Corrag leaned into the blackness under the rubble, hoping to hear voices, signs of intact life, miracles buried under the shards of glass, twisted beams and concrete chunks. They dug for hours and took turns running the emptied buckets back up the hill of rubble, careful not to fall into the gaps of blackness where life oozed itself away in silence and shame.
Corrag's arms were burning with fatigue. She could hardly open her hands to get them around the bucket handle when it was full. Her hands were bleeding. She was thinking of ways to exit the scene, and how she would never forgive herself if she did. Mired in self-recriminations, she suddenly heard a cry, a voice below. She yelled back. "Who's there?" And popped her head and shoulders deeper into the crevice. "Help!" she heard.
Corrag stood and called out for help. A boy with a searchlight passed up the line. Corrag took the light and told the boy to hold her by the legs. She leaned into the chasm, coughing in the dust. The light showed up a length of a corrugated I beam. Underneath it she thought she saw something move.
"Are you there?"
"Yes," said a squeaky, scared voice.
"We'll get you out. Don't worry," said Corrag.
Ten hours later the light was showing in the sky and the rescue teams were wiped out with exhaustion. Several tons of debris had been moved by hand. An excavator bot had been located in a sand and gravel depot in Bridgeport and was on its way, but the volunteers had to keep working without stopping for food or water. Corrag felt only one thing, a constriction in her throat that almost blocked her breathing, but not quite. Everything else was numb. She couldn't lift the buckets, but somehow dragged the empty ones back from the dumpster on the boat on the dock. The guerrilla soldiers were smoking khat and listening to jihad rap. They had come up from Philadelphia, they said. About fifteen or so had disappeared in the bombing. Then someone yelled that the girl was out. They'd rescued the little girl. Everyone wanted to see her; she was wrapped in a nanofoil blanket and whisked away on a zip bike before Corrag could get to her. Corrag was crying as the sun came up, sitting down where she was at the edge of the rubble pile. At least she could feel the tears. One life was saved; a small victory had been enacted in the midst of all the useless, evil destruction. There was some celebration, but there was also word coming down that the survivors of the Korazan Brigade had been ordered back. The soldier, the black man with tribal scars, tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to a porter truck, one of a line of vehicles that had appeared suddenly on the edge of the park. They were evacuating, and she was going with them. She was giddy, elated. She wanted to fight whatever or whoever had been bombing the neighborhood hours before. Her identity as a Democravian did not immunize her from feeling a part of this. On the contrary, it impelled her to seek to destroy the evil before it got away with worse.
She was barely able to walk. She was so tired, but full of a sudden joy and excitement at the cold December sun glinting off the aluminum roofs of the trucks. The men and women piled in after clicking on the safety latches on their rifles. Corrag sat on a utility bench with no backrest. One of the soldiers offered to switch with her. She stayed where she was. Everyone was exhausted.
They drove in a convoy across the GW Bridge and out to the Delaware Forest. The truck had no windows and was decaled with the markings of the Lambertville Chinese Vegetable Growers cooperative, a celebratory, drunk looking New Year's dragon festooned above the lettering. The parking lot was on the edge of the highway. Across the highway was an A frame at the edge of the woods. Dead oak trees alternated with low, dying pines strangled by invasive tropical vines. They crossed the road at a trot after checking for clear with one of the soldiers on an emosponder. Corrag could see beside the A frame, as she got closer, there were pup tents set back in the bushes. A couple of others who, like her, had been volunteered into the trucks now were brought inside the A frame by the soldiers, holding their rifles up and urging them up the rotted plank steps.
Inside the door, a black girl smiled. She got them inside and then closed and locked the door. She was about twenty, with sharp features and broad shoulders in her camouflage jersey. A man with a face that held almost no recognizably human features sat on a beat up sofa in the dark room.
"These are the new inducts, General."
"Well, introduce us, then," said the man on the sofa.
"Guys, this is General Korazan. Welcome to the Korazan Brigade."
"Come closer to where I can see you," said the man.
