Nightfall

by Moshe Ben-Or

  Sexual love? He’d loved only one woman that way in his entire life. It had taken months to happen. And it had felt… different. Not like this. Nothing like this.

  Anyway, the whole thing was plain ridiculous. He didn’t believe in love at first sight.

  But Liza, too, had been Talented. Talented and scary smart, and lost in the woods, in her own way…

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of this Talent before? Surely it would be useful in business negotiations, for example. Why aren’t there Talented out there, working for governments and big corporations? Why are there no selection and testing programs, looking for more Talented to recruit and train?”

  It was beautiful to watch her think, her mind cutting through a problem like a scalpel.

  “The Talent is too unreliable. It comes and it goes. It can lie. It can be mistaken for intuition and intuition can be mistaken for it. Half the time you don’t really know if an impression you have is due to the Talent or if it’s just a regular, everyday feeling. Also, people who have it tend to be insane. Generally, the stronger it is, the crazier you are. The more it comes out, the harder it is to control yourself.

  “You can’t base negotiation strategy on this sort of thing. You can’t base military intelligence on it, either.

  “There are psychiatrists out there, trying to develop training methods. There probably have been since the Talent was first recognized, whenever that was. I’ve even worked with a couple, on and off. But they haven’t had much success to date.

  “If the mechanism was known, or if we had some idea of which genetic combination is responsible for it, work could be done on enhancing it, on making it more reliable. The fact that they didn’t really crack it even during the Golden Age doesn’t bode well. Humanity is centuries less advanced, scientifically and technologically speaking, than we were back then. So much was lost during the End Time War and the Dark Ages, so much destroyed by fanatics…”

  “You said stress brings it on,” said Mirabelle, “Everybody has stress.”

  “Wrong word, perhaps. Strong Talent comes out when people are stressed to the breaking point. There has to be a massive psychological shock. Your whole world has to turn upside-down. Somebody once told me it’s a defensive mechanism.”

  “Why is mine stronger?”

  Yosi propped himself up on one elbow, ticking off his points on the fingers of his left hand.

  “You’re female. You probably have better genes for it. You may have lost more, psychologically, than I once did. Or you took it harder. Or it took longer. Or all of the above. And, whatever it is that happened to you, it doesn’t take a master shrink to figure out that it’s recent.”

  Miri’s eyes misted over.

  “I see…” she muttered quietly, staring off into some void her companion couldn’t see.

  “I am sorry.” Yosi ventured, “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s all right,” she answered, “You weren’t.”

  * 30 *

  “I have to leave you for a while. Only for a few days.” Yosi tried to project as much calm and reassurance as he could muster. It wasn’t working well. His Talent was submerging itself once again, deteriorating by the hour. It always left him feeling half-blind and half-deaf when it did that. He knew that the eerie feeling of being walled off from the world would pass in an hour or two, as his perception adjusted, compensating for lost input. That knowledge didn’t make the dislocation any easier to bear. This was the wrong time for an argument.

  “No.”

  He could hear the panic in Miri’s voice. She was probably broadcasting like a ground link. That would account for his own growing nervousness.

  “I have to go on ahead. You can’t keep up. I’ll only be gone for a couple of days. There’s someone waiting for me. I have to be on time.”

  “No.”

  Mirabelle’s voice shook.

  “Please don’t leave. I’ll keep up, honest.”

  “Honey” – Yosi took her trembling, ice-cold hands into his own – “you can’t keep up. Your body is not trained for it. Your feet need time to heal. I’ll find you a hiding place somewhere nearby; leave you plenty of food and all the ammo for the submachinegun. You’ll be safe until I come back.”

  Suddenly, she pulled away from him. Her whole body shook like a leaf in a hurricane.

  “They’ll find me. They’ll find me, rape me and kill me.”

  Her voice was quietly hysterical.

  Yosi was suddenly afraid for her.

