The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  Everyone here had lost all they knew and loved. Their whole world now lay within the wire, and that felt more claustrophobic than protected some days.

  “You’re right, Sol,” Trinder said. “You can ignore reality, but you can’t avoid what it does.”

  If Solomon had more secrets, he wasn’t confessing. Trinder almost asked him if he kept a record of what had happened to everybody’s next of kin, but any answer short of a miracle would be a bad one.

  Trinder didn’t believe in miracles.

  * * *

  Transit Camp:

  three Days Later, 0725 hours

  Chris opened the truck door and paused to look back at the small convoy. Behind his own vehicle, the old APC, the gun truck they’d commandeered in Baltimore, and Dieter’s pick-up idled at intervals along the track, clouded in vapour, but the thaw had started. The air smelled a little more like spring this morning.

  On the flatbed of the pick-up, the dogs were barking and wagging their tails like excited kids heading for the beach. Rich, the driver, kept tossing a softball to them, laughing as they tussled for it. Erin had her head out of the top hatch of the APC, smoking and looking down every so often to talk to Jackson and Conway inside. Lee, the gunner, perched behind the HMG on the gun truck with his eyes shut and head tilted back as if he was sunning himself, while Matt leaned out of the driver’s window to talk to Jamie. They hadn’t formed up like this for a long time. It was more a march unit than a full convoy, but Chris still tried to do things properly.

  “Five minutes, people.” Chris pulled his beanie down over his earpiece and checked the squad radio again. Erin stubbed out her smoke on the hatch and raised her hand to indicate she’d heard him. “Mount up.”

  Zakko sat in the driver’s seat, fiddling with the dashboard like a nervous pilot. He was so jumpy that Chris almost regretted the business with the finger. Damn, was I really going to do that? Those were rules from another life. He’d suppressed them, but the reflexes were still there.

  “Relax,” Chris said. “I’ll tell you what you need to do.”

  “I’ve never driven in a convoy before.”

  “Exactly, which is why you need to learn. You’re the lead vehicle, so you don’t need to worry about maintaining intervals like the folks behind you. Focus on what’s to your front and flanks.”

  “Okay.”

  Jared wandered up, arms folded, a picture of disapproval. He was never going to make a poker player. Chris lowered the side window.

  “It’s not too late to accept Ainatio’s help,” Jared said. Well, those were the words that came out of his mouth, but both of them understood that Jared thought it was a bad idea to let Zakko drive. “Those guys need to get out more.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t need them pausing to consult their Polite Boys’ Book of Regulations if things get hairy.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “That’s exactly my point.” Chris refolded his paper map with the first leg of the route uppermost and laid it on his lap. It was almost impossible to get lost, but old habits died hard. “Radio check on the hour. Just a burst unless there’s a problem, okay?”

  “Watch your ass. And your alarm.”

  Chris smiled and made a point of rearranging his jacket so Jared could see the dosimeter on his lapel. “We’re not passing through any hot areas.”

  “Hot areas shift all the time.”

  “I’m more worried about infected plant material. See you later.”

  Jared gave the signal to move out. Chris tapped the dashboard, Zakko released the brake, and the truck picked up speed as they rolled out of the camp. Four armed vehicles were probably overkill, but it was important to look like trouble when they were low on ammo. The dogs were a noisy deterrent in their own right. If anyone was left in the area, they’d hear the vehicles coming for miles, so there was no point in trying to enter Kingston unnoticed. It was easier to get in, search fast, and get out if they went in mob-handed with gun trucks and a sniper on overwatch.

  The automated decontamination unit on the road ahead, a covered tunnel of frames like an avenue of Shinto temple gates, marked the boundary between the safe bubble of Kill Zone and the salted earth of the biohaz cordon. The vehicles ran the gauntlet of UV light, compressed air, and chemical sprays at low speed, hatches closed. Chris felt like he was passing through a portal to another dimension.

  When the truck emerged and the windscreen cleared, it almost looked as if he had. For a couple of miles ahead, the deforested zone was still dead, an alien landscape of felled trees and flat-topped stumps like stepping stones. A fungal smell of rotting timber wafted in when Chris lowered the side window. He’d never been sure why Ainatio had bothered to clear the zone, seeing as trees didn’t seem affected by die-back, but maybe it stopped insects and fly-infested animals wandering through from contaminated areas and spreading the virus.

  “We didn’t eat grains or beans in the Stone Age,” Chris said, thinking aloud. He hadn’t been outside the wire for so long that the landscape looked freshly depressing to him. Reduced to a distant background blur from the top of the Kill Line ridge, it didn’t look quite so stark because he could see forest and grassland beyond. Die-back had only attacked certain plants, leaving others untouched, but they happened to be the staple ones most people depended on. “I mean, those are the crops that were wiped out, but we don’t need them. We can live without them.”

  “Just not as many of us.”

  “Yeah, that’s your problem right there. Dependency.”

  “You think the whole planet’s going to die, Chris?”

  “Doubt it. Ninety per cent of life on Earth was wiped out in the Permian era, but the world was back in business a couple of million years later.”

