Hell on Earth (5 page)

North America unwound beneath the window like a quilt airing out on a sunny day. We were over the Mississippi, sinking lower, falling west, descending fast. Then we entered a cloud bank. We weren't there very long.

“I know where we are!” shouted Arlene, voice starting to sound funny from the breathing problem. I placed it too. We'd popped out of the cloud bank about 150 kilometers due west of Salt Lake City. The Bonneville salt flats were ideal for a landing—a vast, dry lake bed, nothing to hit but dirt. Very hard dirt. But we had a chance.

“Spill the fuel!” she screamed, right in my ear, straining against the buffeting. At least we were low enough that we could breathe. I yanked the lever, dumping what little JP-9 remained in the tanks.

The cabin was getting hot again, the structure of the rocket shaking like we were in a Mixmaster, and it was now or never. “Hold on!” I shouted, thinking how stupid it sounded but needing to say something.

Arlene screamed like a banshee—a much more insightful comment.

We came down fast and hard, finally striking the ground at Mach 0.5. The ship shredded on impact, skipping like a rock on the waters of a salt-white lake. Then it rolled, and Arlene's elbow jammed into my side so hard it knocked the breath out of me.

End over end we tumbled, and my brains, already fried, scrambled so I didn't know dirt from sky. We shed bits and pieces from the ship—only the titanium frame was left, but still we kept rolling.

The ship finally skidded to a stop, on its side, with me underneath Arlene.

For a good five minutes, felt like five hours, we lay silently, dazed, wondering if we had made it or not . . . waiting for the world to stop spinning.

“Are you all right?” Arlene managed to ask.

“I think we're alive,” I said.

The fuel was completely spent, which was just fine with me. No risk of fire or explosion. Now if we could just get out of the thing.

Fortunately, the door on Arlene's side wasn't jammed. In fact, it wasn't even with us anymore. Arlene stumbled out, falling heavily with a grunt. I followed somewhat more gracefully, which was a switch.

We'd suffered no injuries, thank God; I didn't want us to wind up sitting ducks. If aliens had taken over Utah—a belief held by one of my old nuns many years before the invasion—then we must be on our guard. Someone, or something, would come to find out what had just made a smoking hole in the salt lick.

We took a moment to enjoy being alive and in one piece, enjoying the dusk in Utah, breathing the best air we'd tasted in months. Then we took inventory. The food and water came through. But the weapons were trashed.

“You said we couldn't do it,” she teased me.

“Never listen to a pessimist,” I answered, adding, “and the world is so full of them you might as well give up.” She laughed as she playfully punched my arm, numbing me.

Astonishingly, Arlene's GPS wrist locator was still working. That was one tough piece of equipment! I thought maybe I should buy stock in the company; then I wondered whether any companies still existed. Maybe the monsters had done what no government was able to do: end all commerce and starve the survivors.

She sat cross-legged and fiddled with the thing, trying to get a fix on our exact position. The satellite should have responded immediately, spotting us within a meter or two.

“Getting anything?” I asked, listening to the symphony of white noise coming off her arm.

“Nada,” she said. “I'll bet the sat is still up there, but the Bad Guys must have encrypted the signal. Maybe so humans can't use them in combat.”

“I wish they were all as dumb as the demons,” I said.

“Yeah, one spidermind goes a long way. But who cares, Fly? We've beaten the odds again. We're alive, dammit!” She ran across the sand like a kid let loose at the beach. Then she gestured for me to join her. I ran over and grabbed at her. She threw me off balance and I took a tumble in the sand.

“Clumsy!” she said, sounding as young as she had when sleepwalking through her waking nightmare on Deimos; but now was a lot more pleasant.

“We don't have time for this, you know,” I said, but my heart wasn't it.

“We don't have time to be alive, or to breathe air. But here we are, still in one piece. God, I didn't think we were going to make it. We got down from orbit with nothing but spare parts, spit, and duct tape, and our bare hands—hah!”

