“Dick?” she said.
At the end of the room, something stirred in the dark. Bunker came down toward her, past the cot where Willie was asleep. “What happened?” He picked up the overturned cup.
“Jennie’s in the entry port. You were right. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Then why did you try?”
“The debt owed to common humanity.”
“You keep saying that. What does it mean?”
“Ask Saba. It’s one of his dicta.”
“Then it’s meaningless. Give me your arm.”
She held her arm out toward him, and he ripped the tape patch away. On the pale field of skin at the crease of her elbow were several small pinpricks of blood. He took another patch out of its paper folder and stuck it to her arm.
“No,” she said. “It means something to him. To An Chu, maybe even to me. We couldn’t let Jennie go without trying.”
“It doesn’t mean much to An Chu any more.”
That was so. And what they had tried to do certainly meant nothing to Jennie Morrison. He smoothed the patch with his thumb.
“What’s on this tape? Where did you get it?”
“Antibiotic. While you were out playing cowboy with An Chu I broke into an apartment building. During a raid.”
“I’m thirsty,” she said.
“The water is where it always is.”
She went the length of the room, limping hard to show him how hurt she was, although her hip felt much stronger. The water was cold. She drank two cupfuls and went back. Willie slept like a child, the blanket snug over his neck. The dip-lamp flickered in the draft of her passing. An Chu’s blanket-coat was slung over the foot of the cot. Paula sat down with her back to the wall, beside Bunker, and folded her knees up to her chest.
The glossy mud of the lake was cracked and dry. Paula swiped at the stinging insects buzzing around her head. She was moving at a fast walk toward the ruins on the lake shore, three shells of houses half-buried in thorn bushes. There had been no rain in the dome since the coup. With the trees and animals gone and so many more people living here, the whole environment had changed. She climbed up a steep slope and went in among the walls of the ruins.
Here it was hot, even hotter than outside, and the bloodsippers and no-see-ems attacked her in clouds. She looked quickly over the snares she had set. A half-dead bird was tangled in the net trap; she killed it. Something bigger had sprung the other snares and eaten the baits and she reset them.
East of the lake the land flattened out. The grass here was full of snakes. She ran toward the north, holding the binoculars with one hand to keep them from banging her chest. The flats broke into a rising hillside. She walked up to the height, sat down on a tree stump, and focused the binoculars on the nearest of the Martian settlements, about a mile away.
The eighteen buildings of the complex were surrounded by a mesh fence over twenty feet high. The grass was jewel green. Dick, who went there all the time, said it was plastic turf. The glasses showed her children playing kickball, a woman in a sun-chair with a pad over her eyes, a dog sleeping in the shade. She looked in the windows of the building. The man on the third floor had almost finished his water color. She watched the Martians for nearly an hour. When dark fell she went back across the lake to her building.
Outside the tunnel hatch she pulled out most of the bird’s feathers, gutted it, and put the innards in her bait-jar. When she went down into the hidden room Bunker was there with three people she had never seen before. She put the bird on a spit.
“This is all of you?” Bunker said to his guests. “Just you three?”
“How many more do you want?” the strange woman said.
Paula took the bird out to Jennie Morrison’s empty flat, where she had dug out a fire pit, and lit the fire. Through the open door she could see the people in the hidden room. She pretended not to be watching. She had eaten nothing but meal for two days and had no interest in sharing the meat.
“Give me ten days to steal the car,” Bunker said. He stood. He wore no shirt and sweat glittered on his washboard chest. The other people rose.
“If there’s anything we can do,” the woman said. “Any way we can pay you for your help—”
“I’m not doing it for you, I’m just hurting Savenia.”
Paula went into the room to get a drink of water. It irritated her that he spent days helping strange people leave the dome. With a lucifer match she lit the dip-lamp in the wall.
“When you get outside,” Bunker said, “you’ll have to dodge the Styths.”
