The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (49 page)

The log is ramming against me. I slam on the brake.

Take both hands and shove it out. With every particle of force I got.

It backs off and then heads around and slips in front of the hood, bumping the grill just once.

ANGEL

Like it had come to do its job and was finished and now went off to do something else.

SUSAN

Muddy, my arms hurting. I scramble back in the truck with the murmur of the water all around us. Angry with us now. Wanting us.

Bud makes the truck roar, and we lurch into a hole and out of it and up. The water gurgles at us in its fuming, stinking rage.

I check Gene and the power cells, they are dead.

He is heating up.

Not fast, but it will wake him. They say even in the solution he’s floating in, they can come out of dreams and start to feel again. To hurt.

I yell at Bud that we got to find power cells.

“Those’re not just ordinary batteries, y’know,” he says.

“There’re some at DataComm,” I tell him.

We come wallowing up from the gum-yellow water and onto the highway.

GENE

Sleeping…slowly…I can still feel…only in sluggish…moments…moments…not true sleep but a drifting, aimless dreaming…faint tugs and ripples…hollow sounds…. I am underwater and drowning…but don’t care…don’t breathe…. Spongy stuff fills my lungs…easier to rest them…floating in snowflakes…a watery winter…but knocking comes…goes…jolts…slips away before I can remember what it means…. Hardest…yes…hardest thing is to remember the secret…so when I am in touch again…DataComm will know…what I learned…when the C31 crashed…when I learned…. It is hard to clutch onto the slippery, shiny fact…in a marsh of slick, soft bubbles…silvery as air…winking ruby-red behind my eyelids…. Must snag the secret…a hard fact like shiny steel in the spongy moist warmness…. Hold it to me…. Something knocks my side…a thumping…. I am sick…. Hold the steel secret…keep….

MC
355

The megatonnage in the Soviet assault exploded low—ground-pounders, in the jargon. This caused huge fires, MC355’s simulation showed. A pall of soot rose, blanketing Texas and the South, then diffusing outward on global circulation patterns.

Within a few days, temperatures dropped from balmy summer to near-freezing. In the Gulf region where MC355 lay, the warm ocean continued to feed heat and moisture into the marine boundary layer near the shore. Cold winds rammed into this water-laden air, spawning great roiling storms and deep snows. Thick stratus clouds shrouded the land for at least a hundred kilometers inland.

All this explained why MC355’s extended feelers had met chaos and destruction. And why there were no local radio broadcasts. What the ElectroMagnetic Pulse did not destroy, the storms did.

The remaining large questions were whether the war had gone on, and if any humans survived in the area at all.

MR. ACKERMAN

I’d had more than enough of this time. The girl Susan had gone mad right in front of us, and we’d damn near all drowned getting across.

“I think we ought to get back as soon’s we can,” I said to Bud when we stopped to rest on the other side.

“We got to deliver the boy.”

“It’s too disrupted down this way. I figured on people here, some civilization.”

“Somethin’ got ’em.”

“The bomb.”

“Got to find cells for the man in the box.”

“He’s near dead.”

“Too many gone already. Should save one if we can.”

“We got to look after our own.”

Bud shrugged, and I could see I wasn’t going to get far with him. So I said to Angel, “The boy’s not worth running such risks. Or this corpse.”

ANGEL

I didn’t like Ackerman before the war, and even less afterward, so when he started hinting that maybe we should shoot back up north and ditch the boy and Susan and the man in there, I let him have it. From the look on Bud’s face, I knew he felt the same way. I spat out a real choice set of words I’d heard my father use once on a grain buyer who’d weaseled out of a deal, stuff I’d been saving for years, and I do say it felt
good
.

TURKEY

So we run down the east side of the bay, feeling released to be quit of the city and the water, and heading down into some of the finest country in all the South. Through Daphne and Montrose and into Fairhope, the moss hanging on the trees and now and then actual sunshine slanting golden through the green of huge old mimosas.

We’re jammed into the truck bed, hunkered down because the wind whipping by has some sting to it. The big purple clouds are blowing south now.

