Coalition's End

by Karen Traviss

  “These fuckers ruined my life.” Maybe he was joking. “I’m going to make them pay for that.”

  “Yeah, let’s go pop some more of those bitches,” Cole said. “You and me, I think we’re gonna get good at this game.”

  “Hey, I’m just following you out of curiosity.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “Seriously. Don’t you get afraid of anything?”

  Cole knew Baird needed something reassuring right then, something he could believe in. And Cole was good at that, even if it meant lying just a little bit.

  “Hell, no, I’m the Cole Train!” He whacked Baird playfully across the back. “Stick with me, baby, ’cause I never lose!”

  “I’ll do that,” Baird said, following him into a mall full of grubs. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  HALVO BAY, SOUTHWESTERN BORDER OF TYRUS: THREE MONTHS AFTER E-DAY.

  Dizzy had done this a dozen times in a dozen cities now, but it still didn’t get any easier. He jumped down off the truck with his shovel and pickaxe and waited for orders while a thin, miserable drizzle of rain started to fall.

  All he could hear was the sea in the distance and the rumble of truck engines idling. The dead city had nothing to say for itself, and neither did anyone else except the Gear in charge of the burial detachment.

  “Okay, I don’t want to see anyone without gloves or masks.” He was an engineer, a corporal called Parry. “And listen for the whistle. Two hours on, fifteen minutes off. Get to it, people.”

  Halvo was mostly rubble. A week ago, it had still been a fancy seaside resort. Now the grubs had trashed it, the survivors had been evacuated, and it was time to clear the bodies and try to stop disease from spreading. Dizzy put on his rubber gloves. The white fabric mask didn’t fit tight over his beard, but if he caught some shit and died then he didn’t much care either way. Everything and everyone he cared about was gone—his wife, his stepson, and even the shipping line he’d worked for. He didn’t know if any of his old shipmates were still alive, but the odds weren’t good.

  And I ain’t alone. Look at those flags.

  Someone had already worked through the rubble with sniffer dogs and stuck small red flags in the ruins to mark where there were bodies to clear. They’d run out of the thin metal poles at one point, and the red flags were knotted around bits of wood. And then the flags had run out as well, and there were just branches or long jagged splinters from planks with red paint daubed on them.

  In the distance, Dizzy could hear the search team still moving through the city center. There was the weird tinkling sound of bricks and tiles sliding, and an occasional bark from one of the dogs. He looked up. He couldn’t see them.

  “We can’t keep up with this.” One of the firefighters was standing close enough for Dizzy to hear. “We’re going to have to start bulldozing and burning.”

  Dizzy turned around, angry. “Well, I’m willin’ to keep at it.”

  “Okay, buddy.” The firefighter had probably lost family or friends too, and Dizzy felt bad for snapping at him. “No problem. You carry on.”

  The guy was right. It was a lot of time and effort wasted when the living needed their help a lot more. But torching the place still didn’t feel like the decent thing to do.

  Dizzy put on his mask and trudged down the path that had been cleared between the collapsed buildings, an area marked on his street plan as a road with pavement cafés and shops for the folks who used to come here on vacation. An emergence hole had punched up through it. If he marked the plan with whatever he found and where he found it, then there was more chance of working out what had happened in the final moments, although there were so many of those that he got the feeling the government would stop bothering pretty soon. Searching for ID was the thing he hated most. He could pretend the bodies weren’t people at all until he put a name to them.

  The recovery team today was a mix of city employees and refugee conscripts. He looked around the faces and found there weren’t many he recognized from the last time. It wasn’t the kind of work that drafted folks stuck with. Goddamn it, if he could stomach it, why couldn’t they?

  He pulled down his mask. “Hey, Chuck!” A guy he’d gotten to know in the last couple of weeks turned around holding a pickaxe. “You seen that fella from Ilima?”

  “Gray? No, he shot through.” Chuck prodded around in his pile of rubble. “Said he’d take his chances in the mountains. Crazy, if you ask me. The grubs could come up any damn where. At least we got army protection here.”

