Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  “I wanted to,” Sabry groaned. Oh, how he had wanted to. He leveled a glare of hatred at Lauterbach. “I wanted more than life to kill you.”

  A moment later the American left, and Sabry dropped off to sleep. He didn’t dream again.

  IN THE LIGHT

  The reel purred as his Pa brought in the line.

  “No fish today,” Jerry said.

  “No fish,” Pa agreed. He set the rod. In the pool of light on the pier his mottled fingers caressed the lures, the sinkers, before closing the tackle box.

  “You’ll be leaving now,” he told Jerry. Then Pa was up and walking away.

  Jerry stared after him in disbelief. When his body could work, he scrambled to his feet and ran after, his heart in his throat. At the other end of the pier, Jerry caught him. His fingers sank into his Pa’s arm.

  Pa turned around. His face looked stranger than ever. The eyes had sagged, and his mouth, too. His nose was a long horned beak.

  “What are you talking about? I’ll never leave you,” Jerry said.

  “You know, Jerry?” his Pa said in Ward Cleaver’s voice.

  “You know what you do with wild things when you capture them?”

  Jerry knew. He had seen all the programs. “You let them loose so they can be free.”

  Pa’s rubbery arm slid out of Jerry’s grasp. He turned and headed back to the house.

  “But damn it, I ain’t no bird or lion or nothing,” Jerry said, rushing to catch up.

  On the lawn, Pa stooped and laid the rod down, put the tackle box beside it. “You’ll grow up soon,” he said without looking up. This time he sounded like Bill Cosby. “Boys get interested in girls, you know. And their fathers aren’t so important anymore.”

  “Not me, Pa.” God. Wouldn’t his Pa look at him? If he looked, he would see the need in his face. Need was a kind of glue. It had held Jerry to his old Pa, even when he’d got drunk and beaten him. Now it held him to his new Pa like a fly in honey.

  “I’ll be good,” he promised, his voice a whine. “I’ll never do it again. Whatever it was I done, Pa, I’ll never do it again.”

  It didn’t seem that his Pa was listening. Jerry had the frightful thought that maybe his Pa didn’t love him anymore. Maybe he loved the soldier.

  Pa stood regarding the red tackle box. “You’ll want to go home one day, and we won’t be able to bring you back.”

  “No, I won’t. I won’t. Really. Pa, look at me. Why don’t you look?”

  Pa looked up then. His face was even stranger. The black eyes had a multifaceted sheen. “We’ve learned everything we could from you.” He didn’t sound like a television dad now. He didn’t even sound like a human.

  “No, Pa. No. Please. I can show you lots of things. Fireworks ...” His mind jittered a dozen different ways, all his thoughts tangled in the panicky idea of abandonment. “You never seen fireworks.”

  A dull pop at his back made Jerry turn around. A red chrysanthemum burst streamers into the night sky. A whistler went up next, riding a wavy ribbon of brilliance. It exploded into blue and then orange and then green, the sparks racing toward Jerry so fast that he stepped back in surprise.

  Pop. In the sky, purple flowers bloomed, their fallen seeds glittery crimson.

  “You’ll see. I promise,” Jerry said. “I can show you lots of things.”

  Pop. Another chrysanthemum swelled until it filled half the sky. Suddenly Pa’s cold arms were around him. Pa pressed his spongy body against Jerry’s back.

  “Tell me,” Pa whispered into his ear.

  Something sharp and hard dug into the meat above Jerry’s collarbone. He held his breath and forced himself to stand very still. “Shoeing horses,” he said, tripping over the words in his rush. “Fixing cars.”

  The sharp thing pressed harder, stinging a little. His Pa’s cold, sodden face was right next to his, cradled in the crook of his neck.

  Then Pa released him. Jerry turned around, rubbing his shoulder. There was a tiny hole there, like an exploratory bite.

  “We use you, Jerry.” His Pa’s voice was a pulsing bass, like the hot throb of some huge engine.

  “That’s all right,” Jerry told him.

  “And we’re not what we seem to be.”

  “That’s okay, too.”

