by Joe Haldeman
He took it and stared at it. “One afternoon, back in ’62. This is the safety?” She nodded, and he put the pistol in his waistband, out of sight under his shirt. “Thanks. Pray we don’t need it.”
I put two bottles of water and some snacks in a bag, and slung it over my shoulder. I’d lost my sun hat down on the beach, so pulled a faded NASA cap off a peg. Paul straightened it. “Now we’re official.”
“If you’re not back in two hours, we’ll come after you,” Namir said. I checked my wrist tat and it was still 10:23, for the rest of my life.
“Make it three,” Paul said, without suggesting how either of them could tell time—some secret military thing, no doubt. “Take us half an hour just to walk there.”
“Careful by the bleachers,” Card said, unnecessarily. Paul nodded and went out the door.
It was a relief to be alone with him, the first time since we’d left the billet at dawn. He took my hand and squeezed it. “You and me.”
“Me and you,” I said automatically. A song refrain from when I was eighteen. Paul an ancient man of twenty-nine.
We walked in silence for a minute. “It’s a lot to take in.”
“I’m still trying to sort it out.”
“Guess we’re all still in shock.” He laughed. “Except Snowbird. The only one who knows for sure she’s going to die.”
“Poor thing.”
“Poor us. Poor whole fucking human race. How many will be alive a year from now? A month from now?”
“In a month, they’ll still be eating groceries,” I said.
He nodded. “In a year, each other.”
“Save you for last.” I pinched his butt. “You always were a tough old bastard.”
We both laughed. Keeping that one monster at bay.
There was a lot of trash on the road, with no wind to blow it around. Press releases and promotion packets, as well as cups and food trash. And this wasn’t the main avenue out; people who lived in California would be going the other way. Assuming they were headed home.
A couple of hundred yards before we got to the bleachers, there were the first signs of violence. Dark spatters of blood, dried in the dust.
No bodies at first, but then Paul followed a trail of drops to a place behind a portable toilet. A woman in sexy silver shorts, who had been wounded in the abdomen. She’d held it in with her hands for a couple of dozen steps, and then collapsed. Her guts were a pile of glistening gray and blue, awash in blood. Paul checked her pulse while I usefully leaned the other way and vomited. He held my shoulders while I gagged and coughed the last of it, and handed me a water bottle.
“We don’t have to go any farther,” he said.
“We do,” I said, my voice a hoarse croak.
“It will probably get worse.” He started to pull out the pistol, and I leaned against him.
“Leave it hidden. Someone might be watching.”
“Of course.” He put his arm around me, and we continued up the road toward the HQ building.
“Look at the brass. Someone stood here and fired toward the bleachers.” A scatter of brass shell casings to our left.
“Or up in the air,” I said. “No more bodies.”
“That’s something.” He stopped. “This isn’t smart. Let’s go back to—”
We were maybe twenty yards from the entrance to the temporary building. A tall fat man stepped out onto the wooden deck, brandishing a weapon, and fired a burst into the air. “Y’all put up your hands?”
We did. He clumped down the three steps to the ground. “Look what we got, Jemmie. Y’all from that spaceship. The starship. Saw you on the cube last night.”
“We are,” Paul said.
Another person, presumably Jemmie, stepped out of the darkness. He was also holding a weapon, and binoculars with a strap dangling. “Been watchin’ you. You come up from the motor pool.”
They were both wearing NASA coveralls, spotless, with the fold lines still visible. Jemmie’s were a couple of sizes too large, the sleeves rolled up.
“You work for NASA?” I said.
“Guess we do now,” the fat one said. “You wanta help me launch my rocket?”
Paul tensed. Don’t! “We don’t mean you any harm,” I said.
“I bet you don’t.” The fat one stepped forward, his weapon on Paul, looking at me.
“You keep it in your pants, Howard. Bet they got that god-damn Martian back there.” He stepped down to join us. “Don’t you.”
“I don’t know who’s down there now,” Paul improvised. “You saw a Martian in the binoculars?”
“He was with you all on the cube this morning, before it got shut off.”
“And the other aliens did that,” Howard said.
“Time we did something back,” Jemmie said, pointing his weapon down the road. “Let’s us go have a talk with Mr. Martian.” He started walking. “Then we figure out what to do with you all.”
Howard came alongside me and put his big arm on my shoulder. “They say you was with all those men fifty years.” He grabbed my breast, hard. “Don’t seem possible—”
I was going to give him an elbow to the ribs, hesitated, and heard a tiny metallic click. Then there was a huge explosion and a shower of blood and gore in front of me.