Her back to them, Paula muttered, “Tell them Paula sends her love.”
“What?”
Bunker escorted his clients out through the flat toward the stairs. Paula took her clothes off. The heat made her hair frizzy. Her skin was rough with insect bites. She washed with a towel and a pan of water.
“Have you seen Luhan?” Dick said. He came into the room and slid the door shut.
“Not in days.”
The water in the pot was murky. She threw it out and poured fresh water to wash her face with. Sitting on the cot, she combed her hair. “How many of these people do you think escape from the Martians and the Styths both?”
“Very few.”
“Maybe none.” She watched him walk the length of the room. His gray beard grew like wool along his jaws. Dropping down beside her on the cot, he scratched her back.
“We ought to move,” she said. She squirmed to bring other parts of her back under his fingernails. “I’m getting a bad feeling about staying here.”
“You’re superstitious.”
“We’ve been here too long. You bring half the population of the dome in, everybody knows where we are. You should put out a sign. I’m saving the world, apply here.”
“Savenia has a reward out for those people.”
“She probably has a reward out for us. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Saba and Tanuojin have money out for us.”
“All right.” He scratched her shoulders and down her arms. “We’ll move.”
“Good.”
“After I get these people out of the dome.”
Paula woke up with a jump. Something was crashing against the apartment door. Beside her Bunker thrust himself up on his arms.
“Raid.” He left the bed like a bird from the limb.
The door crashed open. A bright light stabbed into the room. Paula scrambled across the head end of the cot toward the darkness. Men rushed into the room, surrounding her. She lunged for the door, tripped, and fell on her face halfway across the threshold. A boot tramped on her hand. She was hauled up by the arms to her feet.
In the white glare of a hand torch, Bunker stood with his arms gripped behind him and a rifle across his neck. Three men held him. He looked frail. His muscles were strung like wires along his bones. The men around him wore no uniforms, although on their upper arms there were red armbands.
“You’re the forger?” Another man stepped between Paula and Bunker.
“Who are you?” Bunker said. His voice was hoarse.
“My name is Han Ra. I’m the chief of the Red Army. We fight the Martians. If you’re anarchists, you’ll join us.” He was taller than Bunker, and lean, with a wild yellow beard and hair like a mane hanging down over his back.
“I don’t join anybody,” Bunker said.
“You have an air car. Where is it?”
More men crowded into the room. The third man was Willie Luhan, with a rifle in his arms.
“Where is the air car?” Han Ra said. He whipped a long knife out of his belt and aimed it at Bunker’s chest. Dick took a breath; his chest swelled as if to meet the knife.
“Don’t hurt him,” Willie cried.
Han Ra laughed. He ran the tip of the knife down Bunker’s breastbone. “Where is the air car?”
Bunker said nothing. Paula was standing on tiptoe, her arms crooked painfully behind her. She glanced at Willie Luhan again, caught him looking at her, and gri
tted her teeth, and he brushed by the man in front of him and went to Han Ra.
“You told me you wouldn’t hurt them.”
“I want that car. What about her? Does she know?”
“Yes, but—”
Han Ra drew his arm back and drove the knife into Bunker’s belly. The slight man went down bonelessly to the floor. He made no sound. Han Ra swung to Paula, the knife bright in his hand.
“Where is it?”
Willie clutched his arm. “No. Don’t hurt her. I—I know where it is. I was lying before. Keeping it for myself.” His eyes glistened. The glare of the torch shone on his face and the wild bearded face of the Red chief. “Don’t hurt her, for god’s sake.”
“Come on,” Han Ra said. He squatted to go through the door. The man with the hand torch followed him. The darkness they left behind in the room swarmed with men.
“What about her?” someone called, behind her.
“Leave her. She’s a woman. What can she do?”
They left her. Passing by, the last to go knocked her carelessly to her knees. She went after them to the low door and shut it and crept back to Bunker lying on the floor.
