I had no time to turn, no time to question it.
The gunshot boomed in the still air, driving me forward. I stumbled and fell to my knees, coughing up gore as white-hot pain blossomed in my chest and back. Bullets stitched the ground in front of me, driving Alice back to her car. I was deafened. The sound of automatic weapons fire sounded dull beneath a high-pitched whine in the center of my head.
I tried to crawl forward, but the pain was too immense, and I couldn’t feel my arms. My legs kicked uselessly at the ground. My eyelids grew heavy, and the world swam out of focus, leaving me with a deep yearning for sleep. My heart was beating too quickly, pushing far too much plasma from my body.
Black shoes rushed forward. Bare caramel-colored ankles and smooth shins kneeled before me, and I watched Alice’s lips move, but I couldn’t hear her over the ringing in my ears. My eyelids were heavy. I didn’t want to close them, but I did. I tumbled into a void of silence and darkness, feeling nothing, even as I coughed, wracking my body, purging myself of fluid. The darkness was a cool invite, but it promised warmth, and I could deny it no longer. I fell in whole and knew that I was damned. My eyes fluttered open briefly. Red lips floated before me. Impossibly delicate, they parted to reveal white, impossibly perfect teeth. And they swallowed me into the darkness.
Chapter 7
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Gunfire sounded in the distance, loud enough to pull me from my stupor. I needed a few moments to collect myself and remember where I was and why there might be gunfire. The sound was no longer foreign to my life.
I untangled myself from a thin, moth-eaten blanket and pushed myself up from an equally thin cot, gripping the metal frame for support. Rifle reports echoed in the air, and I recognized the familiar cadence of target practice.
The cot across from mine was empty. I pushed through the tent, surprised by how early the hour was. The sun was slowly ascending, and the grass was wet with dew.
The smell of coffee pulled me toward the reservoir, and people sat in lawn chairs beside their RVs, eating and drinking. Our little group had picked up three newcomers—refugees heading north from Chula Vista to escape the Mexican gangs and militias fighting over border claims. The plan was to head east, into the Sun Belt.
My exhalations turned into gray bursts of vapor, and I stuffed my hands deeper into my wool-lined coat pockets. I nodded at the few acquaintances Mesa and I had made, my mouth watering at the plates of venison being breakfasted on, even though the meat was too gamey for my taste. Not feeling particularly personable, I filled a cup with coffee and moved off toward the shooting area.
Staring intently though the scope, Mesa had a rifle stock jammed against her shoulder. A man in his mid-twenties stood close to her, his hand pressed low and flat against the small of her back. I didn’t much appreciate the familiarity of the gesture. In the still moment, my footsteps crunched loudly, and Jacob took his hands away from my daughter and stood at a more respectful distance as I approached.
“Morning,” I said. He nodded hello.
Mesa said nothing, as was often her way these days. She stared down the gun sights, centered it, and fired. The bullet pinged through an old soup can maybe thirty feet away, knocking it over. She watched it all though the scope, and when she was satisfied that the can was going to stay down, she relaxed and lowered the rifle. She looked at me quickly before pretending to ignore me. It was what passed for acknowledgement between us. She gave the rifle back to the boy and sulked off.
“How’s she doing?” I asked him.
“Good. She’s a good shot.”
“Any funny business between you two?”
His face reddened and the denial that stumbled out was a lie.
“She’s too young for you,” I told him. “She’s just a kid.”
“Yeah,” he said. “okay.”
“Unless you want to end up like that soup can, you’ll listen to me. You stay away from her.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said again, but his whiny, high-pitched tone told me otherwise. I didn’t expect him to listen to reason, even as I hoped nothing worse ever came of this.
I made sure he saw the resolve in my eyes and made sure he broke eye contact first.
He said, “Yeah, okay,” again, then pushed past me, muttering beneath his breath.
