Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  I stepped carefully around the wreckage, trying to find the entrance to the storm cellar. It was designed to withstand the worst hurricanes Canaan could throw at us during the Night; maybe it could have kept them safe...

  The graves were around the back. They were fresh enough that I could still make out the mounds, just a few months old, but flattened enough that they had to have been dug just after the occupation. Each was decorated with a cross lashed together from bits of building stone, four of them, with the names hand-carved in each one.

  Jacob Mitchell, honored father.

  Barbara Bolesky-Mitchell, beloved mother.

  Abigail Mitchell, beloved daughter.

  Leah Mitchell, beloved daughter.

  I didn't remember falling, but I had a dim realization that my hands were buried in the muddy ground, clawing at it. I couldn't breathe, couldn't speak, couldn't see. My eyes were squeezed shut and a noise I'd never heard before was coming from my throat. I think that's the noise people mean when they speak about keening for the dead.

  I'd had this image in my head, a fantasy I'd been unwilling to acknowledge because it was so ridiculous. Dad would see me, would understand why I was here, and he'd admit to me he'd been wrong: that we had to fight and I'd been right all along. He'd tell me how proud he was of me and pull me into one of his very rare hugs and everything would be all right.

  I'd known that wouldn't happen. A more realistic side of me had imagined we'd still be at odds, that I'd have to argue him into it, but that Mom would help to convince him and he'd at least grudgingly go along with it. I'd tried to imagine how happy Mom would be to see me, how she'd cry and I'd have to comfort her.

  "God..." The word split my lips, clawing its way out of a throat closed by sobs, a plea and a prayer and a vile curse all in one word. I dragged in a breath, pounding my fists into the ground like I was trying to punish it. I would have kept doing it until I got tired, and I didn’t tire easily. But then…

  "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

  I had known they were there for a while now; my headcomp had warned me. But I had also known they were humans and whoever they were, they hadn't been important enough to stop mourning my family. It was a man's voice behind me, deep and familiar in its arrogance and superiority. Older than I remembered it, but not that hard to recognize.

  I drew in a ragged breath, wiped my arm across my face and pushed myself to my feet, turning to meet them. There were six of them, dressed in a mix-and-match of outdoor clothes, dark colored and functional. They carried weapons, which told me something about them immediately; they'd adapted away from the whole "thou shalt not kill" thing in the last few months.

  They mostly had old hunting rifles but one was sporting a captured Tahni laser; he was obviously their leader. His long, blond hair was tied back in a ponytail and partially concealed under a black, felt cap, an unruly blond beard sticking out over his jacket. Like the others, he was wearing commercial night vision glasses; not as durable or dependable as military models but small and thin and a damn sight better than nothing.

  He was taller than me, and a bit thinner, thinner than the last time I'd seen him.

  "Hello Isaac," I said to my brother. “It’s been a long time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Caleb...” His voice was a hoarse whisper.

  I don’t know that I’d ever seen Isaac’s face as pale and shocked as it was in that moment. He took a step backwards and his hands clenched at the laser carbine so tightly that I thought he might shoot me.

  “They told us you were dead.” This was less a startled exclamation and more a challenge, as if anger was replacing the shock.

  I wanted to say something balanced and well-reasoned, something to get him to trust me. I wanted to be logical and persuasive and professional. I wanted to tell him that there was a good explanation for everything but we had to get somewhere safe first. I wanted to tell him I was here to help. But there was a big fucking lump of pain in my chest that I couldn’t get those words past.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said exactly the wrong thing instead. I winced, shook my head, chewing at my lip so I didn’t lose control again. “Is…is Pete…” I motioned to the graves.

  “Is it really you, Cal?” The one who said it was maybe sixteen, his blond hair shoulder-length and shaggy, a wisp of a mustache fighting to emerge on his upper lip. He was taller than me, taller than Isaac, and broad-shouldered with a look of rangy strength to him. The hunting rifle seemed at home in his hands.

  “Pete?” I realized and all the resentment and anger seemed to fall away for a moment. I took a hesitant step toward him. Surely this couldn’t be my baby brother…

  Yes, it could. He’d be just turned seventeen now, actually. I took a hesitant step forward, then stopped. He’d been not even eleven the last time he saw me; I was a half-remembered stranger to him and he’d probably react badly to me trying to give him a hug.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” I said instead. I finally screwed up my courage to ask about Rachel when Isaac interrupted.

  “What are you doing here, Caleb?” The question was a demand, his voice and demeanor the same arrogant assumption of authority as I remembered from before I left. The night vision glasses hid his eyes, but not his sneer.

  “I came here to help,” I replied, trying to remind myself that I was an adult now, and all that shit between us was years ago, and meaningless. “If there’s any organized resistance to the Tahni around here, I need to talk to them as soon as possible.”

  “I’m in charge of the militia,” Isaac declared, stepping forward to get between Pete and me, as if I were going to contaminate my little brother somehow. “Anything you have to say, you can say it to me.”

  I counted to ten under my breath. All right, so maybe he was in charge. He’d be a respected farmer in his own right by now, and he certainly had the temperament for fighting.

