Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  He strained to listen, but there wasn’t much to hear: no growl of diesel engines, no voices. In the still air, the fog lay thick across an enamel-green pasture.

  “Da-a-angerous, deadly,” he breathed. The wraparound goggles shut off all sounds from the command room, even his own. He sang on in silence. “A missile clutched between our che-e-e-ks.”

  There should be some noise, he thought. The village wasn’t that far, just a mile to the west. He should be hearing the lowing of cattle, the tinkle of goat bells.

  “Ro-o-bot geeks.”

  He pressed his foot gently, dubiously, to the accelerator.

  A half-mile up the road he found a body.

  An old peasant woman. Black shawl. Gray hair beginning to revolt from the tyranny of its pins. She was lying on the other side of the road, head resting on her arm, body curled as though in sleep. Blinking once hard, he activated his telescopic vision. There were goddamned flies crawling on her face.

  He blinked again quickly, more a reaction of surprise than a command. His vision returned to normal, and suddenly she was just an old lady who had decided to plunk down where she was and catch a few Zs.

  There was no blood on her. No wounds. Her eyes were open, her lips fish-mouthed. Her face a dusty blue.

  “Scene One, Act One of Night of the Living Dead.”

  Gordon whispered, even though he couldn’t hear himself talk, even though he knew he was four hundred and fifty miles away.

  He trundled on nervously, knowing where there was one gas victim, there were bound to be more. At the next turn of the road he found them, sprawled over a yellow and white buttercup-massed pasture. All of Bagnères-de-Luchon was there. The Arab National Army had obviously marched them into the flower-bedecked meadow. And the people had stood and waited, wondering what would come next.

  Death had. Only a few, it seemed, had figured out the mystery early and tried to flee the helicopter’s spray. They lay on the road, they hung over fences, they sprawled loose-limbed in the sweet grass of the roadside ditch. A yellow hound was feeding on a body.

  “Whoa. Stephen King does France,” Gordon whispered.

  Abruptly the dog yelped and bolted, glancing to the field in alarm.

  His heart doing a triple-step, Gordon turned to see what had scared the dog. At first he thought it was his imagination, the morning was so misty, the thing moving in the pasture so subtle. A cold thing, neon blue.

  He blinked. The pasture clicked into close focus. The blue light was real. Not much brighter than the fog, it flitted from corpse to corpse, like a butterfly among flowers.

  The light halted. Gordon had the eerie sensation it was regarding him. A sort of wintry lassitude weighed him down, the same placid comfort that precedes a death by freezing. His eyes started to close. Faintly, in the back of his mind, he could hear the monotonous tap-tap-tap of sleet striking a window.

  He shook himself out of the half-sleep, and his eyes popped open to darkness. He’d inadvertently shut down the CRAV.

  He gasped. Violently he jerked his head twice to the right. The vision field came back. The blue light was closer, right at the fence; and he could sense, as he could feel his robot arms and treads, the light’s intense curiosity.

  “Arm missiles!” he screamed.

  The head-up display sprang into life. The blue light was square in the center of the kill box.

  The words MISSILES ARMED, MISSILES ARMED marched in red across his vision.

  He touched the stud in the little finger of his left glove and tried to bring it into contact with his thumb. His hands were shaking like a drunk with the d.t.’s. Jesus God. He didn’t have the strength to push his fingers together hard enough to fire.

  The thing was closer now, moving through the log fence like a ghost. The sound in his mind grew louder, the tap-taptap more authoritative now, hail more than sleet. Gordon was afraid that he would freeze where he sat and that the duty officer would find him at lunchtime, arms and legs encased in ice, mouth open like the gassed dead in a last, airless shriek.

  A few clustered anemones bowed their heavy heads at the light’s passing. It eased over the body of a teenaged girl, ruffling her hair, her clothes.

  Gordon’s thumb finally found the bulge at his little finger, finally steadied a bit. He backed up a few feet to move the light into the kill box. Out of the corner of his vision he could see the robot fingers mimic his hand’s firing position. The steel hand, too, was trembling.

