Earthbound

14

Everybody was dead tired when we came to an overpass and Paul suggested we take one short break, out of the afternoon sun, and then press on till dark. We flopped down and I heard Paul and Namir agreeing that we shouldn’t take the state road that passed overhead. It followed a winding route to the sea in one direction and back to Oregon in the other.

Spy began to squat in his Buddha style, but then stood up straight. “Trouble,” he said, and disappeared with a pop.

“Hey, come back,” Roz said. My sentiment, too.

“Lock and load everything,” Namir said. I jacked a round into the chamber of my assault rifle and took the little pistol from my knapsack, cocked it, and stuck it in my belt. My hands started to shake, and I couldn’t catch my breath.

“Roz,” he said, “tell Hermosa to climb up to the road overhead and hide.”

“Might be too steep,” she said. I’d never make it myself. Not even when I was twelve. The little girl obediently scrambled up, but slid back.

She didn’t have time for a second try. There was a soft whirring sound, and from around the curve a line of black-clad men on bicycles rolled toward us. One in the middle blew a whistle, and they slowed to a stop, staying in line.

There were nine of them. Three had new-looking bikes with luminous CA HIWAY PATROL shields in front. The other six bikes looked random and stolen.

They all seemed to have pistols, and two of the three official bikes had rifle scabbards. They got off the bikes almost in unison and stood by them. The one with a silver whistle on a chain had a large automatic weapon in an awkward-looking holster. He left his bike parked and stepped forward with his hand on the butt of the weapon. “We’re the California—”

“We don’t care,” Namir snapped. “You have no authority over us, and we have you outgunned. Just pedal on, and there won’t be any trouble.” I’d never heard him use that tone before. Very military and alpha-male.

Even with Namir’s weapon pointed toward him, the leader stood his ground. “You don’t want to do this. You couldn’t take on nine men with body armor, even if you did have more guns.”

Namir raised his weapon higher and pointed it at the man’s face. “Turn around and go.”

“No son policía,” Hermosa said in a squeaky voice, and pointed past the leader. She said a couple of names.

I’m not sure quite what happened then, and in what order. One or two of them fired, and both Hermosa and Roz crumpled. The leader had his gun out of the holster and fired, I think into the ground, as a blast from Namir’s weapon tore half his head off. His helmet spun away, and before it hit the ground everyone was shooting.

I had the pistol out and held it the way they’d shown me, both hands, but I wasn’t aiming, just pulling the trigger as fast as I could, pointing at the black-clad men, most of whom had dived to the ground and were firing from a prone position. When the pistol was empty, I threw it down and raised the rifle.

Sharp sting in my left thigh and I fell down backwards, rifle clattering away. I curled into a ball, clutching the wound. There was a lot of blood, and I was peeing, too. I might have been screaming, but all I remember is gunfire and then a big explosion, and silence.

Roz was still alive, though she had a long wide wound to her face; she’d managed to dig that hand grenade out of her bag and throw it at the bikes.

Only one of the enemy was still standing, staggering, and Namir cut him down when he raised his rifle to aim. Or perhaps to surrender. The others were lying on the ground, still or writhing in pain. With her good arm, Elza took a pistol from the closest dead one and walked among them, shooting each one once in the head. The expression on her face was stony and terrible.

I kicked off my sandals and pulled down my pants, already sodden with blood. Blood from the wound was flowing freely but not spurting. The bullet had missed my vagina by two finger widths. A shallow rip about three inches long.

“Put this on it.” Dustin was holding out a thick white bandage with ribbons hanging from four corners. I pressed it to the wound while he laced the ribbons around and tied them tight. I should have made some sexual joke but was busy trying to keep my lunch down. He pressed an ampoule into my thigh below the wound.

“Okay. Lie back and rest, try to rest.”

“Where’s Paul?” I was starting to drift.

He shook his head. “Don’t know.” I got up on one elbow but it gave way. Dustin eased me back, and I blacked out.

When I woke it was cooler and growing dark. Elza was smoothing a patch onto the back of my hand, some sort of quick stim. Blood pounded in my ears, and I saw sparkles flare and dim.

“We have to move,” she said. “I’d like to let you sleep.”

“Paul?” I said.

She chewed her lower lip. “He’s alive, Carmen. Just.”

