Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  "I said they were crazy, not stupid," Pamela said.

  Well, if nobody turns up soon, we're toast. In fact, we're dinner, Havel thought.

  "Here they come," he said a second later.

  This time they were doing it smarter; half throwing rocks, the other half scuttling forward. Far too many …

  They must have been recruiting among the people they attacked, Havel thought. Those who refused to turn cannibal going into the stewpot.

  He saw the faces and the eyes now that they were closer; there was little human left in them. Animals, but cunning ones.

  And Pam's right too.

  "Dinner's going to be expensive," he snarled. "Haakkaa paalle!"

  Eric shot his last four arrows, and put two more of the enemy out of action. Then they were close, three in front of Havel with blades, more behind carrying stones—one woman in the tattered remains of a business outfit clasping a rock the size of her head, ready to sling it into him at close range.

  Not good.

  He stepped forward, the downward slope giving added force to the cut. The backsword blurred down and caught the axman at the join of neck and shoulder, and the eyes in the dirt-smeared face went wide. Shock vibrated up his arm as bone parted with a greenstick snap.

  He wrenched at the steel with desperate haste, beating aside a spearhead with his shield; the blade was fastened immovably by the dead man's convulsion and the sagging weight tore the braided-leather grip out of his hand.

  The time lost let a man with a hatchet too close. He dodged and the spearhead from the other side went by his face; the hatchet skimmed off his shoulder, rattling along the rings of his armor. The hatchetman stepped in, trying to grapple, and Havel lashed out with his steel-clad forearm.

  The vambrace took his enemy in the face. Bone crumbled. He snapped the puukko into his hand and struck as he stepped in towards the spearman, the vicious edge grating on bone as he slashed it down the haft of the spear, trying to ward off a third attacker with his shield …

  "You didn't come!" the woman with the big rock screamed. "You left us!"

  Whatever the hell that meant, she was entirely too close, raising the rock in both hands, and he couldn't dodge—not in time. Two of the cannibals were swarming over Eric, one grabbing his hair to pull his head back while the other hacked clumsily with a bread-knife …

  Then the one with the rock looked down at the point of the sword that had appeared through her chest, dropped the big stone on her own head and collapsed forward.

  Signe stood there instead, revealed like a window when the shade rattled up, leaning forward in a perfect stepping lunge, her eyes going wider and wider as she looked down at the results. Havel took a pace back and clubbed the cannibal about to stab Eric in the throat with the metal-shod edge of his shield; it clunked into the man's neck and dropped him limp on the rocky ground.

  The other turned to run, and had just time to scream when he saw the line of blades coming up the ridge. One scream, before Eric's fist closed on his ankle and dragged him back towards the knife.

  Havel took the time to draw three heaving breaths, straining to pull air that felt like heated vacuum into his lungs, then stepped forward to plant a foot and wrench his sword free of the body of the cannibal he'd killed.

  "Thanks," he said to Signe.

  "You're—" She bit back a heave. "You're welcome."

  Relief was like a trickle of cool air under his gambeson.

  The A-list of the Bearkillers swarmed up onto the ridge as the cannibals fled.

  Then they sheathed their swords and unlimbered their bows.

  "You're late for the party," he said to Will.

  The Texan shot; a shriek of pain followed right on the heels of the bow-string's slap against his vambrace.

  "But not for the cleanup chores," Will said.

  * * * *

  "Well, I think we can assume he's innocent," Havel said.

  The man lying in a cage of barbed wire stank; he was also skeletally thin, and his left foot was missing, crudely bandaged with the remnants of a T-shirt. Enormous brown eyes looked out of a stubbled hawk-nosed face. Havel mentally subtracted twenty years and put him in his thirties.

  "I should hope so," the prisoner croaked. "Do I look like I've been eating well?" He waved the stump. "I've been contributing to the pot. Aaron Rothman's the name."

  "Mike Havel," Havel said. Then: "Get him out of there."

