Let it go.
The Cessna buzzed north, losing altitude. Costigan estimated; two kilometers to landing. Yes. He was going to use the airstrip that the National Guard had built just before the Game began.
He climbed methodically down the tree, to the leaf-strewn floor of the forest. It was Autumn, and getting chilly. Costigan wished it were Winter. People made bad decisions when they were cold.
He checked his weapons one more time before heading north.
THE FIRST YEAR following God’s arrival was easily the worst.
Costigan could not even guess how many people died that year. At its end, only a fraction of a percent of the humans on Earth were still alive – two million people, maybe three. The cities died within days; within the first week they were pits of disease that only the suicidal entered. Bodies rotted everywhere. Why nobody set the bombs off Costigan did not know. Perhaps God had prevented it. Perhaps, Costigan thought once, and smiled his only smile of the twelve years of the Game, perhaps they had simply been lucky.
Surviving the first year was largely a matter of luck. Costigan lived in a small mountain village on the west slopes of the Colorado Rockies. His nearest neighbors were over two kilometers away. He had time to prepare before those who survived the first couple of days came hunting. He was different, he understood clearly; a human with the force of will to control the Instinct to the degree that he could wait, and force the others to come to him, to fight on his territory.
He was the only vet within forty kilometers who had actually seen combat. It gave him an edge. That and great luck let him survive the first year.
And he learned.
THE LAKE, LESS than a kilometer south of the National Guard airstrip, was new. It had not been there only a few months prior. By now Costigan no longer found the appearance of one of the salt water lakes anything to remark upon. If the lakes had any relevance to the Game, he was unable to determine what it might be. It had been many years since he had given it any thought.
The machines that built them were slick, steel-gray, almost living. They could not truly be alive in any animal sense; Costigan had never felt the desire to kill one.
Costigan detoured, avoided the lake without anything approaching a conscious decision.
IT WAS DURING the second year of the Game that the locators appeared. Costigan awoke in the middle of the night after something set off one of his perimeter warnings. The locator was sitting next to his H&K 91. The first time he saw it he knew how to use it.
He had killed over a thousand people by that time; others who had survived this long had compiled similar records. Humans were becoming scarce. The wildlife population was exploding. By the end of the second year, Costigan thought there were probably more deer than humans left on the face of the Earth.
The locators sped things up. Within the immediate surroundings they were useless – inside a circle of three kilometers or so they no longer tracked. Outside three kilometers but within, Costigan guessed, a hundred and fifty, they gave an accurate placement of all living humans. The first time he had used the locator, there had been four humans within eighty kilometers distance. Costigan tracked them down and killed them, and each time God spoke through the Line, and said Well done.
Never again were there that many humans within range of the locator at once.
Summer came again, and then Winter, and the Game continued. Three and a half years into the game Costigan realized that he had not seen a woman in almost two dozen kills. He tried to remember what that woman had looked like and could not. He could not remember Caroline’s face either, when he tried, or the faces of any of the women he had known and loved from before. He entered a small town after the locator told him it was empty and entered the remains of a small liquor store. Most of the liquor and all of the food was gone. There were three skeletons within. Costigan ignored them and searched through the piles of garbage until he found what he wanted. It was an old magazine, a news magazine or something like it, from before. He opened it and leafed through it, read the pages and looked at the pictures of the men and women. There was a fashion pictorial near the center of the magazine, and one of the models, a slim, dark-haired girl, stirred the remote awareness of desire within Costigan, and before he realized what he was doing he flung the magazine away from himself, unslung his H&K 91 and fired into the magazine, held down the trigger until the H&K’s entire clip had been expended.
Without pause he yanked the clip out of the H&K and replaced it and ran out of the liquor store, ran until he had left the town entirely, tears streaming silently down his face.
COSTIGAN LAY FLAT on his belly, in the brown grass at the edge of the airfield. The Cessna was down, engine killed, parked by the fuel pumps. With the binoculars Costigan scanned the air field, the Guards barracks buildings, the administration buildings. There was nothing.
He lowered the binoculars slowly, thoughtfully.
Once, for a brief while, when the Game had slowed unacceptably, the Line had answered questions. There were less than a thousand humans still alive then, all men. Costigan did not know how the others had used their time with God, and did not care. He spent his studying the competition. He had learned everything that God was willing or able to tell him about his opponents. If the one called Roseleaf had flown the Cessna in, then he would be dug in down at the beach, with the water at his back, with a couple of mines planted in the sand for good measure. If D’Amato had won their battle then D’Amato would be....
