by Chris Lowry
“We’ve heard that once or twice since we got back,” the older man said. “Usually from people who’ve lost someone. How old are you? Eighteen?”
“Close enough.”
Weber nodded.
“That’s how old I was when they sent me up,” said Renard.
“Who did you lose?” Weber said. The left side of his face didn’t move much as he spoke. It looked spooky in the firelight, like he was wearing half a mask.
“Excuse me?”
“The ones who say it was our fault, the soldier’s fault, they lost someone,” Weber explained.
His eyes danced in the firelight, like he was in on some inside joke with the cosmos.
“Sometimes more than one someone?” Weber continued.
“My dad,” Jake grunted an answer. “My brother.”
Weber nodded in a wise fashion.
“Have you heard of the Citadel?” Renard barked.
Weber tried to wave him off.
“That’s ancient history,” he said. “Things that matter down here are different.”
Renard glared into the fire while Weber watched Jake, a curious look on half of his face.
“Citadel?” Lt asked.
“You heard of it?” Weber joked.
“Studied it,” Lt said. “You the guy?”
“Wasn’t much to study I suppose,” said Weber. “Unless you think studying luck is a worthwhile endeavor.”
“Wasn’t a success,” said Lt. “Everyone died.”
“Almost everyone,” Renard snapped.
“Almost everyone,” Lt agreed. “One man made it out.”
“They dropped a shipload of us in a dome,” said Weber. His thick fingers worked the kinks out of one hand, as if they ached.
It wasn’t cold, not yet, so Lt surmised it might ache from memories.
“Talk about a cluster. One crate of weapons for hundreds of us. One set of instructions. No training.”
“But you survived.”
“I survived.”
“And you did it twice, getting off Mars.”
Weber nodded.
“Stole a ship,” said Renard. “Last ship out, as far as we know. We hit the atmosphere almost at the same time as the Licks exploded the EMP. Shorted out our systems.”
He used his finger to indicate the network of scars on his head.
“But any crash you can walk away from.”
“Funny you surviving twice,” said Jake. “Pretty lucky.”
“I never said I wasn’t kid. You wouldn’t want to play poker with me.”
“What’s poker?”
“Poker,” Babe called out of the darkness. “But I hardly know her.”
Renard and Waldo chuckled.
“Babe, there’s a lady present,” said Lt.
“I’ve heard worse,” Steph turned the rabbits, watching small droplets of grease drip into the flames to create miniature volcanos in the fire. “I had brothers.”
“Had,” Weber sighed. “So much lost down here.”
“Why didn’t you fight?” Jake asked. “You landed. You had access to weapons, and experience. You could have fought.”
“Ever been in a crash, son?” Weber answered, but it felt like an evasion. A half truth.
“We watched them all die. They hunted us on Mars, and just when we thought we won, it was a trap. We barely made it out.”
Jake glared at the two veterans, then into the flames. He spit into the fire and listened to it sizzle on a rock.
“We’ve watched people die. We’ve lost people, and we’re fighting.”
“Call us cowards, son.”
“I’m not your son,” Jake snapped and shoved up off the ground.
He stomped toward the darkness at the edge of the campsite and muttered curses into the night.
“Your man has a discipline problem,” Weber told Lt. “I like that in a soldier.”
“He’s not a soldier,” said Lt. “I’m not sure what he was before. We conscripted him on a train heist. Him, her and the Doc who found the suits.”
“We’ve heard about your exploits out here,” said Renard.
“A real cowboy operation you’ve got going.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty darn proud of the work we’ve done. Miles to go, though.”
“Is it worth it?” Renard asked, but he said it in a way that seemed like he didn’t expect an answer.
“It’s ready,” Steph announced.
Lt took a sniff through his open visor.
“Damn Oakley, you’re better at that than Lutz. I may have to change your name to Julia Childs.”
“Her name’s not Oakley?” Renard asked.
“He doesn’t use our real names,” said Steph as she slid half a rabbit into the hands of Weber and watched as he juggled it like a hot potato.
“We heard that too,” said Weber. “But the way word travels down here, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s made up. You’re a bit of a legend now.”
“You hear that Babe? I’m a tall tale around here. Like Paul Bunyan and the Babe.”
