by J. S. Bailey
A rumble behind them made them drop to the ground. A blast of heat and smoke wafted over the street, scorching the back of Errin’s sweat- and blood-soaked clothing.
Then all grew still.
Errin rolled over and sat up. One of the Verdant ships was no longer a ship, exactly. It was more like twisted, metal components that used to be a ship.
“Did we do that?” asked a woman in Errin’s group. The tip of her ponytail was singed, and a hole smoldered in the brim of her straw hat.
“I don’t know.” Errin frowned, looking for any human movement around the remains of the ship, but saw nothing.
Dalton had walked far enough up the barricade funnel that he could see where his batch of Greens had gotten to. They waited about a third of the way down, poised and ready.
His hands shook at the sight of them. Hell, all of him shook.
And now he could hear part of the battle coming toward them from the northern end of the funnel.
He peered up at the roofs of the taller buildings around him. Citizens stood at the edges holding sacks of boomstones: regular people turned into killers out of necessity.
The tips of flamethrowers poked from the open windows of a Desert Van Lines bus parked across a side street.
Again, in his mind, Dalton could see the broken bodies of his family lying at the bottom of Piney Gulch five years earlier. He’d seen a shoe with an ankle sticking out of it that he was fairly sure had belonged to his young cousin Gia. A tiny hand lay beside a tricycle next to the blood-soaked playground. A head . . . dear God, a head belonging to his brother Rob had lain beside some shrubs like a unique lawn ornament. Its expression had been one of permanent surprise.
Dalton’s thoughts whirled faster and faster.
The Verdants were coming up the street, chased by Greens from the other end.
Greens, who had destroyed everything good in Dalton’s world.
Greens, who could kill his people as easily as the Verdants.
As if on cue, the Greens on his end surged forward to help pin the Verdants in the middle.
Dalton imagined the dismembered limbs, the entrails, the grim silence of death where laughter had reigned mere moments before.
He remembered the bright blue eyeball peering at him from where it lay on the ground. He’d struggled to place the eye in a face he’d known, but his mind had shut down completely then. He’d crawled to the playground tunnel to die. The next thing he’d known, he was in a hospital, minus an arm.
How had he forgotten the eyeball until now?
The Greens . . . were going to kill . . . everyone.
Dalton held up his bullhorn. “Stop!” he cried. “Stop it, all of you! There will be no more fighting today!”
Someone tugged on his sleeve. He turned and realized that Lennox McTavish hovered at his elbow.
“What do you want?” Dalton growled.
“Erm, we’re all going to die if we don’t fight. You said.”
“We’ll have to find some other way then, won’t we?” He lifted his bullhorn again. “You lot on the roofs, retreat!”
“Sir, you’re not making any sense,” Lennox went on, softly but urgently. “If we don’t fight, we’ll die anyway.”
“Then we’ll . . . surrender to the Verdants, or something. Work out a deal.”
Something leafy reached down in front of Dalton and yanked the bullhorn out of his hands.
It was a Green, of course. It tossed the bullhorn onto the ground and stomped it flat.
Dalton stared up at it, fully expecting the plant to kill him. It held still for what felt like a long time, but was probably only a few seconds. All four of its eyes focused on him, and it seemed to be studying him just as much as he was studying it. He’d never truly contemplated just how alien the Greens looked . . . or how intelligent.
And he’d killed one the other day.
“I’m sorry,” was all Dalton could manage to say.
The Green’s gaze lingered a moment longer before it turned and rejoined its group.
Dalton stared helplessly after the plants. A faint murmur from the roofs made him jerk his head up. Half a dozen people frowned down at him as if unsure of his most recent order.
He cupped his hands around his mouth. “I said, no fighting! You hear? We can’t be like them! We can’t be murderers, too!”
He felt a tap on his shoulder. He whirled, half-expecting a stray Green to be sneaking up on him, but it was only Gurmeet, whose cheeks had flushed in something like rage.
Gurmeet’s fist shot out and struck Dalton in the temple.
Dalton crumpled like a disintegrating house of cards. As stars danced in his eyes, he felt himself being pulled off the street.
A door opened, and he was dragged into dimness. The air smelled of garlic and tea leaves. Hands forced him into a chair, and a rope began winding its way around him from his chest down to his ankles. Where had they gotten a rope? Why were they doing this to him? It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t—
“Should we really have done that?” Lennox whispered, somewhere out of Dalton’s line of sight.
“We have to defend ourselves,” Gurmeet said matter-of-factly. “My grandfather did not come to this planet so his grandchildren could die like pigs.”
A door clicked shut.
Dalton opened his mouth to call after the men, but the only thing that came out was a croak. Many things had happened to Dalton in his thirty-five years, but getting punched in the temple wasn’t one of them, and he decided he didn’t like it very much. Ice! He needed ice. And then he needed to get back out to the street and tell everyone to stand down.
He wiggled to try to get the rope off. He wiggled again, when nothing happened. He tried to stand up with the chair still attached to him but lost his balance and crashed to the floor on his side, feeling even more nerves explode with pain.
Dalton said a bad word.