  The girl’s mind seemed to be breaking down from the inside out. He’d seen this sort of thing before. A sort of post-traumatic shock. Something inside her could no longer be kept down. The hysteria could drive people insane. He’d seen it happen. There was little he could do but hold her hand and hope that something would reassemble itself once the storm blew over.

  “Who’ll find you?” he asked quietly, hoping that her mind would throw it all up, purge itself of the poison.

  She muttered at him with the rapidity of a machinegun, her teeth chattering a strange rhythm in accompaniment to her words. Even her vocabulary had changed, as if her mind had somehow regressed to a younger age in its struggle to keep itself intact.

  “About six hours after all the electronics died, men came into our house. We had a big place in Torremolinos, up on the Via San Lorenzo. There were about a dozen of them. They broke down the door and barged right in.

  “Daddy, mom, Annie and Brandon were all downstairs, at the dinner table. Daddy had decided that we should carry on as close to usual as we could, until we heard from the government. He was so sure things would be taken care of…

  “They always had been before, when he’d been mayor.

  “I was being punished for staying out after curfew the night before, so I was up in my room, on the second floor.

  “Daddy got up from the table and said in his most official voice, the one he used for speeches: ‘What is the meaning of this?’

  “One of them pulled out this huge gun, put the muzzle right up to daddy’s face and pulled the trigger, laughing.

  “‘Your rich ass don’t matter no more, blanco,’ he said, ‘Your kind ain’t got no power now.’

  “Brandon was right next to daddy and another one of them grabbed him right by the throat, pulled out a butcher knife…

  “They all stood there and laughed at my five-year-old brother flopping around on the floor like some sort of fish out of water, screaming in this high-pitched voice…

  “I didn’t know a human being could make a sound like that.

  “I was watching all this through a crack in the door. Mom looked over in my direction and her eyes just said ‘Run’.

  “There was a trapdoor behind the Tailor in my room, in the corner where there was least light. You couldn’t find it unless you felt for it. I’d found it when I was five or six, I don’t remember. When we’d just moved in. There was a crawlspace behind it. My secret place. I’d never told anyone about it. I used to hide there when I was little, when I’d done something wrong and mom or dad found out. I got in there, between the floor of the second story and the ceiling of the first.

  “I couldn’t see anything that went on, but I could hear it all. Annie was screaming and mom was pleading: ‘Please, please leave her alone. She’s only fifteen. I’ll do anything you want, anything. Please!’

  “They just laughed and said: ‘You’ll do anything we want, all right. You and your little bitch.’

  “I could hear them both scream then, and their clothes rip. And screams, screams, screams, then whimpers, then moans. They did things to them all day and all night, took turns, laughing, rampaging through the house.

  “Then, sometime in the morning, one of them said: ‘Shit, man. This blanca cunt ‘ere‘s dead.’ And another voice answered: ‘Mine too.’

  “Then the guy who shot dad, he said: ‘Neh. She’s jus’ pretendin’, ain’t ya, paleface bitch? I’ll wake ya up.’ I could hear hi
m grunt… it seemed forever. Then he said: ‘Yeah! She’s dead all right.’

  “I lay there and cried, quiet as a mouse. I was so frightened that had one of them found me right then I wouldn’t have had the strength even to scream.

  “I listened for hours, trying to make sure they’d left. I fell asleep listening. I must have stayed in that crawlspace for over a day. When I got thirsty, I licked condensation off the cold water pipes in front of me, but I wouldn’t touch the trapdoor.

  “I knew I had to get out of the house. I couldn’t hide there forever. But I was too afraid. I thought if I’d move, make a noise, anything, they’d find me, pull me out, do to me what they did to mom and Annie.

  “Finally, I had no choice. It was either leave the crawlspace or die of thirst. It must have been the afternoon of the second day when I finally got up the courage to tiptoe my way down to the first floor.

  “The dining room was a mess. There was blood everywhere. Walls, ceiling, floor. Every time I’d take a step, a piece of glass or pottery or something would crunch underfoot…

  “I tried not to look at the bodies, but I couldn’t help it. It was terrible, sickening. They’d forced a broomstick into my sister, in the end. Almost half a meter of it.

