Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  The helicopter roared back up the beach with its skids flashing toward him at head height. Saul threw himself forward, scraping his chest and belly and genitals against sand as harsh as sandpaper. The blast from the rotor blades pressed his face deeper into the sand as the helicopter passed over. Whether automatic weapons fire meant for him found the machine or something mechanical found its own breaking point, Saul did not know, but there came a sudden sound like a wrench dropped into a rolling steel barrel and the helicopter surged and shuddered even as it passed over Saul’s prone form. Fifty yards down the beach it tried to climb for altitude but succeeded only in slewing left over the surf and then banking too steeply to the right as the rotor assembly and tail boom tried to counter-rotate with a will of their own. The helicopter flew directly into the line of trees.

  For a few seconds it appeared that the rising craft would use its own rotors to hack a path through the top thirty feet of vegetation— palm fronds and leafy debris were flying above the tree line like ditchdiggers leaping out of the way of a runaway motorcycle in a Mack Sennet comedy— but seconds later the helicopter itself appeared above the forest’s edge, completing an impossible loop, the cabin’s Plexiglas gleaming in rain and reflected glare from its own spotlight which now stabbed skyward from its inverted belly. Saul threw himself down again as bits and pieces of the helicopter began crashing down across a fifty-meter segment of beach.

  The cabin hit the edge of the beach, bounced once, skipped across the first three white lines of surf like a hard-flung stone, and disappeared in ten feet of water. A second later something triggered the explosive charges still in the cabin, the sea glowed like an open flame seen through thick green glass, and a geyser of white spray rose twenty feet into the air and blew in toward Saul. Small bits of wreckage continued to patter onto the sand for half a minute.

  Saul stood, brushed sand from his skin, and stared stupidly. He had just realized that he was standing in a small stream set in a broad depression on the beach when the first bullet struck him. There was a stinging on his left thigh and he spun around just in time for a second, more solid blow near his right shoulder blade to send him sprawling in the muddy stream.

  Two speedboats were coming in on the surf while a third circled a hundred feet out. Saul moaned and rolled to one side to look at his left thigh. The bullet had drawn a bloody groove just below his hip bone on the outside of his leg. He fumbled with his left hand to find the wound on his back, but what ever had hit him there had left his shoulder blade numb. His hand came away bloody, but that told him little. He raised his right arm and wiggled his fingers. At least his arm still functioned.

  To hell with it, Saul thought in English and crawled toward the jungle. Twenty yards down the beach, the bow of the first boat touched sand and four men waded ashore, rifles held high.

  Still crawling, Saul looked straight up and saw the ragged edge of clouds pass over. Stars became visible even as lightning continued to illuminate the world to the north and west. Then the last of the clouds passed over like some vast curtain pulling back for a third and final act.

  Tony Harod realized that he was scared shitless. The five of them had descended to the main hall where Barent’s people had already set out two huge chairs facing each other across an expanse of tiled floor. Barent’s Neutrals stood guard at each door and window, automatic weapons looking incongruous with their blue blazers and gray slacks. A small cluster of them stood around Maria Chen, including a man named Tyler who was Kepler’s aide, and Willi’s other catspaw, Tom Reynolds. Harod could see out the broad french doors to where Barent’s executive helicopter sat idling thirty yards down the swale toward the sea cliffs, a squad of Neutrals surrounding it and squinting into the glare of floodlights.

  Barent and Willi seemed to be the only ones who really understood what was going on. Kepler continued pacing and wringing his hands like a condemned man while Jimmy Wayne Sutter had the glazed, smiling, slightly stunned look of someone deep in a peyote dream. Harod said, “So where’s the fucking chessboard?”

  Barent smiled and walked to a long, Louis XIV table covered with bottles, glasses, and a breakfast buffet. Another table held an array of electronic equipment and the mustached FBI man named Swanson stood nearby with earphones and a microphone. “One does not need a chess-board to play, Tony,” said Barent. “It is, after all, primarily an exercise of the mind.”