  “As long as you understand what’s happening.”

  Jerry knew what was happening. It had to do with love and stuff. It had to do with gluey need.

  His Pa bent to pick up the fishing gear. “What do you want for dinner?” he asked.

  Jerry studied the cherished and ever-changing curves of his Pa’s back. “I love you,” he whispered fervently.

  Pa looked up, surprised. “I love you, too,” he said in Bill Cosby’s voice.

  WARSAW, POLAND

  Baranyk got out of the Humvee and waded through the snow, Shcheribitsky and Zgursky at his heels. The wind was bitter, and the temperature, unless Baranyk was imagining it, was stilt falling.

  At the eastern perimeter the main street was cluttered with tanks. Skirting the traffic jam, Baranyk made his way down an alley.

  “Like January, sir, isn’t it? The way January used to be,” Shcheribitsky said, his breath coming in puffs of fog.

  Baranyk caught a glimpse of something green deep in the rubble. He stopped, bent, and peered into a small cavern. A girl was lying there, curled in sleep like a cat. One of Warsaw’s army of orphans.

  “Sir?” the major asked at his back. “Just a moment, Shcheribitsky.”

  The general reached in a hand to touch her face. She was cold, he saw. As stiff and hard as the bricks around her, and her face as gray as the masonry dust.

  Quickly he got up and dusted off his gloves.

  “Sir?” the major asked.

  “Nothing,” Baranyk answered and continued on.

  As they reached the ruined perimeter, Baranyk saw that most of the earthworks were gone. Where the munitions stockpiles had been was a smoldering crater. Four blocks away from the wreckage sat the radar station, its door wrenched off its hinges. A line of soldiers like worker ants were carting equipment from the building to a sooted apartment house nearby.

  Baranyk followed a burdened lieutenant up the stairs. In the living room of a vacant apartment, a fire was blazing in the hearth. Jastrun, surrounded by computer components, was muttering orders to his men.

  In the neighboring bedroom stood Czajowski, a phone to his ear. “I am on hold,” the commander said with a droll smile.

  It was too hot in the apartment. Baranyk slipped his coat from his shoulders and draped it over a swivel chair.

  Jastrun turned his irritable attention to a sergeant. “Where are the cables? You were going to get me the cables.”

  Without a word the sergeant turned, his every movement weary, and trudged out of the room, leaving snowy footprints in his wake.

  “No,” Czajowski said into the receiver, his English words clipped with irritation. “I will not leave a message.”

  Baranyk glanced at the commander, but Czajowski was no longer looking his way. He was standing ramrod straight, staring at the snowdrift on the bedroom windowsill.

  “Has there been any movement of ANA troops?” Baranyk asked Jastrun.

  The colonel glanced up from his appraisal of a keyboard.

  “What? Uh, no. No movement as yet, general. Captain?” The captain was on his hands and knees searching for a plug. “You will do a diagnostic on this, please.”

  Baranyk caught Shcheribitsky ‘s eye. “Perhaps the snow confounds the Arabs.”

  The major shook his head doubtfully. “They are Afghanis and Cossacks and Iranians, sir. They understand cold.”

  Baranyk studied the room. On one side stood the gleaming computers, the radar screens. The overstuffed and
ugly furniture, tattered anachronisms, lay piled against the opposite wall.

  “Whose apartment?” he asked Jastrun.

  “Who knows?” the colonel said, not looking up from his work. “They are dead, they are gone away? Who knows?”

  Most of the pictures had been taken down; Baranyk noted their pale, square ghosts on the wallpaper. Yet the Poles had let a cross remain, along with a saccharine painting of the Virgin.

  Czajowski gave a sudden loud and joyous cry. “General Lauterbach!”

  Baranyk turned to the bedroom.

  “You were to get back to me ... What? No, not yet. Are you ... Yes, I know it is difficult. You must understand our difficulty as well.”

  Baranyk looked at the mute, gray plastic speaker on the table.

  “What is that?” Czajowski asked. “No, sir. I do not think we can hold against an enemy attack for more than a couple of hours, perhaps less. Yes? You ... Well, I see. I understand, but ...”

