Prisoner 9639 lay in her bunk, shivering with anger, fear, and despair. Dear God in heaven, help me! she prayed. Why am I here? What kind of world is this? She began to weep. She drew her thin blanket over her face and stuffed it into her mouth to stifle her sobs. Mother! Father! she called silently. Ah, they were dead! Gone! "Charles," she groaned aloud, but he was dead too. She was alone. And lost. She had only the Lord to stand by her now. Oh, Death, where is thy sting?
The overstormer in charge of morning roll call noticed Barracks Chief Munglo Patti's earlobe and called her over. "What happened, Barracks Chief?" he asked.
"I cut myself shaving this morning, Overstormer!" Patti answered immediately.
The overstormer stared at her blankly for a long moment and turned to his sergeant, silently asking, Did I hear her right? The man shrugged. "‘Shaving’?" the overstormer asked, and then his face lighted up and he burst out laughing. "Shaving! She was ‘shaving,’ storm man! Shaving!" The two almost collapsed with laughter. Tears streaming down his cheeks, the sergeant bellowed, "Let's look and see if she's got scratches on her back!" and that sent the two into further gales of laughter.
Roll call for Barracks Ten went very smoothly that morning.
Chapter 23
Charlie Bass awoke to the sound of someone weeping.
The blast that had knocked him out hadn't injured him seriously, although he did sustain numerous cuts and bruises. The tang of burned wood stung his nostrils. It was almost dawn, first light, that time of day when one can read a newspaper without artificial light. Automatically, he glanced at the ridge on the outside of town. Nothing, at least nothing he could see in the early morning light. Around him lay the shapeless heaps that had once been the members of the Judah family.
Zechariah Brattle cradled Consort's body in his arms. It was he who was weeping.
"Zach—Zechariah," Bass whispered. His throat felt like dried newsprint from the last century. "Zechariah." Bass stumbled to his feet and staggered over to where Zechariah sat on the ground. "Wh-Where's Comfort?" Bass croaked. He swallowed and collected more saliva in his mouth. He forced himself to look at Consort. She'd been shot in the chest at point-blank range. He could see the jagged white of her rib cage. What kind of bastard would shoot a wounded woman like that? Bass wondered, but he already knew. Men sometimes went wild in combat and shot everything that moved—until it didn't move anymore. "Where's Comfort?" he asked again.
Zechariah shook his head. "I don't know. Gone. They're all gone now. They're in God's hands."
The thought of Comfort dead cut through Charlie Bass like a red-hot knife blade. "We should look for her, Zechariah," he croaked, laying a comforting hand on the grieving man's shoulder. "Come on, Zechariah, we've got to get a move on. They'll be back as soon as it's light. Come on."
Zechariah shook his head. "No. It's all in God's hands now. I don't care what happens to me. I'm staying with my Consort."
Bass decided not to argue with the man. He walked around the house swiftly and then just as quickly searched the house itself, but no sign of Comfort. That was a relief. The Judah boy lay just inside the front door. His eyes were still open but he was already dead. Bass shook his head sorrowfully and stepped back outside.
"Zechariah, leave her. We've got to get under cover. Now."
"I—I can't just leave her here like this!" Zechariah whined. The front of his shirt was soaked in his wife's blood.
"We must, for now anyway. They'll be back, those men. When they come, we want the bodies where they can see them. Make them think they got us all. Do you understand, Zechariah? When the danger is past, we can give them a decent burial. There was another family came back with us, the Rowleys? Have you seen them?"
"L-Leave Consort here? Like this?" He ignored the question of the Rowleys, and so did Bass. If they'd been killed, so be it. If captured, as he expected Comfort had been, then it might not make much difference what precautions they took. Flight through the caves was the only alternative. They'd know soon enough. Anyway, now there was no time to spare digging graves and conducting funereal obsequies.
"Until they've made their reconnaissance and satisfied themselves we're no longer a threat to them. Yes. Now come on, Zechariah."
"No! I can't, Charles! I'm staying here, and if they come back I'll die here."