  “Okay,” I acceded with a sharp nod. “Then I need someone to brief me about how the Tahni defenses are set up. Do they have access to the planetary defense lasers? How heavily is their base fortified? What’s their security like? I need…”

  “Why?” His snorted laugh was humorless. “Do you have a company of Marines hiding out there somewhere?”

  “No, it’s just me,” I admitted readily. “But I’m here to help you.”

  “Are you serious?” He let his laser carbine hang at his side from its sling and stepped closer to me, almost nose to nose. “You show up here after six fucking years and expect us to just let you waltz in and take charge of everything? How the hell did you even get here?”

  I could smell his breath and there was alcohol on it. He didn’t smell like someone who’d been bathing recently either. I supposed that could be excused by the circumstances…but Pete didn’t smell like ten kilometers of bad road and neither did the others.

  “Isaac,” I grated out between my teeth, still trying very diligently to keep my temper under control, “this isn’t the time for a pissing contest. We’re not kids anymore and this is life and death.”

  “Don’t fucking tell me about life and death, you irresponsible shit!” He exploded at me, spittle flying out of his mouth. “Look around you!” He gesticulated wildly at what was left of the house. “They're all dead! Everything around us is dead! You don’t fucking show up after all this time and lecture me!”

  I could see it coming. A fucking blind man could have seen it coming. I swayed backwards to avoid the punch and barely touched his shoulder to send him stumbling sideways off balance, his laser sliding off his arm to clatter on the ground. I didn’t attack, just let him catch himself and turn towards me.

  “Please stop this, Isaac,” I said, keeping my voice even and calm despite an intense desire to kick the shit out of him. “You’re drunk.”

  “Isaac…” Pete began, a slight quaver in his voice.

  “Isaac,” one of the other men with him said in a stronger voice, bending over to pick up his laser.
“This is unseemly.”

  He was a young man, about my age, and I didn’t recognize him. Maybe he was from New Jerusalem.

  “Fuck you!” Isaac snapped, face still red with fury, looking like he was about to make another charge at me.

  I sighed. Time to make an impression. I stepped over to Isaac too fast for him to react, grabbed him by the front of his jacket with my right hand and lifted him into the air. His eyes bugged out and he flailed helplessly, slamming a fist into my arm without effect. His feet were nearly a meter off the ground and I held him over my head so he could see my face.

  “Calm the fuck down, brother,” I said to him in a cold, flat voice. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “What…” He croaked. “What the fuck are you?”

  “I am the one damn thing that might give you all a chance of living through this,” I said. “But we can discuss that later. For right now, take me to your people.” I set him down, pushing him away from me as his feet touched the ground. He caught himself before he fell on his butt, and he stood there wheezing, still staring at me with a mixture of anger and awe. “I need to talk to someone sober.”

  ***

  I’d visited the Caves of Adullam once, when I was a kid, with my school geology class. All I remembered from the visit was trying to scare Rachel when they’d turned off the lights to show how dark it could get inside the cave system. It hadn’t worked. I tried to pay more attention this time.

  It wasn’t difficult, since no one was distracting me by talking. Isaac had been sullen and silent, dragging near the back of the group while I'd walked in the front next to Pete and the deputy leader who'd taken Isaac's laser. The walk had taken us on a nearly ten-kilometer path around the outer edge of the farming settlement and back into the foothills of the mountains. They hadn't volunteered where we were headed, and I hadn't asked, but I'd been able to make a fairly accurate guess once we hit the well-traveled dirt track back through the Forest of Ephraim.

  Pete had been staring at me most of the trip when he thought I wasn't looking, and I wondered if maybe he was trying to resolve what I was now with the dim memory he had of his long-lost older brother. What stories had Mom and Dad and Isaac told him about me, I wondered? Was I the disloyal son who'd abandoned his family and his faith to chase after the ways of the world?

  After we'd been walking for nearly an hour at what seemed to me like a painfully slow pace, I finally spoke to him.

  "Pete," I said, having to clear my throat to speak the words I didn't want to ask. He looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and a little fear. "Mom and Dad and the girls...how did they...?" I trailed off, not willing to say it. He looked down, a lump working through his throat before he was able to talk to me.

  "Most of the people that died," he said finally, his eyes looking far away beneath the clear lenses of his night vision glasses, "it was during the initial invasion. I don't know why they targeted the places they hit, but they destroyed most of the bigger farmsteads. Isaac and I were out working in the fields with Dad when the assault shuttles started making their runs. We went back to the house, but it was too late...it was burning, and blown down to not much more than what it is now."

  Pete drew in a long, ragged breath, and I could tell that just relating the story still took a toll on him. "Dad was...confused, I guess. He was out of it, like he couldn't accept what was happening. He knew Mom and the girls were dead, but he had to keep telling himself it had been some kind of mistake. He thought that if we talked to the Tahni, explained that we wouldn't fight them, that they'd treat us with respect." Another pause. "He got together with a few of the Elders he could find, Elder Pratt and Elder Ramirez, and a few others, and they went to Harristown." He looked over at me. "Harristown is where the Tahni have their main base set up now. Back then, it was just where they were landing their soldiers."