  Striding into the bedroom, Baranyk hit the button on the speaker. Lauterbach’s calm, amplified voice suddenly filled the small apartment. The men at the computers looked up. “ ... wish you all the luck in the world,” the American was saying.

  Baranyk’s pulse jumped. A vein beat madly in his temple. “Shit!” he shouted into the speaker. “You feed us shit!”

  There was a pause, then the American asked, “Valentin Sergeyevich? Is that you?”

  “Yes, T. Williams. That is me.” He looked at Czajowski’s pained face and then back at the speaker. “Have you told him?” he asked.

  Another pause from the gray square of plastic. “Told him what?”

  “That America plans to drop its pants for the Arabs.”

  “Valentin,” Czajowski said, his tone cajoling and embarrassed.

  “Tell him, T. Williams!” Baranyk shot. “Tell him the truth! You are right now drawing up plans for a negotiated peace.”

  Lauterbach’s answer was curt and quick. “We are not.”

  “You are not sending a division,” Baranyk persisted.

  A short hesitation. In that brief silence Baranyk could hear his world crumble. “No,” Lauterbach admitted.

  “You never were.”

  “No.”

  “You will let the Arabs have Poland, to keep Germany safe. Tell him, T. Williams. Admit it.”

  Over the speaker came the sound of Lauterbach clearing his throat. The apartment was hushed now, except for the crackle of the fire. Soldiers were seated on the living-room floor, their terrified eyes on the speaker.

  “I cannot allow that to happen,” Lauterbach said.

  “What?” Baranyk pulled his gaze away from a young Polish boy’s blanched face, the memory of the little dead girl following like an afterthought.

  “I said I cannot allow the Arabs to have Poland. It will upset the balance of world power. You have to look to the future, Valentin Sergeyevich,” he was saying.

  Baranyk was trying to understand. The future? But there was no future. Didn’t the American realize that? There was no tomorrow for Warsaw. There were only eventualities.

  “I’m looking ten, twenty years ahead, as America should have done after the Second World War ...”

  “What shit,” Baranyk whispered. His eyes went to the window and the softly falling snow. Suddenly an idea came to him. It was a nasty idea, and it moved in him as a worm through a corpse. “How do you plan to stop them?”

  “You must understand the necessity,” the American said.

  Baranyk exchanged a horrified look with Czajowski.

  The American was saying, “I don’t make this decision lightly. I’ve tried everything. God. I’ve tried. Believe me ...”

  “Don’t ask me to believe you!” Baranyk shouted. “How can I believe you? You will not let the Arabs have Poland, so no one may have Poland. You will make it unlivable for a thousand years!”

  “It will be a surgical strike. Low yield.”

  Now that Lauterbach was finally speaking, he wouldn’t shut up. Baranyk wanted to clap a hand over the speaker as if it were the American’s mouth.

  “There’s a chance for you,” Lauterbach was saying. “There will be some warning. I can’t tell you more than that. Get into the basement. Take food and water. Maybe you can ride it out. I wish ...” His voice foundered, struggled to go on. “I wish you all the luck ...”

  Lauterbach must have hung up, because Baranyk realized that he was listening to the hum of an empty line.

  He looked around. None of the soldiers had moved, and for a moment he had the frightening thought that they were dead, all of them dead, their insides crisped to cinders.

  IN THE LIGHT

  “You must leave now,” Dr. Gladdings said.

  Rita was standing in the entranceway before the heavy double doors, Dr. Gladdings beside her.

  “They’re coming. You have to leave,” he told her.

  Her hand dropped to one of the scrolled knobs. Cold. Cold. Like the touch of frozen flesh. Ice sweated from the pores of the metal skin.

  “No,” she whispered, snatching her hand away.

  But suddenly she was outside, at the curb, in the dull, gray day. Above her head the ice-bound branches chimed softly. On the ground a few dead leaves caught the wind and sailed scrape-stop-scrape along the asphalt.

  “Dr. Gladdings?” she called, turning to the closed, unlit building.