  “Kind of a long wait, though.”

  “That was after an asteroid hit and millions of acres of volcanoes had been chucking up lava for centuries. This is just a hiccup by comparison.”

  Zakko paused for a moment, lips pursed as if he was afraid to ask another question, which he probably was. “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I was studying geology. Until the college closed, anyway.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” Chris could hear the tinge of genuine surprise. He wasn’t proud of his past but he wasn’t ashamed of it either, even if he wished it could have been different. But that would have meant being born in a much kinder, safer world. The life that he’d led had given him exactly the skills he needed for where he found himself now. He was fine with that. “You want to ask me what I was doing time for, right?”

  Zakko nodded. Maybe he’d heard, although the camp was that rare place where folks made an effort not to care about anyone’s past. “I think I can work it out.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well... I guess it wasn’t theft.”

  “I put a guy in the hospital for a long time.”

  “I suppose he asked for it.”

  “It was nothing noble.” That wasn’t quite the whole picture. Maybe Zakko needed to see that. “I used to resolve contractual compliance issues.”

  “Huh?”

  “I enforced things. For criminals.”

  Zakko blinked a few times, eyes still on the road. “Well, shit.”

  Chris wondered whether to fill in the more complicated gaps, but that would have sounded like an excuse. Only one image recurred from his teenage years: his dad, his nice respectable accountant dad, afraid to leave the gated community that they could barely afford, constantly rehearsing for home invasions because of the feral thugs that nobody seemed willing to deal with. Chris decided that he couldn’t spend his life under siege. His father was teaching him to be afraid. But he wasn’t: he was angry, resentful, and mutinous.

  And then his buddy Ben got beaten and robbed on his way home from football practice. Sitting at the guy’s bedside most
evenings for three weeks, Chris realised you couldn’t wait for something to come and get you. These days he understood it as taking the fight to the enemy, but even as a kid, he knew instinctively that the only way to stop the monster wasn’t to defend himself when it came for him, but to grab a weapon and head out at night with a few buddies to hunt it down and scare it so badly that it never came back.

  Or kill it.

  He killed it for Ben. He didn’t set out to, but he wasn’t upset that he had. And the monster ran away, leaving a trail of blood, but Chris knew he’d finished him, because it was on the news the next day, and there couldn’t have been two identical stabbings in the same neighbourhood on the same night.

  “Are you all right, Christopher? You look pale.”

  “I’m okay, Mom. Just watching the news.”

  Chris suddenly felt like he’d woken up from a nap. “I went to work for one of my dad’s clients after college,” he said, wondering if Zakko was still listening. “The guy had some pretty irregular business friends. Apparently I was good at that sort of persuasion. Until I got caught.”

  It was a different crime, but Chris got his sentence, and he felt that kind of balanced the universe for what he’d done years before. Even now, though, if he tried to replay how he’d progressed from being an angry teen vigilante to a collar-and-tie gangster’s enforcer, he still couldn’t see the fork where he took the wrong road.

  But it wasn’t wrong, was it? This is where I was meant to be. This is what I was meant to do.

  Yeah, I hate time travel put-it-right movies. You get one chance and the choice you make is who you are.

  “But State Defence took you on,” Zakko said. Yeah, he was paying attention. “You couldn’t have been that bad.”

  “They were so short of recruits that they got guys released. They weren’t picky about criminal backgrounds when things started to fall apart.”

  “But they gave you a chance.”

  Chris’s boss had abandoned him and his folks had disowned him, but the military didn’t leave him behind. He didn’t care why. He’d rather have been executed than spend another day in that cell. It felt like his childhood all over again.

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “They did. So it all works out.”

  Zakko didn’t comment. He seemed to have the answers he wanted.

  To his credit, he maintained a steady speed and stayed alert to risks. It was more than Chris expected of him. The guy had no military experience and had never been taught to read atmospherics, all the little signs and not-quite-right stuff that said shit was about to happen to your patrol. Maybe he’d honed his personal radar on the streets.

  The truck bounced from time to time on the potholes carved out of the road by successive winters without repair crews to fix them. Chris checked the dashboard monitor to see if the three drivers behind were keeping intervals, then glanced at the wing mirror to make sure.

  They were back in live woodland and abandoned pasture now. It was a few saplings at first, then bigger trees until the landscape began to look almost normal, just scrubbed of all traces of humans except the power company’s boxes almost buried in overgrown bushes at the side of the road, and a lonely charging station for cars that had vanished years ago. A small bird swooped low across the road and disappeared.

  Chris checked his dosimeter. Everything looked okay.

  Cattle were grazing on the verge up ahead. As the convoy got closer, their heads went up as if they were going to bolt, and Zakko slowed down. But the animals seemed to take it as an invite to follow him, and started trotting along with the vehicle as it passed. Chris realised that some of them still associated humans with being fed. He hadn’t realised cattle lived long enough to remember things that must have happened seven or eight years ago.

  “Keep moving,” he said.

  “What should we do with them?” Zakko kept checking the rear-view, probably worried that the gun truck would just mow the animals down. “Take them back with us?”