Then some voices I could hardly hear, my ears ringing. At first I thought all the blood was mine; I was dead. But then Howard fell in front of me, hard, the top of his skull shattered, an artery still pulsing.
I turned around and saw the other man, Jemmie, trying to run backwards, both his hands out to protect himself from Paul’s pistol. Paul had the pistol gripped in both hands, but they were shaking so violently he probably couldn’t have hit the man if they were in a small room together.
I saw all this in a strange state of floating calm, realizing that the little sound I’d heard before I went deaf had been the safety on his pistol.
The man was running like a sprinter now. Paul fired once over the man’s head, and stooped to pick up the weapon he’d dropped or thrown down.
I looked back at the big man dying, his arms and legs moving feebly as the blood spurt slowed to a drizzle. He’d shit his new blue trousers. I leaned over and burped a little acid, and opening my mouth wide made my ears crackle, and some hearing came back.
Paul came up from behind and gathered me to him, still shaking hard, sharp sweat smell and gunsmoke. “Killed him. Jesus fucking Christ.”
I was still floating, stunned. “That’s the most religious thing you’ve ever said to me.”
From Rear View Mirror: an Immediate History, by Lanny del Piche (Eugene, 2140):
. . . there is no way to calculate how many people died in the first second, minute, or hour. A week later, when there was still food, perhaps one billion of the globe’s seven billion had perished. Failure of transportation systems and medical life support—which almost claimed this writer’s life—accounted for a large fraction of those deaths immediately. Most died in violence, though, after the total collapse of civil and military authority. As far as I know, no truly large city, more than ten million people, survived the initial crisis well, except perhaps for the religious police states in the Middle East and America’s new Confederacy. (But I don’t think either would last very long without supporting technology to keep the desert at bay; without wealth to trade for water.)
Civilization, in the broad social sense of the word, obviously has survived in smaller towns and cities around the world. This writer met a couple who had sailed from Australia to California, who said that life was reasonably comfortable and secure in a string of hundreds of fishing villages spread along Australia’s eastern and southeastern coasts, and in the Great Barrier Reef. Here in Oregon, we have had sailing visitors from as far south as Costa Rica, and as far north as the Aleutian Islands. No sailors have come from Europe, Africa, or the American east coast, which leads us to believe that the Panama Canal is not open.
A few individuals and small parties have made it here from th
e East Coast and Midwest by horseback or bicycle. I’ve heard of people who walked all the way, but haven’t met any, and would not be inclined to believe them. That would be a long walk in less than two years.
The tales these travelers bring are not usually happy. Most of the heavily populated parts of the East are burial grounds, or just boneyards. There are towns like this one, able to guard enough land to grow subsistence crops, and keep a moderately large population safe from marauders.
Of course these towns tend to be on rivers or lakes, in temperate or warmer climes. The surviving population of Florida is probably ten times that of New England.
(The people who originally settled this country from Europe did live in the north, and had to deal with killing winters. They wouldn’t have done so well, though, surrounded by millions of starving people with guns. Hard to get a farm going when people will kill for one ear of corn.)
Fortunately, ammunition is getting scarce . . .
2
I felt Paul wave and turned around to see Namir running toward us, his rifle pointed down at a slant. “We’re okay,” he said, too softly for Namir to hear.
Still holding me, he turned partway around, to look in the direction the man had been running. “I think he went back into the HQ building. Here.” He handed me the pistol. “Sit down behind me.”
He sat down cross-legged and planted his elbows on his knees, bringing the man’s rifle up to sight down the barrel. He clicked a switch, I guess a safety, several times.
The pistol was heavier than it looked. The barrel was warm. I kept my finger away from the trigger.
Namir ran up and hesitated, looking at the body, and then got down prone next to us and pointed his rifle in the same direction. “Somebody in there?”
“I think so. I’ve got his weapon.”
“Probably more in there. Come on!” He sprang across the road to where a panel truck was stalled sideways. “Get cover.” We followed him and crouched down behind it.
“So what happened?”
“Two guys wanted to go down to the motor pool and kill a Martian. They didn’t know we had Elza’s pistol.”
“That one grabbed me.” I pointed at the body. “Grabbed my breast.”
“And you shot him in the head. Remind me to mind my manners.”
“I shot him,” Paul said. “Had to. It was obvious they . . . they weren’t . . .” He swallowed hard.
“Weren’t going to let you live,” Namir said. “Good you thought fast.”
“I didn’t think at all.” He left the truck’s cover and walked over to the man he’d killed. He nudged the man’s body with his toe. “Fuck.” He kicked him. “Shit. Fuck.” Kicked him harder.