Bass sighed. "Zechariah, you remember what you did after Samuel was killed? You've told me about it often enough. You went back to your people because they needed your leadership. You refused to let your grief infect them. Remember? Well, you've got to put Consort down now, Zechariah, and come back with me to the caves. Your people still need you. I can't lead them without you."
Zechariah shook his head and groaned, holding Consort's mangled body even closer and tighter.
Bass drove his fist into the side of Zechariah's head and then pulled the stunned man to his feet. He grabbed him by his belt and shoved him bodily toward the caves. "You aren't going to crap out on me now, goddamnit!" Zechariah staggered, and Bass shoved him again. He stumbled in the dust, and Bass picked him up. "Keep moving. Keep moving," Bass urged, looking over his shoulder as he propelled Zechariah forward, his eyes on the sky in the direction the fighters had come from. They were well into the scrub when an Avenging Angel swooped down on the village, flying slowly and very low. Bass pushed Zechariah under some bushes and crawled in after him.
"Why didn't we pretend we were dead and lay out there for them to see us?" Zechariah asked.
Bass smiled. Zechariah was himself again.
"Because if they come back later and we're not there, they'll notice there aren't as many bodies as there were."
"Oh. Charles?"
"Yeah?" Bass warily eyed the sunlight glinting off the aircraft's frame as it cruised in a circle over the ruins of New Salem. Apparently, it was just a reconnaissance flight, not a bombing sortie.
"I'm sorry. I lost control. Thank you. Thank you, Charles."
"Don't mention it, old friend. Look, I'm sorry I hit you like that. I couldn't think of what else to do."
Zechariah rubbed the side of his head were Bass had struck him. "Next time, try bribing me with a cold bottle of beer." He chuckled. Then he groaned. "God forgive me for that. I shouldn't be talking like that with my beloved wife and my beautiful daughter dead."
"I don't think Comfort's dead, Zechariah." The Avenging Angel roared away. "Let's just stay here for a while."
"Not dead?"
"No. I think they captured her, Zechariah."
"Oh, thank God! I pray you're right Charles! Alleluia! Praise the Lord!" Zechariah began to weep again, this time tears of joy. Immediately, he got control of himself. "I'm sorry, Charles, it's just so—"
"You don't need to apologize to me. Hell, who could keep a dry eye after what's just happened?" He thought of Comfort and had to exert an effort to control his breathing.
"What do we do now, Charles?"
"Now?" Bass laid a hand on Zechariah's shoulder. "Right now we're going back to the caves and get your people organized. And then, Zechariah, I am going to get Comfort back for you."
The doctor's examination was perfunctory and consisted of asking 9639 routine questions about her medical history. He was an older man, much older than the commandant. His face was thin and narrow and his expression sour. He wore an immaculate white lab coat over his black SG uniform. His black boots shined like mirrors. He was very diffident in his physical exam, such as it was, as if reluctant to get his hands dirty touching his patient.
"You may dress now." Quickly, 9639 slipped back into her prison garb. "You'll do. You can work," he said at last, as he made a note in her dossier, which he handed to the guard. He leaned back, put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat and grinned. "You had a fight with your barracks chief last night? But you have no marks on your body, 9639. Who won?"
She gasped in surprise. How did he know about that? "It was nothing, er—" She hesitated because with that lab coat over his uniform she couldn't see his rank. "—M
ister Doctor."
"I am Understormleader Shirbaz, 9639. I could not care less what happens in the barracks. All I do is patch you up so you can return to work or bury you, whichever occurs first. Ah, 9639, I see you are surprised! You have studied the rank chart in the barracks, haven't you, and you are wondering why an understormleader, who comes between overstormer and overstormleader, is not himself the camp commandant? It is a question that has occurred to many. That is because I am a medical officer, and medical officers never command anything but a medical unit. So I sit here, day in and day out, looking up your dirty behinds, and take orders from people with half the education and experience I have."
Having had no idea of the doctor's relative rank, she really was surprised now. He was the first staff member so far to talk to her as if she was a real person. Despite the way he'd lewdly gazed at her nakedness during the "exam," she felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. And it was evident to her that this was a sore point with him and that he'd given that speech many times before.
