But it did no good to turn away, for wherever one turned, death waited. All of the buildings had been bombed by the precise and deadly Skoll-10 missiles, and all of them were blasted piles of rubble. Some incendiaries had been used—particularly around the armory— so there had been tremendous fiery explosions when the armaments went up, and much of the nearby piles of debris were still burning.
They saw hundreds of bodies—and hundreds of body parts around the armory. Vashti walked up on an arm, severed at the shoulder, but the uniform sleeve was curiously clean and unmarked, with a lieutenant’s stripes. The hand was still holding a box of 9 mm cartridges, unexploded. She turned around and with her head held high and her eyes dry, she marched to the edge of the camp and sat down on the ground, alone. No one stopped her or commented. They barely noticed.
“I heard helos,” Fong said numbly to Colonel Ben-ammi. “This precision shooting wasn’t done by fighters. I wanted to look so badly, because I thought they must have been the new Messerschmitt-Daimler Daggers. The precision of this strafing . . .”
“This is no strafing,” Ben-ammi sighed heavily. “This is meticulous execution. One shot, one death. They must have a new targeting system for small arms. Based on something like your Baby BAD, maybe.”
Fong nodded blankly, then wandered off.
David Mitchell’s worst fear was realized; he found his friend Joey Dane, the Stealth warrior. He’d been running for his plane— perhaps for a last good-bye. He was sprawled in the grass of Runway N4, shot through the back with a single 50-caliber shell.
David simply couldn’t face turning him over, and not just because his chest would be gone. It was his face—bright, laughing, freckled, always so alive—that David didn’t want to see. Like a man in a deep trance, David knelt by him and picked up his hand. It was already stiffening, and so cold. David stayed so long that his legs went to sleep.
All of them found scenes of horror. Rio Valdosta found a woman, just a girl, really, who wore a nurse-corpsmen’s uniform. She was lying on top of a young boy who was lying facedown in the street, obviously trying to shield him. They were both dead.
Lieutenant Deacon Fong saw, with longing, that none of the base’s planes or helicopters had been touched. Goth rats are coming back to get ’em, huh? Not my baby! I’m gonna go burn her myself ! He actually took a step toward the helo yard, then stopped. This was no time to think of his helicopter. This was a time to mourn and honor the dead. Lieutenant Fong turned himself smartly around and made himself go to every single body he could find, and stop, and look at them. He committed them to memory, each of them. That was his way.
Lieutenant Ric Darmstedt ran straight to the command center. His closest friends outside the team were the electronic intelligence men, the tech-heads who operated all the complex equipment and interpreted the results. Ric liked doing that kind of thing for fun, and he’d made friends with several of the earnest droneheads. But the command center, which had been a three-story brick building with a basement, was now level with the ground. It had been so pulverized by numerous Skolls that not even a brick was left whole. The men inside, too, must already be little more than ashes and bone. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust . . . no more than dust . . . none of us are any more than a little smear on this earth anyway . . . God’s little worker ants . . . Wonder if He’s noticed this atrocity yet? Ric thought with galling bitterness.
Ric was joined by Con Slaughter, who was moving as slowly and painfully as a seventy-year-old man. His weathered face was riven with sorrow and horror. Together they found their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel J. P. Nix.
He was lying right outside where the door of the command center had been, in a curiously defiant position; one knee was still jointed, so that from a long way off it might look as if he were lying down, relaxing at a picnic. His arms were spread-eagled perfectly, and Con thought numbly that he must have still been firing two-handed even as he lay on his back, his left leg almost blown off. His old Colt .45 was in his right fist, and a cold dead cigar was still clenched between his teeth. Numbly Con tried to push his leg down, and lay his hands across his chest, but rigor mortis was already setting in, and the limbs wouldn’t budge. Con kept trying. Ric was staring blankly down into Colonel Nix’s face, which still grimaced with defiance. Even in death he had not admitted defeat.
“Captain Slaughter,” a deep, kindly voice said behind Con’s right shoulder. “You can’t move him, you know. Leave him.”