  An explosion of light and sound. In the chaos something scraped his cheeks, nicked the bridge of his nose.

  “Don’t fire!” Colonel Pelham was shouting. “For God’s sake, don’t fire!”

  Gordon struggled out of his command chair, but a female MP caught him in a bear hug. In front of his startled, disbelieving eyes was the boxy computer unit of the CRAV, the blank olive wall. They’d pulled off the goggles too fast; he felt dislocated from his body. He arched his back, and his forehead collided with the MP’s cheek.

  “Settle down,” the MP growled.

  The control room was crowded with people, and Colonel Pelham was taking Gordon’s gloves off so quickly that the leads scraped his skin.

  “Print that!” someone snapped.

  Still dazed, Gordon turned to the voice. A stocky Oriental man with a black-and-yellow Mitsubishi windbreaker was staring at him.

  “Help that soldier,” the man said when he caught Gordon’s glance. “You took him out of CRAV reality too abruptly.”

  Gordon’s ear stung from the goggles. Warm blood trickled down his neck.

  The man from Mitsubishi popped the floppy disk out of its drive and handed it to the colonel.

  “Get my unit,” Gordon said, but no one was listening to him. No wonder. His tongue and mouth were thick, his words mushy.

  “My unit.” They’d left his CRAV out in the field, out in the goddamned road. Left it vulnerable to the attack of that cold, blue light.

  Pelham pocketed the disk and looked at Gordon curiously. They were all staring at him now—the contractor representative, the colonel, the MP.

  “You let that thing get my robot,” Gordon said and, to his shame, started to cry.

  IN THE LIGHT

  Lieutenant Justin Searles snapped awake to find himself in a high-backed seat, a blanket rumpled around him. Except for the faint growl of the engine, the bus’s interior was burdened with silence, the sort of sticky, late-night silence in which nothing moves.

  Beyond the night in the window, a bloated moon coated the desert with fish-belly light. He stared out, wondering where he was. An old, established desert. Arizona. Maybe New Mexico. The rocking motion of the bus and the musty smell of long-enclosed places lulled him to sleep again.

  He shut his eyes and dreamed of the persistent tap-tap of cold fingernails against his bedroom window, a sound like the dead wanting in.

  Jackknifing forward, he jerked himself out of his doze.

  It seemed to him that he had had this dream before; and it seemed that he had never quite awakened from it. His heart was doing a heavy-metal rock number in his chest, and his breath came hard and fast and painful. Panicky, he blinked into the potato-chip bag- and magazine-littered darkness.

  On an aisle seat near the door an elderly man was snoring softly, mouth ajar, hand around a bent-spined paperback. Reading lights haloed the heads of the sleeping passengers, as though the small group were dozing away the miracle of Pentecost.

  Justin’s heart started to slow. The ache in his chest subsided. Peering over his shoulder, he noticed someone else awake. The girl had brown hair and huge brown bonbon eyes.

  An American girl, he thought. As his mind formed the words, he could see her smile flicker and die.

  Somewhere pellets of ice rattled against rocky ground, the sound of their impact so loud that he
wanted to cover his ears. Instead, he yanked the blanket to his neck and looked out the window in time to see a shooting star flash orange across the desert sky.

  “Hello. My name is—“ a voice said.

  He turned. The girl was sitting next to him, but he couldn’t, for the life of him, remember moving over for her. I must have, right? he asked himself. I just moved over and forgot about it, that’s all.

  Her brows furrowed in thought and then cleared. “Ann,” she said after a moment, as though she had just then decided on the name and thought her decision charming. “My name’s Ann. Where are you headed?”

  “I—” He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember where he was going. “I think there’s something wrong,” he hissed.

  The clatter of frozen rain was so intrusive, the noise made him forget what else he was going to say. It was so loud he began to wonder if in the morning he would find the inside of his skull coated with ice.

  Swiveling, he stared out the window and saw the orange smudge against the sky again.

  No. That burning thing wasn’t a falling star. Oh, God. It was an F-14 crashing.

  “Read me your book,” Ann said.