And no one was around to hear him.
Chapter 27
Several things happened.
Carolyn, whose group had crept in to investigate the remains of the ship from Nydo Base, approached some of the white-clad miners and was about to wave them over to see if they needed any help when the lead miner lifted a blaster and began firing at the humans, as if Ashi’ii had never tried talking any sense into them. The shots hit two of her people, and the rest of her group charged the Haa’la, throwing boomstones at them without mercy.
Errin, whose shirt was now ripped in at least four places and whose hair was most certainly charred beyond immediate repair, let out a battle cry as they raced down the barricade funnel behind a line of Greens. Body parts wearing Verdant armor lay on the dusty street. This would haunt their nightmares for years to come—if there were years to come.
Ashi’ii fled the laundry room and found an abandoned blaster lying on the ground. Technically it wasn’t abandoned, as its Haa’la owner lay next to it, but that was just semantics.
She rushed out toward the main bit of fighting. Her people pummeled the Verdants as hard as they could, but the Verdants kept on coming like a stubborn tide. But wait—what was that? Greens? They were going after the Verdants, scooping people off their feet and plucking their limbs from their bodies like petals from flowers. Her vision wavered and went black.
Gwendolyn Goldfarb sat at a table, her eyes round with awe. She wasn’t sure whose table it was, or why she was there, but pictures danced in her head like ballerinas. Ballerinas tall like the trees, ballerinas dripping crimson rivers . . .
She stood, pushed her chair in, and strode out the door.
Dalton lay on Gurmeet’s kitchen floor, hearing screams outside and cursing Sikh Highlander with every foul word he knew.
Small explosions made the room shake. He wished he could crawl inside Chumley’s Cube and stay there, but it was back in his office at the police station, and
the logistics of getting there while bound to a chair were a bit too complicated for his aching mind to work out.
The screaming seemed to go on for hours. Dalton wept awhile, though he would never tell anyone this. Blaster shots went on for so long, he could scarcely remember what life had been like before their incessant reports filled his ears. Maybe this was the way life always had been, and he’d only dreamed of a time free from war.
Eventually, the sounds of the battle grew quieter and then stilled into silence. Dalton could hear his own heartbeat, and he held his breath as he waited.
More time passed. Dalton fell into a daze, both thirsty and hungry, and so exhausted he could hardly remember his own name. A door creaked, and a woman stood over him.
“Darneisha?” he whispered, for he could speak no louder. “Is that you?”
A hand more wrinkled than a raisin reached toward him and clasped the fingers of his right hand. “It’s Gwendolyn, Sheriff.”
“Gwendolyn?” He squinted up at her, and her ancient brown face wavered into focus. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“You’re trapped. I came to help.”
“But the battle . . . !”
“I believe,” Gwendolyn said, “it is finished.”
Gwendolyn was too frail to pull Dalton to his feet, so she found scissors in one of Gurmeet’s drawers and cut him free of the chair.
“How did you know I was in here?” Dalton asked, rubbing his arms to try to get the circulation back into them.
Gwendolyn didn’t answer. He supposed she didn’t really need to. She went to the door and pulled it open, sending a blinding ray of midafternoon sunlight across the floor.
Gingerly, Dalton followed her out the door, dreading what he might see.
His breath caught in his throat once they emerged from Gurmeet’s house. This was worse than Piney Gulch; this was bigger. All along this block lay bodies and parts of bodies. Two mangled Greens lay in the street, but the rest were humans and Haa’la. He recognized some of the humans, feeling too stunned to even remember their names.
Gwendolyn took Dalton’s hand and led him past the worst of it, back toward the police station. Citizens stood at the edges of the streets, watching him with hollow eyes.
Dalton drew to a stop twenty meters from the police station door. He couldn’t bring himself to go inside. “Gwendolyn, what do I do?” he asked, as if an ancient woman with a fractured mind was in the proper state to be dishing out advice.
“Two broken halves make a whole,” she said, as if that meant everything.
He spread his arms wide. “This isn’t two broken halves. This is thousands of broken people.”
She dipped her gray head. “Do your duty.” Then she turned and walked away from him.
He went inside the station. Debbie Harper, whom he’d fired, sat at her old desk, cleaning the blood off of Cadu Mão de Ferro’s arm. Her mousy hair hung in a limp ponytail down her back.
“Hi, Debbie,” Dalton said weakly.
She gave him a long look. “Hi, Sheriff.”
“You know you don’t work here anymore.”
“I just came to help.”
Dalton looked to Cadu. “What happened?”
Cadu winced. “I don’t really know. It was all so fast, you know? One moment I’m tossing boomstones, the next I’m lying in a pool of my own blood. Maybe one of my stones bounced back at me.”
“I’m . . . I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me too. I’d been planning a GatorMan marathon for this evening, anyway. Can’t miss that ow that hurt.”
While Cadu continued to writhe under Debbie’s ministrations, Dalton looked to Carolyn, who sat off to one side speaking into her comm unit and typing notes into a datapad. Instead of interrupting her, he looked to Errin Inglewood, who was haggard to the point of being unrecognizable.
