by L. E. Howel
It was a war in his mind. He couldn’t agree with Jane. She had to be wrong. He had to believe it. There had been times that he had felt he had lost it all, that he couldn’t see the same hopes as the others. There were days when Edwards had fallen far from the faith and everything had seemed hollow, empty, and void. This whole existence opened up before him, emptier and more desolate than the driest desert or the most frigid icecaps. He was alone. It was like looking over the steepest precipice into nothingness and he had slunk back in fear. Beyond these hopes there was chaos, he had to hang on to them or die. He knew nothing else and wanted nothing else; he was attached enough to his old thought patterns that Jane’s words stung him like a personal blow.
“Don’t judge what you don’t understand,” he snapped robotically. She had questioned conventional reality and he had vended the correct response. Privately he still feared that perhaps she understood better than he did. Her eyes were unclouded by their years of struggle and their hopes, perhaps she saw more clearly than any of them. She was an outsider and it was possible that she could see the truth because she hadn’t spent a lifetime constructing it. He couldn’t accept that. “There is more happening here than you know,” he continued. “We will win.”
“I’d like to believe that,” Jane smiled thinly as she looked up at him, “but somehow it doesn’t look like it. Remember, this is all new to us. It’s a new world to Lauren and me and when things look like this it’s a scary world too. We want to understand our world, and help if we can, even in the smallest of ways.”
“You will help,” Edwards answered stiffly, “but first we must get to Washington.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
As they climbed the rusty, rickety stairs to the second floor Birch used the vantage point to look for Ares positions. The city looked as dead from here as it had from the ground. The sun was beginning to disappear behind the mountains and the light played cruel tricks of movement and life in the shadows of the surrounding streets, but beneath it all the complete stillness of the city was evident. It was a museum and a mausoleum, showing the past but having no future. It felt diseased, like the rotting corpse of a city. Nothing could live here, nothing human anyway. He found himself beginning to doubt whether even the Ares would have ventured into such a place. He felt instinctively that they also shouldn’t stay here long. Tomorrow they would get some answers and then get out, back onto the healthy plains.
Night was quickly approaching as they reached the door to the room. Birch and Karla shivered, even in the last remaining heat of the day. As darkness fell it was as though this gray city were drawing a cover of darkness over itself, seemingly relieved that its horrid aspect could again be hidden until another day. Its unnatural deformity could be forgotten for the night and it could rest again in peace.
With some effort he pushed the door open. They walked into a dusty, decaying example of basic motel accommodation. In its prime it might have been tolerable, and if you had watched the color TV enough you might not have noticed the dank smell, or the mold, or the mouse that ran across your floor at night to investigate your edibles while you slept. All of this might have happened in its prime. Now, with the onset of deterioration, it wasn’t that good.
The room, like much of the city, was largely intact, but decayed. Some evidence of rodents remained on the carpet and on the bed. The dank smell, that once would have been a vague impression, was now an overpowering stench that was almost enough to send Birch to the windows to fling them open, but his natural caution kept him from doing it.
In addition to the thick smell of mold and decay the room had accumulated a layer of dust and dirt that showed the neglect of many years. The carpet seemed to crunch underfoot with debris and the simple bed in the center of the room was grimy. As Karla set her bag on it an explosion of dust rose up into the air and set her coughing.
“Ugh,” she exclaimed, “this is horrible. I wouldn’t let my dog sleep in this room.” She looked about her with dismay, poking suspiciously at the covers beneath her bag.
Birch grunted. “At least it’s a bed. You can have that tonight. I’ll sleep in the chair. If anything tries to get in I’ll be waiting for it.” He moved toward a garish orange chair with plump cushions and sat heavily, putting his feet on a nearby table and slinging his rifle across his lap. “You go to sleep,” he continued, “I’ll stay up for a while just to see if anything happens.”
Karla eyed the bed distastefully. “I’m not sure I really want it,” she looked down at the filthy floor, “though I guess it’s better than the alternative. Maybe you could take the bed and I could have the chair, I can wait up to see what happens as well as you.” Birch was not amused.
“Just get on the bed and get to sleep, Karla; you’ll need all the rest you can get for tomorrow, so stop messing around. This may be the last chance you get to sleep in one of those in a long time you know, you better take advantage of it while you can.”
“I’m not sure that’s the best term for it, but I will tolerate it because it’s the only thing going. I wish we could have checked in at the Ritz instead of this flea-pit, the price would have been the same you know.” Karla’s voice was filled with a humor that Birch missed.
“Next time I’m planning a vacation itinerary I’ll keep that in mind,” he remarked sourly. He slumped down in his chair and said nothing more. Karla pulled her bag from the bed and brushed at the covers gingerly. He watched her from his seat. Computer geek or not, sometimes he thought she looked more like one of those prissy girls who was probably on the cheerleading team. Now she was being confronted with the real world and real dirt for the first time she was worrying that she might get her hands dirty. Sure, she could catch a fish, and shoot a rifle, but she was still who he thought she was, someone who couldn’t cope with the hardships.