“Wha—what?” Con jumped up and whirled around, furious, to face Darkon Ben-ammi. “Leave him! Over my cold dead body! We have to—to—bury all of them, with full honors, and—and— or burn them, at least! A funeral pyre!”
He was up in Ben-ammi’s face, shouting, the furious spittle flying from his lips actually touching the older man. Still, Darkon Ben-ammi merely looked sad. He laid his meaty hands on Con’s shoulders. “Son, you’re not thinking straight, and you’re not thinking smart. You’re the last officer here, Captain Slaughter.”
Con reeled backward a step as if Ben-ammi had struck him hard across the face. He staggered, then recovered, but his head was down and the hand he dragged across his face was shaking. “I’m— the last?” he mumbled.
Ric stared at him, and Colonel Ben-ammi’s horsey face was filled with pity. Neither of them spoke.
Captain Con Slaughter, as the colonel and the lieutenant knew he would, recovered quickly. His back straightened, his face set in grim lines, and his voice hardened. “You outrank me, Colonel Ben-ammi, and so does Colonel Nicanor, and I won’t ever forget that. But you’re right. I’m the ranking American officer here, and more important, I’m the leader of this fire team.” He looked around at the devastation, and his voice grew hoarse. “They’ll come back, won’t they? The Goths. Bound to. If nothing else, they’ll want to pick up all those expensive toys out there.”
Colonel Ben-ammi nodded, though Slaughter wasn’t looking at him. “They were pretty thorough here, Captain Slaughter,” he said quietly. “They killed everyone. Do you understand? Everyone. ”
Slaughter said grimly, “Not everyone. But they don’t know that, do they?”
“Not now,” Colonel Ben-ammi said as calmly as he could. “But they would if we honored these men and women—”
“And children!” Rio Valdosta growled from behind him. Ben-ammi hadn’t even known he was there.
“And children,” Ben-ammi added, his voice catching slightly.
“They would know if we honored them in death, Captain Slaughter. They would know, and they would hunt until they found us. And then we would die, just as uselessly as these men have.”
Con Slaughter swallowed, and he looked around again, almost in bewilderment. “My—friends,” he said gutturally. “My friends, my comrades . . . I never thought I’d leave them for the vultures.”
No one said anything.
He saw Lieutenant Deacon Fong’s small figure in the distance, kneeling down by a small lump on the ground. He saw the sun in the west, glowing a cruel orange, riding low. He saw smoke, and smelled burning metal and running blood and the foul stench of death.
“Let’s go,” he said, his voice dropping to a half-whisper. “We can’t stay here tonight. I’m getting you—my team—as far away from here as possible.”
Turning, he knelt again by his commanding officer’s body. With gentle hands, he reached out and unpinned the silver eagle from his chest. “I don’t think you’d mind if I keep this, sir,” he murmured, “to help me remember. I swear to you, old man, that I’ll die as good as you did. I’ll never surrender!”
TWENTY-THREE
AHARDHUNTER’SMOONGLAREDdown on the Gulf, making spiky sparkles on the barely lapping waves. Victorine stared up at it, unblinking, the monochrome planes of her face set and unyielding. Her mother, a slight, fragrant rustle behind her, murmured, “It’s going to get cold. I can feel it.”
Victorine said nothing. She merely stared at the moon.
Tessa Kai, with a small sigh, went
on, “Dancy’s asleep. I guess I’ll go to bed, too.”
“Would you stay here tonight, please?” Tessa Kai, independent as always, insisted on sleeping in her own condo.
Victorine still wasn’t looking at her. Tessa Kai stepped closer and stared up into her daughter’s too-still face. “Why?”
“I’m going—out.”
Incredulous, Tessa Kai scoffed, “Oh? To the opera, or the symphony?”
Victorine didn’t smile as she finally turned. “I’m going to go down to White Dunes to see if Gerald’s there.”
“Victorine, it’s dangerous. What if those filthy Pikes or those awful Spikes are out pillaging?” Tessa Kai spat out Dancy’s given names for the gangs that were roaming the beach. The Pikes, the first gang they’d seen, had been bad enough. About twenty men and a dozen or so women, they’d been drunk, drugged, and so dirty that Dancy had sworn she could smell them coming. They roamed up and down the key, breaking into cottages and condos.