I felt light; insubstantial, like zero gee. Maybe like a ghost. I stood up and fought dizziness. I could feel stitches pulling on the wound in my thigh, and the grip of fleshtape, but it didn’t hurt. Just cold underneath the skin.

Elza stroked the back of my head, patting my short hair. It had grown out enough to make me look like a boy instead of a baldie. When had I last looked in a mirror?

There was a pile of black-clad bodies and a small grave. A shovel was stuck in the soft dirt. Waiting?

Dustin sat with crossed legs next to Paul, who was stretched out on a sheet of dark plastic lettered CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL. When I got closer I saw that the plastic was really light green. The darkness was blood, dried or clotting.

Paul was shirtless, a thick wad of bandage taped over his chest, and his right hand was hidden inside another blood-soaked wad. Forehead wrapped in fresh white gauze.

Only the whites of his eyes showed. His breathing was a quiet, labored rasp.

Namir came up beside me and stood close, not touching. “It’s a wonder he’s alive,” he whispered. “A bullet went completely through his chest and out the back.”

“The head wound?” I said, feeling horribly detached. The man I love is dying?

“Might be a skull fracture.” I couldn’t ask about the hand.

“Shall I try to wake him up?” Elza said.

“Let him rest,” I said. “If he’s going to die, let him go.” Words I didn’t want to say but couldn’t take back.

“We have to get out of the open,” Namir said. “Roz found a place a couple of hundred meters down the road.”

I looked around. Not a good place to spend the night, the road in a tight loop. People could sneak up from both sides and overhead.

The sun was setting in a brilliant swirl of scarlet and orange and purple. “Could I be with him for just a minute? Alone with him.”

The three of them moved quietly away. I heard someone gathering hardware.

The skin of his face was cold and wet, but his forehead was warm. I touched his eyelids but got no reaction. They stayed closed.

He made a noise in his throat, like an “R.” My name? I said his name, and he took a breath and made the sound again. He opened one eye and tipped his head slightly toward me. “Arm,” he whispered. “Be?”

That was a lot better than nothing. “You’ll be all right,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “We have to move you. Get out of the open.”

He nodded slightly and closed his eyes.

Namir and Dustin helped me carry him, using the plastic sheet as a floppy stretcher. We had to rest twice, but managed to haul him up the road and over a concrete berm, to where Elza was standing guard. Roz was asleep in the weedy grass, and didn’t wake up when we settled Paul next to her.

“Check your leg,” Dustin said. I took off my trousers, and he and Elza studied my crotch more carefully than anyone had done in a while.

“Not my best work,” Elza said, carefully tracing the line of the stitches. She licked her thumb and rubbed dried blood away. It was still numb. “Might have to be redone by a real doctor someday.” If someday ever comes.

The stim still had me tingling, though from the heaviness in my arms and legs I knew I was headed for a crash landing when it wore off. So Elza let me take over for the first guard watch, while I was still wide-eyed.

As soon as it was fully dark, I could hear scavengers of some kind down by the pile of bodies. I hoped all the fresh meat lying around would keep them from digging up the grave.

But did it really make any difference? Wolves above the ground or worms below. I tried to get that out of my mind.

That poor little girl, who came to us for protection. Welcome to the Carmen Dula good-luck streak. What had Card said? Maybe it wasn’t Mars… maybe you’re to blame for the whole fucking shooting match. Though it was starting to feel more like a shooting gallery than a match, the targets falling two by two.

My raw right hand still felt the pumping recoil of the pistol; the web of my thumb was skinned where the slide had rubbed over it.

I heard claws rattle on the pavement below me, then stop. A dog or a wolf was looking up at me in the darkness. I pushed the safety knob forward, and after that quiet click the claws moved on.

They knew we were here. But they weren’t hungry. Not yet.

Namir relieved me at ten o’clock. Paul was conscious and talking quietly, breathing without trouble. I slept straight through till Roz woke me at six. Like good little soldiers, we cleaned and inspected our weapons. Check the action but don’t carry a round in the chamber. Irrelevant to Namir himself, with his double-barreled shotgun always ready.

(When the bikers attacked, I hadn’t gone for my own assault rifle, strapped across my back. I had the pistol in my hand and just emptied it, and then stood there like a target while I fumbled with the rifle. The bullet that hit me might have saved my life, since it put me flat on the ground before Roz’s grenade went off. All the shrapnel went over my head.)