Still no people. Not that Bud slows down to search good.

Bones of cattle in the fields, though. I been seeing them so much now I hardly take notice anymore.

There’s a silence here so deep that the wind streaming through the pines seems loud. I don’t like it, to come so far and see nobody. I keep my paper bag close.

Fairhope’s a pretty town, big oaks leaning out over the streets and a long pier down at the bay with a park where you can go cast fishing. I’ve always liked it here, intended to move down until the prices shot up so much.

We went by some stores with windows smashed in, and that’s when we saw the man.

ANGEL

He was waiting for us. Standing beside the street, in jeans and a floppy yellow shirt all grimy and not tucked in. I waved at him the instant I saw him, and he waved back. I yelled, excited, but he didn’t say anything.

Bud screeched on the brakes. I jumped down and went around the tail of the truck. Johnny followed me.

The man was skinny as a rail and leaning against a telephone pole. A long, scraggly beard hid his face, but the eyes beamed out at us, seeming to pick up the sunlight.

“Hello!” I said again.

“Kiss.” That was all.

“We came from…” and my voice trailed off because the man pointed at me.

“Kiss.”

MR. ACKERMAN

I followed Angel and could tell right away the man was suffering from malnutrition. The clothes hung off him.

“Can you give us information?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, why not, friend? We’ve come looking for the parents of—”

“Kiss first.”

I stepped back. “Well, now, you have no right to demand—”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bud had gotten out of the cab and stopped and was going back in now, probably for his gun. I decided to save the situation before somebody got hurt.

“Angel, go over to him and speak nicely to him. We need—”

“Kiss now.”

The man pointed again with a bony finger.

Angel said, “I’m not going to go—” and stopped because the man’s hand went down to his belt. He pulled up the filthy yellow shirt to reveal a pistol tucked in his belt.

“Kiss.”

“Now friend, we can—”

The man’s hand came up with the pistol and reached level, pointing at us.

“Pussy.”

Then his head blew into a halo of blood.

BUD

Damn if the one time I needed it, I left it in the cab.

I was still fetching it out when the shot went off.

Then another.

TURKEY

A man shows you his weapon in his hand, he’s a fool if he doesn’t mean to use it.

I drew out the pistol I’d been carrying in my pocket all this time, wrapped in plastic. I got it out of the damned bag pretty quick while the man was looking crazy-eyed at Angel and bringing his piece up.

It was no trouble at all to fix him in the notch. Couldn’t have been more than thirty feet.

But going down he gets one off, and I feel like somebody pushed at my left calf. Then I’m rolling. Drop my pistol, too. I end up smack facedown on the hardtop, not feeling anything yet.

ANGEL

I like to died when the man flopped down, so sudden I thought he’d slipped, until then the bang registered.

I rushed over, but Turkey shouted, “Don’t touch him.”

Mr. Ackerman said, “You idiot! That man could’ve told us—”

“Told nothing,” Turkey said. “He’s crazy.”

Then I notice Turkey’s down, too. Susan is working on him, rolling up his jeans. It’s gone clean through his big muscle there.

Bud went to get a stick. Poked the man from a safe distance. Managed to pull his shirt aside. We could see the sores all over his chest. Something terrible it looked.

Mr. Ackerman was swearing and calling us idiots until we saw that. Then he shut up.

TURKEY

Must admit it felt good. First time in years anybody ever admitted I was right.

Paid back for the pain. Dull, heavy ache it was, spreading. Susan gives me a shot and a pill and has me bandaged up tight. Blood stopped easy, she says. I clot good.

We decided to get out of there, not stopping to look for Johnny’s parents.

We got three blocks before the way was blocked.

It was a big metal cylinder, fractured on all sides. Glass glittering around it.

Right in the street. You can see where it hit the roof of a clothing store, Bedsole’s, caved in the front of it and rolled into the street.

They all get out and have a look, me sitting in the cab. I see the Russian writing again on the end of it.