“You named him after an ox?” Weber tore off the rabbit into small strips and put it into his mouth with the tips of his fingers.
“Hell no,” Babe squatted and accepted half a rabbit from Steph. “Named me after a baseball player.”
“Babe Ruth,” Weber grinned and licked the grease off his fingers before tearing into some more. “Homerun and Strike Out king.”
“How can you be both?” Babe asked.
“Because he went down swinging, Babe.”
Jake stomped back to the fire and sat next to Steph.
“Drawn in by the smell of cooking,” said Lt. “Get’s ‘em every time.”
They ate in silence for a few moments, making quick work of the small meal, then tossed the bones into the flames. The smell of roasted meat lingered over the small campsite.
“You call them all by nicknames,” said Weber as he leaned back and stared through the canopy at the stars beyond. “But you won’t let anyone nickname you.”
“Well, the way I figure, most folks are going to go for the easy play and call me by the moniker you did back at the compound.”
“Billy the Kid.”
Lt grimaced and nodded.
“A joke my dad made, maybe. Could have been my mother. She had a comedic disposition, and the teasing from other children would have pleased her.”
“You don’t know that it did?”
“They passed when I was too young to know better. No other living relatives, so I ended up in an orphanage.”
“They raided orphanages for alien fodder on Mars,” said Renard. “How did you avoid it?”
“Clean living,” Lt smirked. “Or mayhap some of that luck you’re Sgt. is so fond of.”
“You know my rank.”
“Like I said, we did some studying. And I am a student of Lick killing.”
“I’d say you were a master,” said Waldo as he stood to return to sentry duty.
“Thank you, Waldo, that was kind of you to say in front of our guests. Killing fucking Licks is one of the pleasures I get out of a life that ain’t had many.”
“What else do you do besides kill Licks?” Renard asked.
“What have you heard?”
The younger man shrugged. Lt ran some math in his head and calculated his age near the early twenties, but his face had the set of a much older man. He guessed war and crashes would do that to a man.
“I drink beer,” said Lt.
“Beer doesn’t exist anymore,” Babe called back to them.
“I dream of beer,” said Lt. “And when we find it someday, I will drink it.”
“I know how to make wine,” said Steph.
“What are you planning to do with that suit?” Weber stared at the lumpy ruck on the ground beside Jake, but his question was directed at Lt.
“Wine?” Lt glanced at Steph. “Oakley, if you know how to make wine, then you have the basics for bootlegging moonshine. If we fou
nd the ingredients, do you think you could build a still?”
She nodded.
“I think so. It wouldn’t be too hard, if I had help.”
Lt clapped his hands together.
“Think you can skip the pre-drunk celebration and answer his question?” Renard grumbled.
“There’s no answer yet,” said Lt. “I’m still deciding. But I also have one more tool for my Lick killing tool belt coming up.”
“You’re going to give them corn mash?”
Lt grinned.
“I’m going to give them whiskey by the gallon.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jake lay back on the ground and stared up at the stars. His leg ached, but he couldn’t recall why. He shifted position to try and find more comfort, but the pain was deep, and nothing worked.
He rolled over on his side and saw Steph watching him in the low light of the small fire.
She offered a tiny smile, and he returned a half grin.
“Can’t sleep?” she murmured.
He shook his head.
“You either?”
“Not since before I was captured,” she said.
“You remember it?”
It was her turn to shake her head.
“Vaguely,” she said. “Like the memory of a dream.”
He grinned again.
“I can’t even remember that much.”
“Where did they get you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I remember being taken,” she whispered. “I was at a camp in Colorado. A couple hundred of us. The hovers moved in and zapped us with sound waves. I woke up on one of their bases.”
“Near here?”
He watched one shoulder shift up and down, a half shrug to his answer.
“I don’t know where here is.”
“Me too.”
“Where were you before?”
“Small town on the border of Missouri,” he said. “I think we’re still in the middle. Somewhere.”
“But you don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t look like Colorado, but there are mountains, ridges. Could be Tennessee?”
“Could be.”
“Could be West Virginia.”
“Maybe,” he said.
But he didn’t think so.