We dined on crunchy dried rations. There was a temporary toilet-paper crisis, solved by Ronald Reagan.

“Another perfect day in paradise,” Paul groaned when he woke, blinking up at the unbroken blue sky. “Have we decided who’s going, who’s staying?”

“Only Roz and I are comfortable with horses,” Namir said. Someone had to fetch a horse and cart from Funny Farm, to carry Paul.

“I guess you ought to go,” Paul said. “Dustin and the girls can protect me.”

“Girls,” I said. “We’ll bake him some fucking cookies.”

“Leave this with you,” Namir said, setting the riot gun down next to him. He rattled the box of shells. “Don’t spend them all in one place.”

Elza had the light machine gun and two short belts of ammunition. She held up a belt, and he shook his head, no. “Just a pistol. I’m not getting into any gun battles.” He hoped.

He looked at the sun. “Eight hours there, maybe three back, depending on the horse situation.”

“And whether you get lost,” Roz said. Without a native guide.

“Straightforward enough. I’ll stay close to the road.”

“Stop if it gets dark,” I said, unnecessarily.

“Be back before that,” he said without conviction. He pulled his rucksack straps tight and squeezed my arm. “Take care.”

He turned into the woods and disappeared.

We decided to keep the two-hour guard interval, with one of us standing watch at the top of the berm, looking down the road toward the bodies, and another hiding up the road in the other direction.

I did that one first, lying behind some thick brush that gave me a clear line of sight down to the road. Saw two squirrels and heard others arguing overhead. No birds. I passed the time making letters and even whole words out of the random lines presented by the clutter of stems and branches in front of me. THIT THIT, one area lisped, and I could but agree.

Roz eventually came to relieve me, her face looking a little better. She’d taken off the emergency fleshtape and cleaned the line of stitches and then re-applied new fleshtape more evenly. Still a bad rip from eye to chin, and she had to drink through a straw. She offered her thermos to me, a harsh mixture of tepid instant coffee and rum. Not my usual before-lunch pick-me-up, but memorable.

Dustin was stretched out on top of the berm, looking down over the machine-gun sights at the pile of bodies, which was not as orderly as it had been. When I got up to where he was, I could smell them, a slight whiff of rot.

“Wait till they’ve been in the sun all day,” he said. He handed me the hourglass contraption and adjusted the figure-eight sling, grimacing.

“Any of those wolves?”

“Dogs, I think, but no. Not since it got light.” He put his hand lightly on top of the gun. “I guess Namir told you, it’s a hair trigger. Just tap it and get off, that’ll be two or three shots.”

I looked at the two belts beside it. “And we only have, what, fifty?”

“Actually forty-eight. You could burn it all up in a few seconds.”

“I’ll be careful.” Namir had emphasized that it was mainly a psychological weapon, to make us seem more powerful than we were. “It’s cocked?”

“Ready to go. Don’t touch it till you can see the whites of their eyes.” I think that was some kind of a joke. But how close would that be? Besides, it’s California; the natives all wear sunglasses.

Maybe I would fire when they were close enough to hit.

I wondered whether I had killed anyone yesterday, blasting away at random. If it was important, I could go down and look at all the bodies. See if anyone had been felled by a single tiny shot.

That was a topic that had come up now and then on the starship. Namir was obviously bothered by it, having killed a carload of people as a young soldier, and more than a dozen more later in life. (He had never told me this, but had admitted it to Elza one drunken night. It was not official spy business for Mossad, but personal revenge just after Gehenna. In one day, he tracked down and killed eleven enemies with bare hands or a knife, and six more later.)

None of the rest of us had had anything like that experience, though Elza and Dustin were supposedly skilled in the art and craft of murder, and Paul had gone through basic training, and learned about bayonets and hand-to-hand fighting and all. Namir said a single killing changed you forever, separated you from the rest of the human race with a silent barrier. One time he wondered whether it was like motherhood—an experience that was common and yet so profound that having it or not divided the race into two species.

Our philosopher Dustin pointed out that both actions gave humans powers that normally are reserved for gods: giving life and taking it.