Corrag and the three others beside her, all young men, complied. General Korazan had the tribal scars that a lot of his soldiers had and flat, lifeless eyes. There was a stink about him of rotted flesh that reminded Corrag of a vulture she'd once seen in the San Gabriel Mountains up close above the cloud line. It had been sitting on a rock as they'd almost reached the summit of some climb, she couldn't remember which, maybe Sentinel Ridge, and the smell of it had been overpowering. Ricky had chased it away by hollering, and it had flapped its huge wings and dropped several dozen feet into the chasm before achieving some lift and clearing some outcroppings and veering away out of sight. The memory was a powerful one, and Corrag thought it providential that it should resurface at this time, so far from her childhood and those family hikes. She wished she'd never seen General Korazan. He seemed devoid of emotion and therefore either extremely untrustworthy or their promised redemptor.
"Okay. Now I can see you. Tell me who you are and why you want to fight with me."
They were quiet, shuffling in a line in front of the sofa. Corrag turned around. The black girl was standing at the door clutching her rifle.
"You first," he said, pointing at her.
"Me?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'm from Democravia, Edmundstown. And I don't know why I want to fight with you. Honestly, I lost my cousin. I would like to find him and maybe by joining up with you I can. I'm not really a fighter. Beithune is. I'm sure you could use him. Why are you fighting?"
"Why? We're fighting to rid the world of the oppressors, child. No other reason. The scum who want to kill our future. Make slaves of us and our children. They running this circus they call the Republican Homeland. It’s only a homeland if you call this shit a home with 25 percent homeless and over half with no access to the Augment."
"Okay," said Corrag.
Korazan stood and walked over to the door.
"What's your name, child?" he asked.
"Me? Corrag Lyons."
He whispered something to the girl and she got on her emosponder. They both looked back at the sofa at the inductees who shifted their weight, waiting for another cue from the general. The girl got a response on the emosponder and relayed it to the general in a rapid patois that was impossible for Corrag to understand.
"How about you?" Korazan walked back to the sofa and questioned the next volunteer, a boy with sandy brown hair and thick, tattooed arms. He sat back on the sofa and resumed his grasp of the khat pipe he'd left teetering on the sofa's arm.
"Billy Gansky."
"Why are you here, Billy?"
"I don't know how you want me to say it."
"I don't want it in any way. Just tell the truth."
"They ... k ... killed my parents," he stammered. It took him awhile to get his words together.
"My Mom and Dad were st ... strawberry growers. From Graftonburg. That's in P ... Pennsylvania. They wanted to grow in our own way, using our own people. We always made our own harvest until they said we had to use the S ... Sandelsky scalers. The government and S ... Sandelsky are trying to run the table all across this country."
"Okay. And you?
Korazan turned to the last boy.
"I don't know. I hate the Repho," he said, in a quavering voice.
"Come here."
"Why?"
"Just do as I tell you. What's your name?"
"Ivan."
"Ivan, how old is you?"
"Twenty five."
As he questioned, Korazan flipped open his emosponder and
held it up to the inductee's face. It shone a light into his eyes.
Korazan checked the emosponder down close, squinting his eyes at the screen held in his hand. He looked at the door and the black girl guarding it, and his glance caused her to move to the door and open it. Three soldiers shuffled in, lightweight sniper rifles with night vision sights slung across their backs.
"Ivan, did you know you have an augment? We don't like that at all."
"I hate what they've done to me. I want to kill all of them!"
"Take him away," Korazan said to the soldiers and placed the pipe in his mouth.
"No, you don't get it. I'm on your side!" Ivan made a dash for the door. The black girl jumped in his way and ducked as he swung a fist at her. Then the soldiers jumped him from behind as he was going through the door and pinned his arms behind his back and cuffed him after he went sprawling forward down the steps. They manhandled Ivan through the trees. Corrag could see it from her spot inside the room. Then the door closed, and it was dark as the general spoke. Korazan sucked at his pipe. He was talking, telling them about the Korazan Brigade and the fight against the Repho that had broken out across several hotspots. They were part of a broad alliance of rebel groups who fought under different banners and different causes. Some of them were against the Augment because they were opposed to the immortality project that it fit into, others were fighting the corruption of the Sandelsky/Gheko alliance because the power that had once belonged to the traditional political institutions was now concentrated in the hands of cronies, the friends and relatives of the two autocrats. But the Korazan Brigade took on the fight on behalf of the downtrodden, the powerless. Many were the sons and daughters of migrants that had been refused access to any commercial or government augment because of a lack of documentation or finance.
