to die to save him?”
“Fates.” Mahlia looked away, feeling lost. “If he dies, I’m dead anyway. I don’t got nothing else to lose.”
The half-man looked at her, scarred and huge. It didn’t move.
“Never mind.” Mahlia turned and started back into the swamps. “Do what you want; I got to get him back. If he’s dead, I’m dead. It’s how it is.”
“Pack,” the half-man said. “He’s of your pack.”
The way the half-man said it made Mahlia think that it was more than just when you talked about dogs or coywolv running together. It was something absolute and total.
“Yeah,” she said. “Pack.”
20
THE SMOKE THICKENED about them. Mahlia cut a strip of fabric from her tank and soaked it in the swamp, bound it around her nose and mouth, and fought to keep from coughing.
The half-man didn’t seem affected at all. Even as Mahlia’s eyes teared in the smoke and she fought against sneezing and coughing, the half-man eased through the trees and pools and kudzu like a wraith. Sometimes, he would hold up a hand and she would freeze and he would sniff the air.
Three times, he motioned her off the trail and into the tangled vines of the jungle. Then they lay on the muddy ground, listening as snakes slithered through the undergrowth and then, just as Mahlia was becoming annoyed at the charade of hiding, she would at last hear footsteps and people would be on top of them.
Twice it was people from the village. She was tempted to call out, but then remembered Amaya and knew the villagers were just as much of an enemy as the soldiers.
They lay under smoke and vines and watched the shapes of the refugees rise out of the smoke, sobbing. Clutching themselves. Old man Salvatore, but not his baby. Emmy Song. Alejandro, who had given her so much trouble, hurried past with two young children Mahlia didn’t recognize and didn’t think were his. People. Old, young, children. So much like other refugees she had seen.
The townspeople had always hated war maggots and now they were just more of the same. Displaced and on the move, hoping they’d find some solace or safety. And despite all the antipathy Mahlia had for them, she found herself wishing them luck, and an easy path under the eye of the Fates.
The people fled with rice and sacks of potatoes and anything that they could carry, and it was heartbreakingly little. She watched them rise from the fog, and disappear again, and she wondered at their future.
Would they ever have a chance of settling again, or would they all end up like her, cast off and wandering, without hope of shelter ever again? Would another village take them in, or would it fight them off?
And then Tool would tap her shoulder and they would climb from their hiding place and glide deeper into the thickening smoke.
The third time Tool motioned Mahlia off the trail, he didn’t make her hide, but instead he stopped short, sniffing, and then turned and guided her back the way they’d come. She wanted to ask what he was doing, but she took her cue from his absolute silence.
Ever since they had started toward the village, he had not used his voice, and even now, as he guided her off the trail and into the tangling kudzu, and then onto another path that she hadn’t even guessed was there, the half-man didn’t say anything.
“Why?” she whispered.
The half-man motioned her sharply to silence. He mimed with his hands, as if he were holding a rifle, then held up fingers, pointing back the way they had come. Pretended as if he were squatting. Held up six fingers again, looking at her significantly.
Six soldier boys. Sitting on the trail, waiting in ambush. Without Tool, she would have walked right into it.
They eased down the new path. Mahlia’s anxiety increased. The silence was terrifying.
Suddenly Tool grabbed her and pushed her down, hand over her mouth. She tried to fight him off, but then the guns opened up and she heard people crying and screaming, and soldiers laughing and shouting, and then more shooting, and all the while, Tool lay beside her, hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out and give away their position.
They weren’t more than fifty feet away. That close. She could hear someone moaning in the smoke, sobbing. She heard footsteps. There was a quick scuffle and someone cried out. The sobbing stopped.
“Dumbass civvies,” someone said. Someone else laughed. The soldiers. Right there
beside her. Not more than a couple yards away. Slowly their voices moved off. Another person cried out in pain.
Tool motioned and then they were up and sneaking past, moving through the smoke, Mahlia praying that she wouldn’t cough and give herself away, and then they were past the ambush and Tool was motioning her onward, urging her faster. She hurried after the hobbling monster.
She was moving so fast she almost stepped on them before she realized what was happening. Bodies lay everywhere. Dozens and dozens of dead. Mahlia jerked up short, on the verge of crying out. She was surrounded by a carpet of bodies. Her breath came out in a low, trembling exhalation. She took another breath, fighting for calm.
