Earth Thirst

by Mark Teppo

  At the top of the terraces, bodies are scattered—both Escobar's security force and Secutores. Escobar's men have scented strips attached to the lapels of their BDUs. They don't smell particularly pungent—gardenia with a faint hint of cypress and cedar—but it's clearly enough of an olfactory signal for the bees to distinguish between friend and foe.

  I hear gunfire from the lab, the rattle of an assault rifle, and the noise is punctuated by the solitary sound of a handgun. In the wake of the last shot, all I hear is the distant buzz of bees and the faint noise of a wounded man whimpering in pain.

  In the pit, Phoebe has left the slab. She's climbed up to the fifth level and is breaking open one of the nearly ripe pods. Making sure none of the chimerae survive.

  I run for the lab, which is a single story building with two wings, extending laterally from a central entry. Secutores corpses lie both in and outside of the room. Some coming; some going. It looks like the door was enough of a bottleneck that they tried to turn it into a defensive position, but couldn't hold it. I scoop up a discarded assault rifle, check its ammo, and replace the magazine. Half full. Green stripe on the magazine. It'll have to do.

  There's a wounded Secutores man in the corner, trying to stay conscious, and he's slipping into a fog as I approach. He can't lift his rifle in time, and I pin his hand with my boot. “Leave it,” I tell him, pointing my gun at his chest. His face is puffy with bee stings, and he's leaking from a round or two that managed to slip under his vest. I lift my foot and he takes his hand off his weapon. I kick it away from him and lower mine. “You're going to die,” I tell him. “Your way or mine?” I show him my teeth, and he shudders once and then slumps, his chin dipping forward.

  It's been a long time since I scared a man to death. Usually it takes longer, and I'm happy it was quick. I push his head back so that I can get at his neck, and I drink enough to do something about the hole in my chest.

  There are bodies and a blood trail leading into the right-hand wing. Toward the helicopter pad. I follow the trail, my gun ready. I clear each room as I go, moving as quickly as I can toward the end of the hall, where I suspect I'll find what I'm looking for. It's an old habit. Always clear the building. Never assume otherwise.

  I get to the end eventually. The blood trail leads into the last room on the right. There's a temporary wooden door at the end of the hall. If my sense of the facility's layout is correct, beyond that door is the helicopter pad. I ease up to the last door and carefully push it open another few centimeters.

  Nothing happens until I duck my head in to look. Gunfire rattles, followed by the spattering echo of bullets chewing through the wall next to the door. I quick-look again, drawing another fusillade. It's delayed. Whoever is shooting at me isn't at optimal efficiency. Their response time is sluggish.

  I move to the other side, and push the door open with my foot. This time, there's no gunfire. The door swings open and gently bumps into the wall. I'm on that same side, protected by both the door and the wall. “How are you doing in there, Tony?” I call out.

  “It's not going optimally,” Belfast responds.

  “I can imagine,” I reply.

  “It has promise, though,” he says. “If you're still alive, then I made the right choice.”

  “What choice is that?” I ask, even though I have a pretty good idea. My stomach sinks as I wait for his response.

  “Silas?” Mere's voice is weak and ragged.

  “I've got your girlfriend,” Belfast says. “Again. Fuck. You know this bitch shot me earlier?”

  I shouldn't have left her.

  I risk one more look. Belfast lets me have this one because he wants me to recognize his position of strength.

  The room inside is an unfinished lab. There are lab bays, heavy installations that divide the room into several channels. At the end of the one directly in line with the door, Belfast has sequestered himself between several overturned desks, protecting both his flanks. He's resting against a crate, and there is a jumble of gear next to him.

  Mere is lying on the floor in front of his makeshift fort. Her face is pale, and she's got her hands pressed against her side. There's too much blood—on her face, her hands, her clothes, on the floor around her. Too much.

  I rest my head against the wall, trying to block out what I've seen. Part of me is analyzing the entire scene—calculating angles and trajectories, running through assault scenarios. None of them bode well for anyone in the room. Least of all Mere.