A shot was fired. Nobody said anything about it. Corrag felt herself go numb, as if the blood had drained out of her body. She didn't see herself getting along with a bunch of people who executed volunteers in cold blood. But there was nowhere else to go. She was in the midst of a war. Sides had been chosen. She squeezed her arms, trying to keep her spirits up.
She trained in the use of the Bograd, a flamethrower that used compressed hydrogen. She had been chosen, not for any particular predisposition she didn't think, but rather because it was a weapon that depended on the strength of a unit, two loaders and one director, and she seemed to be able to communicate well with the different sorts of volunteers that were coming in -- from rural refugees to urban working class, disaffected youth.
There was a distinct religious cast to the unit's basic culture. Male and female priests set up in a makeshift shed almost every day to lead evening prayers. Corrag attended these services, drawn to the solemnity and the richly colored robes the priests wore, different from the Unitarian church services she'd attended with the Hunnewells in New Albion and the blue-jeaned pastor there. Although there was no mention of it, she was pretty sure it was the Church of Peter the Rock. The priests in the camp had companions that traveled with them, and some of them had relationships with some of the soldiers.
The black girl, Gillema, aide to Korazan, who had assigned Corrag to the Bograd, came by at meals to make sure she was all right. The other two boys that were the rest of Corrag's unit usually ate with her, and they also shared a tent that they pitched beside hers. Their names were Cesar and Kevin. Cesar was Guatemalan. And Kevin, the black soldier that had tapped her for duty back in Van Cortland, had originally been a child soldier in the wars of the African Horn. He was Somalian. Kevin knew the names of the stars in his language. Benadir, Xidigta, he said, and tried to teach Corrag. Corrag listened in the dark without looking him in the face, and tried to repeat. There was the Big Dipper. He pointed and said Aquila. The eagle. Corrag shivered. She couldn't look him in the face because it scared her to see his eyes, even in the dark when she could hardly see them. She could tell instantly what he was thinking by the light in his eyes, like an eagle's, voracious and unstoppable. She wished Beithune were there to learn the names of the stars. He would be better than she was about remembering.
At the end of the second week she went over to find Gillema in her tent. She was sitting outside the flap nursing a small fire and drinking tea from her vintage aluminum cup that she'd picked up at the swap shop in Lambertville. Jokingly, she called it her Korazan Brigade chalice.
"Hi Gillema. Can I see you?"
"Yes, of course. Sit, girl. Talk to me. How is your Bograd unit?"
"We're fine. We're getting along well. But, I don't know. I feel funny. My heart is twisted inside me. Do you know what I mean?"
"Well, that is a strange condition. Tell me more."
"You know Kevin and Cesar?"
"Yes?"
"They're both very special to me. I feel funny."
"You like them. Which one better? Are they fighting over you?"
"No, please. I don't want them to fight. But Kevin is very nice. He teaches me things. Like new words for everyday stuff. Did you know that Kevin always prays at noon? Because he believes that the words travel up to the sun. Words are related to light. Light decays and becomes night, but just before the night, once it hits the upper atmosphere, the light is able to materialize our prayers, the prayers inside the light, and be heard by God. But I don't know if I believe in God, Gillema. I wasn't brought up to believe. I certainly don't think my soul should belong to him."
"Only if you want. It's your free choice," said Gillema, shifting and making a spot beside herself on the log. Corrag sat and pulled her legs up into her chest as far as they would go.
"There's so much new information. I'm having a hard time processing it all. This is the way I always wanted to live. I feel strong. I have a purpose. But I'm scared. I don't want to die. Kevin says some of our allies use suicide squads, but we don't. Is that true?"