  Her voice startled him. He looked down at his hands and saw he was holding a Navy manual with the words TOP SECRET emblazoned in white across the dark-blue cover.

  “Read it to me aloud,” she told him, leaning toward him intimately.

  He opened to the first page.

  CHAPTER ONE, it said in large, sans-serif type.

  And under that was printed:

  MAYDAY!

  MAYDAY!

  MAYDAY!

  With a spasm of fear he slammed the book shut. At his shoulder the girl was staring at him.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. Suddenly her face began to sag, the features drooping, as though its underlying structure was as boneless as a snail.

  He tried his best to get out of his seat, but the blanket held him down. “Jesus God! I’m not on a bus. Where am I?”

  She put her hand on his arm. There was a mushy, arctic feel to her flesh. “In a moment. I want you to read me the book now.”

  He moaned and twisted. The book dropped from his lap.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she told him. “We won’t hurt you.” The bus was rolling side-to-side like a ship on a slow sea. Down the aisle came the bus driver, steadying himself by the tops of the scats.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” he asked angrily. The bus driver’s face was jowly and the armature of his skull nearly buried in fat. And Justin knew, he knew for sure, that if he dared touch the man’s cheek, his hand would sink into that gummy flesh.

  “Don’t you want to fuck her?” the driver asked.

  The fat driver, the boneless girl, had him trapped against the window. He turned to look out, to see if there was some escape.

  The F-14 was going down in a blaze of glory, twin dandelion fluffs of parachutes behind it.

  “Take her to the back,” the bus driver said. “There are empty seats in the back and no one’s looking. You can fuck her all you want. You can fuck her brains out.”

  With a moan, Justin tore his gaze from the window and looked at the girl. His gaze flash-froze there. Behind her blank eyes he could sense the strange, chill weatherhead of her thoughts.

  CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

  Sometimes it seemed the lesson the Army most wanted to teach Gordon was how to wait. After being dragged from his command chair, he’d been taken to a small, windowless room, where he sat for an hour. He had the time to contemplate his situation (screwed) and his bladder (full).

  Someone in the next room was making coffee, and soon the smell began to remind him that he’d missed breakfast.

  An MP finally came for him, the same MP he’d bumped faces with. She didn’t smile. Gordon didn’t either. With some chagrin he noticed her cheek was turning purple.

  When he asked, she took him down the hall and let him use the bathroom. She didn’t offer him a cup of coffee and she didn’t mention lunch. When he came out of the john, she marched him straight into Colonel Pelham’s empty office and left him there.

  Gordon was fucked. He’d been about to shoot a missile off into-what? An optical illusion? They’d get him on a mental for sure.

  Morose, Gordon sat and studied the room. Behind the colonel’s high-backed chair were taped maps of the war. The red arrows of the ANA’s movements were, in essence, a march from famine, an exodus from the greenhouse heat. Gordon’s eyes followed the Arabs’ desperate journey north through Spain, through Almeria, Valencia, Barcelona. A smaller red arrow spiked up from the Black Sea to Bucharest, where the Syrians had stalled. From the east came the largest and most ominous of the red arrows, sweeping north across the Carpathians, losing part of its width in the tragic struggle through Ukraine and then spilling toward Poland. No, the war wasn’t going well, and even if Gordon hadn’t been able to read defeat in the maps, he could smell it in the stale air of Colonel Pelham’s office.

  The sound of the door opening behind him brought Gordon up and out of his chair. He dug his right toe in the linoleum and pivoted into a crisp, military salute, a real poker-up-the-butt salute. Only two things were wrong with it: the squeak his Nikes made during the pivot, and the fact that Pelham was nowhere around. Right hand to his eyebrow, Gordon stood staring at the man from Mitsubishi.

  Quickly he lowered his arm. For a moment the two men studied each other. When the moment approached the point of awkwardness, Gordon bowed. He dipped his head the exact instant the Oriental stuck out his hand. He nearly got an eyeful of thumb.

  “I am Toshio Ishimoto,” the Japanese said in a clipped, Morse-code grunt.