  There was a time when Chris would have shot first and worried about how to transport the carcasses later, grateful for some decent meat in a famine, but they weren’t starving now, and even his limited city-boy knowledge of livestock told him that cattle needed health checks before mixing with other animals.

  “Doug won’t thank us if the Kill Line herds catch some disease,” he said. “They’ll just have to take their chances.”

  Zakko nodded, but his face said he was worried what would happen to them. “Okay.”

  Between the islands of forest, all the greenery that Chris could see was overgrown fields or grass recovering from the snow. Resistant weeds and bushes had moved in to fill gaps that might have been fallow fields, crops finally overrun by their tougher wild neighbours, or even areas of die-back. The ragged patchwork of vegetation was probably good eating for animals but there wasn’t much for humans.

  How were folks getting by in Asia? Chris wished he’d asked Kim when he’d had the chance. Ainatio’s reaction to her nagged at him more every day, but maybe he was overthinking it. If people had been cooped up in a compound for years with almost no outside contact, they were bound to get a little weird. It was a prison. And he knew exactly what that did to people.

  “Thirty miles to Kingston,” Zakko said. “We’ll probably lose the radio over that hill ahead.”

  He’d done his homework, and he was right: Chris tried the radio when they reached the hills, but the signal was gone. The convoy stopped for a bathroom break, as much for the dogs as the humans, and Chris tried again, this time using a small drone with a receiver attached. It climbed a long way before he could acquire a channel and send a confirmation. If they were going to attempt long foraging missions again, they’d have to beef up the transmitter.

  Lee watched from the open back of the gun truck as the grenade-sized drone descended and landed in Chris’s hands. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “Your buds at Ainatio are watching over us.”

  “Yeah?”

  Lee pointed up in no particular direction. “Drone. Look.” He pulled his optics visor down over his eyes to take a closer look. “I thought you told them to rack off.”

  “Politely.”

  “That sounds like scary-politely.”

  “For their own good.”

  “Come on, they’re bored out of their skulls. They want to play soldiers.”

  “I still can’t see it.”

  Lee nodded and passed Chris his visor. “There. Above the trees.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Not sure why they need one that big, but they do things differently that side of the fence, don’t they? They must want us to know it’s there. Nobody’s that crap at covert surveillance.”

  Chris did a slow wave, then gave the drone a thumbs-up gesture. A little diplomacy didn’t cost anything. Fine, they could watch. But he wasn’t going to change how he did things today. The convoy rolled off again, with the gun truck between Chris’s vehicle and Dieter’s pick-up, and the APC bringing up the rear.

  “Maybe they want to understand how we do things,” Zakko said. “It takes a lot to say hey, we’re useless, can we watch you and learn, yeah?”

  Whatever faults Zakko had, he seemed to think the best of people until proven wrong. Chris wondered whether to give him the talk on sensible mistrust. But Zakko probably understood all too well, and just wanted to look on the kinder side because keeping the world at arm’s length was soul-destroying. He didn’t need Chris to crush his morale by reminding him how shitty people could be.

  You don’t build a guy up by trashing what keeps him sane. Find another way. Come up with a better plan.

  “You’re right,” Chris said. He still hadn’t worked out how he’d ended up as a leader when he had no ambition beyond surviving the day. But he was, and that meant responsibilities. “Bet they’ve never raided dumpsters. We’ll educate them.”
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br />   “Yeah.” Zakko nodded. “We’re good at that.”

  Kingston eventually started to appear ahead of them a ruin at a time, first an old charging station with a scruffy blue car picked clean of tyres and seats, hood open, then the blackened shell of a mobile diner. A propane cylinder lay on its side out front with a split in it like a mouth, its coating weathered into a dull, dusty red that made it look like ancient terracotta. Chris read two scenarios in that. These were either random events — a gas cylinder left leaking when the diner staff had to leave in a hurry, a car abandoned when the charging station turned out to have no power — or an indication that marauders had been around. But there was no sign of any recent human activity between here and Kill Line. If anyone had come this way, they’d turned back or moved on a long time ago.

  And someone probably picked Kingston clean around the same time. But we might get lucky. And sitting back waiting for luck or hand-outs is never an option.

  Chris focused on the road again, checking features against the map and looking for places where they might get ambushed. The journey out of Baltimore had been about skirting urban areas whenever they could, or getting through them as quickly as possible. Going into a town and back out by the same route made him uneasy. But as he started to see more shuttered and boarded-up houses, he could tell Kingston had been evacuated with enough notice for folks to go through the motions of securing their homes, even if they realised that boards wouldn’t stop determined looters.

  Now the town was close enough to send up a swarm of micro-drones to check it out. The convoy pulled over while Dieter launched them. Chris sat back to study the composite feed on his screen as he guided the swarm into the town centre, dreading what he’d find. He’d searched too many derelict places for one lifetime and seen too many bodies and treasured possessions, all that was left of harmless people who’d minded their own business until the predatory reality of a collapsing society rolled over them.

  “I thought the place was bigger,” Zakko said, looking over his shoulder.