Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  “Lieutenant?” one of the men said. “I hear something.” Rita saw Dix erase the heart. Then she, too, heard it. A throbbing growl in the distance.

  “Helicopter,” Dix whispered, grabbing her gun.

  Rita eased herself into a mound of straw. Around her, the rest of the squad did the same.

  The sound of the helicopter went from a throb to a flutter and finally to a definite whop whop. It was coming right down the center of the village, fast and low.

  “Shhh,” Dix whispered.

  No one moved. The robot was still as a boulder, and even the blue light seemed to dim.

  WHOP WHOP

  The helicopter passed overhead, the sound of its rotors dopplering as it went.

  In a splash of sun, a soldier sat up. “It’s raining,” he said in wonder. “It’s—”

  From the dark roof, a pigeon fell. Then another. The soldier’s trembling hand halted halfway to his face and he stared at it moronically. “Raining,” he whispered.

  Dead pigeons fell like feathery bombs into the straw.

  The soldier gave a strangled, prolonged gurgle. He stared at Rita, eyes cartoonishly wide, face darkening to a cyanotic blue.

  Rita lunged forward to help, when a pigeon fell by her outspread hand. She blinked in surprise and noticed she was seeing double.

  Her muscles were weak and trembley. Dear Christ, she thought. How stupid. I’m going to faint.

  Then she realized that the soldier wasn’t dying from a coronary. What was killing him had felled the pigeons. And had also touched her.

  Nerve gas was fatal within seconds.

  She tugged at the Velcro fastener of her mask. A few feet away, Dix’s small body was twitching on the straw, and the robot was trying to hold a gas mask to her face.

  Rita jerked, the Velcro ripped apart, and the mask fell to the hay. She tried to pick it up, but fumbled, not able to tell which of the two images was real.

  Atropine, she thought. I have to get the atropine. But an instant later a shudder jackhammered its way up her spine, demolishing logical thought as it went.

  The world went dark, and something heavy slit on her chest. She couldn’t breathe. Blindly she reached out and encountered a shuddering hand.

  The blue of Dix’s eyes enveloped her. Wide, staring, dead eyes. Curious eyes.

  A serene, catacomb chill settled down. Somewhere water was trickling. She was in a cold blue bed in her old house in New Orleans and in the bathroom the faucet had begun to drip.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

  Gordon ripped the smothering goggles off his face without waiting for the CRAV to power down, He fought free of Toshio’s restraining hands, tore off the gloves and bolted from the room. At the door he collided with Pelham, nearly knocking him down.

  Gordon didn’t stop. Gasping, he sprinted up the stairs, taking them two at a time. In the sun-drenched yard he halted, pressing his hands against the sides of his head.

  Never. Never. He’d never felt so helpless. Had never seen people die like that. This wasn’t the corpses of Bagnères-de-Luchon lying in the grass as if they were movie extras.

  I should have died with the squad, he thought. And then his mind screamed back, Goddamn. You weren’t even there.

  The tasteless, odorless venom of reality was soaking into him. In seconds he could drown.

  “Sergeant,” Pelham said softly.

  A hand touched Gordon’s shoulder. Gordon pushed his face into the rough wall.

  “Come with me, sergeant,” Pelham said. “Now.”

  The colonel grabbed him around the chest, and pulled him backward. Gordon stumbled, almost fell.

  “Come on,” Pelham said as he pulled him across the yard.

  Gordon’s ankle bumped something. Pelham’s grip tightened.

  “Get me something!” the colonel was shouting to someone. “Get me a sedative for this soldier!”

  Someone tried to claw his fingers from his face, but Gordon wouldn’t drop his hands. This wasn’t some horror flick on HBO. This wasn’t something he could skip by glancing down at his popcorn.

  If he looked, he would see real people. He’d see Dix and her men glass-eyed, fish-mouthed, and staring. If he listened, he would hear the gurgling of their lungs.

  Pelham pushed him into a chair.