  Around her sleet began to hiss on the gelid ground.

  “Dr. Gladdings?”

  Something huge was coming down the wintry, tree-lined street, its headlights bright halogen stars in the gray afternoon. It crawled along, scattering drifts of brown leaves. Over the dark square of the driver’s window was a sign that read CHARTER.

  The bus stopped at the curb, brakes groaning. The ribbed metal of its sides wore a matte finish of dust.

  A hydraulic sigh. The door opened. On a high bench seat sat the driver, a lump of ill-shaped clay.

  “Get in,” he said.

  She blundered back, back down the sidewalk, toward the safety of the library. Her shoulders and the rear of her head bumped against the inside of the windshield.

  The bus stank of stale air and mildew. The windows were dry, but rain chattered and gossiped on the roof. In the middle of the banked rows of seats a man was screaming.

  “We going to fuck now?” a boy asked.

  She whirled. In the front row a Navy flier sat, smiling bitterly. “Hey, driver,” he said. “You want to order us to the backseat so the captain and I can fuck?”

  The bus lurched as it drove off. Rita grabbed the frigid steel bar of the driver’s seat and hung on. The screaming man was an ANA private, a Turk, too old for his rank, too old, it seemed, even for the service. He was ranting as he shrieked, a hopeless, futile babble. Beyond him in the shadows was another ANA soldier. A young Libyan corporal.

  “Look, honey,” the pilot said. “I don’t have anything against dark meat, but could you make your breasts a little bigger?”

  Warily, she sat across the aisle from the American pilot as the bus drove into the night. Don’t make a sound, she thought. Don’t move. Don’t draw any attention. She sat like a child in church, hands folded in her lap, deciding that, if she stayed very still, danger might pass her by.

  The sound of rain on the roof grew heavier. The driver turned on the wipers.

  “Hey,” the pilot said, leaning toward the driver. “Where’s my F-14? Or did I learn that lesson already?”

  Rita looked out of the corner of her eye and saw they were in a desert. On either side of the road, black sand dunes hunched like waiting assassins in the dark.

  “Gosh, folks,” the young, dark-headed pilot said. “You already taught me I’m a coward. I just can’t wait to see what you’re going to teach me now.”
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br />   Behind her the screaming man’s voice rose to a keen, thin garrote of a wail, then lowered to a blunt-instrument moan; an unending assault of sound.

  The bus pulled up next to a tapestried tent agleam in torchlight. The door wheezed open. A Saudi officer, a hatchet-faced, cruel-looking man, boarded; he gave one curious glance to the pilot and another to Rita before he strode down the aisle. Very slowly, very cautiously Rita turned and peered over the seats. The Saudi skirted the screamer and sat down beside the corporal.

  Now the wailing man was beating his head against the window. Along with the ever-present rain, there was the hollow-melon drumming of a skull on glass.

  “Please. Where are you taking us?” she asked the driver politely, in the voice one uses to address the powerful: a priest, a president, a murderer.

  He didn’t answer. They were moving out of the desert and into the chill, waiting stars.

  “It’s all an illusion,” the pilot laughed.

  The stars gathered, as though for warmth, in the center of the windshield. A moment later they sprang away. Rita saw the bus was landing, coming down in a moonlit forest.

  With an imperious snap the door opened. A cold wind whipped in the doorway, carrying with it confetti flakes of snow. There was no sound now, except for the old man’s howls.

  “Last stop. Get out,” the driver ordered. The pilot stood.

  Fearing to be left behind, Rita got to her feet as well. “I think we’re home,” she whispered to the pilot.

  The boy’s lips twisted into a patronizing smile. “Just play along,” he said. “It’s easier that way.” He walked down the steps. Then the two Arabs left, abandoning the hysterical old man.

  The driver turned in his seat, his eyes flicking by Rita and resting on the screamer. Below those pitiless, bulging eyes, his nose was a daggered beak.

  The driver started to rise, but Rita said, “Please. I’ll get him, I’ll get him.”

  The driver settled into his seat like so much khaki ice cream. In the dead, oblivious silence, she inched her way down the aisle.