Earthbound

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 for 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?”

“Because it’s there?”

“Some version of that. The challenge.”

“Plunder,” I said.

“What?”

“They are pirates; you called them that. They want plunder, treasure. Funny Farm has the equivalent of gold and pieces of eight. Ammunition and food.”

“Alcohol and women,” he said. “And all this low technology, if they’ve thought that far. Lights and machinery that work without power.”

It had become too dark to see the shelf. I reached out and touched the rifle magazines, the box of pistol cartridges, the machine gun’s ammo box, with the long belt protruding. A short belt, nineteen rounds, was already locked and loaded.

He could tell what I was doing. “How do you feel about reloading the machine gun in the dark?”

“Rather you do it.”

“Okay.” He stepped around me and picked up the weapon and its plastic box. Propped it next to him and peered out into the gathering dark. “If they’re smart, they’re sleeping now. Rest up and hit us a few hours after midnight. Meanwhile, send out decoys now and then to keep us nervous and burn up our ammo.

“They could do that for days,” I said.

“And they might, if they were a well-organized army. I think they’re itching for action and their leaders, if they have leaders, know they’ll be losing people every day. They’ll hit tonight. The only question is how long will they wait?”

As if in answer, one shot on the other side. I faintly heard a male voice, maybe Wham-O, saying, “Don’t!” There was no return fire.

“Flash suppressor,” Namir said, and I checked mine, though I remembered sliding it into place.

“Don’t start without us,” Elza said from the ladder. She crawled up onto the floor, and Dustin handed up two rifles and followed her.

“What do you think?” he said, panting.

Another shot on the other side. “I think ‘lock and load.’” Sound of greased metal, rifles being cocked. I heard Namir move the machine gun around, rattle and sweep of its ammunition belt. “This machine gun, we’ll wait for clear targets. Every fourth round’s a tracer.” We knew that, of course. It would draw attention.

“Dustin, you do bursts of three. The rest of us go single-shot for the time being?” His voice was calm, except for an edge that wasn’t fear. He was looking forward to it, in his way.

He once told me that up to a certain point, every battle you survive makes the next one easier. But everyone had a limit. Once you’ve cracked, you are like a pot that has cracked. Not very useful.

Maybe some of us were different. Maybe we started out cracked.

Another shot, and then another. My mouth and throat went dry, and I concentrated on keeping my nether parts the same.

I heard Elza unscrew a bottle and smelled sweet wine. “Here, Carmen.” It helped my throat a little, but my stomach was a knot.

Just get on with it. Please just do it. I suddenly realized that the people in the woods must feel the same way. You may not want it to happen, but even more, you don’t want to wait any longer.

“Places,” Namir said. “Carmen, come up to my left.” For a panicked moment, I couldn’t remember which was which. “Dustin, Elza, magazines on the shelf at waist height. Five or six?”

They moved into place, and I could hear them counting with their hands. They murmured assent, and the wind brought the smell of powder.

There was a loud deep pound, a shotgun, and someone screamed in pain, “My hand! My hand!”

Then the gunfire started crackling, that dreadful popcorn sound. “Hold fire,” Namir said conversationally. “Let them waste it.”

There was a loud thump, and then three more, as bullets struck our walls. They were thick split logs on the sides that faced out. “Hope they don’t have anything bigger,” Dustin said. Thanks.

“Give me the pistol, Carmen,” Namir said. “Guy right down on the edge.” I should’ve thought to close my eyes. Under our roof it was darker than night. When the pistol went off, it was a bright blue flash, and I was blind except for the strobe image of Namir aiming down.

“Think I got him. Can you see, Carmen?”

“Not yet.”

“I can,” Dustin said, and I heard him shuffle over to Namir’s window.

“By the main door, the side facing us.”

“Yeah, I see. Not moving.” Someone fired a long burst in our direction; I felt Dustin duck as it stuttered on the walls. One round came through the slot and banged into the metal roof. “Shit,” he whispered. His head could’ve been there.

Or mine. The wine surged up and I swallowed it back, then drank half a canteen of water on top of it. Just don’t puke. Do, my body answered. I wasn’t going to stick my head out the window, but I made it to the door, and decorated the ladder.

“Thanks for waiting,” Dustin said. Elza handed me a towel that smelled of sweat, but I managed not to barf again. Sat back and picked up the heavy rifle and held the cold metal to my cheek for a moment, smell of gun oil and powder.

“I’ll be okay,” I said to no one, and no one believed me.

There was a loud explosion to the left and a sudden yellow glare. “Fire bomb, damn!” Namir said.

