Earthbound

by Joe Haldeman

  Computers don’t care, anyhow. It’s only humans who get confused.

  Jerry made a protracted intestinal comment, to remind me that humans and computers weren’t everything.

  So how did Elza and Dustin plan to keep from being shot by the good guys? Would the fact they were shooting at the bad guys protect them?

  I tried to visualize the situation. They’d have to approach on this side of the river, east; it was too deep and fast to cross. But they wouldn’t just walk up this road alongside the river. Too exposed, even here.

  They’d probably loop around farther east, and circle back behind the stockade. The orchard wouldn’t afford much cover, which probably meant the enemy wouldn’t be there.

  Then what? Holler for someone to cover them while they rushed for the back door? If Namir was there, he could identify their voices. “Don’t shoot; they’re fellow spies from nonexistent governments.”

  My degree in American Studies was woefully deficient in course work on staying alive at the end of the world. Find good boots. Count your ammo. Try to keep the mule from farting too loud.

  I jumped at gunfire, but recognized it: the “burst of three” setting on the standard-issue army rifles that we were carrying. Two bursts on top of each other. Then one more. Then two more.

  Didn’t mean it was them, of course. But it wasn’t the manic rattle we’d heard before. Had they had time to circle around? Depends on how thick the woods were; how cautious they were.

  Jerry backed away from the noise. I patted him and told him it was all right. Lying to a mule, how pathetic.

  Paul groaned, and I went around to check on him. No change.

  I heard a noise, and crouched down behind the wagon. There was something or someone moving in the brush on the other side of the road, back where Dustin had been.

  Thumbed the rifle selector straight up to B3, burst, and peered over it to the other side. It sounded like someone walking, not being careful. But then why not walk on the road?

  The wagon was too well hidden; I couldn’t have seen anyone unless he was wearing bright clothes. Quietly I stepped around past Jerry, pressing his muzzle, and whispering, “Quiet.” He nodded, which was strange. I went down into a shallow ditch that would be a streamlet when it rained. I touched the extra magazines in my pockets, talismans, and crept down toward the road the way I’d been taught, the butt of the rifle stock firm under my arm, finger inside the trigger guard but not on the trigger.

  The noise to my right grew louder. About halfway to the road I stopped and waited, hunkered behind a thick brown tangle of dead brush.

  The noise stopped, too.

  There was the slightest rustle, that could have been wind—but there was no wind. I swung the rifle in that direction and a wolf’s head appeared, or a dog like a German shepherd, teeth bared and ears flattened down. I fired and the burst went low, scattering dirt a couple of feet below the face, which disappeared.

  Probably running away, though I couldn’t hear anything but cotton stillness and metallic ringing. Ear protectors dangled in a small plastic bag hanging from the rear sight, so you wouldn’t forget to use them.

  Assuming he was scared away now, but everyone else within a mile knew where I was, I wasted no time getting back to the cart.

  The water and supplies and extra weapons were as I’d left them, strapped to the sides. Jerry was restless but quiet. I looked in the wagon at Paul.

  His eyes were open.

  “Paul?” No reaction.

  I touched his skin and it was cool and dry. He didn’t blink when I touched his eyes.

  I closed them.

  16

  We had talked a couple of times about whether it was better to lose a loved one suddenly, without warning and with no emotional preparation, or go through the agony of watching them slip away slowly.

  For yourself you want it to be sudden and unexpected. But perhaps for the ones you love, you want time to say good-bye.

  I still had no clear answer. If the biker gang had killed Paul there by the underpass, I wouldn’t have had the hours of talking, or trying to talk, while he slipped away. And he would have been spared the agony of a lingering death. Physical and emotional.

  I had stopped crying, and started digging, by the time they came back. Cursing the blunt entrenching tool and the coarse network of roots that resisted it. I only had a small hole when Dustin and Elza came up the slope, along with two men from Funny Farm, Wham-O and one who introduced himself as Judd when he took the entrenching tool from me with quiet insistence.