  Gordon straightened quickly enough to see Ishimoto jerk his hand back and give him a small, answering bow.

  The rep had a low-center-of-gravity build, the kind of body that looked impossible to tip over. “I look forward to working with you, sergeant.”

  Before Gordon could respond, Pelham entered. Gordon hastily saluted again.

  “At ease,” Pelham said, shutting the door carefully behind him. “And sit down.”

  Gordon perched on the edge of his hard-backed, hard-seated Army-issue chair. Pelham dropped into his seat with a weary sigh. Ishimoto remained standing, hands clasped behind his back, looking more Army than Gordon could ever hope to look.

  Pelham opened a drawer, pulled out a small tape recorder, and set it on the desk.

  “Tell us everything,” Pelham said.

  “Yes, sir,” Gordon replied. “What does the colonel want to know?”

  “Your impressions,” Ishimoto explained. “From the moment you saw the blue light.”

  Gordon sat straighter. The blue light. So it hadn’t been a figment of his imagination after all. “Scared, sir.”

  “Why?” Pelham asked.

  “Why, sir?” Surprised by the question, Gordon glanced from Ishimoto to the colonel. Neither was giving clues. “Well, it was weird, sir.”

  “Weird?” Pelham asked.

  “Yes, sir. And there were all those bodies. I mean, for a minute there I thought I had clicked into a Channel 27 rerun of some old John Carpenter film.”

  Pelham sighed, shook his head, and said to the manufacturer’s rep, “Sergeant Means here is our resident comics and science fiction expert.”

  “How appropriate.” The flicker of a grin lightened the Samurai scowl. “Did you feel the light acted intelligently?” Ishimoto asked suddenly in his machine-gun grunt.

  The question made Gordon’s jaw drop.

  “Did you get that feeling, sergeant?” Pelham insisted. ‘This is subjective, here. We have the visuals. Now we want to know how you felt.”

  “Well, yes, sir. I mean, I never stopped to consider it. I just—”

 
; “You just what, sergeant?” Pelham leaned forward. “I felt it was curious about me.”

  Ishimoto and Pelham exchanged looks.

  After a while, Gordon asked, “Sir?”

  “Yes?” Pelham answered.

  “What about my CRAV unit, sir?”

  “Safe. Mr. Ishimoto sent it into cover.”

  Gordon shot a hard look at the manufacturer’s rep. Having someone else use your unit was a little like having someone else use your girlfriend. “Thanks,” Gordon muttered.

  “My pleasure,” Ishimoto said.

  “Anything else you can tell us, sergeant?”

  Gordon forgot protocol utterly. He simply shook his head.

  “Well. You will never discuss this meeting or what you saw today. You will not mention it to the other operators, you understand?”

  Gordon stared into Pelham’s brown eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  “And if you encounter this object again, you are to treat it as a friendly.”

  “Okay,” Gordon said. “So it’s an object, okay, sir? That’s cool. And I’ll consider it a friendly. If it wants to come up and mate with my CRAV, I’ll lift my tail for it, begging the colonel’s pardon. But, goddamn, I mean if I’m not supposed to talk about it, can’t I even know what it was?”

  The other men exchanged glances again and then both stared at Gordon.

  Ishimoto was the one who answered. “We don’t know what it was.”

  Very quietly, very slowly, Pelham reached out and turned off the recorder. “Dismissed, sergeant,” he said.

  Gordon was so glad to leave the room that he realized only later that he still had his stripes and that he must not have lucked up too badly. And it was only after lunch, much too late to go back and bother the colonel, that he remembered the odd sound the blue light had made in his mind, that clattering sound of sleet.

  CENTRAL ARMY HOSPITAL, BADAJOZ, SPAIN

  Be a pediatrician, her mother had told her. Go info obstetrics. That’s the field for a woman. Even now, Rita Beaudreaux thought, she could be back in the States running a general practice, wiping children’s snotty noses and lancing boils on working-class butts. The National Guard captain considered her mother’s advice as she pulled the overhead microphone closer and tapped the foot pedal to turn on the recorder.