"Well, 9639, good luck. If you learn to fight like an animal, you may be barracks chief someday. Take her to the commandant's office," the doctor ordered.
Once again 9639 stood before the commandant. "Sit," he said, reading her file and not bothering to look up at her. She sat. He looked up. "Now, 9639, the doctor says you are fit to work. Since your ultimate fate has not yet been resolved, I cannot assign you somewhere permanently. All my staff are screaming for prison help. You have no particular skills. So, you will work in the kitchen until ultimate disposition of your case." He slammed her dossier shut. She expected to be dismissed, but he kept her sitting there for a long moment and then reopened her dossier. "I want to go over some things with you."
"Yes, Overstormer."
"During the initial interview with the Special Group personnel who captured you, you stated that you were one of the sole survivors of the demons' attack on your sect at the Sea of Gerizim. You said that, let's see, um, sixteen of you, all told, out of those thousands, survived the attack. Tell me how that came to be. Did you know that the Special Group identified only ten bodies in the ruins of the village after their attack?"
"No, Overstormer, I did not know that. I saw the Judahs killed and—and my mother. I don't know what happened to the Rowleys and my father. My brother, I told them, had been killed earlier. Perhaps the other bodies are in the ruins somewhere?"
"Um. How did you survive all those months?"
She told him about the night the devils attacked and how they managed to get by after that. She omitted everything else that had happened over the last months. She was confident that the rest of the survivors were safely hiding in the caves. She prayed silently this interrogation was not a trick, that she was the only prisoner, that there was no one to contradict the story she had told. Then she thought, So what? What are they going to do if they find out? Send me to jail?
Overstormer Rudolf listened attentively. "How did you kill the soldiers who attacked your village? They reported you were in fortified positions some distance from the village and that you used acid weapons on them." Evidently someone had just passed this information to Rudolf, or he would have asked it earlier.
She thought fast. The interrogation the Special Group men had given her just after her capture had been only perfunctory. She remembered them, highly excited men, slapping each other on the back and laughing as if they'd just come through a tremendous battle safely. They acted like drunks, she thought at the time. She could see that clearly through her fear and pain.
"Many years ago we built a water catchment in a ravine outside the village, to trap runoff for our cattle, and we hid in there during the bombing. It was not a fort, Overstormer. We used shot rifles, old-fashioned things like shotguns that we found in the abandoned camp above the Sea of Gerizim, after the devils attacked it. They were not expecting resistance. It was easy to kill them. I don't know what they mean by acid guns, Overstormer." She paused. "We came out in the night to get things from the homes that were not destroyed. Then these other soldiers came."
"Um. You're lying, 9639." Rudolf slammed her dossier closed with a bang. "I know that. You know that. But who cares about a bunch of ragtag Bible-thumpers? I don't give a good goddamn. I'm a jailer, not an intelligence officer. You will write down your statement in full. Here is writing material. I am leaving you with your guard. When you finish, leave your statement on the desk and he will take you to the kitchen."
"Oh, dear God, have mercy on us!" Hannah Flood groaned when Zechariah told her about the attack.
"Charles," Spencer Maynard pleaded, "we didn't dare come out. We heard the shooting and could see the aircraft hovering and we were really scared! We were afraid they'd come down here to investigate. The reconnaissance car would be plain to see. I don't know why they didn't come here."
"It was night, Spencer, and there was a lot of shooting—anyway, they may not even have known about the car," Bass answered. He surveyed the faces of the people anxiously gathered inside the cave. They reflected horror, fear, and anger. They were on the edge of breaking down.
"We thought you were all dead," Samuel Sewall croaked. He came forward and embraced Zechariah, tears in his rheumy old eyes. The others crowded around Zechariah and offered him their condolences.
Bass took Raipur aside. "Those men were wearing black uniforms, body armor, shooting everything in sight. Who were they?"
"Special Group men," Raipur answered at once. "Not our bunch, Charles. Do you know who the Special Group are?"