  “I’m sorry,” Elza said. “How many years?”

  “Actual? I was eighteen when we met and a few weeks older when we fell in love, or I did. Twenty-one real years?”

  “Not enough.”

  “No.” How many would be enough? We had moved back to the cart, and I stared down at him, at his body. I wanted to touch him, and I didn’t want to.

  Judd had followed me up, holding the small shovel like a toy in his large hand.

  “Ma’am, I’ll do whatever you say, but wouldn’t it be best if we buried him in the graveyard up at the farm? You’re part of the family now.”

  “Of course,” I said, and did a bad imitation of smiling. “I wasn’t, I’m not thinking straight.”

  The three men had no trouble convincing Jerry to back and fill and come back down to the path with them. As we made our way along, they told me what had happened.

  The gunfire we’d heard had evidently been in the nature of a probe: two or three people with automatic weapons staged an attack on the stockade’s front entrance. They killed the man who was standing guard there.

  The “farmers” responded with fire from two of the guardhouses on the corners of the stockade, but worried they might have used up too much ammunition in a show of force.

  When Dustin and Namir came to their aid, giving flanking fire from the east, the attackers withdrew fast, leaving a blood trail but no bodies.

  Other than that first casualty, none of the good guys was injured, but it was a prudent assumption that they hadn’t seen the end of it. And they wanted us inside the stockade as soon as possible.

  I thanked them for coming to our rescue so quickly. Dustin pointed out that it wasn’t exactly charity. Out there, I could be captured and held hostage. Even if they weren’t smart enough to do that, weapons and ammunition and a vehicle that ran on grass were beyond price.

  A phrase with no meaning. When would things have prices again?

  It wasn’t just Dustin and Namir and Judd in the rescue party. They said that Namir had wanted to come up with the horse, but the farmers already had a squad organized and on alert, which was how they were able to come back so fast. I never saw more than two of them at a time, but there were eleven others along with Judd, moving through the woods alongside of us, ahead and behind.

  We moved along at a pretty good rate, and after about twenty minutes turned up into the road that cuts through the wheat field to the stockade. Judd shouted an order and then stayed back in the woods with his scattered squad.

  Jerry stopped for a moment when he saw the building, and then all but trotted toward it. The double door swung open, and Namir came out on horseback to meet us.

  He looked in the cart and nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not unexpected,” I had to say, but my voice cracked.

  He dismounted and walked alongside me. “You were with him,” he said.

  “Yes and no. I went off to check on a noise—a dog or a wolf. When I came back he was, he was gone.”

  “Hard on you.”

  Yes and no, I thought. That chest wound would not have healed without surgery. Even if he had been sheltered and comfortable, he wouldn’t have lasted very long. He probably knew that as well as I did. When we could talk, we talked of other things.

  Gunfire to our right, two single shots. The horse and mule both realized it was time for speed, and we were hard-pressed to keep up with them on the way to the door. It slammed shut be
hind me, but they eased it back open a few inches, a guard watching through the crack.

  Not a job anyone would want, sniper bait.

  The place didn’t seem much changed from before except that some people carried weapons. And there were more of them. Judd confirmed that they had taken in a few neighboring families, who brought food and munitions with them.

  Did they turn away people who came empty-handed? I could ask later. There were other horses and mules inside the compound, in a corral improvised from scraps of old lumber. A couple of men held it open for the horse and unhitched Jerry. They both went straight for the pile of hay, and I had a sudden vision of how hard that was to come by now. Harvesting under armed guard, quickly. The same with the orchards and other crops, and nobody would be lazily fishing out of the stream. There were chickens underfoot everywhere, which I supposed had been cute for an hour.

  When would it be safe to go back to normal living conditions? Would it ever be?

  Namir and Dustin and Elza helped me carry our gear to the small cabin we were sharing with two other couples. Then we went to the rear of the place, to the cemetery garden just beyond the back door.