So was I a god yet? Or did it only count if you were sure you had done it, and what if you thought you had done it but hadn’t? At least that didn’t happen in childbirth. Did I leave a baby around here somewhere? Well, my own status as a mother was problematic.

The carrion birds who were feeding on the pile took off with a confused clash of heavy wings. I didn’t see anything. My finger moved closer to the hair trigger as I willed myself not to touch it, not yet.

Then I was touching. Just enough to feel the cold of it. I shifted slightly, so the barrel was lined up with the darkness under the underpass.

The shadow moved and a shape inched into the sun. Not a wolf, too big.

A bear, its brown fur coppery in the sun. It looked left and right, then waddled directly toward the pile of bodies. Then it—she—looked back toward the shadow, and two cubs came out in a line.

Feeding time at the zoo. She went to a body that was lying separate from the others, and flipped it over with one pat. It didn’t have much of a face, and its belly was open, guts trailing. She tore at the clothes and got the pants halfway down and ripped away at the meat. She ate a little, but mainly seemed to be flensing it for the cubs, pulling out strips of gray-and-red flesh. There wasn’t as much blood as you would expect.

The cubs rolled around, playing with their lunch, and would have been cute in another context. The mother left them, stepped up to the top of the pile of bodies, and looked around.

She looked straight at me.

I couldn’t breathe. Should I just shoot? How fast can a bear charge?

She growled, loud and scary, and shook her huge head, and turned to look at the cubs.

I heard someone creeping up behind me. If it was another bear, it was a little one.

“What the fuck?” Dustin whispered, philosophically. “Are there bears here?”

“Three, anyhow. You left Paul?”

“He’s awake. Has the riot gun.” He set his own rifle down silently, parallel to mine, and crouched low. “I don’t suppose they’re going anywhere soon.”

“Not unless something bigger comes along.”

His gun was a fancy sporting model with a big telescopic sight. He peered through it and clicked something twice, not electronic.

“Don’t shoot.”

“Won’t unless we have to. Try a head shot if we do.”

“Probably bounce off.” As if to demonstrate something, she closed her jaws around a body’s head, evidently trying to crack the skull. But he was wearing a hard plastic bike helmet, and she tossed him away. The next one cracked like a walnut.

“I guess we’re safe as long as she has all that food,” Dustin said, still peering through the sight.

I wasn’t so sure. “They’re predators, not scavengers. If she knew we were up here, she might attack.”

“Would she?”

“How the hell should I know? We didn’t have bears on Mars.”

“Didn’t used to have them here. Except on the flag.”

“What?” Stars and stripes and a bear?

“California state flag. I guess they were here in the old days.”

I had a chill. “Namir will be coming back this way, with the horse. He’ll be using the road.”

“That’s some time from now. Maybe they’ll eat their fill and move on.”

“Why should they?” How fastidious could they be? Momma, this one tastes bad. Shut up and clean your plate.

I shifted my weight and was rewarded with a sharp stab of pain in my thigh.

“What?”

“Painkiller’s wearing off. My leg.”

“Kit’s down by Paul. I’ll keep an eye on this.”

“Thanks.” I tried to inch away silently, but the underbrush made little scraping noises. When I was far enough down the berm, I stood up slowly. Dustin looked back and nodded.

My head spun and I lurched, limping, down to the first-aid kit. Paul had rolled onto one elbow, holding the shotgun up at an angle. He waved a salute. “What’s the commotion?”

“Bears down on the road. You’re feeling better?”

“Weak. Couldn’t outrun a bear.”

“Me, neither.” I found the box of Anodyne ampoules and read the instructions. Not more than two in one twenty-four-hour period. Unless you’re in a plane wreck and get shot by bicycle gangers. Then you can take all you want.

I sat down and wriggled out of my pants and popped the ampoule near the wound.

“Could I have some?” Paul said, and for a mad moment I thought he was talking about what I had just exposed.

“When did you last have one?”

He touched the head bandage gingerly. “Guess it’s too soon. How’s your leg?”

“Good thing I have two.” I pulled my pants back up and sat next to him, stroking his arm. “Should you be sitting up?”

