by John Barnes
“Why do you say that?” I tried to keep my voice lower than hers.
“Because this is twenty times as good a place for an ambush, and it’s not that far away. If they had just scouted up the road a little, they’d have found this. And there’s no place anyone in his right mind would stop, or turn off, between there and here. Any truck or car that went by there would go by here. Either they must have set up at the first convenient place and never bothered to move, or else they’re too stupid to see that from the rocks down below us, they could rake a vehicle from one end to the other with fire, and the vehicle could never get off the road because of the dunes to the side. If they held fire till the right moment, people in a vehicle would never be able to go either forward or back. They’d just be pinned down until enough rounds found enough vulnerable spots. I’d put the main force down by the road, and the lookout—geez, I’d put it right—”
She stopped and gestured for me to listen. I did, listening harder than I ever had in my life, as if I were throwing my mind into the surrounding rocks and desert, trying to pick up anything other than the soft susurrus of our breathing and the gentle creak of wood and leather as Esmé drew a knife from a sheath and wriggled through a shadow, out to the side, and down the hill. I thought about whether or not to draw my pistol, but I suspected that moving as quietly and carefully as Esmé was, she would be taking a long time getting down the hill to whatever sound she was checking out, and I knew I would be getting steadily more nervous the whole time. I didn’t want to be holding a pistol when she came back, if I was going to be jumpy; I couldn’t see any way that could be a good thing. At best, I’d be more worried about not shooting her accidentally than about identifying anyone else who might be approaching. And at worst, I might cost us a fighter and give away our position. I left the pistol where it was and tried to do nothing but watch very actively and very quietly for any sign of motion.
There was a blur of motion in the shadows about sixty yards in front of me and perhaps thirty feet lower. I moved forward cautiously, keeping my head in shadow, and peered at it, but saw nothing. A very long time went by, and I turned everything over and over in my mind while I tried to stay ready, calm, and watchful. Esmé had found something or someone creeping up on us, and had had a quick, silent, deadly fight with it down there. Probably someone on their way up to our present position.
If Esmé had won, she would now be creeping down the trail of shadows, over the boulders, to the place she had picked for setting a main force for the ambush, probably hoping that the force there would be small, maybe just one or two, so that she could take it out herself—or if it were large, she could see it, crawl back, let the rest of us know, and come back with some firepower. No doubt she was going to take a while about it—if she had won.
If she had lost, whatever beat her was now on its way here. I moved the pistol around on the belt, carefully, never taking my eyes off the slope below, scanning as hard as I could, my hand resting on the butt. I could now draw it fast, I knew where the safety was, and I would draw it as soon as something moved, and fire as soon as it wasn’t Esmé. I thought that anything that had overcome her, when she had the advantage of surprise, would probably get me, but a shout and a shot might make all the difference to our people back at the esty.
I squatted, changing my position slowly, just often enough so that nothing would stiffen or go to sleep, and watched and tried to be in the state of empty readiness for anything that is supposed to be characteristic of martial artists. The slope was motionless and silent. The shadows were imperfectly dark; a blade of grass, a bit of saguaro, or a white rock might shine a little in them, and might seem to move now and then, helping to keep me alert but nervous. The bright spots where the moonlight hit fully were distracting and tempting as places to rest the eye, but if you did that, they seemed after a while to float up away from the shadows, and instead of a dimly lit rocky, scrubby hillside, you could find yourself looking at an uninterpretable set of blobs of light and darkness that made no particular sense and might not interpret into reality fast enough.
I tried to check the road and the desert beyond it regularly too, and to keep an ear out behind me in case someone with even more night-fighting talent than Esmé had crept around behind me and was about to drop on my shoulders.
I wasn’t moving much, but I was busy, as the shadows shrunk and reached westward, and the half-moon—now too bright for me to look at as my eyes had become completely dark-adapted— crawled up the sky toward the zenith, shortening the shadows and lighting more of the landscape. I guessed that it had moved about thirty degrees, roughing it as a third of a right angle, since I took my post, which meant around two hours had passed. It seemed like much less.
How long had it been between taking up our position and Esmé’s going forward? I had no idea, but not as long as I had been waiting here, I figured.
A half-moon with the curved side east, like this one, is bang overhead just when the sun comes up, and since I was really beginning to hope the sun would come up, I stole a couple of upward glances. The moon was perhaps ten degrees, which would take about twenty more minutes, from the zenith; the first glow before dawn should be happening any moment. I watched and waited.
A voice behind me said, very softly, “Lyle, please take your hand off that gun. If the safety is off, please put it back on.”
“Safety is on,” I said, and very slowly took my hand away from the pistol butt. “Esmé?”
“Yes, it’s me.” She sat beside me, her teeth chattering as if she’d just been drenched in a freezing bath and then sent out into a winter wind.
I ventured to ask, “Any chance there are any more?”