  Two of the Bearkillers went in with a stretcher. Pam knelt beside it and soaked the bandage with her canteen, edging up one end of it. When she saw what lay beneath she swore and reached into her bag for a hypodermic.

  "You're a doctor too?" Rothman said. "As well as the Amazon thing?"

  "Vet, actually," Pam replied. "Too? You are a doctor? Medical variety?"

  "GP," he confirmed and weakly held up a hand. "That's the only reason they didn't kill me, dearie, when I wouldn't … join up."

  "Thank goodness," she said. "I've got to pull you through, then. We really need a doc."

  The wounded man looked around at the mail-and-leather clad Bearkillers, and at Howie Reines and Running Horse standing in horrified silence as the grim work of cleanup went on.

  "Oh, I was so hoping this was all over," he sighed. "If only you'd come in helicopters!"

  "It isn't over," Havel said grimly, as Pamela cleaned and rebandaged the gruesome wound. Red streaks went from it up the wasted calf. "In fact, it's probably just starting."

  Rothman sighed. "It could be worse. I used to live in New York."

  Havel looked around; there were half a dozen living captives, huddled under the Bearkiller blades. And about the same number of liberated prisoners getting help, counting Rothman and the girl who'd been screaming when he arrived—she huddled in a patch of shade, a blanket clutched around her shoulders and her eyes squeezed shut. A couple of young children, too—as far as he was concerned they were all prisoners, no questions asked.

  "So, any of these innocent too?" Havel said, going down on one knee and putting an arm behind the doctor's shoulders, lifting him to a better vantage point on the presumptive cannibals.

  The weight was featherlight. Rothman fumbled at his breast pocket—he was in the remains of slacks and shirt with pocket protector—and brought out a pair of glasses. He peered through them, and smiled with cracked and bleeding lips. It wasn't a particularly pleasant expression, and Havel didn't blame him one bit.

  "Not a one, barring the children," he said. "And I'll testify to that in court."

  "That won't be necessary, Dr. Rothman," Havel said, lowering him gently back to the stretcher. "Things have gotten a little more … informal, since the Change."

  He looked up. There was a cottonwood growing out of the cliffside, dead and bleached but still strong; a convenient limb stretched out about ten feet up.

  "Will!" he called. The Texan looked up; Havel jerked a thumb at the limb. "Get some ropes ready, would you? Three at a time ought to do."

  * * * *

  "I can't! I'm sorry, so sorry!"

  They were on a low hillside above the camp, which was the only way you could get any privacy. Havel drew his hands backward as Signe fumbled to refasten her clothes. His long fingers knotted on his knees in the cool sage-smelling darkness; herbs and long grass crackled under the blanket, adding a bruised spicy smell to the night.

  "OK!" Havel said, turning his back a bit while zippers and snaps fastened. "Look, it's OK!"

  No it isn't, he thought, and his voice probably gave his words the lie.

  "I'm sorry. I thought I could—look, let's try—"

  Havel made his gesture gentle. "No, we just tried to rush it, Signe," he said. "I know it isn't easy to get over the sort of thing you went through. Head on back to camp and tell them I'll be down in a while, why don't you?"

  "Mike—"

  "Signe, I said head on down."

  He waited until her footsteps had faded in the darkness before he drew his sword and looked at the twisted stump at the fo
ot of the-rock that blocked off the view to the west.

  "Is it worth the risk to the blade?" he murmured. "Yes." A pause for thought. "Hell yes."

  Then he spent twenty minutes of methodical ferocity hacking the hard sun-dried wood into matchstick splinters.

  * * * *

  Interlude II:

  The Dying Time

  "You sure this is a good idea, Eddie?" Mack said, as they walked into the built-up area of Portland from the west.

  "Look, who does the thinking here?" Eddie Liu replied.

  "You do, Eddie," Mack said. "But this place gives me the creeps—all those stiffs. We've been eating pretty good out of town since things Changed. A lot of places are growing stuff, too, so we can get that when it's ready. Or maybe we could go east, I hear there are plenty of cows there and not many people. So I was just asking, are you sure about this?"