  How many refugees would still be here tomorrow? Every day, more folks vanished from the cities and camps and headed for the wilds. Dizzy had thought about it, but he decided that he probably wasn’t that desperate to survive.

  He put the idea out of his head again and started lifting chunks of masonry. Rubber gloves didn’t last long handling razor-edged brick and broken glass, and he wished he still had those leather rigger’s gloves he’d had onboard ship, but they were long gone now along with the Star.

  The next obstacle in his way was a concrete slab with half a shop sign still attached to it. It was too heavy to shift on his own. He waved Chuck over in silence and they lifted together.

  Chuck grimaced at what they’d uncovered. “Goddamn.”

  “Y’know, I think that was probably a better way to go.”

  Dizzy saw it a lot. The grubs didn’t get to slaughter everyone personally. Some people were killed when buildings collapsed, like these poor folks had been. He was looking at something that didn’t much resemble human beings, something hit so hard and so fast by the falling debris that all that was left was a pinkish mass, stained clothing, and hair. There wasn’t really anything left to recover for burial.

  “Amen,” Chuck said. “Now how are you gonna identify that?”

  Dizzy took what comfort he could from a quick end and hoped that was how Lena and Richie had gone. “I’ll find something.”

  He rooted around in the debris for half an hour before he found a purse, but it might not have belonged to whoever he’d found. How many people kept their ID on them every second of the day? The charred card had half a number on it but he couldn’t read the name. So he marked what he had on the street plan, put the card in a plastic bag, and carried on.

  That was as lucky as he got that morning. The other bodies were in a state to be moved and bagged, and when he got a chance to dip out of sight for a moment, he switched himself off with a few gulps from the small screw-top bottle he always carried with him these days.

  The only reason he’d ever had for staying sober was Lena and Richie.

  The whistle went. It was time for the mandatory break. He walked back to the assembly area and went through the ritual of lining up at the mobile control vehicle to wash his hands and face in a bowl of antiseptic before going to the field canteen for a mug of coffee and a snack.

  Corporal Parry came over and sat down beside him with his coffee. They kind of knew each other by now, or at least as much as a Gear and a refugee ever could.

  “You’re a volunteer, aren’t you?” Parry said. “Don’t get that many, not from the refugees.”

  “I was Merch,” Dizzy said. “Imulsion tankers.”

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  “Okay, maybe I didn’t do enough to find my own family. So if I find someone else’s like someone found mine, then I reckon I’m even with the world.”

  That was part of it. But it was an explanation he’d come up with after he’d been thinking about it for weeks. What was the word? Rationalization. He wasn’t sure why he’d decided to do all this, although he worried that there was some crazy idea at the back of his head that if he kept looking, he’d find Lena and Richie even though he knew damn well they were already dead and that they couldn’t possibly have been in the places he’d been sent to anyway.

  Punishing myself? Maybe. Making myself look at death and accept that they ain’t coming back? Yeah, maybe that too.

  One thing he knew
was that the work was so backbreaking and exhausting that he fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow and he didn’t remember his dreams. It didn’t let him think. In fact, it had taught him how to switch off because he couldn’t avoid seeing those terrible damn things all day. He had to find a way of bringing down a big transparent shutter to stop himself from going crazy. It did what the hooch did, except it was free and a lot easier to get hold of.

  “You could join the army, Dizzy,” Parry said.

  “You gonna tell me a man my age should be on the frontline and not hanging out with the old folks and medical rejects?”

  “No.” Parry shrugged and handed him half a sandwich. “You could be an engineer again.”

  “I just fix big marine engines.”

  “Can you drive heavy goods vehicles?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, then.”

  “I need to do this.”

  “Okay, buddy. I understand.” Parry patted him on the shoulder and got up. “Nobody’s going to draft you as an engineer all the time you’re willing to do this.”