“Are you all right?” Dalton asked them.
Errin sat in a swivel chair tapping their foot frantically against the floor, arms folded tightly over their chest. “I fought,” they said. “I really did. And—I see now. Piney Gulch. I know what you saw. And . . . and . . . ”
“It’s okay,” Dalton said, though it wasn’t. “Have you seen Chumley?”
“Maybe two or three hours ago, over by the Verdant ships. He saved my life, I think. I was so distracted by everything, and he shot a Verdant who almost got me. A Verdant almost got me!” Their eyes were round and haunted. “Nobody ever cares about what I feel or think. They just expect me to do everything I’m supposed to, no questions asked. Good old reliable Errin, that’s me. I bet they don’t even know I have a life outside of kissing Carolyn’s arse. But now I’m somebody important. Because I fought. And I won!”
They giggled, and the sound of it turned Dalton’s blood into ice water.
“Errin,” he said gravely, “I give you permission to take the next whole year off of work. To hell with what Carolyn thinks.”
Carolyn was so busy with her conversation that she didn’t even look their way.
“How do you get the pictures out of your head?” Errin asked.
You don’t, Dalton almost said but, opting to be nice for once, he said, “I don’t know. But when I find out, I’ll let you know.”
Errin nodded, and swallowed.
“You’re sure you haven’t seen Chumley recently?” Dalton said.
“I’m positive. We saw each other by the Verdant ships not long before one of them blew.”
Dalton’s heart stuttered. “Did any of the others explode?”
“I’m not sure. Our Greens chased the Verdants into the funnel, and we went in after them. Then once the fighting stopped, I came straight here.”
“You could have gone home.”
“I live alone, Dalton.” A hint of tears appeared in the corners of Errin’s gray-blue eyes. “And being alone is the last thing I want right now.”
“Have you talked to your sister?”
“Not yet.”
So you might not even know if she’s alive, Dalton thought.
“Listen, Errin . . . ” Dalton swallowed. “If you ever want to sit and talk about this, let me know, okay?”
They nodded. “Okay.”
“Well, take care,” he said, feeling hollow. “I need to see about a few things.”
He strode into his office and took off his grime-covered trench coat. He held his arms out in front of him and glanced from his hands down to his scuffed boots to make sure all of him was present and accounted for, then went to the cabinet in the corner and helped himself to a bottle of Kentucky bourbon he’d been saving for a special occasion. It felt like divine fire trickling down his parched throat.
Once he felt sufficiently numbed, he plucked the Cube off his desk and activated the doorway the way he’d seen Chumley do, yet when he stepped inside, the portable universe was unoccupied.
“Chumley?” he asked the empty room, then stepped back out into his office.
He shut the Cube inside his desk drawer for safekeeping.
For a moment he felt the world wobble, as if he’d just stepped off that Terror Drop ride. What was he supposed to do now? His deputy may or may not be missing, quite a lot of people were dead, and all he felt like doing was going home and sleeping for the next five or six years.
Well, for one, he could go try and find his deputy. Chumley might be out there helping the injured. He might not necessarily be . . . indisposed.
It took every ounce of fortitude in Dalton’s body to slip his coat back on, don a spare Stetson from the hall closet, and step back out into the aftermath. Everywhere he looked, he could see people standing around bloody and bewildered as if waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
“If you’re hurt, go to the hospital,” he said as he passed a woman with a charred shirt. Then, to a man kneeling beside a fallen comrade,
Dalton said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
He spotted Maxine of the city watch standing guard over three Haa’la miners she’d roped together with a clothesline. Their veils had all been removed and tossed aside, and their eyes blazed with fury.
Dalton nodded at her. “Nicely done.”
“We’ll need to put a call in to the Feds,” Maxine said matter-of-factly. “I’ve heard these people have been causing some problems other places, too.”
“Find someone to help you take them to the brig,” Dalton said, referring to the little-used Richport jail that hadn’t held a prisoner in more than two months. “And make sure they don’t have their teleports on them. Have you seen Chumley?”
Maxine’s head shook. “I’m afraid not.”
Dalton let out a curse. “If you see him, tell him to go straight to the station.”
“Will do.” She paused. “The Greens are all mingling in the town square. You might want to see what they want.”
Panic rooted him into place. “You want me to talk to them?”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You led a band of them just a short while ago, didn’t you?”
While Dalton wouldn’t have exactly called what he’d done “leading,” he understood her point. “I’ll call Carolyn,” he said. “See if she won’t come with me.”
By some miracle he caught Carolyn on her comm, and he invited her to join him in the town square. On his way there, he spotted Dr. Monica Kaur squatting beside a fallen citizen with her medical kit open beside her. She gave him a grim nod, which Dalton returned in kind.
He rounded a corner into the town square and shuddered at the sight of the Greens, who’d banded back together and stood in neat rows facing him, as if he’d been expected. A dozen or so Richport citizens stood at their perimeter holding flamethrowers, presumably in case of sudden moves.
He coughed and cleared his throat. “Hello there,” he said. “Erm, thank you for helping us.”