It’s just the dead. You’ve seen plenty of them. Just keep going.
She started picking her way over the bodies, trying hard not to tread on them, trying hard not to look at their faces, at the blood, how torn and broken they were. Trying hard not to see Bobby Cross where he lay.
But even as she tried to ignore the carpet of death, a part of her was seeing the wounds and trying to fix them in her mind. All her doctor training, plucking at her conscience, telling her how to fix up something that couldn’t be fixed. Doctor Mahfouz instructing her in that calm voice of his that first she should stabilize the patient, make sure that breathing and circulation weren’t compromised. First fix that. Close the hemorrhaging wounds. Then onto the splints and sewing and…
Had she really brought this down on them? Was this all her fault? Was this an army’s revenge for the coywolv?
Mahlia started to retch, and suddenly it came out, all of it. The doctor was right. Everything you did just made it worse. One thing spinning into the next, into the next until a whole village was dead—
Tool clamped his hand over her mouth. “Be silent!” he growled. And though she struggled, he didn’t let her go. He buried her face against his body so that even her screams were barely sounds at all, and then her sobs poured out and he stifled those as well with his huge body.
“Lock it away,” the half-man whispered. “You feel, after. Not now. Now you are a soldier. Now you do your duty for your pack. If you break, your Mouse will die, and you with him. Feel, after. Not now.”
Mahlia wiped at her watery eyes and snotty face, nodding, and they went on.
The smoked lessened. They came to the edge of the blackened fields, with fires guttering all around. Ravens picked at the burned remains of the place. Across the fields, she saw the soldiers. Lieutenant Sayle and his pack, all together, standing around a cluster of people kneeling, and in the center of that knot, under cover of weapons—
“Fates.”
21
OCHO WIPED SOOT from his face. All his boys were a mess. The burning had taken longer than the lieutenant had wanted. Some of the crops had been wet, so setting the villagers to work ripping up their food and then lighting it on fire with cooking fuel and wood that his boys made them gather had taken longer than they’d planned, but Sayle wanted scorched earth and Ocho was going to make damn sure he got it.
There’d been a bit of resistance from the villagers, right at the beginning. Some of them had tried to run for the swamps, just as the lieutenant had planned, and Ocho heard gunfire and screaming as a bullet squad tore them apart with heavy weapons. After that, they had fewer defectors. Ocho ordered an acid squad to round up stragglers, while he limped behind.
His rib splints were hurting him, but he wasn’t going to show anyone how bad it was. He wasn’t showing a bit of weakness, today. The LT had given him a second chance. By the time they finished this operation, he wanted to be back in Sayle’s good graces, solid. Ocho wasn’t drugged on painkillers now. He was ready for war. And by the end of the day everyone would know it: Sayle, soldiers, civvies. Every one of them.
Ocho gritted his teeth through the pain and soldiered on, ordering half-bar patrols up into abandoned buildings, trying to ferret out the last of the people who were still hiding in the ruins. Getting others organized to put the townspeople to work, burning their own town. He was just assigning a new squad when the doctor came back into town.
At first, Ocho couldn’t believe what he was seeing. While half the villagers were scheming to flee, slipping out through the LT’s security nets, or dashing off into the jungle when they got half a chance, here the doctor was, coming out of the jungle with his damn doctor bag.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Van said as he watched the doctor come on. “LT was right. We got ourselves a doctor. Bo-na-fide human-ee-tarian.”
Ocho spat, watching. The doctor was a fool. He’d kind of suspected it, the way he’d stood up to Lieutenant Sayle on their first night in Banyan Town, but here it was again. The doctor, striding across the blackened field like he was the Rust Saint himself, coming to save everyone.
From the jungle, a bunch of gunfire opened up. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.
The doctor spun, and fell.
“Dammit!” Ocho waved his hand. “Make Hoopie stop shooting shit, will you?”
One of the licebiters was dispatched, running back across the sooty, uneven ground. Ocho headed across the fields toward the doctor, moving slowly. The man lay in the soot and muddy soil, facedown, but trying to sit up. He groaned as Ocho arrived.
“Whoa there, Doc.” Ocho knelt beside the man. Saw the blood. Sayle was going to be pissed.
Another bullet winged overhead.
“Blood and rust! Make that Hoopie stop with the shooting, or I’ll ram that rifle up his ass!”
“I got it, Sarge.”