  “What’s wrong with him?” a female voice asked.

  The colonel’s reply was an angry shout. “That’s fucking classified information, major! Get him something! Now!”

  Gordon heard steps hurrying away.

  “I can’t,” Gordon said, rocking back and forth in the chair. “God. I can’t.” I can’t deal with this.

  Pelham was calm now. “There wasn’t any way you could have helped them, son. There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

  Gordon opened his eyes and saw he was in the clinic.

  “You okay now?” Pelham asked.

  “No,” Gordon whispered.

  A woman major in a white lab coat came back with a syringe. She pulled up Gordon’s sleeve and plunged the needle into his arm.

  “The syringes,” Gordon said dully. “I should have remembered the syringes.”

  “It wouldn’t have done them any good,” Pelham replied.

  The doctor looked at them both.

  “Get out,” Pelham told her.

  “We better put him in bed,” she said. “As much Valium as I’ve pumped into him, he’s going to fall out of the chair in a minute.”

  “Out of here, major.”

  After a hesitation, she obeyed.

  “I want you to get some rest,” the colonel told Gordon. “Take a day or so. Toshio will command your unit.”

  The drug was saturating Gordon’s body with lethargy. He blinked and remembered the lieutenant’s wide blue eyes. When had he realized she was dead? He’d been trying to keep the mask on her face, the rubber skirting of it around her head like the petals of an olive-green flower. Then she wasn’t seeing him. She wasn’t seeing anything. And never would again.

  Gordon shuddered.

  “Cold?” Pelham asked;

  Cold, Gordon thought. Cold to the marrow. There was a lump of ice in the pit of his stomach.

  “We’ll have you up and running again in a couple of days.”

  Gordon shook his head. Afternoon sunlight flowed over the linoleum like spilled honey. “No. Not the CRAV again,” he said. His lips felt thick, his tongue awkward.

  “You don’t want to command a CRAV?” Pelham was surprised. “Why?”

  The only part of Pelham in Gordon’s vision was the colonel’s sinewy, folded hands. Strong, brown hands. “Alone,” Gordon said.

  “What?”

  “Alone.” Gordon had been alone all his life. In high school. Through college. All the time he’d sat in front of the Nintendo screen.

  And in the CRAV he was the loneliest of all.

  He hadn’t known that. Not until now. The diamond-hard armor of the robot had kept out more than rockets. It had kept him from bullets of humiliation and heartache.

  Gordon suddenly saw how dangerous that armor was, and how destructive the fantasy of computer games. They had made him so self-absorbed, he had become an adult without understanding consequences.

  “You’ll change your mind,” Pelham said.

  “No,” Gordon said without taking his eyes from the sunlit floor. “I won’t.”

  IN THE LIGHT

  Past the pane of window glass, so old it had gone slightly wavy, stood a low, circular stone wall, its center filled with winter-brown leaves. Beyond that was a rusted swing set, its childless swings rocking in the wind.

  Rita turned. Light trickled through the grand floor-to-ceiling windows
, caressed the stacks, the books. Against one wall of the library a fire crackled in an ornate stone hearth.

  “Hello?” she called. Her voice was absorbed into the thick, cool air. Silence dropped like dying birds from the fourteen-foot ceiling.

  “Hello?”

  No one answered.

  “Read me your book,” a voice said.

  She whirled. The person standing by one of the stacks looked like Dr. Gladdings, her old professor of anatomy. But when she looked closer, his face swam, as though she were seeing it through one of the antique windowpanes.

  “I’m dead,” she told him.

  “You know a lot about death,” he said. “That’s why I’ve asked you here. Read me a book about it.”

  If she were dead, she shouldn’t be afraid. She shouldn’t be wanting to run. The thing that looked like Dr. Gladdings took a, step toward her. She blundered back, fetching up against the chill of the window.

  There was a book in her hand. She’ looked at the cover.

  Gray’s Anatomical Book of the Dead.