  “And you two’ve been playing through the mails for months, you say?” asked Joseph Kepler. His voice was strained. “Since just after we turned Nina Drayton loose in Charleston last December?”

  “No,” said Barent. He nodded and a servant in a blue blazer poured him a glass of champagne. He sipped and nodded. “Actually, Mr. Borden contacted me with the opening move a few weeks before Charleston.”

  Kepler laughed harshly. “So you let me think I’d been the only one to make contact with him when you and Sutter’ve been in touch all along.”

  Barent glanced toward Sutter. The minister was staring blankly out the french doors. “Reverend Sutter’s contact with Mr. Borden goes back much farther,” said Barent.

  Kepler walked to the table and poured a tall glass of whiskey. “You used me just like you did Colben and Trask.” He downed most of the drink in one gulp. “Just like Colben and Trask.”

  “Joseph,” soothed Barent, “Charles and Nieman were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Kepler laughed again and poured another drink. “Captured pieces,” he said. “Taken off the board.”

  “Ja,” Willi heartily agreed, “but I have lost some of my own pieces.” He salted a hard-boiled egg and took a large bite of it. “Herr Barent and I were much too careless with our queens early in the game.”

  Harod had moved close to Maria Chen and now took her hand in his. Her fingers were cool. Barent’s guards were several yards away. She leaned close to Harod and whispered. “They searched me, Tony. They knew all about the gun in the boat. There’s no way off the island now.”

  Harod nodded.

  “Tony,” she whispered, squeezing his hand, “I’m frightened.”

  Harod looked around the large room. Barent’s people had rigged small spotlights to illuminate only a portion of the black-and-white tiled Grand Hall. Each tile looked to be about four feet square. Harod counted eight rows of illuminated squares, each row having eight squares across. He realized that he was looking at a giant chessboard. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to Maria Chen, “I’ll get you out of here, I swear it.”

  “I love you, Tony,” whispered the beautiful Eurasian.

  Harod looked at her for a minute, squeezed her hand, and walked back to the buffet table.

  “Something I don’t understand, Herr Borden,” Barent was saying, “is how you deterred the Fuller woman from leaving the country. Richard Haines’s people never found out what happened at the Atlanta airport.”

  Willi laughed and picked small, white flecks of egg from his lips. “A phone call,” he said. “A simple phone call. I had prudently tape-recorded certain telephone conversations between my dear friend Nina and Melanie years before and had done some editing.” Willi’s voice shifted to a falsetto. “Melanie, darling, is that you, Melanie? This is Nina, Melanie.” Willi laughed and helped himself to a second hard-boiled egg.

  “And had you already chosen Philadelphia as the playing area for our middle game?” asked Barent.

  “Nein,” said Willi. “I was prepared to play wherever Melanie Fuller went to ground. Philadelphia was quite acceptable, however, since it allowed my associate Jensen Luhar to move freely among the other blacks.”

  Barent shook his head ruefully. “Some very costly exchanges there. Some very careless moves on both our parts.”

  “Ja, my queen for a knight and a few pawns,” said Willi and frowned. “It was necessary to avoid an early draw, but not up to my usual tournament play.”

  The FBI man, Swanson, came up and whispered to Barent. “Excuse me a second, please,” said the billionaire and we
nt over to the communications table. When he returned he glowered at Willi. “What are you up to, Mr. Borden?”

  Willi licked his fingers and stared at Barent in wide-eyed innocence. “What is it?” snapped Kepler. “What’s going on?”

  “Several of the surrogates are out of their pens,” said Barent. “At least two of the security people are dead north of the security zone. My own security people have just detected Mr. Borden’s black colleague and a woman . . . the female surrogate Mr. Harod brought onto the island . . . not a quarter of a mile from here on Live Oak Lane. What do you have in mind, sir?”

  Willi opened his palms. “Jensen is an old and valued associate. I was only bringing him back here for the end game, Herr Barent.”

  “And the woman?”