“Fucking kids,” I said. The coffee was too bitter and burnt. I flung what little was left toward a clump of dead trees. Something rustled a bit deeper in the woods, drawing closer and moving quickly. We’d seen bobcats a few nights before, and the few deer we’d come across, we’d killed and butchered for meat. I found the grip of my gun at the same time a small child burst from the trees, smears of dirt and blood on his face. Charlie, thirteen years old, maybe. One of the scouts who had gone out the other day, but three others had been with him.
“Get out,” he said, panting heavily. “Go! They’re coming.”
The words struck me dumb with terror, but I turned on my heel and chased after him, back up the slope. To each cluster of people he passed, he said the same thing, breathless and wheezy: “PRC! PRC! PRC!”
Everyone was bewildered and dazed. We’d expected it, of course, but that didn’t make it easier.
Mesa was having an animated conversation with another girl as I ran toward her.
“C’mon,” I said. “We gotta go.”
“Go where?” she asked. I grabbed her hand, making her run with me. “Hey, let go, goddamn it! Where are we going?”
I shoved her through the tent before me, dug the rifle up from beneath her cot, and handed it to her. I could see the terror in her eyes and tears standing on the surface. She wouldn’t take the rifle. I shoved it against her, forcing her to take a hold of it or drop it.
“C’mon,” I said, grabbing my own rifle.
I led her up the trails, to a nice perch for us to take aim. Through the scope, I watched mothers and their children being pushed into the RVs. The men stayed outside, shoving the doors shut after them, then banging on the side, telling them to go, go, go. A few clusters of single women with guns joined the party.
“Everitt, you up there, man?”
“I’m here,” I said.
One of the men in our camp, Kevin Mason, was a communications engineer and had found a way to jury-rig a local system for our neural commNet. That was him inside my head.
“You see anything? What’ve we got?”
“There’s a squad coming through,” I said. “Count eleven strong.”
I suspected that our scouts had reduced their numbers. Most PRC squads were composed of fourteen men. They’d met up with our scouts, one group stumbling upon the other, and shots had been exchanged. Of the four who had gone into the woods, only the boy had returned. The squad could have been out there for a training exercise or as part of a mission. Any reason at all, really. Maybe PacRim satellites had picked up our heat signatures from orbit, and they had come to check it out.
They’d engaged our scouts and would soon be coming upon our small, but armed, band. They would have transmitted word back to their base that they’d come under fire. If satellites hadn’t found us before, they would be searching for us now, and the datastreams would be feeding information to them about our locations, our weapons, our numbers, and the terrain. Back at their base, reinforcements were no doubt being prepped for support, and choppers would be winding up to come in hot.
There were maybe twenty of us. Not many, but enough to hopefully do what we had to do and get the fuck out.
Mesa and I had been practicing with the rifles for a little more than a month. We were rank amateurs, and we knew it. We had to pull our weight, though. Our little commune didn’t have much use for a community college art history instructor. Despite that, it had turned out that we weren’t all bad, and even Mesa seemed to have a small bit of natural talent for shooting. Jacob, our tutor—if you could call him that—had lived in Michigan for a time. Then the plant he had worked at was shut down, and he’d found himself heading west. He’d b
een young enough to be able to get a fresh start somewhere new. He had served in the Army for a single tour, but he’d learned most of his shooting skills from his father and uncle. They had spent long weekends in the woods, hunting deer, and much of the advice he gave us had once been passed down to him. He seemed to have a knack for teaching.
Through the scope, I watched the squad taking careful, measured steps. They were alert, their eyes scanning across the potential battlefield before them. They moved with assuredness, but also with a subtle hint of nervousness. You could see it in the eyes of the younger soldiers, and they fought to clamp it down, Adam’s apples bobbing as they choked their hearts back down into their chests. They were spacing themselves out as they moved, consciously making many targets instead of one large group that could be brought down more easily and quickly.