“Dick.” The room was utterly dark. Her hands groped over him. He was rigid, doubled up in a knot on his side on the floor, and for a moment she could not feel him breathe and thought he was dead. Her fingers slid over the skin of his ribs and down and touched the slime of blood.
“Paula.”
“Wait.” She scurried off around the room. “Just a minute—I’ll get a light—” She banged into the end of the bed so hard that for a few steps her leg would not hold her. Feeling over the wall she reached the dip-lamp in the chink by the cupboard and lit it. The medical patches were in the old cupboard. She knelt beside him and pasted one square to each of his elbows.
“Paula.”
“Don’t talk.” She yanked the bedcovers off the bed and wrapped him in a blanket. The dip-lamp made the room stuffy in a moment.
“Get out,” he said. His voice wheezed.
“I won’t leave you.”
When he breathed in, his breath whistled. “Stupid bitch. Both of us. Get out. Luhan. Doesn’t know. Where. The air car.”
“Oh.”
He closed his eyes. His skin looked black in the feeble light. She tore pieces from the second blanket and made a bandage over the slit in his belly and fastened it with a nail. He tried to help her move him but he could not even stand. She dragged him up the tunnel. Every few yards she stopped to rest, and while she rested held him tight in her arms to keep him warm. By the time she reached the surface, he was unconscious.
The warm night was unusually windy. The long slope led away from the mouth of the tunnel toward the lake. She laid him carefully on one blanket and pulled it by the edge down across the grass. The wind rustled behind her and she started so hard she went cold, thinking it was Han Ra coming back.
A hundred feet from the tunnel, the slope broke off in a sheer fourteen-foot drop, like a bite taken out of the hillside. She hid Bunker in the shadow at the back of this notch and returned to the secret room. All their food was hidden in a hole dug out of the wall behind the bed. She put it into a sack, took the sack and some rope out across the wasteland to the only tree in the area, and hoisted it up to the high branches, away from dogs.
Bunker was where she had left him: awake now. She felt of the bandage. It was so full of blood it squelched when she touched it.
He whispered, “Tools. Fire.” His voice sounded as if it were rising through water.
“I’m afraid to leave you here. It’s too close to the tunnel.” She bundled him up again in the blankets. There were only three or four hours left until daybreak. His eyes were closed and she thought he was asleep again, but when she lifted him with his arm around her neck he pushed with his feet, trying to help. She took him off over the gentle hump of the next hill and down into a narrow gulley whose sandy bottom yielded under her feet.
When she had found him a soft shelter she went back at a run to the tunnel. On the slope, she stopped still. Above the tunnel, near the crown of the slope, was the flat turret of the building’s gatehouse. A light shone through it. While she watched it faded out. She went at a jog up to the gatehouse and looked in the door.
She could see down the stairway, and the light was just disappearing away along the corridor that led to Jennie’s flat. Quietly she followed it. For the first time, she remembered she had no clothes on. Her bare feet made no sound on the slick plastic floor. Ahead, the light bobbed along; the people carrying it were one dark moving thing, now and then a head and shoulders silhouetted against the ball of light before them. They went into Jennie Morrison’s old flat, and Paula went into the next one.
There was a hole blasted through the wall between this place and Jennie’s. Chunks of plasticrete and shelving littered the floor. She stepped carefully over a sink basin.
“They’re gone,” someone said loudly, in the next room. “That bitch got him out.”
“I told you to do for her.”
“We’ll find them.”
She put her hand on the wall and looked through the hole into Jennie’s flat. The low doorway under the sink was open wide and the light shone out from the secret room. Long shadows passed back and forth through it: the legs of the men walking past the light. They were looting the place. She backed up a step into the ruined apartment behind her, stooped, and in the rubble found a piece of plasticrete she could lift.
“We could use this cupboard for firewood,” one of the raiders said. “I wonder how they got it in here?”
She threw the chunk of building stone at Jennie’s kitchen wall. At the thud someone yelled.