  “I confess that I planned to utilize her as well.” Willi shrugged. The old man looked around the grand hall at two dozen of Barent’s Neutrals armed with automatic rifles and Uzis. More security people were visible only as shadows on the balconies above. “Surely two naked surrogates do not pose a threat to anyone,” he said and chuckled.

  The Reverend Jimmy Wayne Sutter turned away from the windows. “But if the Lord creates something new,” he said, “and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up, with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord.” He looked back out into the night. “Numbers sixteen,” he said.

  “Hey, thanks a whole fucking shitload of a lot,” said Harod. He removed the cap on a quart of expensive vodka and drank straight from the bottle.

  “Quiet, Tony,” snapped Willi. “Well, Herr Barent, will you bring my poor pawns in so we can resume the game?”

  Kepler’s eyes were wide with rage or fear as he tugged at C. Arnold Barent’s sleeve. “Kill them,” he insisted. He thrust a finger at Willi. “Kill him. He’s insane. He wants to destroy the whole goddamned world just because he’s going to die soon. Kill him before he can . . .”

  “Shut up, Joseph,” said Barent. He nodded at Swanson. “Bring them in and we will begin.”

  “Wait,” said Willi. He closed his eyes for half a minute. “There is another.” Willi opened his eyes. His smile grew very, very wide. “Another piece has arrived. This game will be more satisfying than even I had anticipated, Herr Barent.”

  Saul Laski had been shot by the Wehrmacht SS sergeant with the piece of sticking plaster on his chin and had been dumped into the Pit to lie with the hundreds of other dead and naked Jews. But Saul was not dead. In the sudden darkness he crawled across the wet sand of the Pit and the smooth, cooling flesh of corpses that had been men, women, and children from Lodz and a hundred other Polish towns and cities. The numbness in his right shoulder and left leg were turning into searing cords of pain. He had been shot twice and dumped into the Pit— at last— but he was still alive. Alive. And angry. The fury flowing through him was stronger than the pain, stronger than fatigue or fear or shock. Saul crawled across naked bodies and the wet bottom of the Pit and let the anger fuel his absolute determination to stay alive. He crawled forward in the darkness.

  Saul was vaguely aware that he was experiencing a waking hallucination and the professional part of his mind was fascinated, wondering if the shock of being shot had triggered it, marveling at the verisimilitude of the sudden overlay of realities separated by forty years of time. But another part of his consciousness accepted the experience as reality itself, a resolution of the most unresolved part of his life— a guilt and obsession that had left him without much of a life for four decades, a fixation that had denied him marriage, family, or thought of the future in forty years of reliving his own inexplicable failure to die. Failure to join the others in the Pit.

  And now he had.

  The four men who had come ashore shouted to each other and fanned out behind him to cover thirty yards of beach. Small arms fire rattled into the jungle. Saul concentrated on crawling forward in the almost total darkness, feeling ahead with his hands as beach sand and loam gave way to more fallen logs and deeper swamp. He lowered his face into the water and raised it with a gasp, shaking droplets and twigs out of his hair. He had lost his glasses somewhere, but it did not seem to make a difference in the darkness; he might be ten feet or ten miles from the tree he was searching for and it would never matter in such blackness. Starlight did not penetrate the heavy foliage overhead and only a faint gleam of his own white fingers inches from his face convinced Saul that the impact of the bullet in his right shoulder had not blinded him somehow.

  As a doctor, Saul wondered how badly he was bleeding, where the bullet was lodged— he had not succeeded in finding an exit wound— and how soon he would need medical treatment to have a chance of survival. It seemed an academic question as a second round of rifle fire ripped through foliage two feet above Saul’s head. Branches and twigs dropped into the swamp with soft, plopping sounds. Thirty feet behind him, a man’s voice shouted, “This way! He went in here! Kelty, Suggs, come with me. Over-holt, move down the beach and make sure he don’t come out that way!”

