All Fall Down (4 page)

Whether they heard me or not, I sure heard
them. Two of 'em, laughing and cussing and crunching across the
hard packed dirt like they was walking down the middle of the
street leading a parade.

I stayed in the shadows of the tunnel and
waited. I'm not ashamed to say my hands were sweaty. I might be
trained to kill a man, but I never was sent into combat. I didn't
aim to hurt anybody now unless I had to. I had a knife—so did
Harley—but most of my training had been in the kind of close up
fighting that used electric currents and pressure points. I'd been
forty years out of practice doing that kind of work, and I didn't
aim to start now unless I had to.

The two of them stopped about ten feet back
from the entrance to the tunnel. They were both big men, but the
kind of big that's only a shadow of what it must have been before
the war started. Their black leathers hung loose on their bodies.
They both wore dull black helmets and sunglasses, and had beards
that had seen better days.

"Maxine?" said the one on the left. "You in
there, woman? You got something that belongs to me."

I squinted at the guy with the mouth on him.
The sun still hung pretty low over the mountains to the east,
creating that kind of early morning twilight that makes telling
details on any one thing hard on my old eyes. I'd never met
Maxine's old man, as she called him, but she'd had a picture or
two, including the one tattooed on her shoulder blade. The talker
could have been him, which would make him Harley's daddy. I
couldn't be sure, but who else would have trekked all the way out
to my little patch of nowhere while a global war was going on?

I was trying to decide whether to stay quiet
or just tell the guy he had the wrong corner of the desert when he
started tossing something up in the air and catching it in his
hand. I had no problem recognizing that thing.

It didn't take much to figure out where
Harley's daddy got a grenade. The desert around here's full of old
army ordinances. See, the army used to practice out here in the
desert. Practice going to war, complete with stuff to blow up so
that soldiers would know what the real thing was like. Some stuff
never got found, not until somebody stumbled over it. The grenade
Harley's daddy was bouncing around on his hand wasn't from this
generation's war but the generation before's practice.

He'd probably used another one just like it
to blow up my trailer when no one answered him. Since I figured
he'd have no problem with the idea of blowing up a mine entrance
just for fun, that pretty much made my mind up for me how I was
gonna play it.

"Ain't no one named Maxine here," I yelled
back. "You got yourself the wrong corner of the desert."

The other one laughed. "See, I told you I
seen tracks back there, didn't I?"

"Yeah, you're a real tracker, that's what
you are," Harley's daddy said to his buddy, then he turned his
attention back to me. "You come on out of there, old man. I know
Maxine's your kid. She used to tell me about this place, that
little trailer you had out in the middle of nowhere. Took me a long
time to find it, but here I am. I figured this would be where she'd
run off to."

The last thing I wanted was to leave the
dark of the mine. They didn't have guns, at least none that I could
tell, but there were two of them and only one of me, and they were
half my age. But they'd already blown up my trailer. It wouldn't
take much to bring down the entrance to the mine.

"Okay, okay, I'm coming," I said.

I turned around, ready to signal Harley to
stay put, and about jumped out of my skin when I realized she was
right behind me. I'd never heard her. She'd learned what I taught
her real well.

"Don't go," she whispered. "They'll hurt
you."

I smiled at her, trying to show her more
confidence than I felt. "They're just looking for your momma and
that hog she rode home on. That's all. They might want to look in
here for themselves, so if they do, you hide where I told you."

I'd built in a safe room of sorts into the
mine, a little side tunnel that I'd covered over with cinderblocks.
Shove a couple of them out of the way, and someone small like
Harley could squeeze inside and pull the blocks back in behind
herself.

"They'll go away when they figure out what
they're looking for's not here."

Harley looked at me with those big eyes of
hers. I hoped it wasn't the last time I'd see them.

I walked out into the open, stopping just a
couple of feet in front of the mine. Even early morning desert
sunlight made me squint. I hadn't been outside in the daytime in
longer than I could remember.