  With a spasm of fear she tossed the book away. It hit the, marble floor, making a musical, languid clatter.

  So this is what the brain experiences in the moment of extinction, she thought. She had always wondered what those, final synapse firings would be like. Now she wondered how long they would last.

  Dr. Gladdings was at her shoulder, so close-that she could feel the cold radiating from his skin.

  “You always were a curious girl,” he said.

  She swallowed hard. Probably she should say the Act of Contrition now, but it was too late, as late as the gas mask, as late as the atropine. Beyond the glass in the windows she could hear sleet beginning to fall, rattling on the dead leaves, tapping on the empty playground swings.

  “Did it hurt?” Gladdings asked with an odd, flabby smile.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Death,” he said. “Did it hurt? You always wondered about that.”

  Death had breathed at her through the gaps in the barn roof. It had sidled through the narrow breaches in the boards and clapped invisible hands over her mouth. With a grimace she recalled, her terror. It hadn’t lasted long. Fatal within, seconds.

  “Hurt?” she said. “No. Not much.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  Then he was sitting behind the librarian’s desk: The sleet crescendoed. As he looked at her, his head began melting into his shoulders. His eyes. Oh, His eyes were doing something strange.

  My God, she thought. What huge eyes he has.

  Dr. Gladdings smiled an eerie, shapeless smile. “The better to see you with, my dear.”

  CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

  The next morning, Gordon was awakened by two MPs. They told him to get dressed, that Pelham wanted to see him. He put on his fatigues and followed them out of the clinic.

  It was when he was walking across the foggy yard that he began to wonder how his CRAV was and who, if anyone, had taken it over.

  Oddly, he didn’t care. Not really. Not as he cared before the deaths in the barn. Funny. Now that his life had been revealed for the comic-book fiction it was, he realized that if he had any sense, he wouldn’t go back in the unit.

  But people were always doing things that weren’t good for them, weren’t they? They didn’t watch their cholesterol. They didn’t exercise enough. They smoked.

  Gordon’s vice was that he loved the soft edges of illusion.

  He’d taught himself to view life through a television screen. The program was comfortable, and he’d been watching it so long he wasn’t sure he knew how to change channels. Or even if he wanted to.

  The MPs left him at Colonel Pelham’s door and walked away without a word. Gordon hesitated, then turned the knob and entered. Pelham was standing; a stranger was seated in his chair. The sight of the four-star general was so astounding that for an awkward moment Gordon forgot to salute.

  “As you were,” the general said.

  Gordon glanced at Pelham. The colonel looked ill at ease. The general looked pissed-off.

  “Sit down, sergeant,” Pelham told him gently.

  Gordon sat

  The general was a small man with a balding head and cat-yellow-eyes. “What happened to Captain Beaudreaux?” he asked.

  “Sir?” Gordon asked in alarm. Looking from the general to Pelham.

  “The captain who was with you in Pons,” the general snapped.

  It was easier looking at Pelham, so Gordon did. “She was killed, sir. If she was at Pons, she was killed.”

  “Bullshit, sergeant!” the general roared.

  “Just answer the question, sergeant,” the colonel said in a soothing voice.

  “I want to know what the aliens are doing with her,” the general said: “I want to know what their intentions are.”

  ‘The aliens, sir?”

  “The blue light!” The general’s face was cherry red with anger. “Goddamn it, sergeant! The blue light took her away!”

  SEO DE URGEL, SPAIN

  Wasef stepped over the bodies of the elderly couple. On the wood stove a pot of coffee was boiling over, filling the kitchen with its burnt reek. A roll of Spanish sausage, a slab of cheese, and a loaf of crusty bread sat on a counter. The pair must have been about to have breakfast when his men shot them.

  He took the pot from the stove and set it aside. On the wall, a canary sang in a wooden cage, oblivious to the deaths of its masters, unaware that it, too, would soon die. Wasef picked up a paper bag and spread some seed at the bottom of the cage. After a moment’s thought, he opened the cage door.