“I don’t think so. God, I have to hope there aren’t. I can’t... oh, god, Lyle, no, I think we can just talk, now, if you want to. And I want to, need to, even I’m just having a lot of trouble doing it. Give me a minute and I’ll tell you what happened. But it’s pretty goddam gruesome and I’ve never felt so shook in my whole life, and I would really appreciate it if whatever you say or do is the most soothing thing you can come up with.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. -
She leaned back against the rock, and then moved so that her shoulder rested against mine, obviously needing the comfort of the touch. Just in case she’d made a completely wrong guess about whether there were any more attackers, I kept my eyes on the slope, but I listened as she said, “I found a barely marked trail—mostly just little bitty cut handholds and footholds, and some trampled spots in close to rocks, it was a very clever setup to keep people from noticing that there was any trail there—and I followed it down, staying about five meters off to the north of it. Sure enough, after a while I heard some noise—not much, a boot scrape maybe, or a breath. I had someone coming up that trail. I crept on over and got into a shadow. Somebody passed by me, and I jumped in behind them and went for a silent kill.
“Well, guess who it turned out to be when I jumped onto the trail? Our old multi-lived friend, Billie Beard. This version of Billie knew her stuff, too—I jumped her from behind, hard as I could, and got her trachea squeezed and stuck her in the kidney before she could get into the fight properly, and I still felt like I was trying to hog-tie a steer with masking tape. I sawed through her carotid while I had her in a half nelson, which is incredibly messy and scary. I hope we get to someplace where I can wash, and soon.
“At that point I figured, okay, Billie Beard was going to be a lookout, and there had to be an ambush right in the place I had picked out. I crawled down the hill and was delighted to smell some kind of cheap booze—rotgut bad enough that it might have been vodka, tequila, maybe just straight grain alcohol. Quiet little noises, almost like someone wrestling.”
She leaned in close and said, “This is not romantic, but if you would just put your arm around me, I would really, really appreciate it. Right now I’m afraid I’m either going to cry or throw up. I promise if it turns out I’m going to throw up, I’ll get away from you.
But I think more likely I’m just going to cry, and I guess I’m literal enough that I want a shoulder to do it on. And I’ll say I’m sorry, in advance, if I accidentally get any blood on you.”
I hugged her in one arm, and sat back, where I could no longer see the slope below us, figuring that it made much more sense for me to trust her judgment than my paranoia; if she thought all threats were ended, then anything that could surprise us was something I wouldn’t stand a chance against, anyway.
After a few deep breaths and a couple of “Uh” and “Well” false beginnings, she said, “I was almost laughing, with relief that this was going to be so-easy, and at the chance for some revenge. I crawled forward and there were two high-powered rifles and a couple of grenade launchers, leaning against a rock—and two people moving around in the shadows. The reek of booze was amazing.
“I could have laughed out loud when I realized that there in the near shadows I was seeing two pairs of Levi’s, and two holsters with pistols, and that in the deeper shadow there was a couple fucking doggie-style, giggling, drunk out of their minds.
“Now, in my years with the Colonel, we were on various sides of a bunch of civil wars all over Central and South America, and those are the kinds of situations in which you really, really lose all concept of sportsmanship. If they’d made themselves that vulnerable, then the evolutionary process needed to remove them before they could breed—and here I was, just in time.
“I figured out my footing and position, got into place, and then dropped in right behind the man, bracing a knee in his back and cutting his throat before he knew more than that he was startled. And just that second, damn if that woman didn’t grab a knife from a back sheath, roll to put the dying man between her and me, and come right at me fast and hard, ready to kill me. Never saw anyone handle anything so fast before, Lyle, and I’ve seen plenty. Shit, Lyle, if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, I even remember thinking that I had finally met my equal.
“I got a footsweep on her and gave her a good gash in the arm on her way down—I think I must have nicked an artery, to judge by how much blood there was. She came back at me, maybe already getting weak, and I managed to get inside her blade and drive mine into her eye, hard enough to crunch bone and get right into the brain. Nasty, messy way to go, but fast, and she didn’t make a sound as she died.
“Something made me drag the bodies into the moonlight— some part of my mind must have already known, and thought the rest of me should know. I wiped the faces clean.
“The man was Jesús Picardin—or rather a different version of him. And the woman was me. No wonder she was so handy with a knife, and no wonder our little clash of blades seemed almost choreographed, as if we were anticipating each other’s moves and my little advantages—having clothes on, being less surprised, not being drunk—sort of gave me the win on points.”
She shuddered again, violently, and pressed her face against my shoulder.
I hadn’t the slightest idea what to say or do. We sat like that until the sun was fully up and it was time to go down to the others. Despite having been well rested before my watch started, and having only been awake a few hours, I went right to sleep as soon as we rolled north in the esty, sleeping back in the middle seat. Terri sat up with Paula for driving lessons; I think everyone thought that some distraction or other might be good for her, and besides nobody much wanted to be near Iphwin. It didn’t bother me because I was asleep.