Costigan frowned, and crawled swiftly backward through the grass, into the cover of trees. He brought himself to his feet, and began circling the buildings. At one point the tree cover moved to within eighty meters of the Cessna and the fuel pumps. He pulled the pin from a therm grenade and without pause threw sidehanded. Two seconds later the grenade went off in an airburst five meters above its target.
The Cessna went up immediately, burning. The flames took a moment to spread to the fuel tanks. The tanks must have been dry, or nearly so, after twelve years; the explosion was modest. It took out the barracks immediately, and the firestorm that followed razed the administration buildings within minutes.
Costigan waited, without hope, until the entire airport had burned to the ground. It was mid-afternoon by then. Only after he was sure, when he was certain that he had not killed anyone, when the Well done came not, did he leave the airport, and go down to the beach.
THE FINAL YEARS were strange, grim and meaningless beyond any words Costigan could find to describe them. It surprised him sometimes how good he had become at killing; in boot his DI had called him a collection of parts that didn’t work too well alone and even worse all at once.
Much of it was luck, always luck. In any contest where two men sought to kill each other, one or neither would survive; strictly by the odds the chances were a little worse than two to one against Costigan on any particular occasion. But the population base that he started from was huge; simply by the odds some had to win, and win, and win.
Most of it was skill. Those who survived were masters of death, the lords of shadow. As time progressed, the Game became less hunting, and more a matter of art. It ceased to be slaying and became the Kill.
After the first five years Costigan stopped thinking about it. Sometime in the eighth year he stopped thinking.
Let it go.
At the end of the decade Costigan encountered his first fighter dressed in samurai gear. He
lost some of the muscle from his left bicep that time. He was so sure the samurai was dead after taking an entire stomach full of armor-piercing slugs that he hesitatedto check his locator before re-loading. It took an entire second clip from the H&K 91 before the man stopped moving.
The circle shrank; in the following year Costigan killed Asians and Europeans and Latinos with increasing regularity. He thought there was probably nobody left on the other continents. He thought sometimes that God was bringing his opponents to him, because he alone was able to wait for them, to deny the need to kill long enough.
Just long enough.
NOW IT WAS the last day, and the Line was silent; God absent.
Costigan made his way cautiously, carefully, wearily, down to the edge of the beach. The beach looked deserted, utterly empty. Costigan ghosted along the edge of the tree line, examining the sand, for one kilometer, two....
There. Costigan could not have explained to anyone, even himself, how he knew that that faint rise in the sand, no different in shape from any other patch of sand on the beach, held a human being. He felt it. He unslung his H&K, leaned it carefully against the side of a fir pine. He took an incendiary and a frag grenade from his dwindling supply, pulled the pins and lobbed them, one after the other. He had his H&K 91 in hand and was charging across the sand the instant the fragmentation burst subsided. He fired as he ran, used a clip and reloaded, and then he was there. The sand had baked into glass from the therm grenade; the frag and his bullets had shattered the glass into tiny shards. Costigan plunged his hands into the fragments of sand glass, which was already assuming a dark red shade, found the form of a man, and yanked him up, into the air.
Costigan stared in disbelief. Wearing oxygen gear, with his hands cuffed behind his back, was the freshly-dead body of the Italian Jorgi D’Amato. He hardly had time to comprehend this when a sledgehammer smashed into his hunched back, sent him rolling across the sand. He continued rolling, over the edge of the dry sand and down an incline toward the holy water. He scrambled desperately to a halt before he touched the water, filled with a primitive terror, and ran, crouched low, as automatic fire continued to strike around him. He reached the relative safety of a low outcropping of rock, jutting up out of the water, and let gravity take him to the ground in the shortest possible route. He struck the rock hard.
He took stock of his situation. Roseleaf, of course. Peering over the edge of his meager cover he saw nothing up on the beach but D’Amato’s remains. Each breath was torture; even impact resistant outerwear was not meant to stop heavy-duty slugs for long. Something had gone through, or else the impact had shoved a rib splinter into a lung; perhaps both. Costigan could feel blood in his lungs.
“Corst-ah-gahn!”
Roseleaf was speaking. In twelve years Costigan could not recall that having happened; could not recall an attempt at communication.
“This is Rosslifi, Corst-ah-gahn. Surrender!” The voice came from – there. North and east, 150 meters. Heavy copse of trees. “Surrender ahnd I will let you live!” Costigan estimated the probable drop for firing from this distance. “I cahn do this, you have seen it in Damato. The Game, Corst-ah-gahn, that is all the aly-an cares about. Surrender and I will win and you cahn continue to live!”
Three and a half clips were left to Costigan. Call it five seconds, he thought clinically. He pulled the half clip out of the H&K 91 and replaced it with a full clip. “Corst-ah-gahn! Do....”