Van took off running. A second later, the gunfire stopped and then Hoopie was making his way out of the forest. His skin was all torched and scarred up from the disaster with the castoff girl and the coywolv. He came and stood over the doctor.
Ocho scowled. “LT wanted this one alive.”
Hoopie looked down at the doctor. “He don’t look too good.”
“’Cause you shot his ass!” Ocho waved at Pook and Stork. “Get this one back to the command.”
He turned and caught sight of movement in the trees. “Dammit, Hoopie! You got your zone controlled or not?”
It was some little civvy licebiter, watching from the jungle. “Get that civvy. See if he knows anything about the half-man.” He grabbed Hoopie as he was about to go. “And if you bring him back like the doc, I’ll put a bullet in your head, personal.”
Hoopie’s bloodshot eyes regarded Ocho with total enmity, but he saluted and headed out. Ocho wondered if the armies up north, all those big corporate war bosses, had so much trouble keeping troops in line. Hoopie would need discipline, for sure, for tagging the doc. Maybe Ocho would bust him down to half-bar again. Give his rifle to someone who at least knew who to shoot.
Ocho stared down at the doctor. The old man was gasping and blood was coming out of his mouth, staining his salt-and-pepper beard. Already his eyes were glazing over.
Pook and Stork grabbed the doctor’s shoulders and got ready to drag him, but Ocho motioned them off. “Don’t bother. He’s already dying.” Ocho sighed as he looked down at the old guy.
“What were you thinking, old man?”
Maybe there was someone he wanted to save. But that doctor girl of his hadn’t been anywhere in the area. Maybe someone else, then. Ocho scanned the village. It didn’t make sense.
The man gasped again, and more blood came out of his mouth. It looked like he’d taken a couple in the chest. Surprising that he was even breathing, but the blood and bubbles frothing his lips made Ocho think the man wouldn’t last long.
Ocho squatted down beside the dying man. “Hey,” he said. “You remember me?” The man’s hand came up. Ocho took it. “Yeah. You fixed me up.” He looked down at the man’s blood-bloomed shirt. “Sorry about that, right? None of these warboys got any discipline. Half the time, they don’t even know which way to point a gun.”
The doctor wasn’t looking at him. Ocho couldn’t tell if the man was hearing him, or if he was already gone to his dying place. It was a stupid way to die. Hoop
ie’s squad just pinging him for no reason. They were supposed to herd people back into town and put them on work gangs, but this had just been an execution. Hoopie had been pissed about how the girl had gotten him burned, and figured the doc deserved it.
No damn discipline.
The doctor’s breathing slowed. Stopped. His hand went limp, and Ocho let it fall. “Sorry, old man.” He straightened. “Get that licebiter out of the trees, and make sure Hoopie doesn’t smoke him before I get to ask some questions.”
He strode back across the muddy fields, leaving the dead doctor behind, still irritated at Hoopie.
Sayle talked a good game about unit discipline, but at the end of the day, they might as well have been coywolv for all the restraint they had.
Mahlia watched from the trees. There was a cluster of soldiers standing in the blackened fields and then one of them straightened, and she recognized him.
Ocho. The sergeant she’d saved. Her hand curled into a fist, and then she saw what he and his boys had been standing over, and she gasped.
Doctor Mahfouz. She recognized the green pants and dirty yellow-and-blue shirt he’d been wearing. Stupid clothes for running and hiding, but the man had liked bright things. And now he lay in the mud. Stupid. Too damn stupid.
Soldiers were jogging in her direction. Tool pulled her back deeper into the jungle. For a second, she thought she’d been seen, but then soldier boys dove into the trees a hundred meters off. Gunshots echoed, followed by shouts. A moment later, they reemerged with some licebiter—
Mouse.
Mahlia lurched forward, but Tool grabbed her. He brought his head close. “You cannot survive this fight.”
Mahlia watched, sick, as Mouse was dragged across the fields. Beyond, the town burned, buildings flaming like monumental torches. A roof crashed down, blazing bright, and a cheer went up from the soldier boys.
Somewhere far away, Mahlia could hear a girl screaming, but Mahlia only had eyes for Mouse. The skinny red-headed boy, small between the older soldier boys. Mahlia tried to shake Tool’s hand off her shoulder. “They’re going to cut his hands off,” she whispered. “It’s how they do.”
The Drowned Cities sb-2 Page 14