Three more times they’d seen the Pikes. Victorine had seen their torches in the distance, and had heard them shooting, and after they’d left she’d gone to investigate. They seemed to like breaking into the condominiums—at least the ground-floor units, they were evidently too lazy to go up stairs. They also seemed to prefer staying in the cottages across the street from the beach. There were many more of them than there were condominiums, and some of them were big and elegant. The gangs would pick a place, stay for a night or two, and then destroy it, slashing the furniture and carpets and scrawling obscenities on the walls and shooting out the windows.
But even worse was the women’s gang—the Spikes. They had come staggering down the beach one night, carrying torches and long, sharpened sticks like spears and baseball bats. Victorine and Tessa Kai and Dancy had heard them screaming and shrieking like madwomen long before they could see them clearly. When they finally grew close to the condo, Victorine had seen that they were dragging two men with ropes around their necks. The men had been barely dressed in tattered rags, and they were barefoot and bloody. Victorine had never even heard of some of the obscenities the women had been screeching. She’d shut Dancy and Tessa Kai up in the front bedroom, and had huddled by the balcony door with her father’s old .38. When the banshees and their two captives had kept marching down the beach without a second look at the dark and apparently deserted Summer Sea, Victorine had felt nothing except a furtive disappointment that she hadn’t had an opportunity to shoot one of the women. The Spikes didn’t have guns. Somehow, on some level, that made them seem much worse.
“I know it’s dangerous,” Victorine answered coldly. “But it’s dangerous to be here, too, Mother.”
“Yes, it is. But it’s courting danger to go five miles down the beach on a night with a full moon, Vic.”
“I don’t think so. I can see my way without having to use a flashlight. I’d be able to hear and see any gangs coming for miles, and I’d have plenty of time to hide.”
Tessa Kai considered this, and finally nodded. “True. Of course I’ll stay, Vic. But I do want to ask you—why are you doing this? We have plenty of food and water. I know you like Gerald, and he’s been good to come help you out, but why should you take such a risk to go see him?”
In a brittle voice, Victorine answered, “It’s been two weeks since the blackout, Mother. I want to know what’s going on. It’s only logical: Gerald is the nearest person we can contact. It’s seven miles to the Commissary Supply, and it’s only five miles down to White Dunes.”
Tessa Kai nodded, but her voice was sad. “Just logic, I see.
Victorine . . . you know that Dancy and I are not afraid, don’t you?
I mean, we’re doing very well under the circumstances. And you— you’re not responsible for what’s happened to us. Neither are you responsible for—for our lives.”
“What an idiotic thing to say, Mother,” Victorine said tightly.
“Of course I’m responsible for you. Dancy is my daughter, and you are my mother. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of you and protecting you.”
“I know,” Tessa Kai said, with awkward gentleness. “It’s just that I wish you weren’t so greatly troubled. It’s not your burden to bear.”
“Of course it is,” Victorine retorted, with a touch of anger.
Stubbornly Tessa Kai shook her head. “No, it’s not, Victorine.”
“Really? Then whose is it?”
Tessa Kai’s luminous brown eyes met Victorine’s glittering gaze. “It’s the Lord’s.”
The harsh moonlight made the stark black and white planes of Victorine’s face shift jarringly, but in the next moment she was as coldly composed as ever. “Until the Lord sends us sea gulls with berries in their mouths, and bottomless jars of Proto-Syn soybean oil and baskets of wheat meal, I think I’d better start scavenging around for normal humans and some information. God helps those who help themselves.”
“That’s not in the Bible and you know it,” Tessa Kai muttered.
“And it’s terrible theology besides.”
Shrugging, Victorine said, “I’m leaving now. You have your guns?”
“Of course.” Tessa Kai had two small .22 magnum Derringers, little twin ladies’ guns that her husband had given her more than forty years ago. She’d never used them, never even fired them— until two weeks ago, when they’d first seen the Pikes. “Cleaned, polished, loaded, and ready,” she said with relish, pointing to her ever-present floppy handbag.