  Dizzy finished his coffee and went back into the rubble. The effort was killing him and that was what he wanted. Eventually the fatigue and the occasional slug of liquor ate up the hours and left no space for thinking. He was beginning to get that head-spinning, sick feeling—might have been the booze, might have been exhaustion—when he started hearing things.

  Metal groaned. He knew that by now. When he lifted the weight off pipes and girders, some of them would make real scary sounds. He was surrounded by the dead. His brain made up shit to fill in the gaps and he tried hard not to listen to it.

  That’s not a voice.

  Dizzy carried on hauling bricks and window frames away from a cluster of red flags. His boots crunched on glass.

  Damn, there it is again.

  He could definitely hear something moving and making noises. It wasn’t rats. The next thought that went through his head almost made him crap himself.

  Grubs.

  Sometimes they came back after they’d finished trashing a place. They weren’t heading anywhere in particular, just popping up and killing humans wherever they could.

  Dizzy took a few steps back from the rubble. There was a big dark space down there. He could hear rock moving, like something was scrabbling to get out.

  Oh God…

  There were always a few combat Gears around. Dizzy pulled off his mask and took a lungful of air, stumbling backward, but before he could yell a warning he heard a voice.

  “Help me!” It was faint, but it wasn’t a grub, and he wasn’t imagining it. It was a woman’s voice. “Somebody help me! Get me out!”

  “Everybody, quiet!” Dizzy yelled. “Quiet, goddamn it! Hey, ma’am, where are you?”

  The voice drifted up from the hole. “In the basement. Who’s that?”

  “It’s Dizzy,” he said, which was dumb because that wouldn’t have made any damn sense to a stranger. He started pulling at the rubble with an energy he hadn’t known in a long time. “We got a live one! Someone give me a hand!”

  Suddenly everyone seemed to converge on him—firefighters, Gears, the whole damn team. One of the firefighters dropped to his knees and peered down into the hole.

  “Yeah, we got a void under this slab,” he said, kneeling back on his heels. He called to his buddy. “Jerome, get a hydraulic prop over here. Come on, move it.”

  The firefighter lay flat and managed to get his arm into the gap to use his flashlight. Dizzy hung around, determined to stay until they got the woman out.

  “I can see some movement,” the firefighter said. “Can you hear me, sweetheart? Can you move? What’s your name?”

  The voice was faint, but she was definitely conscious and knew what was happening. “Rosalyn. My name’s Rosalyn.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No. I’m hungry.”

  “You got water down there?”

  “Lots of it. The pipes burst.”

  “Do you know how long you’ve been buried?”

  “No. Couple of days?”

  “A week, sweetheart. You take it easy. We’ll get you out.”

  “I locked myself in the storeroom. I couldn’t get back up the stairs.” She paused. “Dizzy, are the grubs gone?”

  Poor woman. She probably thought he was a Gear. He knelt down and stuck his head next to the hole, ecstatically happy for no good reason. Part of him was thinking that if she could survive a grub attack then there was hope for others, but he knew damn well it was a trick his mind played on him. Nobody was going to find his family alive. They’d been found, all right, and they were dead.

  “They’re all gone, sweetie,” he said. “It’s safe to come out.”

  It took five firefighters and a hydraulic lift to pry open a wide enough gap for one of them to reach in and haul Rosalyn out. The damnedest thing was that she could walk. She put her hand to her eyes to shut out the light and she was a little unsteady, but she got to her feet and she walked.

  There was no paramedic around because nobody was expecting to find survivors. Parry went to check her out, but she was too busy looking around at what was left of Halvo.

  “Oh God…” She was maybe thirty or so, wearing a navy blue skirt and white blouse that might have been part of a work uniform. The street plan said the building had been a bank, so maybe she was a clerk there. And she wasn’t wearing a wedding band. Dizzy began to build a picture of who Rosalyn might have been if her life hadn’t been wrecked just like his had. “Oh God… it’s all gone. Are they dead? Are they all dead?”

  She said it to Dizzy. She didn’t ask anyone else. So he answered her as best he could.