  “I threw up, right then and there.

  “I couldn’t even bury them! All I could do was cover them up with some trash bags.

  “The first few nights, the city was a madhouse. There was shooting, screams…

  “When I snuck up to a window to take a look, I saw fires everywhere. Whole neighborhoods were burning. There were no policemen, no firefighters, no bots. Everything had broken down.

  “Then everybody just disappeared. I think half the city ran away, or died.

  “After the fourth night, there was mostly silence. My food had run out by then, so I went into the house next door. There were bodies there, too. I found some vacuum-sealed stuff and a bottle of water and took it all back to my hiding place.

  “That night it was terribly quiet. And dark. There were no lights anymore. I could see the fires on the horizon, getting closer.

  “By next evening I couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t stay there, with all the bodies, with that smell. I waited until dark and ran.

  “I moved from place to place from then on. Never the same place for more than a day. Mostly I’d hide during the day and sneak around at night. Sometimes I’d hear something moving, or feel like someone was watching me. I’d always run away and hide.

  “I kept moving north. My friend Corazon’s family had a hacienda north of the city. I thought I could find it, but I just got lost in the woods…

  “When that guy found me, I thought that was it. Then you killed him, and I thought you’d rape me like he planned to.

  “I’m so sorry…”

  “Don’t be.”

  Yosi reached out and pulled the girl close to him, gently stroking her hair.

  “Don’t ever be sorry. You had the right to expect the worst.

  “You’re safe now. No one can hurt you here, with me.”

  Suddenly, all tension left the small body in his arms.

  Mirabelle sobbed, loudly. Then again.

  Yosi held her and stroked her hair as she cried herself out.

  As far as he was concerned, after all she’d been through, she was entitled to a good cry. Hell, as far as he was concerned, she was entitled to full-fledged hysterics. Even now, in complete breakdown, she was more in control than he and most of his old comrades in arms had been, back in those first few days on Hope.

  Holding her, feeling the warmth of her tears soaking into his poncho, brought old memories stirring out of their burrows.

  Quietly they stalked him. Dark, silent things of the night.

  He had hidden them, buried them in the deepest recesses of his mind. But now they emerged, to rend him with invisible claws.

  Faces, names…

  Screaming wounded…

  Bloated, hollow-eyed corpses…

  Shadows, shadows everywhere.

  The dead came and sat around him in silent vigil.

  Dov. Tall, strong, silent Dov, leader and brother to all, his chest ripped open by Omicronian shrapnel.

  Menachem, he of the quick smile and light fingers. Burned to death in an incendiary barrage. Not even bones left to bury. Not even ashes.

  Hannah. Angel in the flesh. Hair like the darkest night. Lips like ripe cherries. Skin, soft and smooth and cool as the finest silk. Substitute mother to the youngest, sister to the rest. Every boy old enough to feel desire had wanted her, and half the girls, too. Yet none could get up the nerve to ask.

  She took away everyone’s pain. But who took away hers? Why had an Omicronian flechette found her? Why did it have to hit her face?!

  Mark, Lev, Lyuba, Sarah, Shlomo, Jason, David, Yonah, Johann, Riva, Leah, Rachel…

  Friends, family, neighbors, acquaintances from school…

  Shot, gassed, burned, vaporized, crucified, disassembled into organic goo…

  They came and came and came, until the faces and the names began to blur. They didn’t scream. They didn’t accuse. They didn’t ask why. They simply sat and waited. His soul bled.

  Miri had brought them here. Strangely, that made her even more precious.

  He had feared them. He had run from them. He had turned his soul into a fortress to keep them out. But he had nowhere to run anymore and no walls to hide behind. The past could not be forgotten. The past could not be changed. The past was simply the past.

  Why did it have to be that way?