I ran over and held him, then pulled him so close I could feel his heart’s hammer in my own chest. Felt him kick again and again. “Fucking shit,” he sobbed.
My eyes stinging wet on his chest, I echoed him, fucking shit. Strong and meaningless words.
“Get back here,” Namir said. “Please! You’re sitting ducks.” He fired a short burst at the door.
Paul snapped out of it and hurried back, with me staggering in tow. “Sorry,” he said to Namir, as we got down next to him. “Never done that before.”
Namir squeezed his shoulder and nodded, not taking his eyes off the door.
A spot of white appeared in one corner of the door, a white cloth being waved. “Show yourself,” Namir shouted. “Hands up.”
He stepped into the light, blinking, still waving the white flag, which turned out to be underwear.
“Don’t shoot. I don’t have no gun.”
“Who else is in there?”
“Ain’t nobody now.” He started to gesture.
“Keep your hands showing!” To Paul he said quietly, “Stand up with the gun. Aim it at him but stay behind cover.” Then he stood and started walking toward the man.
“One move and you’re dead. If anyone else shows up, you die first.”
He got close enough to point the rifle right between the man’s eyes. “Now turn around, slowly.” He did.
“We’re going into that building. You’re certain there’s no one in there?”
“Nobody I know of.”
“If I see one person, I’ll blow your brains out.”
“One dead guy! There was one dead guy, maybe two.”
“If they’re still dead, you’re safe.” He tapped him on the back of the head with the rifle’s muzzle, and the man flinched. “Move it.”
“This doesn’t look smart,” I whispered to Paul. “How does he know he’s not walking into an ambush?”
“He’s the expert.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe he’s assuming that if there were someone armed in there, he would have fired at us while we were exposed. But he has to know for sure before we turn our backs on the building.”
“Maybe.” Or maybe, I thought, Namir was going to kill the man in cold blood, and didn’t want to do it in front of us.
They went inside the building, and I waited for the shot.
It didn’t come. They shuffled back out, and Namir said something to him, and he ran away at top speed. Namir kept the gun pointed in his direction but walked casually toward us.
“The place is a mess. A man and a woman dead, and it looks like someone sprayed around the whole control room with automatic fire. Nothing there for us.”
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
“No idea. That man, Jemmie, said it was like that when they came in. He’s probably lying, but I don’t think he or the other killed those two. They were shotgunned.”
“They might have used a shotgun and then discarded it,” Paul said.
Namir nodded and shrugged. “ ‘Every man shall die for his own sins.’ I had to either let him go or kill him.”
“We couldn’t take him with us,” I said, but didn’t like the idea of him being out there and brutally angry.
“Let’s go back to the motor pool,” Namir said. “Wait for darkness.”
“Or the U.S. Marines,” Paul said, “whichever comes first.”
Elza was waiting for us at the door. I handed her pistol back. “It works.”
“We saw, through the binoculars. Good thing you had it.”
“It was.” Though I’d been thinking of it more as a curse than a blessing.
“You should go talk to your brother. He’s not taking this well.”
“The shooting?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t see that. Just things in general.”
The end of civilization? How childish of him. “Where is he?”
“Snack room.”
He was sitting cross-legged under the skylight with six empty near-beer cans in a pyramid in front of him. Pretty fast work. Thirty minutes?
“Card—”
“I saw Paul kill that man.”
“Yeah; me too. See?” I turned to show him the speckles and spatters of blood and gore on my left shoulder.
He nodded, looking at it as if it were a shirt pattern. “I couldn’t be part of it anymore.”
“You’re not going through one tenth what Paul is.” Not to mention your sister. “He’s never killed before.”
“I know, I know. But you don’t understand.”
“I guess I don’t.”
He took the can off the top of the pyramid and sucked at it. “I have three physical identities. Had. The other two are completely, were completely, electronic. They could take external forms—rent-a-bodies—when it was convenient, but they didn’t have to.
“For most of my life, when this original body became uncomfortable, I could step out of it, and automatic repair nanosystems would take over, while I stayed in one of the other two bodies.”
“You mean if your brain makes you uncomfortable?”
“Brain, endocrine system, gonads. The parts that generate and mediate emotional states.”
“Well, welcome to reality.”
He had another drink and shook his head, wincing. “Just wha
t I’d expect you to say, Carmen. But there are all kinds of reality. This one is shallow and painful and inescapable.”
“But this one is the real world.”
“Not to me. Not to billions of perfectly real people.”
We had talked about this a little on the cube two days ago. But I guess to me it was just a more vivid and time-consuming version of the VR games that had so dominated his time when he was a kid. To my great annoyance and our parents’ exasperation.