Jon couldn't help but stare. The corpse wore a Luminous Army uniform. But she looked so much like Maria.
A few soldiers from the platoon approached the corpse.
One of them, a private with a pockmarked face, pointed at the dead Bahayan. "Look at this bitch. Artillery must have killed her from the mountainside."
Another soldier, a mustached sergeant, whistled. "She's pretty hot. Think she'll show me her tits?"
Soldiers laughed. More approached the body. Some whistled and even thrust their hips at the corpse. The mustached sergeant knelt, began to unbutton the dead woman's uniform.
She's lying on top of the bricks, Jon realized. Not below them.
His eyes widened.
He saw it. Cables dangling from the woman's sleeve.
The mustached sergeant pulled open her shirt, revealing a ticking pipe.
"What the—"
"Run!" Jon shouted.
He slammed into George and Etty, knocking them to the ground.
An explosion rocked the courtyard.
Windows shattered all around, scattering shards like a million jewels.
The city shook. Ringing filled Jon's ears. And then the dead began to rain down. Chunks of flesh pattered everywhere.
Jon looked back toward the pile of bricks. The Bahayan corpse was gone. So were the mustached sergeant, the pockmarked private, and a handful of other soldiers.
"That'll teach 'em," Etty muttered, but then she stumbled aside and vomited, and when she looked back at Jon, tears were rolling down her cheeks.
Lieutenant Carter entered the courtyard. He looked over the scene. At his dead, mutilated soldiers. He walked through the gore, around the piles of bricks, and toward the next alleyway.
"Come, soldiers! He's not here." The lieutenant sneered. "We'll find him."
They kept moving through the city.
The higher they climbed, narrower the streets became. Coiling. Branching off. Jon felt like a rat in a maze. He couldn't see the rest of the city. He could barely see a few yards ahead. Just twisting streets like tunnels. There wasn't even a sky above. Just a pall of red smoke. Jon didn't know if it was night or day, whether sunlight or firelight lit his path. The world was black and red like a burnt man.
The city is alive, he thought. And we're parasites inside its stone veins.
And always the cathedral was there. Rising on the mountaintop, casting its long shadow. It guided them onward. And always in those distant windows—a red shadow, moving back and forth.
"Jon!"
Etty grabbed him, pulled him back. She pointed.
Jon stared ahead. He inhaled sharply.
A cable stretched across the street. Barely wider than a cobweb. Jon could see only glints when the light caught it.
The Lions Platoon climbed carefully over the cable. They continued down the street, rounded a corner, and saw another platoon heading down a road. Jon recognized the stars drawn on their helmets—they were the Starfire platoon from the same company.
"Starfire, watch out for cables!" Jon called out. "We found a cable a road back, no wider than a fishing line, and—"
A soldier looked at Jon, tilted his head, but didn't slow down. He walked into a shimmering line.
An explosion roared over the street.
Fire blazed.
Soldiers screamed and the brick walls caved inward.
Jon and his friends leaped back. They huddled down, covered their heads, as bricks rained.
When the dust settled, Starfire platoon was gone.
Scattered fires burned. A few charred limbs rose from the ruins.
"The bastards boobytrapped the whole city," George said. The giant shivered. "Goddamn it. This place is a death trap. Everything here is a bomb. Even the dead! We're going to die here. We're going to die here! I want to go home, Jon. I want to go home."
Nearby, Clay smirked. "Wuss."
Jon placed a hand on his friend's shoulder. "Keep it together, George. We'll get through this. I promise you, buddy."
George took a deep, shaky breath. Surprising Jon, he pulled him into an embrace.
"It's horrible here, isn't it, Jon?" the giant said. "But I promised to look after you. To bring you home. I had to come here with you. I had to."
Jon tilted his head. "What do you mean, George? You were drafted with me. Remember? We didn't have a choice."
George took back a step. He looked at Jon, eyes solemn, haunted.
"Jon… I got an exemption."
Jon felt the blood drain from his face.