“Frankly, my dear, I had my doubts,” I admitted. I couldn't help running after her. She was right. We kept coming through stuff that should have killed us twenty times over. We weren't indestructible, but I was beginning to believe in something I'd always hated: luck.

People who accomplish nothing in their lives always attribute the success of everybody else to good luck or knavery. I believe you make your own luck:
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” But in combat, there are too many random factors to calculate. Arlene and I were feeling cocky. We had plenty of reason to be thankful.

“I wonder what the radiation level is here,” I said.

“Do we have to know?” she asked, skipping. “It didn't look like any bombs were going off in this area.”

“Not while we were watching,” I pointed out.

“There's no reason to nuke a desert. It's already a wasteland.”

“You nuke military bases, Arlene. And don't forget the nuclear testing that's gone on in areas like this.”

“Human wars, Fly; and human preparation for war. Besides, we don't know for certain we were seeing nuclear weapons going off; they could be some other kind of weapon without fallout. Makes it easier to take over later.”

“Some of these beasties seem to thrive on radiation.”

She stopped playing in the sand and sat down. She didn't say anything at first, as she poured sand out of her right boot, but then had an answer for me as she began unlacing her left one: “The radiation levels on the base weren't healthy for humans, but they weren't anywhere near what you'd get from a full-scale nuclear exchange.”

The lady had a point. “You're probably right. You can thank me for going to such lengths to bring us down in this location.”

“Ha,” she said. “Pure luck. You brought us down where you could.”

“Skill and perseverance, dear lady. One of these days, I'll explain my theory of luck to you.”

F
or the moment, I was glad to join her, sitting in the sandbox. I ignored the little voice in the back of my head that worked overtime to keep us alive. It said we didn't have a moment to waste; the monsters of doom could be upon us any second, burning away our little victory faster than the setting sun.

Comes a time when you have to say the hell with it, if only for a moment. Arlene and I had recently faced the worst thing anyone can face, worse than the monsters or dying in space. We knew what it meant to lose your sanity . . . and come back to yourself again.

Arlene started whistling “Molly Malone.” She'd picked one of the few songs to which I knew the words. I sang along. All that was missing was a bottle of Tullamore Dew, the world's finest sipping whiskey. As it was, our duet seemed to transform the lengthening shadows of dusk in Utah into the cool glades of Ireland. I wondered if doom had come there. Were there demons in Dublin? Did the men there see little green leprechauns instead of Martians in their moment of madness? I wondered about the whole world, and it was too much for me.

Right now the world was a stretch of desert in Utah. What we could do for ourselves, for the human race,
for the world, would be determined here, as it had been on Deimos, and before that, Phobos. We'd take it one world at a time.

I lay back happily for a few moments, watching the stars wink into existence in the darkening sky.

As night fell, we spotted a glow, due east. That was the way to bet—Salt Lake City, I guessed. We gathered together what had survived the crash and followed the light. We took a break at nine
P.M
., another at midnight.

“How long do you think this is going to take?” she asked.

“Not sure, but I'm glad we brought the provisions.” The bag survived the crash just as nicely as we did. We had water. We had biscuits and granola bars. We had flashlights (which we wisely didn't use). But I sure as hell wished we had some weapons, other than one puny knife in the provisions bag.

We trekked at night and slept by day. Hell, I saw
Lawrence of Arabia.
After Phobos and Deimos and nearly splattering ourselves over old terra firma, after all we'd survived, I'd be damned if we were going to cash in our chips here. Hell, we could go to Nevada to do that!

The water held out better than the food. We huddled together in the cold during the day, when we slept. We could have made a fire, but no point giving away our location with unnecessary light. And there was one thing about the situation creepy enough to encourage caution, even though we hadn't run into any trouble yet.

Arlene was the first to notice it: “Fly, there are no sounds.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. We crunched along in the night, heading toward a glow that seemed barely bigger than it was three days ago.