I scooted over on my butt and crouched up far enough to see the flames. The double door in the front was covered with some burning liquid. Someone downstairs yelled “Fire!” and a gong clanged three times.

They had a leg-powered pump, a converted bicycle, that brought water from the pond to the kitchen. I wondered whether its hose would reach that far.

“Targets,” Namir said quietly, and fired three spaced shots. Then he ducked down. The shotgun boomed, and a few pellets rattled against the roof.

“Almost out of range,” Dustin said.

“Like to get him anyhow.” Namir said. He put his cap on the muzzle of the rifle and lifted it up to draw fire, but the enemy weren’t fooled, or couldn’t see. Or were being frugal with ammunition.

“Namir,” came a hoarse shout from below. He stepped over to the ladder and nodded down at the man.

“We got to open the door to get the hose to it. Need you to keep their heads down.”

“We’ll try. In ten seconds?”

“Ten.” I heard steps running away and started counting.

At what I counted to be eight seconds, Namir’s machine gun started chattering. One long burst, then two short ones, and he ducked back behind the logs. I heard him slap open the top of the receiver and install the last belt.

He left the machine gun on the floor and stood up with a rifle. His face was plain in the light from the burning door. He stared for a second, then aimed and squeezed off one round. He ducked.

“Let’s not draw too much attention now. Take single shots, one person at a time.”

I stood up and pointed the rifle down at the trees. A lot of shooting but no obvious target. I pulled the trigger at nothing and crouched back down.

The shot had made me deaf in one ear, but I think Namir said, “Good.” Well, I didn’t shoot any of us.

“This place needs a periscope,” Elza said, standing up and aiming. She fired, maybe at random, and ducked back down. “Put it on the list.”

There was a new kind of explosion, a sound like whish-bang! “Rocket,” Namir said. Then a sudden bright blue flickering light.

Namir squinted into it. “Jesus! Everyone up and shoot!” He started firing fast single shots.

I jumped up next to him and aimed down. In the light of a guttering magnesium flare, I could see that they’d blown the double doors down and were charging en masse down the road and across the corn stubble. Dozens of people, maybe a hundred, most of them not shooting, intent on their charge.

A few people in front stopped long enough to kneel and fire over the smoldering door, into the stockade.

One of them was Card. Still wearing the dirty white tourist suit.

I aimed at him but couldn’t pull the trigger. Instead, I fired into the crowd behind him, and two men dropped. Or women or children. Fired twice more, trying to aim, and missed. When I looked for Card again, he was gone.

“That was Card!” I said. I don’t know whether anyone responded. There was an explosion under our feet, and suddenly flames everywhere in front.

Namir yelled something and pushed me roughly toward the ladder. I got halfway down and slipped.

Banged to my knee on the ladder and hurt both ankle and shoulder, somehow, when I hit the ground.

The rifle clattered down a few feet away. I went over to it and had the presence of mind to make sure it hadn’t landed nose first, then aimed it at the open door, where a little fire still flickered.

“Over here!” Namir was crouched behind one of the pilings that supported the lookout we’d just deserted. The side facing out was starting to burn.

Elza was next to him, helping set up the machine gun. Dustin hit the ground heavily between us and rolled toward me. He shook his head, dazed.

Namir called out again, and Dustin looked over dumbly and collapsed. I crawled by him, dragging my rifle.

“Anyone without an armband,” he said. Two or three people were already shooting over the fallen door. Two attackers almost got inside; sprawled dead or dying on the threshold.

“What, are they suicidal?” I said, aiming at the space.

“Desperate.” Another one appeared and was shot down, then three more. Namir was holding his fire.

Then someone hurled a fire bomb, gasoline or something, halfway to the center of the compound—and dozens boiled through the door, shooting and screaming.

Namir fired a burst, then a sustained chatter. They kept coming, though, crawling over the fallen, trying to run left and right.

Shooting back. Even over the machine-gun racket, I could hear bullets hissing by.

I mimicked Namir and lay prone, presenting as small a target as possible.

This had happened often enough that the physical sensation was almost familiar. Time crawled. My face and hands were greasy with cold sweat. All tight inside. Wiping away tears and snot.

“Shoot, goddamn it!” Dustin shouted. I’d fired one burst and still held the trigger down in a spastic clench. I pulled it again and again, firing in the direction of the crowd pushing through the door.

When I was young, I wondered about the expression “shooting fish in a barrel”—the image was so silly. Besides, you could just shoot a hole in the barrel and let the water drain out. That’s what this was, though. Or lemmings, another animal metaphor that had nothing to do with reality. Rushing through the door as if it were the edge of a cliff.