"What?" he whispered. "George…"
The giant nodded. "Because of my brain tumor. The one the doctors took out a few years ago. Anyone who had an issue like that. Even if they're better now. They don't draft you. I volunteered."
"George," Jon whispered.
"I had to volunteer, Jon. To come here with you. To look after you. To make sure you come home. Not like…" He sniffed. "Not like Paul. I promised to bring you home. But now I'm so scared. Now everyone is dying all around us. But I have to be strong. For you."
Jon stared in silent astonishment. Nearby, other soldiers were staring too. Etty had tears in her eyes.
"Oh, George." Jon pulled his friend into a crushing embrace. They held each other for a long time as ash rained and blood flowed between their feet. "I'm so glad you're here, George. I can't believe you did that! But in this horrible place… I'm glad you're here."
George sniffed. "Not me, buddy. Not me. I was an idiot for enlisting."
Jon couldn't help it. He laughed. "Yes you were, George. I love you, you big noble idiot."
George grinned. "Right back at ya, buddy."
Etty approached them, smiling through her tears. "And I love both of you, you big dumb—"
"Kalayaan para sa Bahay!"
The cry rang across the street.
From buildings everywhere, the enemy stormed out, guns blazing.
Soldiers screamed and fell.
Jon and his friends opened fire.
More blood sprayed. More soldiers died. No, this city was not abandoned. This city was death.
As Jon fought, killing men and women, he remembered the words Kaelyn had spoken long ago.
Come back pure. Or come back dead.
A Bahayan ran toward him. Just a boy. But he was old enough to fire a gun. And he was old enough for Jon to kill. And Jon knew that he could not keep his promise to Kaelyn.
Because I'm already dead, he thought. I still breathe, and my heart still beats, but I'm dead. I died somewhere on the road from Mindao to this wretched place.
The enemy died. A few Earthlings died with them. The survivors continued on.
A dog ran toward them, barking madly, wires strapped to its underbelly. They shot it. It exploded too close, killing two soldiers.
They walked onward, and a building blew up, shedding bricks, burying a soldier.
They kept going, and more enemies surged over walls, screaming, firing, killing, dying. Death became a dance, and the world became a fever dream.
Jon and his friends kept moving. Fighting for every block. For every step. For every bloodstained cobblestone. And as he fought, Jon remembered the music he had composed long ago. The songs he had written for Symphonica. And even as his gun roared, as more and more blood stained his hands and soul, he sang softly. He sang the overture to Falling Like the Rain, his magnum opus. Desperately trying to cling to the boy he had been. Knowing that boy was dead. Knowing that his song, written about a fictional soldier, was now about himself.
A dead boy cries
His tears fall cold
On the scattered pages of a poem untold
Do not weep
For notes already played
For symphonies composed
For prayers prayed
In the silence they echo
Marble halls they haunt
Death is only dry ink
Of notes written for naught
A dead boy cries
For those falle
n young
On the scattered pages of a song unsung
Do not weep
For notes already played
For symphonies composed
For prayers prayed
A dead boy cries
His tears fall cold
On scattered pages for a dead boy's soul
Chapter Seventeen
Dance of the Dead
All day Maria moved through the city, clad in white robes, speaking to the downtrodden.
"Holy Maria!" the children said when they saw her.
"Bless you, Holy Maria." Old women kissed their crucifixes, then touched Maria with the wooden amulets, bestowing her with blessings.
Even the Earthling soldiers learned her name. Holy Maria, she who had been a prostitute, who now walked among the poor. The soldiers no longer catcalled or reached out to smack her bottom. They bowed their heads. They too whispered blessings.
"God bless you, Holy Maria," said a burly sergeant.
Another soldier pressed his hands together. "Bless you, Angel of Bahay."
Maria knew it was dangerous. If people recognized her, spoke of her, Ernesto would soon find her.