"Something to do with enforcing orthodoxy, like an inquisition. I haven't had much time to study your culture since coming here."
Raipur briefly filled him in on recent events.
"They took Comfort—that's Zechariah Brattle's daughter. They may have captured some of the Rowley family, we don't know. But if they did, it won't be very long before they come back for the rest of us."
"If they have the girl, aren't we already done for?"
Bass thought for a moment. "Maybe not. Comfort's a tough and smart little lady, and she's as brave as any man among us. I think she could hold up under interrogation."
"Well, if the Special Group comes back out here, I won't be of any help to you, Charles. And I know my platoon commander. He won't be back without heavy reinforcements, and obviously it was decided not to send them. So there goes your peace overture. But Charles, I hate those people as much as you do, and I think most of the men in my army feel the same way about them. But what do we do now?"
"Well, not everything's come back to me yet, but I'm pretty sure I am a citizen of the Confederation and was here as part of its military force. The Confederation has an embassy or something at Haven, right?"
"Yes. At Interstellar City."
"Then that's where I'm headed. I'm going to find out just who the hell I am, and then I'm going to find out where Comfort Brattle is and I'm going to get her back."
"How will you do that?" Raipur asked, astonished. "I mean, how are you going to get there? It's far, far away. And—And what'll you do once you get there, assuming you do?"
"I'll walk. And I'll free Comfort with my bare hands, if I have to."
"By yourself?"
"No, I may need a few good men. Are you with me?"
"Yes, I am, Charles."
The woman in charge of the kitchen was a huge mountain of flesh. When she moved, her several chins jiggled. She was always huffing and puffing and perspiring, and her face was constantly red from exertion. She had a pronounced mustache on her upper lip that she constantly brushed with the back of her hand. A cigarette butt always stuck out one side of her mouth, sometimes lit, sometimes not. And she laughed a lot.
"You are a KP, that's kitchen police, dearie," she told 9639 as soon as the guard dropped her off at the kitchen. She draped one enormous arm around 9639's shoulders. "Everywhere in Human Space machines do all the hard work, dearie. But not here. Everywhere else you press a button, I'm told, and machines wash your clothes; press an
other set, and they clean your house; a third, and they prepare your food. For all I know they have buttons to make machines do their fucking for them too. But at Castle Hurse we do our work the old-fashioned way, with our hands. Hard work is good for us, 9639. Takes our minds off things like oh, sex, food, escape, the usual.
"We start work here at three hours every morning, seven days a week, and all of us work until after nineteen hours, sometimes even as late as twenty-three or even 01, depending on the availability of rations and the preparation we need to get the following day's stuff ready. But we have it good in here, 9639. It's always warm, we get good rations—hell's bells, how do you think I maintain this girlish figure?" She shook with laughter. "And the work is easy. You work hard for me, show you're willing to learn, and in time I'll teach you how to be a cook. But for now you're a KP and do I have a job for you!"
She shuddered. "Yes, 8372?"
"Come on." Prisoner 8372 led her to the back of the kitchen. She stooped and with one enormous hand removed an iron grating in the floor. "Do you know what this is?"
"No, 8372," she answered as she peered cautiously into the floor. An oily substance gleamed back at her.
"It's the grease trap, honey! It has to be cleaned daily. You dip it out and put the stuff in cans out back to be picked up. Over there on the wall are some rubber gloves, a ladle, and a container. The galvanized can out back is marked ‘Grease.’ If the outside girl is screwing off somewhere, don't get it confused with the ‘Edible’ and ‘Nonedible’ garbage cans, Okay? When you're done with that, find me and I'll give you something else to do. Maybe pots and pans?" She laughed enormously and waddled off singing a nonsensical ditty, "—and his ghost may be heard, a-singing in the grease trap, ‘You come a-peeling potatoes with me, peeling potatoes, peeling potatoes, you come a-peeling potatoes with me!’"
Prisoner 9639 pulled on the gloves and knelt on the floor. Her stomach churned uncomfortably at the task before her. She got to work.
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