Darkness Follows

by L. A. Weatherly

  To Mac’s amazement, Collis’s eyes filled. It didn’t seem an act. Collis took a long swig of beer.

  “Sorry,” he said roughly. “I haven’t thought about Tru in a long time.”

  He collected himself and glanced at Mac. “He really did throw the civil war fight, you know,” he said. “I didn’t meet him until the year after that, when I was seven, but…I’m sure of it. I have no idea why he did it. I just know that it broke him.”

  “What do you mean, ‘broke’ him?”

  Collis let out a breath and gazed at the telio. “Like I said, my dad was into some shady stuff. Back during the Big Dry, he used to bootleg liquor. He made a lot of money at it. That’s when he married Goldie.”

  “Goldie?”

  “My mother. She was only seventeen when they got together. Anyway, when the Repeal came in, he had to look for something else to do. And he got into selling dope. Coke, hop-leafs, all of that.”

  Collis looked down, his shoulders tense. “People used to come to the house,” he said. “I wasn’t there much – I was usually at Amity’s – but sometimes when I was, Dad would have me take money from them and give them these little packets in return. I didn’t know what they were. I was…pretty innocent back then.”

  Mac drained his beer and signalled the barman for two more. “Keep talking,” he said.

  Collis waited until the new beers had arrived. “All right, well…the thing is, I guess Tru was looking for a way to blot everything out. See, he drank sometimes. Sometimes I’d stay over at Amity’s, and in the mornings I’d find an empty glass in their kitchen that smelled like Goldie’s bottles at home. I remember once Amity started to use one, and then she smelled it – and I felt so tense; like I knew a secret about Tru that I didn’t want her to find out. She washed the glass out without saying anything – and Amity was someone who always said what she was thinking. But that time she didn’t, and I saw that, on some level, she knew too. Neither of us mentioned it. We just went out to play or something, but…I knew just how she felt.”

  Mac sat silently, watching him.

  “Looking back now, it seems like…Tru was a man in constant torment. And apparently he went to my dad a few times to buy whatever crap he was peddling.” Collis grimaced. “I didn’t know any of this then; my father told me later. He said that the last time Tru was there he’d been drinking, and…he said some stuff.”

  “What?” asked Mac.

  “I’m not sure exactly. Whatever it was, it made my father suspicious about the civil war fight. By then, it was getting harder for Dad to get hold of stuff to sell – laws were tightening up, he owed money to too many people… and so…he started blackmailing Tru.”

  Mac’s eyebrows rose. Collis looked bitter, angry.

  “He was pretty smart about it, I guess,” he said in a low voice. “He didn’t try to bleed Tru dry. He just got a nice little payment from him, once a month – and then gambled it all away, of course, but those payments just kept on coming until Tru died.”

  Collis looked down. “You know…ever since I found out…I’ve been even more grateful to Tru. Because if it were me, and my daughter was best friends with the son of the bastard who was blackmailing me, I don’t think I’d have even wanted to see the kid’s face, much less be like a father to him. But Tru never treated me any differently. Not once.”

  “What about Amity’s mother?” asked Mac.

  “Rose?” Collis’s tension seemed to ease a little; he smiled. “She’s wonderful. She never knew any of this, I don’t think. She and Amity didn’t always get along, but I loved her. She raised me, basically. And Hal, Amity’s little brother…he was my brother too. They were my family, all of them.”

  Collis gazed at the bar and took another sip of beer. “Amity was always asking me to move in with them for real. I couldn’t. My dad didn’t give a shit about me, but he would have put a stop to that in a hurry.” He gave a crooked smile. “So I had this…half-and-half childhood. Amity’s place was like a fantasy, like…like I could be the Collis I really wanted to be. And then I’d get home, and it was just…squalor. Cold. Not enough to eat. And it felt like that was the real me and always would be, no matter what I did.”

  Collis glanced up suddenly. His eyes were blue-green, full of self-doubt. “Sorry,” he said. “Is this the kind of…? I mean, I feel like I’m talking too much.”