She did not try to stand out. She had fashioned the white robe from a shroud, linen she had found in the cemetery, replacing her tattered old dress. Big mistake. It only made her look like some biblical prophet. Once people started bowing before her, she ditched the robe, and she borrowed clothes from Pippi. Maria began to explore the shantytowns wearing jean shorts, flip flops, and a purple tank top. The outfit was a bit more revealing than Maria liked, but these were the most conservative clothes Pippi owned. Maria now looked like any other Bahayan girl. Slender and short, her skin light brown, her eyes curious and dark, a little cross hanging from her neck. Like a million other girls here.
But still they recognized her.
As Maria moved through the shantytowns, listening to the poor share their tales, they touched her reverently. They kissed their prayer beads. They called her Holy Maria.
When she walked through the landfills, the garbage people rose from the trash they sifted through, recycled, sold, ate. They lived in the shadow of a glittering blue cathedral, a place of heaven whose gates were closed to them, and they bowed before Maria, she who walked among them through hell.
"Angel of Bahay," they called to her, filthy and shivering and diseased. They blessed her, and Maria thought them the most noble fighters in Bahay, facing battles as cruel as those in the north.
She walked in the alleyways that framed the Blue Boulevard, dark veins branching out from the glittering neon strip. Children sat on concrete steps, wearing rags. A girl held her starving brother, trying to feed him some milk from a damp rag. Toddlers raced down the alleyway, swinging wooden sticks. A child peered from the corner, gnawing on a bone. He was badly burned, but the scars were old.
Maria spoke to them. Recorded them. Even the sleaziest bars would not employ child prostitutes, but here in the alleyways, men found their pleasure with the urchins and refugees. The children shared their stories with Maria. Many of them dying, diseased. Many would remain children forever, and their slender bones would rest in the cemetery among the gravedwellers.
Not all of this was Earth's fault. Maria knew this. She knew that Bahay too shared much of the blame. She knew that South Bahay's president lived in a palace, a puppet of Earth, and that Bahay's bishops lived in the glittering blue cathedral amid the shantytowns, sucking the wealth of this land like a dying child sucking at a damp cloth. She knew that the priests outlawed birth control, that population kept growing and growing, even as Earth culled them. She knew that the people spent too much time praying, too little time learning the science that the Earthlings understood.
We too bear the blame, Maria thought.
It was hard to separate these stories from the tragedy of war. Every child here, abandoned by Bahay's priesthood and president, bore the scars of Earth's bombs, some on the skin, others much deeper. Some people had come here as refugees, fleeing the burning countryside, swelling the ranks of the wretched. Yet many of these homeless, hungry souls had been born into poverty before the war. Charlie had grown up in a landfill before Earth's first starships had ever sailed into Bahay's blue sky. And there were many like her.
Perhaps this was a tragedy Bahay had planted the seeds for. But Earth had poured so much water onto these seeds, and Earth had watched them bloom into trees of misery.
We are both to blame, Maria thought. And I don't know the way out.
And so Maria would record these stories. To show Earth her sins. To show Earth the humanity of those she oppressed. To show that here on Bahay lived more than the evil Kennys, than the wily slits. That humans lived here. Humans descended of Earth. Humans with souls no different from those that filled any Earthling.
Yes, we're smaller than Earthlings, Maria thought. We're dark and skinny and poor, and we don't have mighty starships or pretty dresses or stores that sell all the foods you might desire. But we still yearn for Earth, for she is our ancestral homeworld. We are all Earthlings.
That night Maria returned to the cemetery. She felt safe walking between the stacks of stone coffins. There was no electric grid here, but Crisanto hovered before her, lighting her way. Bahay was a city of violence and bloodshed, a city where thieves, rapists, and murderers lurked in every shadow. But she was not afraid here. Nobody dared enter the cemetery at night, fearing vengeful spirits.
Nobody but the gravedwellers.
At night, with no mourners in the cemetery, the gravedwellers emerged from their stone coffins. They sat between the tombstones, rolling dice, playing cards, and smoking cigarettes. Candles burned around them, casting warm light upon hard, craggy faces. A few gravedwellers were passing around a skull full of booze. Another was playing a bone flute, and a few men danced, their necklaces of fingerbones clattering.