  “Yeah, I hear she got the drop on you earlier,” I call out. “I'm glad you didn't put one in her out of spite.”

  He coughs. “I'm a professional, Silas. Got to protect my assets. She's my ticket out of here.”

  “How is that going to work?” I ask, all the while trying to figure out the odds. What's his response time going to be like? Is he going to shoot her or me if I charge him? If he knows he's going to die, will he put a round in the back of her head, professionalism be damned? Or does is he clinging to the idea that I'll let him go?

  “What happens to your ticket if she bleeds out?” I ask.

  He laughs, and some of my questions are answered in the wet sound coming out of his lungs. “Nobody wins,” he says.

  “How do you figure that?” I ask. “If I walk away, I win.”

  Mere whimpers from the floor.

  “No, you don't,” Belfast rasps. “You don't know anything. Escobar is dead, I take it. So he can't tell you anything. Your bitch girlfriend dies, which doesn't help you any. And if I die, well, this whole place goes up too. You get nothing.”

  He's got a detonator of some kind. I don't recall seeing any explosives on the way in, but he could simply have a few bricks of C-4 on him. Maybe even a dead man's switch that closes if he dies. The whole room goes up. Given the loose structure erected around me, a fire would burn through it very quickly. He's right on that point. Nothing would be salvageable.

  I sigh. “What are your terms?”

  He chuckles again, trailing off with a wet cough.

  There are no terms, I realize. He knows he's dying. He's just stalling me.

  There's a whisper of sound in the hallway, and Phoebe is there on the other side of the doorway. Her hair is pale again, and her skin is flawlessly pure. She's almost as pale as the albino chimerae. She's killed them all by draining their milky blood. She's a perfect union—both mother and child.

  “Tony Belfast,” she calls out. “Can you hear me?”

  There's a long silence and then his voice comes out of the room. “Y—yes. I hear you.”

  “Do you know who I am?” she asks. Without waiting for his answer, she steps into the doorway, framing herself perfectly for him. He can't miss.

  And he doesn't. Phoebe's body shakes and jerks as Belfast empties his entire magazine. Her wounds weep pink fluid—not quite blood, not quite water. There is no smoke, though, no change in Phoebe's expression that suggests she's bothered in the slightest by the weed killer component of the rounds.

  I see the corner of her mouth curve into a smile as he shouts at her. I hear his gun rattle as he throws it aside, and I know he's going for his detonator. I start to move, but Phoebe's already there, leaving nothing but a ghost of motion in the doorway.

  Belfast screams, but his cry is abruptly cut off.

  I go to Mere instead, lifting her into my lap. “It's okay,” I whisper, brushing her matted hair back from her face. She shudders in my arms, struggling to block out the gurgling wet sounds coming from behind her. She's been shot on the left side, at the top of her hip, and it looks like the bullet went through. The wound has been bleeding heavily, and she's pale and shivering. She's lost a lot of blood.

  There's a way to solve that problem. I raise my wrist to my mouth.

  “No,” Phoebe says. She discards Belfast's body, his neck a red wreck, and she wipes her mouth clean of his blood. “If you give her blood, it'll only save her today,” she says, “But she'll have to be buried if she's going to live longer. She'll have
to be taken to Arcadia.”

  “So we'll take her.”

  She shakes her head. “I can't let you do that.”

  “She's going to die,” I protest.

  “Of course she is,” Phoebe says, her voice surprisingly gentle. “All living creatures do. That is the cycle of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things. And who are you to break that cycle for her?”

  “I've already broken it,” I whisper, lowering my face to Mere's. “I saved her once already.” I press my lips to hers. “And I'd do it again.”

  Mere stirs in my arms, her eyelids fluttering. She sighs painfully, her face tightening. “Silas…” she breathes, looking up at me.

  “I'm here,” I say. “I'm right here, Mere.”