  Eddie Liu shrugged at the question. "No, I'm not sure. But I am sure wandering around the boonies looking for food isn't a good idea anymore. People are getting too organized for the two of us to just take what we need."

  Too many of the little towns had gotten their shit together, with committees and local strongmen and those goddamned Witches, of all crazy things. He could see the thoughts slowly grinding through behind Mack's heavy-featured olive face, and then he nodded.

  "We have to hook up with somebody," Eddie finished. And Portland is where the organization is, he thought—or at least, that was what the rumors said.

  He was betting that in a big city, or what was left of it, there would be less of the no-strangers-wanted thing they'd been running into among the small towns and farms farther south.

  They trudged through endless suburbs; mostly smoldering burnt-out wreckage smelling of wet ash, wholly abandoned to an eerie silence broken only by the fat, insolent rats and packs of abandoned dogs that skulked off at the edge of sight. In the unburned patches there were spots where tendrils of green vine had already grown halfway across the street, climbing over the tops of the abandoned cars.

  On the roof of one SUV a coyote raised its head and watched as he went by, alert but unafraid. Half a mile later they both yelled as a great tawny-bodied cat flashed by, too fast to see details—except that it was bigger than a cougar, nearly the size of a bear.

  The beast was across the street and into an empty window in three huge bounds.

  "Mother of God, I don't like the idea of going to sleep with something like that running around loose!" Eddie said. "I know what it's been eating, too. We'd better find a place with a good strong door and a lock before we camp."

  Farther east they began to reach flatter stretches where the burnt-out rubble was only patches; this road in the area north of Burnside was flanked with old warehouses and brick buildings. Some of them looked grimy and run-down, others fancied up into loft apartments and stores and coffee shops and offices, with medium-height buildings on either side, but still there was no sign of human life.

  There was one encouraging sign. Someone had pushed all the cars and trucks to the sides, so that there was a clear path down the street. That had to have been done since the Change.

  No, make that two encouraging signs, Eddie thought.

  There weren't many bodies around, or much of the faint lingering sweetish smell he'd become used to, either; anywhere near the main roads or most of the cities they'd passed through you couldn't escape it, and the whole area just south of Portland had been like an open mass grave. It gave him the willies—not because he cared about bodies themselves, but because he knew they bred disease. And because they were an unfortunate reminder of how easy it was to join the majority of nonsurvivors.

  He doubted that one in three of the people who'd been around before the Change still were.

  Food I can count on getting, as long as anyone does, he thought. But those fevers … man, you can't shiv a germ.

  "Maybe we should have kept the bitches," Mack said.

  They trudged along the middle of the road—it was the safest place to be, now that guns didn't work anymore and it wasn't so easy to hurt someone out of arm's reach.

  "Sandy was real pretty and she'd stopped crying all the time," the big man concluded mournfully.

  "We couldn't keep 'em unless you were planning on eating 'em. Which, except as what we people who read books call a metaphor, we weren't—"

  He stopped, holding up a hand for silence before he went on: "I hear something. Up that next road on the left."

  The big man beside him wheeled; he was wearing a football helmet, and carrying a sledgehammer with an eight-pound head over one shoulder. His jacket had slabs they'd cut from steel-belted tires fastened over most of it, too.

  Eddie had added a Home Depot machete slung over his shoulder in an improvised harness, but hadn't tried to add much protection to his pre-Change outfit—he disliked anything that restricted his speed. They both wore backpacks; Mack's held their most precious possession, what was left of a twenty-pound sack of beef jerky. He hoped it was beef, at least—it was what they'd traded the girls for, that and two cartons of Saltines, some peanuts and a precious surviving six-pack of Miller.

  He'd considered staying with that gang, but he'd gotten a bad vibe from them all, the way they looked at him, and especially at Mack, like they were noting how much meat he had on his bones.

  I'm not really sure they wanted the bitches just to fuck 'em, either, he thought. Ass is cheap these days if you've got food. And they didn't look very hungry. Sorta suspicious.

  "Someone's coming," Mack said.