I don’t know much, but I can make out at the top CeKPeT and a lot of words that look like warning, including σO’πeH, which is
sick
, and some more I didn’t know, and then II O OΓO’
H
, which is
weather
.

“What’s it say?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

“That word at the top there’s
secret
, and then something about biology and sickness and rain and weather.”

“I thought you
knew
this writing,” he says.

I shook my head. “I know enough.”

“Enough to what?”

“To know this was some kind of targeted capsule. It fell right smack in the middle of Fairhope, biggest town this side of the bay.”

“Like the other one?” Johnny says, which surprised me. The boy is smart.

“The one hit the causeway? Right.”

“One
what
?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

I don’t want to say it with the boy there and all, but it has to come out sometime. “Some disease. Biological warfare.”

They stand there in the middle of Prospect Avenue with open, silent nothingness around us, and nobody says anything for the longest time. There won’t be any prospects here for a long time. Johnny’s parents we aren’t going to find, nobody we’ll find, because whatever came spurting out of this capsule when it busted open—up high, no doubt, so the wind could take it—had done its work.

Angel sees it right off. “Must’ve been time for them to get inside,” is all she says, but she’s thinking the same as me.

It got them into such a state that they went home and holed up to die, like an animal will. Maybe it would be different in the North or the West—people are funny out there, they might just as soon sprawl across the sidewalk—but down here people’s first thought is home, the family, the only thing that might pull them through. So they went there and they didn’t come out again.

Mr. Ackerman says, “But there’s no smell,” which was stupid because that made it all real to the boy, and he starts to cry. I pick him up.

JOHNNY

’Cause that means they’re all gone, what I been fearing ever since we crossed the causeway, and nobody’s there, it’s true, Mom Dad nobody at all anywhere just emptiness all gone.

MC
355

The success of the portable unit makes MC355 bold.

It extrudes more sensors and finds not the racing blizzard winds of months before but rather warming breezes, the soft sigh of pines, a low drone of reawakening insects.

There was no nuclear winter.

Instead, a kind of nuclear autumn.

The swirling jet streams have damped, the stinging ultraviolet gone. The storms retreat, the cold surge has passed. But the electromagnetic spectrum lies bare, a muted hiss. The EMP silenced man’s signals, yes.

Opticals, fitted with new lenses, scan the night sky. Twinkling dots scoot across the blackness, scurrying on their Newtonian rounds.

The Arcapel Colony.

Russphere.

US1.

All intact. So they at least have survived.

Unless they were riddled by buckshot-slinging antisatellite devices. But, no—the inflated storage sphere hinged beside the US1 is undeflated, unbreached.

So man still lives in space, at least.

MR. ACKERMAN

Crazy, I thought, to go out looking for this DataComm when everybody’s
dead
. Just the merest step inside one of the houses proved that.

But they wouldn’t listen to me. Those who would respectfully fall silent when I spoke now ride over my words as if I weren’t there.

All because of that stupid incident with the sick one. He must have taken longer to die. I couldn’t have anticipated that. He just seemed hungry to me.

It’s enough to gall a man.

ANGEL

The boy is calm now, just kind of tucked into himself. He knows what’s happened to his mom and dad. Takes his mind off his hurt, anyway. He bows his head down, his long dirty-blond hair hiding his expression. He leans against Turkey and they talk. I can see them through the back cab window.

In amongst all we’ve seen, I suspect it doesn’t come through to him full yet. It will take a while. We’ll all take a while.

We head out from Fairhope quick as we can. Not that anyplace else is different. The germs must’ve spread twenty, thirty mile inland from here. Which is why we seen nobody before who’d heard of it. Anybody close enough to know is gone.

Susan’s the only one it doesn’t seem to bother. She keeps crooning to that box.

Through Silverhill and on to Robertsdale. Same everywhere—no dogs bark, cattle bones drying in the fields.

We don’t go into the houses.

Turn south toward Foley. They put this DataComm in the most inconspicuous place, I guess because secrets are hard to keep in cities. Anyway, it’s in a pine grove south of Foley land good for soybeans and potatoes.