  There was no answer mere men could understand. Only The Unknowable knew why, and even the few He’d deigned to speak to hadn’t been privileged enough to receive that particular Answer from Him.

  Not even Job, and not even Moshe.

  It just was the way it was, because that is how He had made the world.

  The dead weren’t here to accuse. They weren’t here to scream at him. They weren’t here to ask what right he had to life. They were here to say goodbye.

  One by one, they stood up and walked away, as silently as they had come.

  Miri lifted her face from his shoulder. Her grimy skin was streaked with red tracks. The tracks had carried trains of tears, every tiny droplet a cargo of pain. For all they had carried away, more remained. It would always be so. But now a human mind could carry the load once more.

  “You’ll take me with you? Please? Please don’t leave me here.”

  Yosi looked at the tiny tear tracks, at the grime and dirt smeared all over her face, at those tortured, terrified, trusting gray eyes… And said, with more conviction than ever before in his life:

  “I’ll never leave you. You have my word. Never.”

  She hugged him with all her strength.

  Yosi smiled and hugged her back.

  For the first time in sixteen years, his smile reached all the way up to his eyes. His soul melted and he turned his face away, to hide long-overdue tears.

  * 31 *

  Yosi walked. Fatigue wrapped itself around his body like an impenetrable gray blanket, as if an invisible mountain had descended from the heavens onto his shoulders, seeking to grind him into the dirt.

  For the past few days he had carried Miri on his back for the first six hours of every march. Even so, they’d had to push on late into the evenings in order to have any hope of making it back to Leo on time. The girl never complained, but she had to be on the point of collapse. Perhaps she was long since past that point. The only things that seemed to drive her were determination and fear. Determination to prove to herself and to him that she was as tough as he was. And the irrational, paralyzing fear of being left alone.

  Even when she slept, that fear never left her. She couldn’t fall asleep without holding onto his hand or wrapping her arms around him. All through the night, she would wake at the slightest sound or movement from her companion.

  Come to think of it, Yosi was scarcely in better shape than the girl. For six h
ours of every day he carried a hundred and twenty kilos on his back. For six days. Uphill, over increasingly broken terrain, with nowhere near enough to eat in the evenings, and not nearly enough sleep. He was strong, but there were limits to flesh and bone.

  Infection was eating at him. His antibiotics hadn’t done a thing to it. Every morning he woke up with a fever. Soon, very soon now, he would not be able to carry Miri. There were only two days left to the deadline. Even if they walked all through the night tonight, it was even money they wouldn’t make it.

  His poncho pinged a warning.

  A very large and surprisingly light-footed man was making his way southward on a game trail parallel to their own, some dozen meters off to the left. Yosi dropped. Behind him, he could hear Miri thump to the ground as well. She wasn’t as fast or as quiet as he would have liked, but she knew to follow his lead. He snuck a quick glance in the girl’s direction. She had the submachinegun out, looking for a target, her poncho on maximum stealth. Good.

  Pointing his rifle at the target’s most probable location, Yosi decided, on the spur of the moment, to take a chance.

  “Come on up here, whoever you are!” he yelled, in Standard as the most likely common tongue he had with the stranger in the bushes, “Right now! Before I start shooting!”

  What came up was, frankly, odd. Yosi blinked, trying to figure out whether or not he was hallucinating.

  Sandals, black kimono, conical straw hat and, of all things, a sword. Two swords, actually. Daisho. Katana and wakizashi, tucked into the kimono’s belt in regulation Bushido fashion.

  This apparition did not belong here. It was the wrong millennium. And the wrong planet.

  The stranger turned in the general direction of Yosi’s voice and opened his mouth to speak. For half a second, Yoseph expected to be addressed in ancient Japanese.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Weismann,” came out in perfectly modern, flawlessly upper-class Imperial Standard, “I require your help.”

  Yosi shook his head, blinking in surprise.

  He hadn’t recognized Takawa, dressed as he was, in that getup.

  Good God! The man looked like a refugee from a historical VR. Explanations, however, could wait.