“The night creatures. No owls . . .”

“Are there owls in the desert?”

“I don't know, maybe not. But there should be something. No bugs. No lizards. No nothin'.”

I thought about it. “If we've seen the collapse of civilization, you'd expect wild dogs.”

“There's no coyotes. Nothing. Even out here, there ought to be
something.
Unless everything was killed by the weapons.”

“No, that can't be right. We'd be puking up our guts by now from poison or radiation. That light suggests somebody's still in business.”

“I hope so,” she said. “So you think that's Salt Lake City.”

“Should be.”

“Salt Lake City,
Utah?”

“Unless it's wintering in Florida.”

She was silent for a hundred paces; then she cleared her throat. “Fly, I have to confess something to you. Again.”

“Anytime.”

“I sort of have a problem with the Mormon Church,” she said.

Making out her face in the dim light wasn't easy. I wished we had a full moon instead of the sliver hanging over us like a scythe. “You were a Mormon?” I asked.

“No. But my brother was, briefly.”

“You blame the church for . . . for whatever happened?”

She shook her head. “No, I guess not. He had problems before he joined the Church; had problems when he left.”

“Do you think he might be here?” I asked.

“Nah. We lived in North Hollywood. He left for Utah when he became a Mormon; but after he left the
Church, I don't know what became of him. I don't care if I ever see him again.”

“I'll never bring it up,” I said.

“There's another reason I'm telling you this,” she went on. “I became obsessed with Mormonism while he was with them. I read books by them and against them. I even read the Book of Mormon.”

“Maybe that could come in useful,” I suggested.

“I doubt it. It just makes me more prejudiced. Look, Fly, if we find living human beings at the end of this, we must stand with them and fight with them. I'm promising you right now I won't discuss religion with any of those patriarchal . . .”

She paused long enough for me to jump in: “I get the picture.”

“Do you have any opinions abut them?” she asked, quite fairly.

“Well, I read an article about them having a strong survivalist streak; that they stockpile a year's supply of food and stuff like that. You'll get a kick out of this! When I visited L.A. once, I took in the sights: Disneyland, the La Brea Tar Pits, Paramount studios, the Acker Mansion, and I even found time to go into their big temple at the end of Overland Avenue. There's an angel up top with a trumpet; I mistakenly called him Gabriel.”

“They must have loved that; it's the Angel Moroni.”

“Well,
now
I know.”

“Heh. I used to drop the
i
off that name when I used it.”

I took a deep breath. “Arlene, I'm going to hold you to that promise not to talk theology with them.”

“Scout's honor,” she said.

“Were you ever a Scout?”

She didn't answer again.

We kept the flashlights off; the glow on the horizon was the only illumination I wanted in that desert. It was easy to follow the direction at night. We made sure that we didn't waste opportunities.

“You're burning night-light,” Arlene would say when it was her turn to wake me up. Then she'd snicker. Something amused her, but she didn't let me in on it.

Turned out that we ran out of food, but we had more water than we needed. It took us five days to get to Salt Lake City, the center of what once had been the Mormon world. And by God, it still was!

We lay on our bellies in some brush, shielding out eyes from the sun, leaning against a side-paneled truck.

“They're people!” marveled Arlene as we watched hundreds of men on the streets in the early dawn. They relieved other men who'd obviously been doing the night shift.

“Where do you think the women are?” I whispered.

“Home, minding the kids. Mormons are so damned patriarchal.”

“Arlene . . .”

We were in a good spot to see plenty, behind a wrecked truck on a rise. As the sun crawled up the sky, shafts of light came through the broken windows like laser beams, one blinding me for a second. We positioned ourselves to see more. There was plenty to see.

The streets of this garrison town had over a thousand men with guns, and to my surprise I made out a few women and teenage girls toting heavy artillery. Arlene gave me one of her funny looks.

I didn't make her take back anything she'd said; when a society is threatened, it will do what it must or go down fast.