  Mac pushed a bowl of peanuts at him. “You’re doing fine, buddy. Keep going.” On the telio, the fight had ended and music had started to play: one of the jaunty songs they’d made Van Wheeler do in praise of Gunnison. The Harmony symbol was on the screen.

  Collis took a peanut and shelled it slowly. “When I was younger, none of this bothered me as much,” he said at last. “But by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, it bothered me all right. I knew what everyone in that town thought of my family. And I knew how impossible it all was. Being in love with Amity. Not having anything to offer her.”

  He let out a breath, playing with the peanut shells. “Then Tru died when I was fourteen. His plane crashed. After that, none of it really mattered any more. It took a few months, but without Tru’s payments the money dried up, and my family had to take off. My dad owed too many people. Leaving Amity was…”

  Collis fell silent. He gazed unseeingly at the Harmony symbol. Finally he said, “Anyway. Dad acted like he had a plan, but he didn’t. We just drifted for a while. And then one day he found out that I knew how to fly a plane.”

  Collis’s jaw was steel as he added, “The next day he moved us again…to the Central States.”

  Mac helped himself to a peanut. “Let me guess. So that he could make the right contacts and then pimp you out as a crooked Peacefighter?”

  “You got it,” said Collis sourly. “I didn’t know at first. But I guess it turned out to be a lot harder than he’d thought – you can’t just go up to someone in charge, hint that you know that Peacefights have been thrown, and be met with open arms.”

  Collis went on, explaining that he’d had to go to work at fifteen; his father, failing in his grand plans, had had to go to work also, in the same factory. Collis had tried to fit in, despite this new world of Shadowcars and whispers of correction camps. He’d always been good at making people like him, but he was terrified. All he wanted was to go home, to Amity and her family.

  Then when he was seventeen, he was found Discordant.

  “My father was furious,” Collis said tonelessly. “It was like he blamed me. And Goldie cried. She was…oh, hell… she was such a drunk by then. But she got sober enough to try to stop the Guns when they took me. They hit her. And dragged me away, and…and I was sent to Harmony Three.”

  Mac saw Collis’s throat move as he swallowed. Finally he said, “This next part isn’t easy to talk about.”

  Mac said nothing.

  Collie rubbed a knuckle across his chin. “Once I got there, I did whatever I thought I had to, to survive.” He looked down and cleared his throat. “If you’ve never been in one of those places, you can’t really understand… Anyway, there’s always a prisoner who turns informer. Betrays others to save himself. That – that was me.”

  Mac felt a stirring of respect for Collis for admitting it. If he’d had doubts before, he had none now: he was hearing the truth. He took another sip of beer, letting the silence do its work.

  Collis’s hands were tight around his own beer mug; he stared down at them. “Whatever you’re thinking, Mac, however much disgust you have for me, it’s nothing compared to what I feel for myself,” he said in a low voice. “I justified it – I told myself I had no choice. The truth was that I hated the world by then. I thought everyone was out for themselves and that I’d be a fool not to put myself first.”

  Collis’s voice hardened as he went on: “So, yeah, I survived all right. I finally got given a job in one of the offices. I was known by the Guns as the guy who could get information. And I guess they found me pretty useful. Word of me got all the way to Gunnison. He needed information
about one of the prisoners, someone who hadn’t buckled yet. And…I got it for him.”

  He didn’t go into details and Mac didn’t ask. Collis stared down at the mug, stroking the rim. Finally he went on.

  “So Gunnison got interested in me and checked out my chart. He had his best astrologers go over it, and they decided, hey, what do you know, there’d been a mistake – just, like, a fraction of a degree point, but enough – and that I wasn’t Discordant after all. And they set me free so that I could work for Gunnison.”

  “So that’s how it happened,” murmured Mac. He’d often wondered.

  Collis gave a strangled laugh. “Oh, hell, what a joke,” he said. “You’re Discordant if he doesn’t like you, and then magically not Discordant if he changes his mind. The hypocrisy is just…and he doesn’t see it, that’s the thing, isn’t it? He honestly believes all this stuff.”