A moment later she had pulled all the covers from the bed and flung them to the floor. “Finally,” she muttered and curled up on the bare mattress, “this is much better.”
Birch tried to watch her for a time, but in the gathering darkness it wasn’t possible to see any more than her outline in the thickening gloom. It wasn’t long before her breath could be heard rhythmically rising and falling in the peaceful rhythm of sleep. She had fallen asleep almost immediately. His own eyes were heavy. They stung. Still he struggled to keep them open. He was under the impression that if he waited long enough something would reveal itself to him.
For a time he stayed awake. He listened to the still night air, but there was nothing unusual in that, except perhaps the quietness itself along this once busy street. There was nothing more than that, certainly nothing to indicate that anything more sinister than dark memories remained here now. He relaxed, and as time passed and nothing happened his tiredness overcame him. It seemed like a very long time since they had started out that morning; a lifetime of discoveries had been made that day. It was more than he had ever wanted to learn, and tomorrow he had go into the heart of this dead city and learn more. He had to know what had happened here.
Overcome with fatigue he slept. He wasn’t sure how much later it was when he was awakened by Karla’s voice hissing at him in the darkness.
“Did you hear that, Major?” her voice trembled. “I heard something out there.”
Birch shifted groggily in his chair, his back and neck ached and he was feeling very hazy about where he was. Finally he remembered. He strained to listen; there was nothing except the same unusual silence. Only the sound of insects busily doing whatever they do at night, nothing else.
“What do you think you heard?” Birch asked after a moment.
“It sounded like something passing the door outside. It was pretty faint but I’m sure it was something.”
Birch moved to the window and looked out. He couldn’t see much without moonlight, and the city’s skeleton around them was dark and dead. He moved back to his chair and slumped down into it again.
“I couldn’t see anything,” he muttered, “I’ll stay up to see what h
appens though. You can go back to sleep.” Karla didn’t answer but he could see her outline on the bed shift and reach for something on the floor. He couldn’t tell what it was in the dim light, but from the position she seemed to take on the bed he knew she was waiting with her pistol aimed at the door.
“What are you doing?” Birch asked in the tone of an older brother catching his sibling playing around at bedtime. “You should go to sleep, I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, and if there is then I’ll wake you up later.”
Karla shook her head in the darkness. “I’m not sleeping, I heard something and I want to be ready.” Birch grunted, but said nothing. Fine, he thought, stay awake, but stay out of my way.
He sat in deliberate silence. For a time it seemed that nothing would happen. The dreary stillness, punctuated only by the insect chorus, continued undisturbed. It reminded Birch of that old question that philosophers used to ask about a tree falling in a forest and wondering if there was any sound if no one was there to hear it. The sounds of the city were gone, with those who created them, but now a strange thought came to him. This city wasn’t really dead. Now, as he listened, he could hear it. Life of some sort continued. Not human life. It was the insects. He could hear them, but it just hadn’t seemed important to him, and so it had registered as silence. Was that the measure of human arrogance; that we couldn’t imagine even sound existing if we weren’t there to observe it? This city had existed without the observation of humanity, but it had still lived. It had carried on without us; even in the grave there was life.
That was the wonderful thing about the Earth; it was always alive. You just couldn’t stop it. No matter what havoc you inflicted, life just kept coming back in one form or another. What a contrast to space, where life is so delicate. He thought of the planet on their mission, or now even to Mars, where all life was gone. Out there even the smallest error meant total destruction. Here it thrived. Even in this city, where humanity had done its worst, life continued without them.
A sound interrupted his thoughts. It was faint but distinct, a padding, like the sound of bare feet slapping on concrete. Someone was running across the balcony outside. Birch sat up in his chair, facing the door he released the safety catch on his rifle and took aim.
The footsteps rushed past their door without stopping. Birch sighed and lowered his rifle. So much for the idea that the city was deserted. He was surprised. The city had seemed dead. Perhaps these people were more resilient than he gave them credit for, but still, he would have expected more evidence of habitation. It didn’t seem right that everything in the stores had remained untouched, exactly as it had been left years ago. It was hard to answer, but at least it reminded him that he still didn’t know enough about life here to make any assumptions. He would learn more tomorrow.
The silence had returned, but only for a short moment. The footsteps were coming back, more slowly this time and more quietly, but he knew he could hear them. As they drew closer, so they continued to grow ever slower and stealthier. Finally they stopped at their door. It was like being sniffed out by a dog. He thought he could even hear a rasping breath from outside, and he slowly fingered the trigger of his rifle, ready to shoot.
The next moment was confusion. The metallic click of the doorknob being turned mingled in his mind with another sound he only later identified as the hammer of Karla’s pistol being drawn back to fire. The locked handle rattled as the figure outside tried to gently open the door and get in. Before the rattling had stopped a cascade of loud shots echoed through the room, Karla had fired at the door. A squealing, indignant screech sounded from the other side. Birch quickly reacted and sent his own volley of shots thundering into the door that exploded in a shower of splinters.