  The bird didn’t fly out. It cocked its head and stared at him with its glass-bead eyes.

  Wasef opened the back door to the sunlit, enclosed garden. If the bird decided to save itself, Wasef saw, it would have company. In the garden, a lark trilled from the dark green depths of a blooming laurel. By a thicket of climbing roses, grasshoppers sang.

  Leaving the door open, Wasef turned away. The small house was immaculate except for the splatters of blood and brain. He looked down at the old woman. Her black skirt was up to her knees. The soles of her feet were clean.

  Before he left the kitchen, he made himself a sandwich, using his one good hand. He took a jar of home-pickled olives from near the stove, stepped over the bodies, and left the house.

  A few of his men were lounging under the dense shade of a cork tree, sharing bread, oranges, and cheese. Finishing his own looted sandwich in four huge bites, Wasef trudged up the hill to the bivouac area of Infantry Battalion C. On the way he passed Gamal Rashid, who was sitting by himself, reading. Wasef stopped, seeing the cover of the book.

  Gamal was reading about the blue lights.

  “Captain!” he shouted.

  Gamal nearly dropped the book. His eyes widened with alarm.

  Putting the jar of olives down, Wasef snatched the paperback from the captain’s hands. The Eridanian Way, the cover read.

  “Not a scientific text,” Gamal was prattling in embarrassment, “but then not much scientific is published about UFOs.”

  “Damn you,” Wasef said under his breath. Steadying the book between his cast and his stomach, he tore off the cover and stuffed it into the dirt of a nearby potted fern.

  A blush turned Gamal’s dark neck maroon. “I was hoping to find out ...” he began.

  Wasef threw the book at him. Gamal caught it. “Don’t show interest in such things. The men distrust you already, and where will you be, Mr. Future President, when your constituents turn away?”

  Gamal bit his lip. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  Something else to feel guilty for, Wasef thought. Such a number of choices: the dead he had left in the buttercups of Bagnères-de-Luchon; the old couple h
ere in Seo de Urgel whose blood brightened their terra-cotta floor. Now he must do penance for the death of this young man’s aspirations.

  “My father laughs at me, too:’ Gamal told him. “He says I don’t have a political mind.”

  “You don’t.” Wasef sat, dug his hand into the jar, and brought out a palm full of dripping, brownish purple olives. “Here,” he said, offering them to Gamal. “Eat and forget about the future.”

  The captain frowned at Wasef’s hand. ‘We can’t forget about the future.”

  “Food,” Wasef said, lowering his mouth and sucking up three of the slick, small olives. He chewed the bitter meat from them and spat the pits into the cobblestone road. “Food is the future. If you want your constituents not to fight with each other, you will promise them food and hide the fact that you are an intellectual. They don’t want a smart man to lead them, Gamal Rashid. Only a shrewd one.”

  Gamal eyed him. “You are a shrewd man.”

  “Ah, yes,” he laughed. “Perhaps I will be President.”

  Gamal didn’t smile. “Perhaps you will.”

  Taken aback by the captain’s somber expression, Wasef blinked. “It was a joke; I have no interest in what happens after the war.”

  “You must,” Gamal retorted. “Listen to me, colonel. In a few months we will be handed the responsibility for the world. If we must drag conquered Europe down into fundamentalist ignorance, I would rather lose than win this war.”

  Lose or win the war. The phrase seemed made of nonsense words. Wasef knew logically that wars had their endings, but his heart told him otherwise. There was only strategy and killing, the hollow thuds of artillery and the squeak of tanks.

  “ ‘As you are, you are led,’ ” the colonel recited with an acid grin. “Perhaps we get the leadership we deserve.”

  “I do not listen to the mullahs. You know, colonel, the prerequisite for being a Muslim should not be stupidity.”

  Dig into Gamal Rashid deeply enough, and the softness was gone, Wasef saw. He had struck iron. The boy was staring at him, chin high, mouth set in a firm line. He looked Presidential.