The Ozarks and Appalachians looked different. He couldn’t recall why, scratching back in his memory to some boring lecture in school by a teacher whose name he couldn’t remember too.
Something about climates and zones. Certain trees only lived in certain places.
Like people, he snickered.
“What?”
“I think we’re still near home,” he said. “A couple hundred miles. We were going North on the train.”
“Do you know where?”
“I don’t remember being put on the train. I remember waking up when it stopped.”
She sighed.
“I don’t remember being put on the train either,” she said. “Just when they rescued us.”
“Before this happened, the aliens,” Jake rolled onto his back and absently massaged his upper leg with his hand. “I used to get a funny feeling if I forgot my homework or left something at home. That’s what I feel like now, like I’ve forgotten something.”
Steph rolled over too and watched the stars shimmer and shine.
“I feel like that too.”
They stared up together in silence for a few moments.
“What do you think it means?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’m not sure if I want to.”
CHAPTER NINE
Lutz stared at the metal ceiling of the warehouse where the prisoners bunked. Slept might be more accurate, since there were no bunks, but even sleeping was on the verge of impossible in their prison.
They worked. That’s all he knew. The Licks beat them, kicked them, tortured them to do whatever needed to be done on the former base, and then released them into the warehouse when the sun went down.
Food was rat, if they could catch it, fried on tiny fires built by some prisoners who snuck twigs, sticks or bits of whatever was flammable in their pockets back to the one giant cell.
That’s what the warehouse was, one giant cell, he thought. Tin walls, tin roof, blocking out the stars.
He had killed two rats the first day in. Caught them gnawing on a prisoner who had died in the night.
While he looked around for a way to cook them, six skeletons jumped him and stole his kill.
Six on one, he muttered.
He remembered watching the bomb fall from the sky, remembered running.
Then he woke up here, dumped into an airport hangar to work on a hovercraft. The learning curve was steep.
No one would talk to him. Even when he tried to whisper a question.
He learned why.
Another man, a prisoner from the compound where he was taken, balked at a Lick soldier. The aliens made an example of him by drawing out the torture so his screams echoed across the camp.
Then darkness fell, and he was thrust into a new hell.
The warehouse was large, big enough to hold four 747’s wing to wing. It was full of confused people who kept muttering about how they got there.
He knew how.
He just didn’t know why.
Why were the Lick taking new prisoners, and how did they know to attack the compound at the same time his squad was raiding it?
The ceiling didn’t offer any answers.
No one did.
The concrete under his back was cold, unforgiving. Cold seeped in, leeching his bones of warmth, filling him with a dull ache.
Lt would come.
He hoped he would. Unless they thought he was dead.
In all of their ambushes, in their attacks on Lick patrols, they had never discussed being taken prisoner.
What to do, how to handle it.
He heard sobbing in the darkness across the warehouse, someone breaking down into hysterics.
“Handling it better than them,” he muttered.
“Good for you,” a voice said next to him.
Soft. Raspy, but a woman’s. Or girls, hard to tell. It was dark.
“Could be worse,” he said.
“How?”
It could be weeks later, he thought, but didn’t say it out loud.
Weeks later, there would be a lot more dead, from starvation, and beating. Those who still lived would be little more than animals, fighting for scraps of food, for places on the concrete floor.
But he didn’t say that to the girl with the raspy voice.
“Could be hot,” he said instead.
“It will be,” she told him.
As if they would still be around when the seasons flipped and it got hot again. Southern hot where the air is so thick with humidity, the sun turns it into a muggy clinging mist that offers no relief.
The inside of the warehouse would be fetid with the stench of their unwashed bodies, mixed with the dead, and offal.
“Summer’s gonna be bad,” he agreed even though he knew they wouldn’t live to see it.
“Then we need to get out before then,” she answered.
Lutz sat up and stared into the darkness. He was used to the woods, where starlight created an ambient glow, at least enough to see shadows and shapes.
But the darkness in the warehouse was complete, total pitch. He couldn’t make out shape, or shadow, just the area where the raspy voice originated.
“Count me in,” he said.
But this time, she didn’t answer. He heard the scuffling sound of a body moving across the concrete, away from him.
“Hey!” he called after her.
“Shut up!” someone screamed back. A man. Another on the verge of hysterics.