  “Yeah, they’re all gone,” he said. “But don’t you worry none. We’ll take care of you.” He paused. “I’ll take care of you.”

  GALANGI, SOUTH ISLANDS: SIX MONTHS AFTER E-DAY.

  Bernie had fallen into the habit of watching the TV as soon as she’d finished for the day and not moving until close-down at midnight.

  It was all news now. There were endless reruns of old movies on the other channel, but Sera was shrinking a city at a time, and all the TV companies had shrunk along with it until all their resources seemed to be spent on news. The broadcasts were now coming direct from Kaia, the biggest island in the southern chain. She curled up on the sofa with Moss flopped across her lap and didn’t dare take her eyes off the screen.

  Neal appeared in the doorway. He’d changed into his best pants and decent shoes. “I’m going down the pub,” he said. “And for God’s sake stop watching that, Bern. You can’t do a damn thing about it.”

  He didn’t ask her to go with him. He’d finally given up trying a couple of months ago, and he didn’t ask about 26 RTI, not that she saw much news about them lately. Somehow she thought she was slacking if she didn’t keep her eyes open and live through this second by second, even at a distance. It was like falling asleep on guard duty. It was unforgivable. She’d be letting down her mates.

  “There’s a TV down the pub,” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen. “You won’t get away from it.”

  “Okay.” His coat rustled as he zipped it up. “I might be really late. Don’t wait up.”

  As the door closed, she wondered why even the end of the bloody world couldn’t bring some people together. The problem with living apart from Neal for most of their married life was that they were now discovering what it was like to be married for real, twenty-six hours a day, and Neal didn’t appear to like that any more than she did.

  Naval marriage. That’s what they say, isn’t it? Terrific until the old man comes home from sea for good and you’ve got to get used to this stranger in your house when you’ve been used to running the whole show on your own.

  Except the stranger’s me.

  Watching the endless misery on the screen stopped her feeling too sorry for herself. Every city looked the same. Every capital city was a similar pile of smoking rubble with few landmar
ks. Refugees all had that terrible stare. And all the Gears looked the same, which made it harder than ever not to worry about the mates she’d left behind.

  She was doing her bit just like GH Noroa had asked her, though. She’d organized a militia, not that anyone seemed to treat it with the same urgency as keeping their farms running. She’d even acquired a radio transmitter. There wasn’t much more she could do now.

  Despite her best intentions, she nodded off into a light doze. The studio discussion about how long Sera could hold out and what Chairman Dalyell could do about it droned on in the background. It was only when the tone of the voices changed that she woke with a start and knocked her empty cup onto the floor.

  “… now ending this broadcast because we’ve been told to evacuate the studios. We don’t have many details, but it seems we have … yes, we now have confirmation that there’s been a Locust incursion just north of Autrin. That’s ten kilometers away.” Astonishingly, the news reader just kept going as if it was a traffic report. Bernie’s heart was now hammering so hard she could feel it in her ears. “I’ll repeat that—Locust forces have reached Kaia. I’m sorry, but we now have to stop broadcasting—”

  The studio vanished abruptly and was replaced by a loud continuous tone and the emergency broadcast caption telling viewers to stay put, tune to their nearest radio station, and listen for instructions.

  Oh God. Here it comes. Here it bloody well comes.

  Bernie found she was clutching Moss. He looked up into her face, baffled, ears laid back. The grubs were finally here. Kaia was more than two thousand kilometers away, but that now felt like next door. She could have picked up the walkie-talkie and called Neal, but if he was in the pub he’d know anyway. Suddenly she needed to be with people—yes, with Neal—and she jumped up to grab her coat.

  Under stress, she defaulted to drill. It never failed her. When the shit hit the fan, that training had to kick in regardless, and she found herself checking her weapons and revving up the quad bike. Most of the ride into town was lost in a haze of what she’d have to do to track the advance of the grubs, but she managed to walk into the pub with some semblance of calm.