  EPILOGUE

  The dirt road is barely a road at all, and it peters out at the edge of an unruly field of untended cassava. I have to walk the motorcycle the last half-kilometer, lifting it over the meter-wide trunk of a big-leaf mahogany tree that has fallen across the break in the forest.

  The shack sits on an elevated rise, looking out over an unnamed river that disappears into the wilderness of the Darién Gap. The building sags a bit, but the roof is sound and there is a short sloping overhang in the front so that the runoff from the rain doesn't pool around the building. The porch is screened with mosquito netting, and the windows on each side of the shack have wooden shutters. There's a simple lean-to in the back, a piece of corrugated metal that provides some shelter for the generator and the motorcycle.

  I detach the leather saddlebags from the simple harness that holds them to the motorcycle—it's an old Kawasaki motocross bike that used to be orange and yellow—and bring them with me as I walk around to the front of the shack.

  Mere is resting in a hammock that has been strung up on the porch, and she stirs as I make an effort to walk noisily across the wooden porch. The handle of a compact Mossberg shotgun sticks up from beside her. I put the saddlebags down on the small table near the hammock and undo the strap on one of them. Mere opens her eyes, starts to stretch, and winces slightly as the motion strains the staples in her side.

  I take out the packaged cell phone power adapter and show it to her. “It came in.” I toss it to her so that she can wrestle with the plastic packaging. I don't understand why tech manufacturers insist on heat sealing their plastic. It's like they have a sadistic desire to keep their customers from actually using their products.

  “Finally,” Mere says, turning the package over in her hands. I don't know how she does it, but she always manages to find the spot in the seam where the whole case can be pried open.

  I unload the rest of the bag: week-old copies of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal; a couple of paperback thrillers; a six-pack of Coke de Mexico in small glass bottles; and a bottle of the local rum. The other bag has fish and fruit from the market in La Palma, as well as a block of ice in a double-lined plastic bag. I take the groceries inside and put them in the cooler.

  I grab the bottle opener from the nail beside the cooler, and her bag from near the single bed, and return to the porch. Mere is out of the hammock, sitting at the table and reading the front page of the New York Times. I set her bag down on the table, and pop the top off one of the bottles. I put it near the paper, and she reaches up and touches my hand unconsciously.

  “I'll turn the generator on,” I say, letting my hand slip out from under hers.

  She nods without saying anything, engrossed in the leading headline about record temperatures along the Eastern seaboard in the US, and I wander around to the back of the shack.

  The generator coughs and sputters when I switch it on, and I watch it for a little while as its tiny engine whirs up to speed. It's pretty quiet, and the forest is thick enough around us that I know the sound doesn't carry too far.

  Not that anyone is out here but the two of us.

  The Darién Gap is a stretch of undeveloped land that extends across Central America. It is the boundary between Panama and Columbia—Central America and South America—and there are no roads that cross it. La Palma—the nearest town of any size—is more than sixty kilometers north. I take the motorcycle into town every few days, picking up newspapers and groceries.

  It's a good place to heal.

  Belfast's bullet ricocheted off Mere's pelvic bone, in and out, but it did a lot of damage. It's going to be several months before she's able to move without pain, and it will be years before she gets her full range of motion back.

  I sleep in the ground every few nights, drawing sustenance from the rich humus of the rain forest. Every afternoon, when the sun warms a stretch of the riverbank, I lie out and let it bake my skin. It's still hard to lie still, but I'm getting better at it. My skin is almost as dark as it was when we fled Troy; it's been that long since I've had a real tan.

  Phoebe is out in the forest somewhere. The few times I've run into the natives who live in the Gap and asked them about seeing ghosts in the trees, they've shaken their heads and said they've seen no such spirit. She'll come back though, when she's ready. When she's done communing with the humus.

  The generator starts to purr, and I wander back to the front of the shack. Mere has plugged the cell phone adapter into the extension cord that is our sole outlet in the shack and, from her bag, she's retrieved Belfast's cell phone. It sits on the table next to her, charging, while she looks at the Style section of the New York Times. “Scarves are making a comeback,” she says.