  Four living people were keeping guard in foxholes while a burial party of four others worked fast with pick and shovel. A body lay beside them under a dirty sheet stained with new blood. The man who’d been shot at the beginning of the attack I’d heard from back in the woods.

  They passed us the pick, and we started breaking ground for Paul’s grave. I did a short turn, the pick much more efficient than our entrenching tool, but almost too heavy for me to swing. After a long and heavy day.

  When they finished burying the other man, we stopped digging. Roz came out with two women and two children, and they each said some words, the children crying though the women had finished.

  I thought I was done with crying, too, but it started again when the four of us carried Paul’s body from the cart, using a blanket as a stretcher. We lowered him into the waist-deep hole and took the blanket out; no winding sheets when cloth was getting rare. I used Namir’s knife to cut a square of cloth off my shirt, to cover Paul’s face before the dirt fell.

  I cried then, and so did Dustin and Elza. Perhaps Namir would have if he could. The only humans on this planet who had been to the stars. Come back to Earth to die.

  He would not have wanted a prayer any more than I would. But I tried to remember something he had said to me about how marvelously complex man was in spite of his cosmic insignificance. A shifting assemblage of atoms, mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, come together to “mimic and define” purpose in its beautiful stagger from cradle to grave.

  He had been a beautiful man, full of humor and courage and love. I said that, too, after Dustin and Elza gave their farewells, and Namir said something in Hebrew. Then we each threw a handful of dirt into the grave, and Elza led me away while Namir and Dustin did the heavy work.

  17

  Roz had called a meeting of all the adults, newcomers and old residents, outside the dining hall in last light. There were over a hundred, mostly sitting on the ground or leaning against buildings. She began without preamble.

  “We’ve all heard the same rumors. Some are exaggerated. There isn’t a huge army gathering out there in the woods. But there is a large and growing number of people, not as many as we have here. They have weapons and ammunition and a dwindling amount of food.

  “Some people who joined us today confirmed that they have leadership, a coalition of two biker gangs from San Francisco.”

  The “biker gangs” were social clubs with two hundred years of history. They began as warring clans who roamed the old highway system on compact armed motorcycles, gasoline-powered until that became an expensive anachronism. They evolved into respected service organizations whose public appearance reflected their land-pirate origins. Mostly men, mostly fat and bearded, wearing leather clothing and tattoos. The leader would have an expensive loud antique gasoline motorcycle; the others, quiet electric scooters. They organized charity drives and always showed up in formation for parades and big games.

  A few of the gangs had gone back to their violent origins years before the power went off. Then they junked their useless vehicles and took bicycles.

  They knew which towns were not well defended, and raided their stores. The concentration of guns and ammunition at Funny Farm had protected them from individual gangs—but that concentration was also irreplaceable wealth in what had become a desperate firearm culture. So both large gangs had gotten together to plan a joint raid.

  People who had come into the stockade for protection had wildly varying estimates of the size of the biker coalition, from a hundred to a thousand.

  A hundred would be a manageable annoyance. A thousand would conquer the farm and take everything.

  Namir knew how to conduct interrogations; that was his job description in a dark period of his life. Funny Farm didn’t have any of the advanced tools of the trade, but as Roz saw, he had full control of the basic ones: voice, manner, posture. A small room with one door and no windows.

  She asked him to talk to each of the informers individually, alone. He didn’t raise a hand against them, or even his voice, but he got as much of the truth as they could give.

  “The two gangs in charge,” Roz continued, “the Fangs and the Crips, have worked together before. They attacked compounds like ours—Bakersfield and Torrance—and left behind nothing but smoking ruins and corpses.

  “The Fangs take female prisoners, for sex, but they don’t live long. When it comes to fighting, I want all of us women to remember that. Be fierce. There are”—she cleared her throat—“there are better ways to die. There are worse things than dying.