It couldn’t have taken long. Finally, two of them used the pile of bodies as a kind of shield, firing machine guns blindly toward us from behind their dead and dying comrades. The bullets went well over my head as I hugged the ground between Namir and Dustin. In less than a minute, someone shot the two from a rooftop, and all was quiet.

Relatively quiet. Someone was crying, and another groaned over and over. Namir ran to the pile of bodies and tossed away the rifles the two had been shooting. He studied the pile, I guess for signs of life. Then he peered out from behind the door for a few seconds and pulled his head back in.

Don’t do that, I almost yelled. Don’t push your luck. How many had held back from the charge?

A minute went by, then several, without a shot. Some people came out of the main cabin with candles and first-aid kits and began circulating.

One of them, a woman I hadn’t met, came over to us.

“Any wounded?”

My ankle hurt like hell, but it wasn’t broken. I remembered what that felt like, from the night I fell into a lava tube and was discovered by the Martians. When I was a frightened girl, studying to be a terrified woman.

“Check Dustin over there. I think he was knocked out.” I watched her in the candlelight. She felt for a pulse in his neck and wrist.

“He’s alive,” she said, and he reached up weakly and touched her face.

“There it is again,” Namir said. He was looking up.

The bright blue light, unblinking, moving slowly overhead. Some idiot fired a machine gun at it, tracers slowing and falling away. It shrank to a dim point and disappeared.

“Brilliant,” he said. “Let’s see whether they shoot back.”

They didn’t, and the incident was forgotten in the confused aftermath of the attack. Eight people had serious wounds. They rigged a fly for shelter on the side of the infirmary and put the wounded on makeshift pallets there, along with an operating table; there wasn’t enough light inside for surgery.

They were long out of glue, and had to stitch people up. Running out of everything else. Two of the enemy bled to death because the farm was rationing its supply of surrogate.

It would run out sooner or later, of course, along with everything else medical. Those medical books from the 1800s that we brought from Lanny’s would eventually save a lot of lives. But first a few people, a few million, would have to die from lack of everyday miracles, like nanotech and blood surrogate.

They did have a stretchy ankle bandage to keep me upright and working. I slept for a couple of fitful hours and then was up at dawn to work a grave-digging shift. There were individual graves for the dead farmers, but what I and five others were working on was a mass shallow grave for the eighteen enemy dead. It was a pyre as much as a grave, actually. Hip deep, twelve feet by six. We filled it with dry wood and kindling and stacked pine logs on that. And then the bodies.

I was glad to be excused from that part of it. There were plenty of enthusiastic volunteers.

A vocal minority wanted them stripped. Manufactured clothing would be rare soon. Okay, Roz said—you can take it, but you have to wear it yourself. No one did.

It was a horrible sight. Faces blackening and melting in the flames, restless dead limbs moving, insides boiling away and bursting, the fire bright and greasy with rendered human fat. Finally, it was only skeletons and separated bones momentarily glimpsed inside the roaring flames.

Part of me watched the process with numb detachment. I didn’t even notice when Namir left my side and then came back with a cup of wine, which he offered to me.

“No,” I said. “I’m still queasy.”

“Yes,” he said, and stared at the fire as he drank. He smiled, and I wondered what he was thinking. Maybe I didn’t want to know.

“Got some more for you,” Roz said, approaching with Jerry pulling the cart. Seven or eight bodies, all apparently men. “Let’s check all the pockets for ammo before they go into the fire.”

I reached for the top body and jumped back. It was Card.

“Sorry,” Roz said, recognizing him. “I’ll do it.”

His face was unaffected, calm. But the top of his head had been blown out of round by a bullet that hit him in the temple. On the other side, an exit wound the size of my fist.

“He didn’t feel anything,” I said.

“A pity.” She pulled him off the cart by his feet and dragged him partway to the fire. She turned out his pockets, found something, and held it out to me. “Yours if you want it.”

It was a keychain with two old-fashioned metal keys as well as modern stubs. It was attached to a little carving that I immediately recognized: a small sea tortoise carved from a tagera nut in the Galápagos—my parents had bought them as souvenirs for us before we got on the Space Elevator on the way to Mars.

Mine was still on Mars, in a box of personal effects I’d left behind.

“Thanks,” I said, and stared at it as she and two other women carried his body away. I turned my back toward them so as not to watch him consigned to the flames. There was no love between us, but a lot of history.

My last blood connection to the Earth. Parents long gone and both my children Martians. “Back in a minute,” I said to no one in particular, and headed for the latrine. It wasn’t the most pleasant place to sit and think, but if I spent enough time there, the next time I looked into the fire, I wouldn’t recognize anybody. And the heat from the flames suddenly felt monstrous.