  "Yeah. That's why we're here," Eddie said reasonably. "To meet someone. Now shut up and let me think."

  There were a lot of people coming, from the sound of it. They stepped back towards the curb, between two trucks.

  The young man's eyes went wide, then narrowed apprais-ingly.

  The first men to turn the corner were armed—a dozen with crossbows, which gave Eddie a case of pure sea-green envy; he was still kicking himself for not getting one of those right after the Change, when the sporting-goods stores and outfitters hadn't all been stripped. The other twenty or so carried polearms; murderous-looking stabbing spears seven feet long. He'd seen the like elsewhere. What really interested him was their other gear.

  They all wore armor; sleeveless tunics covered in overlapping rows of U-shaped scales punched out of sheet metal somehow; they had conical steel helmets with strips at the front to protect their noses, and kite-shaped shields of plywood covered in sheet metal, painted black with a red eye in the center.

  Behind them came more people; not armed, but looking businesslike, many carrying tools—sledgehammers, pry bars, saws, and dragging dollies. Behind them came flatbeds and improvised wagons of half a dozen types. The people drawing the vehicles were handcuffed to them, and looked a lot thinner and more ragged than the others. One of the wagons, the last, bore bodies—some fresh, many the wasted skeletons held together by gristle that littered the ground around cities elsewhere. Now he saw why the city itself was less rancid; someone was cleaning house, doing the rounds of buildings where people had dragged themselves to die.

  And I sort of suspect that these guys just pushed people out of town to get rid of them, now, he thought. Pushed 'em out before the food was all gone. That's why the dead're so thick south of town. Clever.

  And there was a honcho, in a rickshaw-like arrangement, sort of a giant tricycle, pedaled by another of the thin-looking men; men who worked like machines with their eyes cast permanently down. The passenger was black and solidly built and wearing a dashiki and little beaded flowerpot hat; one hand held a fly whisk, the other a clipboard.

  The … soldiers, I suppose; unless they're the only racially integrated street gang outside a movie … stopped and leveled their weapons.

  Eddie smiled broadly, raising his hands palm-out. "Hey, no problem. You guys the law around here?"

  "We are the law and the prophets," the black man said, in a deep rich voice. "We are the nobody-fucks-with-us Portla
nd Protective Association, and you'd better believe it."

  "Where do we join?" Eddie asked.

  Several of the spearmen looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes and grinned, not a pleasant expression. The man in the pedicab waved his fly whisk eastward.

  "That way. Here."

  He handed over two disks on strings; squinting at his, Eddie saw "Probationary Applicant" printed on it.

  "Being an Associate of the PPA isn't all that easy, but you can try—and they'll find you something to do. Those let you go straight through to headquarters, and man, you do not want to be caught wandering about."

  He made a lordly gesture with the fly whisk, and the two wanderers headed east. Signs of order increased; traffic on foot and on bicycles and in weird tandem arrangements hauling cargo, an occasional group of marching armored troops … and at what had been the green lawns of Couch Park, a huge pit.

  Thick acrid black smoke poured out of it; a gas tanker stood nearby, feeding lines that spurted burning gasoline over the deep hole. Eddie watched a handcart pulled through a gap in the raw earth berm around the fire pit; it was heaped with skeletal bodies, some no more than bones held together by rotting gristle, some nauseatingly fresh and juicy, swarming with maggots or tunneled by exploring rats. Even now he gagged a little at the smell of the smoke, and of the carts lined up to feed it. He supposed the gasoline kept the fires hot enough that flesh and bone themselves would burn.

  "Why're they doing that, Eddie?" Mack asked.

  "Not enough room or time to bury them all," Eddie said. This bunch doesn't fuck around, he added silently to himself. "Rotting bodies make people sick, Mack."

  The big man nodded, looking nervous. You could fight to take food or anything else you wanted, or to fend off a band after your own goods or the meat on your bones. But you couldn't fight typhus, or cholera, or the nameless fevers that had taken off nearly as many people as the great hunger, or the new sickness people whispered about, the black plague.