"Yeah, you're her daddy," Maxine's ex said.
"I can see the family resemblance." He stopped bouncing the grenade
in his hand. "So where is she?"

"She's dead," I said. "More than ten years
now."

I couldn't see his eyes, but he got the kind
of stillness a man gets when he's surprised by something he don't
expect to hear.

"How?" he asked.

"Got sick," I said. "Couldn't do nothing for
her, not out here, but I tried."

I wasn't about to tell Harley's daddy about
her. Maxine told me she left before he knew he was going to be a
daddy.

My eyes were adjusting to the daylight, and
I made out little things I couldn't see before. Like the Army
patches sewn on the arm of his leather jacket. Like the scar across
the side of his face. Those patches reminded me of something I'd
read about in the histories I'd studied as a part of the program
that had sent me back here. Those patches were the same thing as
notches in a gun barrel.

Harley's daddy hadn't found his grenade in
the desert. He'd taken them off grunts he'd killed.

If he'd killed Army grunts, he wasn't the
kind of man who'd leave me and mine alone just because Maxine had
been my daughter.

"Where's the bike?" he asked.

"The bike?"

"Yeah, the motorcycle Maxine rode here on.
She did still have it when she got here, right? That ride was mine,
old man, and I want it back."

I shook my head. "I'm sorry, son. I sold it
after she died. She never told me it wasn't hers."

"Sold it." The muscles in his jaw worked
like he was chewing over the words and didn't much like the taste
of 'em.

I suppose I was lucky he didn't have a gun,
he'd probably have shot me right then. Instead, he charged me.

I was too surprised and too old to get out
of his way. I used to be better at reading folks, but I suppose I'd
been alone with only Harley for too long. Her daddy rammed me with
that helmet of his, and all the breath whooshed clean out of me. He
drove me down to the ground and hit me again.

I admit to trying to fight back. I found a
pressure point or two, but all that did was slow him down enough
that he didn't beat me to a pulp. Alien or not, old bones snap when
they're hit hard enough. Once he'd broken a couple of my ribs, all
I could think about was staying alive long enough to make sure
Harley was all right.

I think I about died when I heard her
scream.

Not in pain, not my little Harley, and not
in fear.

Her scream was all about rage.

Her momma, my Maxine, had a temper on her
and the same sort of fearlessness that let me step into a machine I
knew would scramble my molecules with only a promise that somewhere
down the line, things would get unscrambled again and I'd be put
back together right. Harley inherited that same fire and
fearlessness from both of us, I suspect. It propelled her out of
the mine and at her daddy hard enough that she knocked him off
me.

"You leave him alone!" she screamed at her
daddy.

She held a rock in her hands, and before he
could bat her away, she hit him smack on the chin with that rock.
If he had taken his helmet off before he attacked me, she would
have brought the rock down on his head and probably knocked him
out, if not killed him outright. As it was, all the blow to his
chin did was knock him off balance and split his lip.

Harley tried to scramble away, but her daddy
caught her. He took the rock away from her, then stood up and held
her against him with an arm around her waist. She clawed at the
back of his hand, the only part of him she could reach that wasn't
covered in leather, but he acted like he didn't feel a thing.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. He took his
sunglasses of to get a better look at her. "You're holding out on
me, old man. You didn't tell me Maxine had a kid."

I coughed, spitting up blood. My chest felt
heavy. One of those old broken bones must have done some damage
inside.

"Didn't ask," I managed to wheeze out.

He laughed then. "This almost makes up for
selling my bike."

Harley had gone still in his arms. I thought
for a minute that she'd frozen up, realizing that this man was her
daddy, but then I saw the desert sun glint off something she held
in one hand.

Her sharp little knife.

She'd been a good student when I'd taught
her all the close-in fighting techniques I'd been taught as a
grunt. She'd acted like they'd expected her to act, which had been
my first lesson as how to survive as an alien. She'd been the
scared, angry little girl. Now she was the efficient soldier.