I was told later that the ruins of Chihuahua were particularly impressive, for it had once been a big, prosperous city, and thus it had come in for more than its share of looting and burning as the north of the country had gotten more and more dangerous; somehow, though, I was content to be spared the sight of a vast expanse of burned and wrecked human dwellings, silent and empty in the early morning sun.
It was almost noon when the Colonel awakened me and said, “Hate to disturb you, Lyle, but we need to hold a little conference before we go further, and I thought you ought to be part of it.”
“Perfectly all right, Roger.” I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and noticed the esty was no longer moving. We were stopped dead in the middle of the road, sitting in the usual environment—desert surrounded by mountains, on a road that connected a meaningless spot on the southern horizon with an equally meaningless spot on the hills to the north of us. While I was asleep they had “fixed” the rear window by taping clear plastic over it. I gathered my wits and managed to ask, “What’s up?”
“According to our map, which is forty-five years old, this line of hills up ahead is the last one before the Rio Grande. Then we’re about three miles from a bridge that should take us over the river and into the United States. If the bridge is still there. If the United States is still there. You might say there are a few complications.”
I yawned and stretched and said, “All right. I’m with you, more or less.” I dragged myself to the edge of the seat and found that all the others had managed to range themselves in a rough circle among the esty seats and aisles.
“And there’s a few things we want to ask Iphwin about,” Esmé said, making it sound like a threat. To judge by the way Iphwin reacted, he surely heard it as a threat too. Esmé smiled at him, an unpleasant smile that registered satisfaction more than pleasure, and said, “Such as who the hell is Billie Beard—what the hell is Billie Beard—and how come I just ran into versions of people who already exist on this side. I still get a feeling someone is not being perfectly honest with us.”
“Before you answer,” Helen said, “think about what you learned about pain, yesterday.”
Iphwin tried to speak, twice, and then finally drew his knees up to his chest, tears leaking out around his eyes, shaking his head. There must have been three full minutes, or more, during which we just sat and stared at him.
Terri realized before any of us, bent over the huddled little man, and said, “I bet you’re really afraid.”
Iphwin nodded miserably.
“That was the first time you’d ever really been hurt and besides you don’t understand what we want or why we do things, so now all of a sudden you’re really afraid that we might decide to hurt you again. And nobody’s talked to you all day and you’re probably also really lonely.”
His shoulders started to shake and tears gushed down his face. Terri put her arms around him and told him, “No one is going to hurt you. We’re sorry. And we’ll be your friends again, if you forgive us and if you promise to try to learn to respect our feelings. Promise?”
“I promise,” he sniffled.
“Oh, Christ,” Helen said, her voice dripping with contempt. There was an echo in it, somewhere, of the way she had been with me in the bedroom. “The ruler of the economic universe turns out to be a big baby.”
I looked at her with some irritation, but before I could think of some suitably adult and urbane insult to toss at her, youth and energy jumped into the breach.
“I guess you’re never too old to be a bully,” Terri said, straightening up and glaring at Helen over the tops of her small wire-rimmed glasses. “And I suppose once you take it on yourself to bully other people, there’s no such thing as a victim that’s too helpless.” The skinny girl looked even younger than her age—like an angry choir boy who might fly at Helen and start slapping or pulling hair—but she pushed her glasses up her nose, raised her chin, planted her feet, and made it dead clear she wasn’t giving any ground.
After a long pause, Helen shrugged, as if it were simply too trivial to take notice of, and said, “Iphwin, I am sorry I hit you, and I shouldn’t have done it. And if you need to cry, well, that’s none of my business. It was rude of me to make fun of you.”
“It’s all right,” Iphwin said, sniffling. “I do feel awful but I think you were right yesterday that I needed to know this sort of feeling was possible. I had no idea that one human being could do this to another one. I don’t mean as a matter of conscience, I mean I had no idea what the effects could be like. And I’m very afraid I might
have done things like this to the rest of you, and I really didn’t know what I was doing, and that’s no excuse at all because I should have known, and ... oh, oh, oh, shit.” He started to cry again, and Terri sat down next to him, patting his arm.
“He’ll be fine in a minute,” she said. “Just needs to get it out of his system, and he isn’t used to it. Why don’t you all take a walk or something?”
There was a long pause, and then Roger got up and went out the door of the esty, silently. Esmé, Paula, Helen, and Jesús followed, sullenly. I trailed after them.
Outside I discovered that everyone, except Roger, was competing to think of how to complain about Iphwin and “that stupid kid.” I thought Terri was the only one in the bunch that had shown anything like normal human feelings, and when I couldn’t stand the nastiness any longer, I went back inside. The Colonel shrugged and followed me in.
Iphwin was washing his face in a bowl of water, saying softly, “You’re right, that does help to make me feel better. Hello, Lyle. Hello, Roger. I’m really sorry about all this. Are the others still angry?”
“Yeah, but I think they’ll cut you some slack now,” I said. “Terri, before anyone gets a chance to bitch at you about it, I think the way you’ve just treated Iphwin is really a fine thing.”