Victorine nodded, and quickly dressed in the warmest clothes she had. That meant piling on several light layers, for in this subtropical climate, they’d never owned very much heavy clothing. Victorine, in fact, had only one coat, a bright red skier’s canvas jacket that her ex-husband had bought her when they’d had the good fortune to draw a Diversionary Retreat in Denver, Colorado, once. It had a removable Syn-Fleece lining that provided warmth, but Victorine had lost the lining long ago, as it had never seemed cold enough to use it. Now she wondered whether this autumn was colder, or if it just seemed so since they had no pleasant Cyclops Enviro-Control to keep every room at a constant 75 degrees. She always seemed to be chilled, and she was sure Tessa Kai and Dancy were, too. It worried her, but she hadn’t had a chance to go scouting for some warmer clothing for them.
Finally she left, going down the cavernous stairwell. She’d hated this ever since the night of the autumn equinox. Victorine flatly refused to admit to herself that she found the blackness and eerie echoes in the stairwell frightening. That made no sense. Therefore, it had no place in her considerations. Still, she ran down the stairs.
Rolling the bicycle to the entrance of the parking lot, she carefully scanned up and down the road and strained to hear any sounds of Pikes or Spikes out “pillaging,” as Tessa Kai had called it.
The silence was complete. As she rode down the deserted beach road, she reflected that this, perhaps, was one of the hardest things to bear: the oppressive silence. Especially on the rare nights like this, when no wind stirred and the tide was sullenly low.
Sometimes, on quiet nights like this, they heard far-off cries of coyotes and even wolves’ howls. Perdido Key, being a tiny barrier island, had not been repopulated with native wildlife, although there were an uncommonly large number of foxes. But just six miles to the north was a wide belt of thick southern wetlands and woods, and for the last twenty years since the migration to the coops, the deer, wolves, coyotes, bears, cougars, rabbits, raccoons, snakes, alligators, millions of birds, and billions of insects thrived. For the last three years Victorine hadn’t allowed Dancy to ride her bicycle over the bridge to the mainland. Just on the other side of the man-made inland waterway that cut through to the ocean on the Key’s west end was the wilderness.
She rode fast, not enjoying anything about the ride. The night was chilly and damp, and her hands and feet felt like clammy lumps. The exotic landscape that she had known all her life now appeared forbidding, too sharp-edged and flat. The piercing moon and prickly stars felt h
ostile.
Finally she reached White Dunes, a condominium complex completely unlike the glossy high-rise Summer Sea. White Dunes was very old, a wooden structure with the two-story units built up on stilts. It had weathered to a gentle sand gray, and had a nostalgic aura of old and slightly tacky beach kitsch.
Victorine stared up at the sharp roofline of Number 5, Gerald’s home.
He was hanging from the roof.
Gerald was tall, with sandy blonde hair, and she could see the slender wand of his body, gently swaying, and the moon gleaming in his light hair. She couldn’t see any other details, and for this she was very grateful. Her breath caught in her chest, and in the stillness she could hear a slight creak as his body swung back and forth lightly.
Victorine stood motionless, her face as still and unmoved as if it were sanded in cold marble. She swallowed. There was no need to blink back tears, for she had none. Only a sickly burning sensation in her throat and a heaviness in her chest.
Gerald Ainsley had been an artist who painted indifferent seascapes, but had the passion of a genius. He’d been a gentle and kind man, timid and a little effeminate. He’d never given her what Victorine called the Look—the automatic assessment men made of women who’d caught their attention. Victorine had sometimes wondered about his personal life, but either he was chaste or very discreet, for he’d been the hospitality manager of White Dunes for thirteen years, and she’d never known him to have a consort or even a relationship. He’d always been good to help her out when she’d needed it. Suddenly, oddly, it occurred to her that Gerald had never asked her for help at White Dunes, and she was sure there must have been times in summer when he could have used some help with the crowds of middle-class vacationers that always overran him. This realization struck her like a thrown rock, and she swallowed again, gritting her teeth.
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 35