  The bar was full now, rollicking and noisy, though even the laughter had a restraint not found in bars in other countries: you never knew when you might get reported. Collis sat hunched over, playing with a peanut shell. Mac slid off the bar stool suddenly and grabbed his fedora. He clapped Collis on the shoulder.

  “Come on, pal, let’s get some fresh air,” he said.

  Collis looked relieved. He drained the rest of his beer and rose too.

  They headed for the graceful, arching structure of the Bradford Bridge. They stopped halfway across it, leaning on their elbows and looking down at the tumbling, moonlit water.

  “I think he sees me as a kind of good luck charm,” Collis said. He added bitterly, “He calls me ‘Sandy’, you know. They called me that in high school too. Once, when Amity and I had gotten together, she called me Sandy and I almost jumped out of my skin.”

  “So she never knew,” said Mac.

  “No,” whispered Collis. “No. Not about any of this.”

  “All right,” said Mac finally. “I already know how you became a Peacefighter. Gunnison needed a pilot he could plant in the Western Seaboard base to throw fights and spy on Commander Hendrix. Right?”

  “That’s it.” Collis scraped a hand over his face. “In training school, everyone else was there because they believed in Peacefighting. I knew it was a lie, but I pushed myself to be a better pilot so that I could move up the ranks fast, make more money on the thrown fights. But then I got to the base, and…Amity was there.”

  Collis stared down at the water as he described the rush of joy at seeing her again – followed closely by shame as he realized what she’d think of him if she knew what he was doing.

  “Part of me wanted out then, but…but if I’m honest, Mac, part of me didn’t; I wanted all the money I could possibly get. Because I was still one of those Reeds. If I wanted to be with Amity, how else could I ever have anything to offer her?”

  “So she’s one of those dames who cares a lot about money?” asked Mac mildly.

  Collis snorted out a laugh. “Oh, hell, no. She never even thinks about it. She’s always had it, you see. No, it was me…all me.”

  He stared at his hands as he described how he knew he should keep away from Amity but hadn’t been able to. Finally, a month after he arrived at the base, the two of them had gotten together. Collis had kept his covert activities totally secret from her.

  “Most of my fights were actually legit, you know.” Collis rubbed his temples with one hand. “I’m not trying to make light of what I did. I threw seven fights altogether, and every time I did, I betrayed the Western Seaboard. I just mean…I was able to forget about it a lot. Being with Amity made me so happy that…”

  He trailed off. “But she was so idealistic. She believed in it all so damn much. And I knew about Tru, and what he had done, and I thought I’d give anything for her to never find out about that – or about me.”

  “She wouldn’t have understood?”

  “Why I was throwing fights?” Collis gave a wan smile. “No. Absolutely not.”

  Mac shrugged. “I’m not excusing you, boyo. But you’d been through a hell of a lot. Sounds like you’d gotten yourself into a tough spot. I mean, what were you going to do – say no to our lord and master?”

  Collis stared at him, clearly startled, as if a more charitable explanation of his actions had never occurred to him. “Of course I couldn’t say no,” he said finally. “But I wanted the money too.”

  “So you’re human. You grew up poor and money’s pretty nice to have. Doesn’t mean you weren’t scared shitless about what might happen to you if you refused. Which I’m sure you were, since you’re not a complete idiot.”

  Collis’s smile was tight. He pushed his hat back slightly. His hair was washed-out gold in the street lights.

  “There’s more,” he said. “Don’t get too forgiving of me just yet, Mac.”

  They started walking again, their hands in their trouser pockets, their footsteps echoing. Collis said, “When I trashed that bar, you said I was shouting that it wasn’t my fault. Remember? Well…I was lying to myself. It was. All of it.”

  “All right, tell me,” said Mac.

  Collis did.

  A long time later, they were sitting on a park bench. Collis had just finished speaking.

  Mac was silent for some time, taking it all in. Collis’s explanation of what had happened on the Western Seaboard base hadn’t surprised him; he’d already guessed a lot of it. Vancour had started to uncover the corruption and Collis had panicked. He’d known Hendrix was corrupt, and Amity had been talking about showing him the evidence she’d found in her team leader’s house. If she did, Collis had known she’d be killed. Yet if Collis told Amity the truth, he’d lose her.