"Hello, Maria!" they called to her.
"Will you dance with us?" said one, a man with a skull mask.
Many of them had woven bones into their clothes, had become like skeletons themselves. They danced and clattered and drank in the candlelight like a skeleton feast.
"Why do you do this?" she asked.
One man grabbed her hand. "To unite with the dead. I wear the bones of my slain wife."
"To unite our world and the world beyond," said a woman. She held Maria's other hand. "Here the living and dead are one."
"We are the undead," said an old woman, hunched over, a spine rattling across her back.
"You're not undead!" Maria said. "You're alive."
But they shook their heads.
"We died long ago. We died in the fires of our villages. We died in battlefields. We died in the poison rain. Now we rise again among the bones."
The flautist began playing his bone flute, and another gravedweller played a ribcage like a xylophone. One man swung femurs like drumsticks, beating a drum kit of skulls. The gravedwellers danced, holding hands, ring within ring of dancers, clockwise and counterclockwise, a dizzying mandala. They pulled Maria with them, clinging hard to her hands, and she danced too. She danced the dance macabre. Round and round the tombstones danced the gravedwellers, and in the night, Holy Maria became a spirit in white.
As they danced, these dwellers of the cemetery, so did the dead. The true skeletons rose from their tombs, and they too joined hands, forming a great circle. The ring of skeletons danced around the living, until death and life became as one.
In the daytime, this was a place of reality. Of the hardship and grittiness of this world. But at night, it had become a place of dreams. Of dark beauty. Of song. And this was not like the music of the day, that symphony of tears and blood, that song of her people. This was a song of the night. And this song was of truths that predated man. Of the spirits and wonder that had flowed over Bahay long before humans had ever set foot there. It was a song of magic. Of dreams and whispering souls.
She danced all night with the dead, and at dawn, Maria found herse
lf waking up in a sarcophagus. She did not remember entering the stone coffin, but here she lay, curled up against an old skeleton. The lid was ajar. She pushed it off and rose into the sunlight.
The cemetery sprawled around her, but the revelers were gone. No more skeletons danced here. No more band played instruments of bones. Once more this was a place of this world, of dust and the distant rumble of the city.
She pulled her Santelmo from her pocket. "What happened to us, Crisanto?"
But the little ball of light could only bob, a tiny moon in her palm. She pocketed him again, for perhaps he too was a creature of the night. She lifted her camera and her gun, and Holy Maria left the land of the dead to walk among the dying.
Chapter Eighteen
The Hunt
Night fell and Earth had only claimed the first few streets of Basilica City. After hard weeks of fighting through wastelands, mountainsides, and the urban labyrinth, the Human Defense Force dug down.
"We're spending the night, soldiers!" Lieutenant Carter told his platoon. "Time to get some beauty sleep before the big push tomorrow."
Jon panted, his battlesuit splashed with his enemies' blood. He had barely slept in days. He bled from countless cuts, ached with countless bruises. The other survivors of the Lion's Platoon huddled in the shadows, nursing their wounds. One private was crying. Another private was leading his fireteam in prayer. Black walls surrounded the platoon. Black cobblestones spread below their feet. They stood in the heart of Basilica City, a labyrinth of stone. The entire city was like a huge network of trenches, and they were fighting to claim each narrow canyon at a time.
Jon looked toward the mountaintop. It was the only place in the city visible from the alleyway. The cathedral loomed there, never closer, always somehow larger. Darker. Watching them. Above its gates, a circular rose window beamed like a malevolent eye, watching the city.
Like Ernesto's white eye, Jon thought and shuddered.
The cathedral was still miles away. But it was calling him. Binding him. He felt like there was no distance between them. Like the weight of that monolith could crush him. Like the searing white eye could burn through him.
Earthlings (Soldiers of Earthrise Book 2) Page 13