“Yeah. Maybe not.” He flopped back down. I went over to the pack pile and picked up the extra assault rifle. It already had a round chambered, which would probably get me flogged in Namir’s army. Go ahead, I can take it. I get shot in the crotch and come back for more. Chew up the bullets with my—

“Hello, again.” Spy had materialized between me and Paul. This time he looked like he’d been dipped in dark green plastic, less conspicuous.

It took me a moment to find my voice. “Are you always going to disappear when we need you most?”

“I have no control over that. As I told you.”

“You know what happened while you were gone?”

“Yes. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help. I could have drawn their fire, at least, and returned it, like last time.”

“Do you know anything about bears?”

“Of course I do. You don’t have to worry about the ones on the road.”

“The big one looks pretty formidable.”

“Don’t worry about her.”

There was a sudden blast of gunfire, and I dove to the ground. Then another. It was coming from the berm where I’d just left Dustin.

Spy hadn’t moved. “Poor bear.”

I staggered back to my feet and limped up the berm, pulse hammering. Stringent powder smell.

Dustin was stretched out prone, rigid, sighting through the rifle-scope. A curl of blue smoke blew away from the muzzle.

The adult bear was lying inert on the slope coming up from the pavement. It had covered about half the distance before it fell.

The two cubs were sitting on the road, looking up at us.

“Don’t go down yet,” Dustin said without looking up.

“What happened?”

“She heard us or smelled us or something. Charged straight up the hill.”

“Spy knew it was going to happen.”

“I wasn’t surprised, myself.” He looked back at me. “What do you mean, ‘Spy’?”

He walked up next to me. “Hello, Dustin.”

“You just come and go as you please, don’t you?”

“No. As I was telling Carmen, I don’t have any control over it. I’m here, and then I’m nowhere for an instant, and then I’m back here, with something like a memory of what happened while I was away.”

“Not a ‘memory,’ ” I said. “Just ‘something like’ one.”

“Don’t I always speak carefully, Carmen? I can’t say the word exactly in English, or any other human language, but ‘memory’ is close.”

Dustin stood up with the rifle. “Better go check the bear.”

“Don’t worry. It’s dead.”

“You knew that before it happened,” I said.

“Not really. I suppose you might say ‘premonition.’ But really it’s no more supernatural than statistics. As we came closer in space-time to the bear’s death, it became more and more clear to me that the bear was going to die.”

I felt suddenly cold. “You knew back then. You disappeared at the overpass. Just before the gangers killed the little girl.”

“I did not know. Not exactly. Just before I went away, I had a feeling of certainty that death was on its way. Who or when, I didn’t know. Then I was gone.”

“Where?” Dustin said.

“I don’t know; everything goes dark for a while. I assume it’s like sleeping is for humans. But I’ve never slept.”

“You had this feeling,” I said, “but you didn’t say anything to us about it.”

“He did, though,” Dustin said. “You told us to watch out or something.”

“I said ‘trouble.’ Then everything went black. That’s when I disappeared, to you.”

“Like the Others wanted to get you out of harm’s way,” I said.

“That’s not it.” He gave me a peculiar searching look. “They don’t care any more about me than they do about you. Maybe less; if they lose me, they can make a new one.”

“Did you have a premonition back then?” Dustin said. “Like, ‘watch out; there’s a bunch of gangers on bikes headed this way’?”

“Not that specific. I did know… what I was about to say… was that danger was coming; death was coming. I knew it was an outside agency.”

“But the Others snatched you away before you could warn us,” I said.

“He did start to.”

“I wonder,” Spy said. “Another few seconds, and I might have realized we had to get off the road. We might have escaped their notice.”

He raised both hands in a human gesture, frustration or helplessness. “There are things I can’t know about the Others. It’s like… as if you made a human avatar, a robot, and gave it no sense of smell or taste… and then wired it so it couldn’t use the future tense, the subjunctive mood. That’s how handicapped I am, from their point of view. As if I knew that smell and taste existed, but had no experience of them and no vocabulary to describe them.”

“And the future-tense thing?” Dustin said.

“It’s not that they know the future, one hundred percent. But nothing ever surprises them, no matter how unlikely.”

“And you’re sort of like that,” I said.

He shrugged. “More so than you.”

“So what about tomorrow?” Dustin said. “We’ll make it to the farm?”

He shook his head and looked down the slope. The cubs were poking at their mother, trying to rouse her.

“I don’t know. I didn’t know there would be bears.”