  Saul crawled forward, getting to his feet as the water deepened to waist height. Powerful flashlight beams illuminated the jungle behind him in sudden strobes of yellow light. Saul staggered ahead for ten or fifteen feet and suddenly stumbled over a submerged log, scraping his thighs across it as he fell forward, breathing in scummed water as his face went under.

  As he fought his way to his knees and brought his head up, a flashlight beam shone straight in his eyes.

  “There he is!” The beam slid away for a second and Saul pressed his face against the rotting log as bullets struck all around him. One tore through the soft wood not ten inches from his cheek and went skittering across the surface of the swamp with a sound like a maddened insect. Saul instinctively turned his face away and at that second one of the three flashlight beams probing the area for him flashed across the trunk of a dead tree scarred and scoured by a deep slash of lightning.

  “Back to the left!” screamed a man. The roar of the automatic rifles was incredible, the rooftop of thick foliage making it seem as if the three men were firing in a large, enclosed room.

  Before the flashlight beams returned, Saul stood up and stumbled toward the tree twenty feet away. One beam of light swung back his way, caught him, and lost him again as the security man raised his weapon. Saul noted that bullets made a sound rather like furious bees as they hummed past one’s ears. Water splashed him as a line of slugs stitched its way across the swamp and drummed hollowly into the tree itself.

  The flashlights found him just as he reached the tree and stuck his arm up into the scar.

  The bag he had wedged there was gone.

  Saul threw himself underwater as bullets tore into the tree at the level his head and shoulders had been a second before. More bullets striking the water made an eerie, singing sound as he pulled his way across the bottom, filling his hands with roots, strands of aquatic plants, and whatever else he could grasp. He popped up behind the tree, gasping for air, praying for a stick, a rock, anything substantial to have in his hands as he rushed them in his last, futile seconds of life. His anger was a transcendent thing now, banishing the pain of his wounds. Saul imagined it shining out of him like the horns of light with which Moses reputedly returned from the mountain or like the narrow shafts of light now shining through the hollow tree where the bullets had punched through.

  In the glare of those thin strands of light, Saul saw something gleaming in the shattered tree right at the waterline.

  “Come on!” screamed the man who had shouted earlier, and the firing stopped as he and another man began splashing across the swamp, moving to their right to get a clear shot. The third man moved to his left, holding his flashlight steady.

  Saul made a fist and struck the thick wood where light made the bark translucent. Once. Twice. His hand went through on the third blow and his fingers closed on wet plastic where the bag had fallen.

  “See him?” screamed a
man to his left. The flashlight beams were partly obscured by dangling webs of Spanish moss from low branches.

  “Shit, get closer!” called the man to his right. He was almost visible around the curve of the trunk.

  Saul clutched at the slippery plastic and tried to pull it through the small cleft he had made. The bag was too large to fit through. He released it and tore at bark with both hands, clawing an opening with his nails. The charred and rotted wood came away in strips and chunks, but segments of the trunk were as hard as steel.

  “I see him!” screamed a second man to his left and a burst of fire made Saul duck into the water, still clawing, as splashes erupted all around.

  The noise stopped after two or three seconds and Saul came up gasping and shaking water out of his eyes.

  “. . . Barry, you motherfucking idiot!” one of the men was screaming not twenty-five feet to Saul’s left. “I’m right in your fucking line of fire, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  Saul reached inside the trunk and found only water. The bag had slipped lower. He stepped sideways and thrust his left arm as far as he could through the ragged hole. His fingers closed around a handle on the top of a long bundle.

  “I see him!” screamed the man on his right.

  Saul moved backward, feeling the presence of the two men behind him as a tensing in his aching shoulder blade, and pulled with all of his might. The bag came up and wedged tightly, still far too large for the opening.

  The man on Saul’s right steadied his flashlight and fired a single shot. A shaft of light angled up through the new hole in the trunk inches above Saul’s head. Saul half crouched, shifted hands, and tugged again. The bag did not move. The second bullet threw a shaft of light between his right arm and his ribs. Saul realized that the men behind him were not firing only because their comrade was directly opposite them now, wading closer for his third shot, never letting the flashlight waver.