They were silent, their mouths still, no hand signals since they were glued to their guns. Any communications to one another were being done through neural nets. Their combat armor was devoid of rank in an effort to better camouflage the commanding officer. I looked for the minor tells that would give away the squad leader, hoping a newbie would shoot a glance over to whoever was in charge before moving forward.
I found a candidate in a markedly older man. He was graying at the temples, and crow’s feet crinkled the corners of his eyes. A glance passed between him and a younger man, along with almost a nod, which told me he was in charge.
“Do you see him?” I asked Mesa.
Her grip tightened around the rifle stock, and her lips were parted in a small O. She licked her top lip and nodded. Her nervousness came off her in waves. I could almost hear her heart racing with fear.
“Shoot him,” I whispered.
“Uh huh.”
“Do it.”
“No.”
“Mesa, c’mon. Shoot him.”
Her lower lip trembled, and a glassy sheen coated the surface of her eyes. She shook her head.
“It’s like the deer. Remember? You can do this, hon.”
“Just shut up.” Fear edged into her voice, tight and whiny, with a bitter dash of anger. She had hate in her eyes.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said. “I need you with me on this. It’s like we talked about before. We both need to take down a target. I have mine. You have yours. We have to do this.”
“I can’t,” she said. Her mother’s stubbornness reared its head, a steadfast refusal steeled with the conviction that nobody would ever change her mind.
“Goddamn it, Mesa.”
Her tears ran freely, but her hands were still tight on the rifle. She still gazed through the scope, following their movements. My gut was tightly coiled, a cold ball the size of my fist. It threatened to lurch its way up my torso, and a cold sweat broke across the nape of my neck.
I left my rifle and crab-walked across the rocky ground to her. The cold earth dampened the front of my clothes. I hugged her with my body and pushed a finger through the trigger guard over hers.
“Do you have a target?” I asked her.
She snuffled, her throat thick with snot. She wiped it away with her wrist then palmed away the tears. “I can’t do this.”
“You have to do this.” Something painful pulled through my heart with the delicacy of barbed wire. I hated myself for what I was asking of her. But these were the new rules. This was our new life. She had to survive, and that meant making painful choices and awful compromises.
I followed the line of the rifle barrel. Her finger was cool beneath mine, her hand clammy. I kissed the side of her face, tasting tears on my lips, and whispered, “Everything’s going to be all right.”
I pulled the trigger with her. So close to her, I could hear her gasp, even over the sound of the gunfire, as a red mist exploded from the man’s head.
The soldiers paused in reflex, looking around them as if an intruder were in the field with them. I slid back to my rifle as their eyes started to scan the horizon, looking for us. One man got excited and forgot about the commNet, pointing up at the mountain pass where Mesa and I were, shouting in Chinese. Eyes and guns turned toward us.
I pulled the scope close, trying to find my previous target—the older man with the weathered look. As I found him, the ground around me jumped where bullets landed, kicking up dust and rocks. Something hot scraped my hand, but I ignored it, centering the target in my crosshairs.
We’d found a deer the previous week—the first time I had ever killed something. I had felt tremendously guilty, watching its dull, dark eyes. It had not known I was there, up in a tree blind. It had been content and at peace. Sharp intelligent eyes scanned its surroundings. Seeking potential threats, its ears twitched at the strange sounds of the woods. I had taken a slow deep breath, not wanting to pull the trigger but knowing that I must, because our survival depended on it. We needed meat. We weren’t killing for sport. I rationalized it and eased the trigger back. A wash of guilt swept through me—along with power, an assertion of control, and dominance. It felt right; it felt natural. And that made the guilt worse. But it also made the second time, and the time after that, easier.
When I pulled the trigger and turned the soldier’s face into a messy crater, I had no remorse. I watched a man die instantly through the center lines of my scope, comfortably at ease.
Mesa was crying, and I knew how frightened she was as the bullets landed nerve-rackingly close.
“Two down,” I said, seeking out a third target.
“About time,” Mason said.