Costigan fired, the entire clip. Pull clip load and fire pull clip load and fire pull clip and load.
He was up and running. He had half a clip left. Roseleaf was not returning fire, and he reached the safety of the trees. Breathing was fire, and he kept running through the trees, flipped the switch on the H&K to single-shot to conserve ammunition.
Something struck him as he was approaching the spot where Roseleaf had been, slammed him back into the trees. He staggered to his feet again, moved to the right. His left elbow was smashed. There was a flicker of movement ahead, and he fired a single round toward it. He kept moving, found himself in a clearing suddenly, and reversed direction in panic. Automatic fire crashed through the clearing, missing him, and he kept moving, back toward the beach. He saw something brown and gray, moving parallel to him, and he cut through brush, went charging after the elusive form, and once again had a brief glimpse of the figure. Then the form was gone, and in the afterimage on his retina Costigan saw Roseleaf, a small man, smaller than Costigan had imagined, a 1,100 rounds-per-minute MAC-10 clutched in his right hand. He was holding his neck with his left hand, and a dark familiar stain was flooding down over his left shoulder.
Costigan followed him, close on his trail. The form appeared and vanished and appeared again, and vanished. Costigan turned the select switch to full auto and fired everything he had left to the last spot he had seen a flash of brown-gray camouflage clothing.
Abruptly there was silence. Costigan was counting, one, two, thr –
Roseleaf was behind him. Costigan knew without knowing how. He dropped, and fire traced through the air over his head. He rolled to the side, arms over his neck and skull, and the fire struck him again and again, smashing his legs and ribs. The last thing he remembered was reaching for a grenade. One of the grenades came free, and he pulled the pin one-handed and threw without the faintest idea where he was throwing.
He was caught in his own blast.
BLOOD IN HIS mouth. His legs were numb, though he could still move them slightly. He crawled, with the one arm that he could get to work, pushing and pulling himself along the ground. A prone gray form, blasted cleanly out of the cover of the woods, lay out on the sand. Costigan moved forward, pushed Roseleaf over onto his back and looked at the man’s face. The man’s left eye was missing and he was bleeding from a nick that he had taken in the side of his neck, but he was still breathing. Costigan reached for his knife; gone. He could not remember what had happened to it. He searched around in the sand until he found a fair-sized stone. He brought the rock up with all the grace with which Cain must have killed Abel, and brought it down again and again until Roseleaf’s brains were spread across the sand.
Costigan dropped the stone, and propped himself up against the bole of a tree. The Game was over.
THE VOICE OF God said softly, distantly, Well done.
Costigan nodded. He was having trouble breathing. The numbness was creeping up into his chest. His legs would not move at all now.
There was silence again over the Line, and then the voice said gently, How do you feel?
At first Costigan could not comprehend the question. Then he answered with the only answer he had. Death. I am all death.
There was a distinct flavor of approval. Will you join Us now?
Costigan did not answer. The world was very quiet. It was a calm Autumn day, still warm. The air smelled very nice, like pines, when the wind did not blow him the scent of Roseleaf’s blood. And the ocean was blue, and serene.
The ocean was stirring.
Costigan stared down at the water. It was heaving, rippling in a thousand sharp waves. The shapes were almost insectile as they came up out of the water, smooth gray, encased in alien metal.
God, he whispered into the Line, why?
What damage was due them? They did not understand, so We did not Play them. They could not have competed, so We did not allow it. Unlike you, unlike Us. They are not Players, they do not understand th
e Game. You were like Us as children, Players of wondrous potential. Should We not have Played you?
But why –
There was a flicker of a smile in the back of Costigan’s mind, the taste of primordial anger and ancient amusement, followed by a brief flash of God’s countenance, of rows upon rows of crystalline sharp teeth. Now they have hands, said God. Now they will learn to Play. And when they have practiced long enough, We will return for them. And give them the Game.
Darkness descended upon Costigan. Death is not a game. Death is not….
All things are the Game. Join Us. Let it go.
Costigan released his body.
Behind him the dolphins were coming up out of the ocean.
END
Strings
INTERVIEW WITH DR. Joseph Fagan, principle architect of the World. Andrea Guerrero interviewing, subject to include the Steinman-McCarthy bill. Scheduled for 4:00 EST; broadcast scheduled for 7:30 EST.
“On behalf of our viewers, Dr. Fagan, thank you for your time.”
My pleasure.
“We’re approaching the fifth anniversary of the World going online. Are you still proud of your work?”
You mean, I think, am I capable of being proud? I am still capable of it. Am I proud of the work that went into the World? Less so than I used to be. Since being uploaded the quality of the work I did to bring the World online has come to embarrass me. I do much better work these days.
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 19