Birch was instantly out of his chair and hurling aside the tattered remnants of the door to get outside. From there he could hear footsteps clanging down the iron steps, despite the ringing from the gunfire in his ears he could still hear that. More alarming was that distinctive Ares screech, screamed by the fleeing figure. It was one of them, and it would bring more with them if he got away.
Quickly Birch chased after the figure, but by the time he had reached the stairs it sounded like their enemy was at the bottom. Without pausing he fired blindly down into the darkness; the figure below whimpered but kept on running. By this time Karla was at his side.
“Did you get him,” she shouted. Birch whirled angrily to face her.
“Shut-up!” he spat the words at her. “Just get in the room and put your head between your knees or something useful like that. You’ve scared him off and I’ve got to try and fix it before he brings his friends back!”
Birch ran recklessly down the stairs, but when he reached the bottom he could see no sign of the intruder. He had disappeared into the darkness. The sound had stopped too, the Ares screech had been replaced again by the sound of insects and nothing. That surprised Birch. There had been no answering call as there had been on the night of the battle. No mass attack followed. Was this just a small patrol, or a trick of some kind so they could lead them into something? Perhaps the answer simply lay with the reddening sky on the eastern horizon and the coming dawn that it foretold. It might be that another night would give the Ares the chance to finish this; perhaps they would wait until then. Birch knew now that they couldn’t spend another night in this city. Quickly he reclimbed the stairs. Karla was waiting at the top.
“I’m sorry,” she admitted quietly, “I heard the doorknob turning and I though he was going to get in so I shot at him. I was trying to protect us.”
“The door was locked,” Birch remarked bitterly. “You may be just great at shooting prairie dog, or whatever it is you used to hunt out on your Kansas homestead, but you’ve got a thing or two to learn about combat. Shooting at him with a low powered weapon like that through a door was never going to do much more than warn him that we were waiting for him. If you could have waited we could have had a clean shot at him when he opened the door. Now he’s gone and is probably off warning all his friends about us. I bet this town is about to become a much less friendly place to be. Even in the daylight I guess we’ll have to keep a close watch for them, now that they know we’re here.”
Karla nodded. “Why do you think he went after our door and not the others? Do you think he knew we were there?”
Birch stopped for a moment, looking down at Karla in the growing light of dawn. He hadn’t thought of that. As he thought about it now he remembered, the footsteps had rushed by their room the first time and then seemed to come directly back to theirs after that. What did that mean? How did he know they were there? Birch couldn’t figure it out. He shrugged.
“We better get out of here,” Birch turned to go back to the room, “they still may come back, so let’s get our stuff and get moving.” Karla nodded and followed him back up the walk-way to the splintered remnant of their front door.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The walk from the motel took them past a series of strange sights. Car lots, with rusted-out vehicles resting uncomfortably on their flattened tires, empty malls, and faded billboards from which only the gleaming smiles of the once-happy consumers could barely be made out. Everywhere that same sense of sudden abandon was evident. Life might almost have gone on as usual here if it hadn’t stopped.
They were getting closer to the downtown area now. It was the TV studios Birch wanted to reach, and Karla remembered enough about the area to be able to guide him. Things in the city center seemed stranger still. Many of the smaller private buildings were left untouched, while larger commercial and political ones were decimated; there seemed a logic behind it. Karla pointed to where the U.S. mint had once stood. Only a pile of rock lay where the sturdy stone structure had once been. Further on they found the State House, its golden dome had been opened like a great can and the contents left to rot under the open sky. One wing of the impressive structure had collapsed and the great stone columns had fallen into the street. The remains of the felled ch
urch steeple lay nearby. The rest of the building was unrecognizable, reduced now to a pile of bleached orange bricks mingled among the cake-icing blocks of the State House and the shattered glass of the tallest towers.
Where the destruction further out of town had seemed almost random, this seemed more like a systematic attempt to destroy the symbols of civilization. The question still remained, what had done this? Had it been the Ares or someone else? This seemed to go far beyond the capabilities of the Ares as far as he had seen, but if it wasn’t them then who could it be? He hoped the TV station would provide the answers to these questions.
It took some time to find the TV station. The scene was much changed from her time, and so it was difficult for Karla to be sure where it was. The gleaming glass-sided towers had been dwarfed and reduced to squat stumps of buildings and piles of unrecognizable rubble. When they finally did find the site it was not an encouraging one. Like the others around it, the building had been felled like a great tree of metal and glass; it was as though a giant blade had cut through the building and the top sections had fallen away. The top floors were completely gone, cut from their roots and hurled aside, leaving the stump of the bottom few floors largely intact.
Birch sighed, “I guess there’s not much chance of finding anything there,” he muttered. “At least the building didn’t collapse on itself like some of them have. We can get in and look around anyway.”
They walked toward the crumpled remains of the broadcast center for News Channel 36. He wasn’t sure that this was a wise move. The last few remaining floors of the building had been left exposed to the weather and elements for so long that they were rotting in on themselves and seemed as though they might soon collapse, joining the rest of the structure sprawled out on the pavement around it. Still, he knew that this was his best hope of finding out what happened here. He needed to know what had happened. If he could understand Denver then maybe he could understand the world.