  He’d tried stalling her instead, telling her he was checking everything out with Mac. When she’d taken the evidence to Madeline Bark at the World for Peace, Collis hadn’t known whose side Madeline was on – he’d realized it could all explode at any moment. He’d been tempted to run but had stayed to try to protect Amity if he could.

  Mac recalled that time himself: after Vancour went to Madeline Bark for help, Bark had called Cain in a panic. It was decided that Vancour would have to be taken out.

  No one in Gunnison’s camp had been sure at that point whether Collis could still be trusted. To take no chances, he’d been drugged to prevent him from tipping off Vancour before her sabotaged Tier One fight.

  When he’d ended up in the sickbay, Collis said that he’d gotten a promise from Amity not to fly. He knew she was likely being set up, but hadn’t told her the truth even then – though he swore to Mac that he would have if he’d known she still planned to take the fight. Mac believed him: it was clear that Collis was crazy about the woman.

  Anyway, most of it wasn’t too admirable but none of it was surprising. What Collis had done in the Central States though, after he and Vancour escaped together…now that had rocked Mac. He felt like puking – or, better yet, taking a swing at the guy’s already-bruised face.

  So close. And now gone for ever.

  The park’s trees rustled in the breeze, their shapes large and dark.

  Collis sat leaning forward, staring at his clenched hands. “Now she’s in that place and it’s my fault,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve been in hell, Mac. There’s nothing I can do. I’ve tried. If I could take her place there I would, even if she never spoke to me again.”

  He gave a short, humourless laugh. “I’ve tried dope a few times, you know. Anything to block out the look on her face… It doesn’t work. Nothing does. That’s why I’ve got to do something, got to be someone I can look at in the mirror again, or I swear I’ll pitch myself off the nearest bridge. I can’t live like this any more.”

  Mac sat quietly, thinking. He still hadn’t spoken.

  Collis gazed tensely at him. Finally he said, “Mac, please…say something. Get it over with.”

  Mac pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “All right, look,” he said tonelessly. “I’m not in the business of absolution. But since you seem to want my opinion,
yes, I think you acted like a cowardly bastard, and what happened to Vancour was just the least of it. I’d be failing at my job if I didn’t have severe doubts now as to whether you’d protect us, if enough pressure was put on you.”

  Collis went still. “Us?”

  Mac fixed him with a look. “Yes. Us.”

  Collis let out a long, shuddering breath. “I knew it,” he whispered. He rubbed both hands over his face and then let them fall. “Mac…I know there’s nothing I can say to convince you. But I’d give anything to undo what I did. Put me through whatever other tests you want. I wouldn’t betray you.”

  “You know what, pal? I’m inclined to believe you.”

  Collis looked up. His throat worked; he gazed quickly back down at his fists.

  “Thank you,” he said roughly.

  Mac stood up. “I’m going to take a chance on you, because I think you’ve told me the truth and I believe that you want to make up for what you’ve done. But the Resistance is no more in the business of absolution than I am. We don’t give a damn about your conscience, buddy-boy. That’s for you to wrestle with. We care about your loyalty and your silence.”

  “You’ve got it,” said Collis. He stood up too; they shook. Mac didn’t think it was his imagination that Collis seemed straighter now – taller.

  They started walking again. “Listen,” said Collis. “I don’t have any right to ask for anything; I know that. But—”

  “Lay off the martyrdom, Reed,” Mac broke in. “You’ve told me your story and now I’ve forgotten it. Clean slate; you’re one of us. Spill it.”

  Collis’s smile looked sincere for the first time since Mac had known him. “Thanks,” he said softly. “All right, look – there’s something I need help with. People I need to try to save. It’s the most important thing in the world to me. Will you help?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  December, 1941

  The spare tyre’s constant vibration shook my bones. Before the first hour had passed I felt sick and battered, my wounds constantly prodded. However much I hurt, I knew Ingo had it worse. I kept speaking to him, terrified that he might pass out and not be able to move quickly when we needed to.