  “We’re going to pull everyone inside the walls except for three scouts. They might be able to give us early warning; they might even infiltrate the enemy force and do some damage from inside. They don’t have specific orders.

  “The rest of us stay inside the walls and hope they hold. The Crips have some military explosives, though they may have used them up cracking into Bakersfield. They had real walls there; it used to be a prison.

  “They’ll probably attack sooner rather than later. They must be close to maximum force now, so have no reason to put it off.”

  “They’ll wait until dark,” said a gray-bearded man leaning against the wall behind her. “While it’s light, they’re sittin’ ducks.”

  She nodded. “Before dark we want to have all the weapons and ammunition sorted out. I don’t think they’ll likely attack from the front or rear, at least not at first, because there’s not much to hide behind.

  “By Wham-O’s count, we have a basic armament of seventeen assault rifles, using the same military ammo, with only about sixty cartridges apiece, so we have to be prudent there. Likewise, Carmen brought a belt-fed machine gun, but with how many rounds?”

  “Only ninety-seven,” I said. “Maybe thirty seconds’ worth.”

  “We have three shotguns in different sizes, each with maybe a dozen shells. Namir has suggested that we not use them until the enemy is coming over the walls, or is inside.”

  “We may lose a wall,” Namir said, “if they use explosives. So ‘inside’ becomes moot. Everybody tie a white cloth above your left biceps.” He had a pillowcase full of strips torn from a sheet. “At least at first, we’ll be able to tell friend from foe that way in the dark.

  “I don’t suppose we have a strategy beyond the obvious. Fire from shelter, and don’t let them take shelter. Don’t shoot each other.

  “The four of us from the starship will take care of the southeast tower,” he said, pointing. “Everybody else meet with Roz now in the dining hall. She has a chart with nighttime positions.” She nodded and led them away.

  I watched them going with a rising sense of hopeless fear, panic. I wanted to run, and there was no place to go.

  Elza and Dustin, holding hands, exchanged a wordless communication with Namir, and went off together fo
r a little privacy. “Aren’t you ever afraid?” I said.

  He gave me a troubled look and touched my arm, an electric tingle. “Always a little. We’ve gotten through worse things.”

  But always with Paul, I thought. “So what should I do with these things?” I had the machine gun, as long as a rifle but heavier, and the plastic ammo box that weighed about ten pounds, as well as an assault rifle and a pistol.

  “I’ll help you carry them up the tower. I guess Dustin should shoot the machine gun, unless you want to.”

  “Oh, sure. As long as I don’t have to hit anything specific.” Or at all.

  The rest of us could crowd in there with him, with rifles and the night glasses. That was what he called the big binoculars, which showed more at night, even without electronics. “Do the three-on, one-off shifts.” He smiled. “Two on, two off for now.”

  I followed him across the compound to the tower, where we relieved a girl who did look relieved. She couldn’t have been fourteen, shorter than the old rifle she passed down.

  There was a large wicker basket raised and lowered by a pulley, so you didn’t have to negotiate the ladder carrying things. Namir scrambled up as soon as the girl came down, and I passed up all the armaments and ammunition, along with two canteens and some bread. I got halfway up the ladder and realized I’d better go pee first, so did.

  The tower was cozy but not too crowded, about six feet square. The outside walls were reinforced with thick logs, virtually bulletproof. A plank shelf, waist high, held all the ammunition, separated by type. Namir made sure I could locate them by touch.

  We looked out over the wheat field and the approach road, with woods to our right. The foliage became thick a couple of dozen yards out.

  “That’s the way they’ll come,” I said.

  “If they hit this site at all. If they attack at all.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “No.” I could just see his face in the fading light, his lips pursing. “You try to get inside the enemy’s head. But there’s a limit to ‘what would I do in this situation?’—when you’d never be in this situation. The countryside is full of soft targets, where they could just walk in and wave some guns around and take what they want. So why attack a fortress?”