The soldiers were moving quickly, seeking cover behind loose scrub and felled trees that the winter thaw had carried down from the mountainside. Some retreated to the edges of the woods and hid among the branches.
Gunfire echoed from the canyons below as our guys stepped up to meet the enemy.
“Mesa? How you doing, honey?”
“I don’t want to kill anymore.” Her voice sounded numb and distant, and that awful barb ripped through me once again.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. “I really am. But if we’re going to get out of this, we need to fight. This isn’t going to be easy.” My bravado was gone and I was an idiot for having thought that this could be easy or that because we had better numbers, it meant victory.
We weren’t soldiers. Jacob was the closest, but even he had never seen combat. Much of his military experience consisted of filing away personnel records at a base in Germany. We weren’t even a militia. We were painters, bakers, construction workers, teachers, and crossing guards. No training. No battlefield experience. We were in way over our heads.
Mesa’s face was pressed tightly to the scope, and she clung to the rifle as if she were drowning. But she would not fire. She would not take a life.
One soldier risked a glance over the fallen tree trunk he’d tucked behind, rising high enough for me to chance it. I fired, but he was already ducking back down, and the bullet crashed into his cheek. He fell back, writhing on the ground, both hands pressed tightly to the wound.
“Stop it,” Mesa cried. I thought she was yelling at the screaming man below. She rushed at me, falling to her knees as she skidded toward me. She pounded my face with her fists. The eyepiece of the sniper’s scope cut me above my eye. I rolled onto my back, my hands up in defense, but it left my belly exposed, and she started punching away at my ribs. “Stop it,” she yelled, over and over. “Stop it!”
I grabbed her in a bear hug, pulled her to the ground, pushed myself on top of her, and suffocated the fight out of her. Mesa’s outburst had surprised the PRC. It had surprised everyone, and the battlefield became dull and quiet in its wake. Then I heard the nearly silent thrumming of a helo’s twin-drive screw engines, felt the warmth pulsing from its large, black body as it descended. Demanding submission, pairs of gunnery sergeants hung from each side of the large insectile aircraft’s carapace.
Mesa yelled at me, but her words held no shape and were mashed into angry noises. A thick rope of saliva hung between her lips, and she was br
eathing so hard and raggedly that snot bubbles burst in both nostrils. Eventually, she grew still as the fight drained out of her.
Below, heavily armored soldiers were rounding up the people I had come to consider friends and leading them to the helo. A half-squad was making its way up the trail to us as Mesa grew still.
I hugged her, and she hugged me back. Her body curled against mine, and her arm snaked around my neck as she held herself against me.
“I want Mom,” she said in a half gasp.
I was suddenly struck by how young she really was. For the last few years, she had hidden behind a thick shell of teenage angst, with attitude to spare. She smoked, drank, and denied all of it. She had an old soul, though, and often acted years beyond her actual age, her rebelliousness aside. She was emotionally strong, strong-willed, and independent to the point of seeming indifferent.
But red-faced and crying, her breath coming in ragged puffs of fog, the façade had broken down around her and she buckled beneath the weight. She was a child, a girl in need of her mother, in need of a comfort and warmth beyond those a father could provide. She was an innocent.
“I know, sweetie. I do, too.”
The fight was entirely gone from her. She was my little girl again.
I listened to the crunch of earth beneath heavily soled boots and felt hands grab me roughly, pulling Mesa and me apart. She went limp as she was dragged away, and neither of us struggled against the restraints. We had no need to.
Our war was over.
Chapter 8
Opening my eyes was a struggle. They felt gummy and unyielding, and it took a moment before I could see, another for the blurriness to pass. A warm breeze brushed my face, and when my focus finally snapped into place, I found myself outside, half-reclining in a hospital bed on a spacious wooden deck.
The sky was clear, and the expanse of ocean was a rich blue green. A figure, too far away to be distinct, moved within the calm water.
Convergence Page 9