  His gaze went back down to the dirt track we were walking. "They made us, all the families, stay out at the caves, just in case. But Isaac went with a few of the other young men and women, and watched from a distance with binoculars. He told me the Tahni didn't even try to talk to them, just opened fire. One of those High Guard things, the big bulky suit of armor that can fly? Just shot the whole group with an electron beamer." His jaw clenched and I knew it was to keep from sobbing.

  "There's nothing really buried in Dad's grave," he said. "There was nothing left." I wanted to say something, wanted to say I was sorry I hadn't been there, but I knew it wouldn't mean anything to him. He met my eyes again, slowing his stride for a second to let the deputy carrying Isaac's laser move out of earshot before he went on. "Don't think too badly of Isaac, Cal," he told me. "He lost his wife just a couple weeks ago to an enemy retaliation sweep. Candace was pregnant with their first child."

  "Ah Jesus," I muttered, feeling my gut clench up, feeling like an asshole for how I'd treated him...and how I'd thought of him, as well.

  Pete shot me a glance, mostly sad I thought, but with a little curiosity. "You never used to blaspheme," he observed quietly, with a perception beyond someone just turned seventeen. "But then, neither did Isaac.” He hefted his rifle and shrugged. “Everything's different now."

  He fell silent again and I didn't press him to talk more. I didn't feel much like talking just then myself.

  I remembered there'd been a sign about a kilometer from the cave entrance back when I visited it in school: a very old, metal plate hand-painted with the cave's name and warnings to bring your own light source. It had been mounted on a solid steel pole set in a block of concrete that had to have weighed a hundred kilograms, by the side of a trail marked with flattened rock slabs and lined with gravel. The sign was gone now and the trail was overgrown and thick with mud. I didn't see any sentries along the path, but I knew they were there. There wouldn't still be a resistance after this many months if they weren't smart enough to conceal themselves from thermal imaging and heartbeat scanners.

  The main entrance to the caves was fairly small, just a meter and a half tall and two meters wide. I didn't remember it seeming that narrow when I'd gone through it at eight; following the others into the pitch blackness inside, I felt claustrophobia clench my testicles in its tight little hand. A few meters in and the roof of the entrance tunnel was no taller, but we were brushing past a curtain of dark-colored cloth and I could see via thermal vision a pair of guards squatting to either side of us.

  Isaac's lieutenant, the one with his laser, held us up in front of a second curtain a few meters farther along, and waited until the last of our group had come through the first barrier and it was back in place before he pulled aside the second curtain. Light blazed beyond it, just an adhesive strip of chemical ghostlights but it seemed to outshine the sun after the utter darkness behind us. My internal filters adjusted automatically, but the others all pulled off their glasses and stowed them in pockets or let them hang from bands that ran around the back of their necks. The chamber expanded ahead of us and we stopped in a broad, three-meter tall room piled high in each corner with polymer totes and lit by multiple chemical light strips.

  No one had spoken on a 'link or a radio the whole trip and I had to guess they didn't use them for fear of detection. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw the lieutenant grab Pete by the arm and whisper a message in his ear. Pete shot me a look and then headed off deeper into the cave to deliver it.

  I shifted my plasma gun on its sling and leaned back against a bit of bare rock wall, checking out what I could see of the place. The chamber we were in was maybe thirty meters across and seemed to be a storage room of some kind, but three children no older than six or seven were playing among the storage crates. They were pretending to shoot each other with toy guns made from discarded scrap metal. The sight made my blood run cold.

  "Everything's different now," I echoed Pete's earlier statement in a whisper.

  "It didn't take long," Isaac's lieutenant surprised me with the comment. He was looking at the kids, a sadness in his eyes. I guess I hadn't been as q
uiet as I thought. He looked me up and down, then stuck out a hand. "I'm Tom McCrey," he said.

  I shook his hand firmly. "Caleb Mitchell," I returned.

  "So I gathered," he said dryly and I had to laugh.

  Isaac had been eyeing me sourly since we'd arrived at the cave, and the way he was wincing meant he either regretted how he'd acted earlier or he was nursing a hangover, or perhaps both. He stepped tentatively to where Tom and I were standing and I found myself unconsciously preparing to defend against another attack. But he just stood there, looking down at the dirt-covered rock floor.

  "Caleb," he said finally, his voice rough and gravelly. I thought for an instant he was going to apologize, but that was probably asking too much. Instead, he squinted at me doubtfully. "Tell me, how is that you're alive, after all this time?"

  I debated for a moment whether I should tell him, but decided that any attempt at secrecy was moot. The Tahni knew we existed already.

  "I was on a training mission," I told him, "on a ship in Martian orbit when the Tahni attacked." I briefly and concisely explained the basics of the unit without naming names.

  "So, they sent you here to help us?" Tom asked, eyes lighting up with a hope I knew I was going to have to disappoint.

  Pete returned, saving me from having to let him down just then.

  "The rest of the Elders are gathering in the Devil's Throne Room," he said. I blinked in confusion for a moment before I remembered that the Devil's Throne Room was one of the largest chambers in the caves. "They'd like you to come and brief them, Cal."

  "All right," I said with a nod. "If y'all wouldn't mind, I'll explain everything there."