Before her daddy knew what she was doing,
she'd sliced through the tendons of his right hand. His grip on her
slipped, and she turned around and did the same thing to his left
hand.

The hand that still held the grenade.

Without control of his hand, the grenade
rolled from her daddy's fingers onto the hard packed desert dirt at
his feet.

I'd never taught Harley about grenades. Even
through the haze of my pain, I could tell that her daddy had turned
this one on. Pins had given way to pressure points, just like on a
human body. Without the pressure of her daddy's hand, we only had a
few seconds before the grenade went off.

"Harley, run!" I shouted at her as loud as I
could.

She pivoted on the balls of her feet. I
thought she'd run, but instead she wrapped two strong little hands
around my wrist and yanked me to my feet.

"Run, grandpa!" she yelled back at me.

I tried. She pulled on my arm and I moved my
feet as fast as I could, but my legs didn't want to support me.

I'd already started to fall when the grenade
went off.

Rocks and dirt and bits of Harley's daddy
pelted my back and drove me into the ground, but the blast didn't
kill me.

I looked over my shoulder as the dust
settled. There wasn't much left of Harley's daddy. If I'd have
stayed where I was, if Harley had left me there, there wouldn't
have been much left of me either.

I didn't see her daddy's buddy. I suppose he
could have been killed in the blast, too, but I didn't see any sign
of his body. I imagine he took off since the fight wasn't really
his in the first place.

I'd fallen with my left hand outstretched,
the hand that Harley had been pulling on. I'd smacked the inside of
my wrist good on a rock when I came down. I was pretty sure I'd
broken something, but the only thing I cared about when was
sprawled out on the desert next to me.

Harley hadn't been as lucky as me. Bits of
rock, sharp as knives, had cut into her back. Blood was seeping
out, more and more of it. But that wasn't the worst.

She'd hit with her head at an odd angle. I
couldn't move her, not without risking her fragile spine, but I
couldn't leave her where she was. She'd bleed to death.

I coughed into my hand. More blood this
time.

It looked like karma was about to wipe out
what was left this new, alien branch of the Wannamaker family. I
didn't mind so much for me. I'd been a volunteer guinea pig.
Harley, like my daughter—they were innocents.

The whatsamajig in my left wrist picked that
moment to ping me.

I'll be damned. I never expected to hear
from my time again.

No voice command came through, only a slow,
steady hum broken by a beat every four seconds. I remembered the
code. They were about to scramble my molecules for a return trip to
my own time.

I didn't think about what I did next. I
still had my own knife in my pocket, and my right hand worked just
fine.

It didn't take long to dig the whatsamajig
out from under my skin. It wasn't in there very deep.

Harley didn't wake up when I cut into her
wrist and inserted the thing that had lain dormant in mine for over
forty years. I ripped a piece of my shirt to bind the wound and
make sure the whatsamajig stayed where it was supposed to.

In my time, they'd know how to fix Harley.
Hell, for all I knew, they might reconstitute her molecules into
the proper order so that when she woke up, she might not have any
injuries at all. I didn't know how that worked for sure, but it
would be better than leaving her here with only me for help.

See, I've been in this world for more years
than I'd been in my own. I'm not really an alien here anymore. If
I'm gonna die anywhere, and we all do someday, it might as well be
here where my wife and daughter lived and died.

Harley would be an alien where I was sending
her, but she'd adapt. I'd already taught her my world's history.
She'd do fine. I had, and she had a bit of me in that stubborn,
beautiful head of hers.

I held onto her hand until I felt the tingle
on her skin I remembered from my own trip all those years ago. I
watched her become translucent, and then finally shimmer out of
existence.

After she was gone, I rolled onto my back.
The sun was crawling higher up in the sky. Soon it would be hot out
here, but I didn't think I'd around long to see it.

The sky was blue overhead. The clouds that
would cover the sky for years wouldn't arrive for a couple of
months yet. Whether he'd meant to or not, Harley's daddy had helped
send her to a better place.