  I make an agreeable noise as I take the short-handled shotgun out of the hammock and set it on the porch. I lie back in the hammock and rock gently from side to side.

  We've settled into long comfortable silences already, like an old married couple—well past the honeymoon stage and into the long sloping twilight of our lives. It's a not uncommon relationship stage for Arcadians—we tend to not be in a rush—but there are times when I can see flickers of impatience in Mere's eyes.

  It's only been a month since the destruction of the facility at Moray. No time at all…

  Belfast's phone beeps, signaling that its battery has charged enough that the phone can now be used. Mere grabs at it as if it might grow wings and fly away. It has a large screen and a miniature keyboard, and I feel somewhat out of sync with the modern world as I can remember when ENIAC was first turned on. It doesn't seem like that long ago.

  Mere smiles, a feral curl of her mouth, as she presses buttons. “He had a password on it,” she says.

  “Had?” I ask, noting the verb tense.

  “Yeah, wasn't hard to guess.”

  I have no idea what it could have been, and I don't ask. She would tell me, but I'm learning to let her keep some secrets.

  “Ah, here we go,” she says. “His call log.” She scrolls through the list. “‘E' was Egret,” she says, putting to rest one of the unsolved mysteries. She finds something interesting, pushes some buttons, and then holds the phone out to me. On the screen is a few lines of contact information.

  The name field reads “Fairchild.”

  “Maryland area code,” she says. “He called this number a lot, and Fairchild called him too. What do you want to bet this is his contact?”

  Someone was paying Secutores's bill. Someone gave them the weed killer.

  Escobar had given himself away when I had said that the company behind the weed killer had other projects in the pipeline. I had been guessing, but he knew what I was saying was true, which means Arcadia is still in danger.

  “What do you want to do, Mere?” I ask as I put my hands behind my head.

  “I want to go after them,” she says.

  I nod absently, staring up at the rough roof of the porch, thinking about Arcadia. Thinking about what I want to do. We've both been thinking—and talking—about what we might find on Belfast's phone, and now that we have a piece of data, it is time for us to make a choice.

  Am I still an Arcadian? Do I owe Mother and the Grove some allegiance? Am I an estranged cousin but
still part of the family?

  Who am I?

  I think of Aeneas, fighting the sea. We are no longer who we were.

  “Silas?” Mere says my name quietly, trying to get my attention. I look at her, sitting on the narrow chair, her hands in her lap. Her red hair is loose about her shoulders, and there are lines on her face that were not there two years ago. The scar on her neck shifts as she breathes. “What do you want to do?” she asks.

  Now, we are nameless scoundrels, running across the dark sea…

  “I'm a steward,” I say. “I have no home but the earth, and I have no family but the humus. That is who I will fight for.”

  She cocks her head to the side. “You have me,” she says.

  And I will fight for you too, Mere.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I'd like to thank Cody Tilson for the cover art. He made an artistic call that forced me to take a narrative path I might not have otherwise discovered. Erica Sage, Kristopher O'Higgins, Ross Lockhart, Jason Williams, and Matt the Intern offered useful commentary on an early draft. Thank you, all. Marty Halpern suffered through my grammatical idiosyncrasies with much aplomb (thank you, sir).

  It may seem odd to acknowledge a cat, but the orange tabby who has been trying to convince me that he can fit in my lap while I type has been a constant companion during the writing of this book. Enkidu likes to sit on the pile of file boxes next to my chair and stare at me, as if to say, “Are you done yet?”

  He's a tough audience.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mark Teppo is a creative executive for Subutai Corporation where he manages the Foreworld franchise, which includes the three-volume epic, The Mongoliad. A synthesist, a trouble-shooter (and –maker), a cat herder, and an idea man, Mark indulges in speculative thinking now and again, occasionally with a Tarot deck. His favorite card is the Moon.