"That's right. Albert ruled out suicide as an effective strategy. Imagine dying inside yourself in order to accept your own death. Anything is possible for such people. That's why we don't trust all the allies."
"Is that why you don't accept augments?"
"Exactly. They're not to be trusted either. They've already died as humans in order to accept themselves as immortals. It's the same idea. They have no real allegiance to the living. The best fighter is a man or woman in love with life."
"But why did you have to shoot Ivan? Couldn't you have sent him back?"
"Albert doesn't believe in taking chances with our safety. He's more than a military man, Corrag. He really cares about us."
The next battles would take place inside the city itself. They were planning an attack on the Sandelsky offices. By infiltrating small units one at a time, units able to live and take cover for days on the street, they would assemble a force at the very doorsteps of the powers that ran the Repho, the brain and neural coordination, the underlying network of greed and death that was responsible for the hard-line police state the Republic had become. Corrag and her Bograd unit could assemble and disassemble the flamethrower in a matter of minutes. They listened to lectures from cartel veterans on techniques for living without being seen, disguised as panhandlers or harmless disruptives. The night before they were to ship back to Manhattan, Corrag attended mass with Kevin. Cesar stayed in the main building. He was going into Lambertville on the bus to call his mother in Quetzaltenango from a Chinese restaurant that had an interface some of the soldiers had figured out how to use. In the sermon, the priest, a thin man with a grey ponytail, spoke about the different types of love represented, and the ideal of friendship.
"For we have chosen. And now the task is to accept our responsibility to each other as the highest calling. There is no greater love," said the priest and gave the sign.
Outside it was cold, and the sky was cloudless. A crescent moon gave just enough light to shine through the leafless branches that they walked under. At the top of the hill was a treeless circle where an old fire tower still stood, rusted cables anchoring it to the outcroppings
of bedrock.
"I want to go up it," said Corrag.
"Go up," said Kevin.
"Will you come?"
"If you want me to go up, I will."
Corrag pulled herself over the barbed wire barrier and reached the stairs that wound on the inside of the tower's frame. Kevin caught his pants and tore a gash in his leg getting over the wire. He sat on the stairs and stanched the bleeding with his hand.
"Are you okay?"
"I think so." He stood, looking at her with a funny smile like a little boy. Sometimes she thought she was like a mother to him.
Corrag continued to the top, where the stairs let out on a platform above the tree line. She could see the Delaware River glinting in the thin light of the crescent moon, and beyond the hills of the Poconos was the hinterland where the Korazan Brigade hoped to one day establish a free state for unaligned, unaugmented humans, a country where the guiding principles of social cohesion and sustainable technology would balance human striving with planetary well being. She believed Albert Korazan when he talked. He seemed so convinced that they could do it, and one day live free, not slaves in a system that took care of you if you sold yourself to the lowest bidder. They would fight the Repho in its home and prove that they were not the weaklings that the Gheko controlled media outlets made them out to be. By confronting Sandelsky and Gheko with the urban campaign, they hoped the weakened Repho state would not want to commit resources when they declared their home ground. But that was years off. In the meantime they had other safe havens and would be moving camp after this next phase of battle. Only Korazan knew where. He was in consultation with the leaders of paramilitary groups up and down the land as far as Panama, he claimed. It was amazing how committed Corrag was to the struggle after so short a time. It was like she'd been planning all along for this without knowing it, all the years of her childhood feeling like something was wrong. The fight wasn't just about the corruption of the Republican Homeland. It was about a state of affairs that was shared with the Democravian Federation as well, a system of governance that depended on passivity, on individuals allowing themselves to be manipulated in the name of security and comfort. What were the good citizens scared of? Was it of knowing the truth, that the ease promised by the two respective systems was a sham? After all was said and done, there was no escape from death in augmentation; there would be no colonies in the distant stars, only the gentrified suburbs of Juarez and Lima, or in the case of the Repho, the exclusive vacation condos of Madagsacar or Croatia with their repetitive, anaesthetizing luxury. If only more people could allow themselves to feel the sweetness of brotherhood. Now Corrag had tasted it for herself, she knew the shared struggle was the only way to live.
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 17