“What’s that?”
Paula was hurrying through the darkened apartment, gathering up pieces of stone. She went back to the hole and threw the debris against the wall around the low doorway. Something crumbled and a shower of dust fell like hail.
“Hey! Who’s that? What’s going on?” A head poked out the doorway, and she flung a stone that came nowhere near him and he ducked back.
“Get away or we’ll shoot!”
She leaned against the wall in the dark room, listening to them. When no more rocks fell around them, they began to talk in low whispers, and suddenly three men burst out of the doorway. A gun went off half a dozen times, like thunder in the closed space, and the three men raced out Jennie’s door and down the corridor, taking their light with them. Paula went into the secret room. Bunker’s tools, matches, the last of their clothes, and the dip-lamp were all piled on the bed. She wrapped them up in her winter coat and lugged them up the tunnel to the wilderness.
From where she was sitting, she could see the whole lake. Three people were coming toward her along its edge. It was strange how even now that the lake had no water in it at all and the mud was dried firm as concrete, people walked along the edge instead of across. Habit. They saw what they were used to seeing. Paula sat cross-legged in the lee of the ruined building watching the three people come on.
The woman led them. Paula had seen that of the three of them the woman was the boldest. The two men followed her trustingly. They reached the big boulder that marked the southernmost tip of the lake and turned to walk along the edge of the meadow, following the curve of the next hillside. Paula stood up.
Instantly the man second in the line saw her and tapped the woman on the shoulder and pointed. Paula waved to them. They broke into a run toward her. Paula waited until they were nearly on her and went off past the ruin. They fell in around her.
“Where is your friend?” the woman said. “We were expecting him.”
“He’s busy.”
Beyond the ruin where Paula had waited for them the land was broken into ridges where the grass still grew thick and there were still many trees. Narrow defiles separated the ridges, their beds made of round stones. She led these people down a twisting gulley, past the place where she and Kasuk and Junna had come into the New York dome, two yea
rs before. At the mouth of this gorge, she went between two old trees and into a cave in the hillside. The cave was lined with polished tile. It was an old terminal on the Underground. A big blue arrow on the tile pointed into the gloom; a sign above it read INDEPENDENT LINE. The air car was parked against the opposite wall.
“Fantastic.” One of the men rushed to it and pried the bonnet up.
Paula put her hands into her pockets. So near its mouth the cave was light enough to make out the strange woman’s broad-nosed, pleasant face. Paula said, “Do you hear that?” and wagged her head toward the rear of the cave. The roar of the underground river came from the darkness.
“It sounds like water,” the woman said calmly.
“That’s how you get out. This car isn’t amphibious, so you have to be careful about getting it wet. Follow the river there downstream until you come to the waterfall. Then you go upstream. About fifteen miles up there’s a hole in the roof of the tunnel.”
The woman was smiling at her. In the same placid voice, she said, “You and he are the last ones, you know. Every free anarchist has gone.”
The two men were climbing over the air car. One called, “This is super-check, Kadrin.” The woman waved her hand at them.
Paula said, “If you’re smart, you’ll go when it’s light out. After dawn. The Styths don’t like bright light.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
“Don’t thank me. I don’t think you’re going to make it. There’s nothing to thank us for.”
The woman laughed. She clapped Paula on the arm, as if Paula had made some tremendous joke, and went to join her friends. Their voices rose, excited, as they explored the car. Paula went out of the cave. She stopped in the gorge, still hearing their voices behind her, and listened awhile, as if they were friends.
“There was something snuffling around outside,” Bunker said. “When I woke up.”
She crawled in beside him and lay down. Her hair caught on the thorny brush above her. Carefully she freed herself. In the thicket, their latest hiding place, there was just room enough for him to lie on his back and for her to lie on her side next to him. The water bucket stood near his head. She drank a cupful of water.
Floating Worlds Page 48
